A lot of people are interested in their dreams. According to Google there are 660 million people who type the word “dreams” into their browser every year – 660 million. But most of those folks don’t understand their dreams and the internet in general does not help that much. If you type in the phrase “what does my dream mean” mostly what you find is pages and pages of dream dictionaries. None of these say anything about the real meaning of your dream.

Our dreams are trying to speak to us. They are trying to get our attention. With 660 million people a year researching their dreams on Google alone, then they are succeeding on that level. From there though, there is a huge gap as most people are discouraged by the wide range of information and misinformation that is our there about dreams. In the end, for most people, their dreams end up as a mere curiosity. There is a huge language barrier between us and our dreams. So they wake us up for a moment but we don’t know how to listen to what they are saying.

If we knew what dreams were trying to communicate then we could begin to break down that barrier. But this is the catch. Dreams by their very nature are communicating to us about what we don’t know. That is the gift of dreams. If they were speaking to us about what we already knew then they would not be that helpful.

Yet if we could at least accept this -that our dreams are trying to reach us, trying to be in relationship with us, then that would begin to change everything. It would open possibilities of feeling into dreams on a whole other level, in a whole other way. Instead of trying to find an answer to what our dreams mean, it would open us to wondering what we needed to ask about our dreams. Understanding dreams is all about knowing what to ask and not about trying to find an answer.

Nobody can give you answers about your dreams. For better or worse there is no way to tell you what your dream means, there is no dream dictionary out there that knows what your dream is about. Done right, working with your dreams is really about asking the right questions – not answering them.

These questions lie in relation to your own very particular and personal relationship to this inner world. For example asking what you feel in a dream is often the absolute most important thing about a dream. Dreams communicate on a visual level yes, but also on a deep experiential level. Exploring, asking questions about what you feel in a dream and what that feeling experience really means to you, often says a thousand times more about any dream, than any dictionary could ever tell you.

This way of exploring dreams opens a conversation with the world of dreams. It allows us each to overcome our own barrier to understanding our inner world because it changes our relationship to it. Instead of being in the world of needing an answer it opens a vertical reality of living with curiosity. It opens a different relationship to our dreams because it shifts the relationship to being in relationship.

My hope is that this blog will help open this understanding of dreams, will help others find their own relationship to their own dreams and help bring the teaching of dreams into this world.

Bill St.Cyr 12/27/11

the chickadee flickers black-and-white and quick in the lilac’s limbs
my body matching its rhythm remembers the wild call of winter’s grey song
beats eager to explore the hidden world beneath the deathly white of snow
the green-becoming-black of the forest’s pines heralds its alchemy
the deep diving down underneath what I know to what I don’t
comes on the quiet feet of mystery to wake my heart

oh, my gosh
I love you

Becca

People get stupid in relationship not because they are really stupid but because their stupidity protects them from their own feelings. The bottom line is that our stupidity keeps us safe from our deeper fears.

When you really begin to see people’s dreams. then the illusions of the world just drop away. You can see how much they are denying their feelings and pretending that everything is alright when it is not.

It is an amazing thing to see couples work and how dreams respond to this work. The good news is that dreams bring a huge level of clarity to dynamics that can seem overwhelmingly confusing to the persons involved in the dynamics. Also, when you see those dynamics and face into them in a different way, then the dreams will show you what it is that you are avoiding.

It seems bizarre really how people do the same things over and over and somewhere in their mind expect things to be different. But there is always a “deal with the devil”. We all like our pathological behaviors even if we say we hate them.

When I finally stopped managing in my relationship I immediately had dreams where I had to face into my own fear. Why rock the boat when it means going into feeling experiences that we have for obvious reasons avoided our whole life. Just keep projecting your feelings out on to the world and the truth is that you don’t have to feel them.

We are all getting to see this here. As soon as someone stops hiding the truth of their marriage, as soon as someone stops behaving the same way they always have, then the dreams respond and not always in a way we like. So someone stops making up stories about their marriage and they have dreams of tortured dying boys.

Who wants to be with that?  Isn’t it better maybe to just pretend that those nightmares had something to do with what I ate or a horror movie I watched.

Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately), not feeling a feeling does not make it go away. It is a law of physics that things don’t just disappear. Every reaction creates an equal and opposite reaction. Every repressed feeling creates a projection, creates a story so that the energy of that repressed feeling can be vented in some way.

The energy behind the feeling needs to go somewhere and the brunt of that projection is usually our partners. So for me I always needed there to be a crisis in my relationship. I always needed to have something out there in the world that was wrong so that my focus could be on that. The problem is not in me, it is out there in the world somewhere, somewhere where I think I have the ability to fix it.

