Dream-time Body-speak (Part Two)

One of my online blogging friends was in another dream. In real life, like me, this friend suffers with chronic pain and illness. In real life, like me, they were once a committed true believer in a fundamentalist Bible doctrine. They slowly deconverted to atheism/agnosticism, I to agnosticism.

In my dream my friend was in our king size bed with my husband and I. There was nothing sexual about the arrangement; we were simply sleeping. The friend had a 5-year old child with them. The next moment the friend and child and I were instantly in the woods beside a mountain creek with rushing water over rocks surrounded by laurels. I was taking them to a path. I don't know where the path led, but it was the path they needed to get where they were going.

In another dream the main toilet in our home was leaking. At first when I entered the bathroom, I thought the leak was coming from the handle. But it was coming from the wall behind the toilet, about 1-1/2 feet up. Like in our real-life bathroom the wall was painted in a textured slate-cobalt blue. In my dream, I was thinking of putting a container below the leak to catch the water, but then more leaks appeared as fissures formed in the wall behind the toilet. I felt frantic. There was no way I could catch all the water. I thought, I have to call Fix-It Man and tell him this needs to be fixed first, before anything else. In real life Fix-It Man was coming to our house in a few days to fix another toilet, the one in the textured sunflower-yellow bathroom. In real life Fix-It Man and I had served together in The Way. He left in the late 1980s, I in the mid-2000s.

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When I was a Way believer, I mostly dismissed sleep-dreams. I recall being taught that ongoing dreams were an indication that I'm not renewing my mind well. Or, at worst, devil spirits were trying to influence and maybe possess me. Dreams could also be just flippant convolutions from current life events. Dreamless sleep, or at least sleep where I couldn't recall my dreams, was the best, an indicator of a well-renewed mind - one more unrelenting standard to feed my defective self-image as a below-par believer.

So, for the most part, I did not try to understand my dreams or what my body and mind might be trying to communicate with me - until my last 6 or so years in The Way when I began to have dreams that were so vivid, and often repetitive, that I simply couldn't ignore them.

The dreams in my final Way years - as I was going through the grueling and ambivalent process of cognitive dissonance with Way doctrine and my own life experiences, with doubts about the organization of The Way, the so-called "household of God" which was the only place that taught the true accuracy of the inerrant Word of God - coincided with a time when my body was ridding itself of toxic levels of mercury after almost two decades of chronic illness.

I feel deeply that my body and soul were going through "healing responses." I prefer the term "healing response" to "healing crisis."

Often there were houses in those dreams, houses with lots of bathrooms and water. Most of the houses were huge, and I was continually discovering another level to explore. In part, this mirrored what was happening in my life at that time. I came to look forward to the dreams. I felt (and still feel), these dreams were my body/mind/soul's attempt to help heal itself, to help put into some type of representative images my struggles at the time, and to remind me that my body/mind/soul was working through them.

I don't believe in "dream interpretations" from others. I do think we can  intuitively so-call "interpret" our own dreams and that we can often(?) receive insight into what may possibly be going on at a deeper level. I don't think it is a supernatural process anymore than eyesight or the immune system or circulatory system or any other incredible function our bodies perform.

These recent dreams. Could they be indicating that my body is actually able to heal itself now, now that the antagonist-hip has been removed and the cobalt-and-chromium metal-leech stopped?

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A couple nights ago I dreamed I went hiking in New Zealand with my son and another ex-Way believer. It was a fun dream. I'd love to go hiking in New Zealand. I'd love to be able to hike, period.

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Dream-time Body-speak (Part One)
Dream-time Body-speak (Part Two)

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