This compulsion killed whatever was possible in my last marriage and it has almost strangled my current relationship. Learning to stay in myself with my own feelings made it possible to have intimacy with Sue. As long as I was projecting, then I wasn’t present and even if Sue was, I could not see her through my own projections.

Staying with my own internal work allowed everything to change, including my capacity to feel loved inside. Once I stopped avoiding the terrible feelings, then I could also feel the pleasure of being held in love. Once I was willing to feel the intensity of the dream where I was on the streets feeling utterly beaten down then I could stop projecting that pain on to my relationship with Sue. I could then be in a place where I felt taken in as I literally was in a dream, taken in off the streets into the warmth of this young couples home, into the warmth of their hearts.

Without that inside I am always looking for the love outside, always dependent on my partner in a not healthy way. Instead of feeling my need for her, in a way that is more about the need to share this love that I already feel.

We have seen this in the dreams here at the retreat too. Someone stops projecting on to their partner and suddenly their dreams open to other possibilities. They have someone at their backs in a place where they would normally feel alone, they have someone who comes to them as a dying woman to show them how to feel love when they are in pain, they see a place where they could be a girl rolling around with their big sister.

Dreams are fierce in their willingness to reflect back to us the truth of who we are. They are equally fierce in the devotion they show to our hearts, when we are willing to not ignore them……

Bill St.Cyr 12/3/11

Christa and Marc

 Winter couples retreat 2011

I am here at our mountain retreat center in northern Vermont. Sue and I got up here Wednesday night late after our NOE executive meeting. We always arrive at least a night before everyone else to get the buildings opened up and make sure all is well for the retreat.

On Wednesday night we also started to look at the dreams that the couples were sending in to work at the couples retreat, as we needed to get them printed and organized. One dream caught my eye because I noticed my name on the page. In the dream my friend Steven is asking me if I ever came to peace with my brother Robert’s death.

In the dream I respond by saying that we never come to terms with these sorts of things, until we come to the end in ourselves. It brought me to tears as I read the dream. I still miss Robert and often think of him when I am here on the mountain. It also touched me because I know that Steven lost a brother and shares the feelings of loss that I have for Robert.

It is Friday night now, the end of our first full day of the retreat. All ten couples checked in last night and then we worked their dreams this morning and then worked them some more after our lunch break. Sue and I have not done any of our own dreams but as always we are doing our own work and having our own retreat alongside what we are doing as retreat leaders.

Last night after the check in, Sue and I spoke about taking time to write, to go for a walk and maybe to explore our sexual relationship. As often happens for us we got caught up in our work as NOE leaders, helping a couple folks with computer projects, uploading video for the camera, checking the heat etc.

As it had gotten late, we decided to skip the walk and just go to bed.  We checked in for a while about our work with our dreams, several of which were related to our sexuality and to our relationship to each other. I noticed though that the energy we had sustained all day long was waning fast and as I was in the middle of my check in I could feel Sue asleep on my shoulder.

Okay…., so this is a tricky moment for me because I could be offended by her falling asleep. I could be offended by her lack of sexual energy and on and on. The truth was that I was also in a bit of a coma. I could feel it.

And it felt off. It felt off that we were each not present in our own way. It felt off that we were leading this couples retreat and yet we were not really with each other.

So with a certain amount of trepidation I started to speak. It ended up taking us a couple hours to get to the bottom of what had happened. Having resisted the urge to downplay things, it was now a battle to resist the pathological urge to make it worse than it was. We both have a badly ingrained habit of over-processing and blowing things out of proportion, doubting anything that had been good and getting into a kind of nihilistic funk.

For me the pattern was familiar and the new thing was for me to break it, for me to speak without feeling hurt or personally offended, for me to stay with my need for Sue without becoming tyrannical about it. I stayed with my current work of being in this young couples house and stayed with my desire for them, staying with the part of me that trusts.

With this I could stay in a place where I had no real agenda. I felt cared for inside and really wanted to share that with Sue more than that I needed something from Sue. I didn’t need to have sex. I didn’t need to resolve anything. I just needed to speak really, to as Marc and Christa say – to say everything.

The truth is that I am tired of settling for less in my relationship. I am tired of not trusting Sue to stay with me if I rock the boat. I am tired in a way of blaming her by being scared to speak, by projecting something on to her about her leaving me that is not right.

It took a while but eventually we were laughing at ourselves. Laughing at the way that we seem to have a masochistic need to sabotage ourselves. We joked about how if we hadn’t had such a good day then this wouldn’t have been a problem.

All laughing aside, it was a battle for me to stay in the place of love that I felt and to really trust that what needed to get worked out would be worked out and that if we couldn’t work it out there would be help and guidance from our dreams to find our way through.  More to come….

Bill St.Cyr 12/2/11

pale morning wraps itself around grey birch
blanketing too warm November air
and blurs the chickadees’ black-and-white song
creating an unexpected opening
my heart beats in a cadence unfamiliar
to a rhythm intimate as immanence
and I know you
loving me
broken open
into new

Rebecca

 From my friend and colleague Patsy Fortney’s Blog:     

A  couple of days ago while I was running in the pre-dawn dark, I finally got something I thought I got years ago. It’s this: 

Nothing is really happening “out here”—meaning, in my outer life. 

I mean, stuff happens: I’m getting older, my kids have become adults, the house needs maintenance of one kind or another, we buy a new car, make plans to go to my sister’s for Thanksgiving. These things are the backdrop of what I have thought of as my real life—my relationships, my emotional life, how close and open (or distant and closed off) I feel with the people in my life. But even my emotional life is not happening most of the time—most of the time it just keeps turning in the same familiar insane cycles.

Yesterday, I found myself once again in a negative dynamic with my husband that has been happening on and off for almost 30 years. The details are irrelevant; what happened was that I got scared and started managing him, blaming him, trying to figure out how I could behave to fix the problem (which really means to keep myself safe).

I have spent many years attending to the messages of my dreams (which is often: Don’t be safe! Be passionate!), and I have grown, for sure. I have also learned what happens for both me and my husband in these charged moments, yet I can still cling to the belief that I can fix our relationship by changing my behavior (or his)—that if I know who is right and who is wrong, I can apply that insight somehow, and something will change.

This can never happen, though, because in these moments I am reliving some old, old story that doesn’t even have anything to do with our relationship. I can’t fix it because it isn’t happening!

I have read this in A Course in Miracles and heard it from many teachers since I first began my spiritual quest as an adolescent. The dreams, of course, bring the same teaching. But they also bring the solution—which is to enter the realm where something is actually, really happening…or at least where it can happen.

In the heat of the moment, I often choose not to believe what I know is true (that what I’m feeling has nothing to do with what I think is happening). I make this choice because I am so much more comfortable fighting familiar ghosts and tilting at windmills than I am going to the moment that will dissolve it all. Part of the story that keeps me spinning is that the dissolution of the story will be the end of me, but that’s a lie. It will only be the end of the story…and the beginning of a life.

The only thing happening in my life that can bring real change—and terrifying, thrilling, swashbuckling adventure—is where my dreams show me to go.

This morning, softened by some inexplicable grace, I spoke to my husband about what was going on for me yesterday. I started down the story road, but then I stopped. I stopped wanting to make him wrong or make myself wrong and try to be better. I took the sensation I felt in my body, what I am calling fear but which holds so much more, and I took it to the vampire lover who is coming back to life in my dream.

And I got wet. (Wet is a state the dreams are always leading me to—the water-world of feeling, where I am all gills and bend and sensuous swim.) I started to cry. No stories there, no blame or shame. I looked across the couch at the man I love, and I felt that love. Everything else was obliterated by the power of that.

Nothing is happening except the water-moment of transformation that my dreams bring to me again and again, even as I fight to keep my head above water . . . until I don’t.

What is really happening is not that I bought underwear today, or got some work done. What is really happening is that I am standing in wait while my divine lover is resurrected, feeling my devastation for how long I have been without him, my joy at his returning, my fear of what a reunion with him will mean. Or I am avoiding that.

Patsy Fortney

Dreamwork Journey

Dream Descent is about letting go of who we think we are and descending into what has been unconscious to us. It is about honestly looking at what keeps us from the promise of the life that we each are meant to live.

This level of honesty is a battle in it’s own right. Yet if we are willing to be honest in this way then our dreams will give us what we need to win that battle.

Our dreams are far from random collections of thought from our days. They are reflections of who we really are in relationship or more often out of relationship from the deepest truth of who we are.

If you are looking for a way through the troubles of this world and the dilemmas of your life then I hope you will consider looking inside in this way. I promise that at minimum you will be surprised at what you find.

Bill St.Cyr 11/22/11

This writing is from a class that I teach with my sweetheart Sue at the Center for Archetypal Dreamwork. We always spend part of this class writing about our own dreamwork. This is a quick 15 minute piece. Part of the class assignment was to write about where we were in relation to the homework and then to feel into what else is possible.

DREAM: I am a young woman (17 ish) and a young couple is taking me off the streets and into their home. I feel the part of me that does not trust them, that feels like a stray wounded dog. And I know that I can trust them. I know that I want to stay here with them.

morning rises harsh with cold behind the mountain

and the sun bleeds white through the cloud

winter digs in reaching down to freeze the ground

you just now open in me to work

the heat of your cut begins to melt my frozen vulva

its icy substrate starts to yield

you ask me dare journey down below what I know

risk the geography of my tumultuous heart

where it’s always open season

I do

I need your help

teach me, please

Rebecca 11/22/11