An illuminating nightscape
Our dreams offer us such powerful information about our experience of life
Photo credit: Piero Guccione
I had a powerful dream in the early hours of this morning. Perhaps that has often been the case but of late, I am remembering those waking hours more and more clearly. This one was about a workshop I had been running, and more importantly, about what happened afterwards. I think this dream has stuck with me today because of the parallels in my day-to-day that are making me curious about the potential of dreaming to help guide me forwards in the big changes we have ahead.
The client who had commissioned the work in the dream - let’s call her Jane - was a former boss of mine in an associate role I had many years ago. In real life, Jane and I rarely saw eye-to-eye and the arrangement was brought to a close when the time was right. The dynamic of being a pair of badly-paid hands, not an equal partner, had to play out a few times before I stepped more fully into my own shoes. As did various partnerships, which were still about power games, but that is for another day.
In my night-time fantasy world, Jane had a colleague - Sylvia for the sake of this account - who organised logistics and kept people happy. She was was too hands-on for my tastes, to the point of feeling like I was being micro-managed. The person playing this character was someone else from my professional life whom I hardly know. There were also a couple of other figures, male, slightly less well-defined, perhaps coming on stage only moments before I woke up, because I didn’t like the direction the dream was going in. I’m going to call one of them Joe, as he bore a more-than-passing physical resemblance to the former POTUS, had a kind demeanour which hid some more sinister characteristics behind the mask. An American film-maker also popped into view, maybe because I read something of his yesterday that must have made an impression on me.
The workshop went well enough, surfacing the usual tensions when people can’t, or won’t, talk about them in everyday life. Sylvia was unhappy about this, believing as many do that a workshop should inspire and lead people to some kind of idealised future, rather than dealing with what is actually happening in the moment, as uncomfortable as that can sometimes be. Consequently, she did not want to let events flow as they needed to so that a container for honest, open dialogue could be woven. Her fear showed up in snarky comments to me and futile attempts to direct things her way, though she tried to hide them from the group. At a certain point she backed off, maybe because she saw that my approach was working and with a tangible resentment of the presence, competence and confidence that years of practice have given me.
Following the workshop, the scene changed and we were suddenly in my father’s old house. Joe was insistent that I packed up all my belongings, while Sylvia and the film-maker Sam, both evidently at the command of Jane who was nowhere to be seen, demanded that I paint the bathroom before leaving. Time was of the essence and I knew I would not be able to sort out which of our possessions I would take with me and what I would throw out in the move. I dodged the redecorating request with the excuse that I have sciatica - unfortunately a recurring issue in my present life - and could see how annoyed the three were.
Hubby suddenly arrived with a big company car we gave back about 8 years ago. He sat outside the house, waiting patiently for me to come down from the workshop. I tried to select at least the most important things that would fit into the car and felt Joe starting to direct proceedings so that he could keep what he thought was of value or useful. Sam was becoming quite aggressive about the conditions of the bathroom and I wanted to get out of there, fast. I was a child who often did not sleep or walked around the house when I did, much to the dismay of my frazzled parents. I developed an early ability to wake up when I want to in a dream, and this morning it did not let me down. I began the day feeling unsettled and a little agitated by what my unconscious had shared with me. Sunlight streaming through our wooden blinds gently calmed me down and while the dream was still fresh in my mind, I allowed myself to wander through its images and sensations again, curious what they had to say.
A dream you dream alone is only a dream. A dream you dream together is reality.
Yoko Ono
Years ago, I did some process and dreamwork following the techniques and wisdom of Arnie Mindell. I’ve long been fascinated by symbols and themes that show up in our dreaming worlds, whether we are fully asleep or right on the edges of it, like on a soporific summer day as often happens here in Milan. I’m aware of several recurring narratives that present themselves in mine: running out of time, often ahead of some kind of departure, not being able to find things that were once important and feeling distressed, missing flights or boats because I’m late, people I haven’t spoken to or even thought about in years making an appearance. I’m more interested in connecting dots between these stories than in a direct meaning of the particular symbols themselves. In other words, at looking at the wider dynamics, and my responses to them, that come through my unconscious processing and make themselves known in my waking life.
This dream felt like a portent for the big changes we have ahead. If you read my last post, you will have seen that we are moving in the not-too-distant future, and if you have seen things I have shared over the last years, you will know that work today looks nothing like it used to. Between the lines, sometimes clear and palpable, other times hazy and barely intuited, is an undertone of loss. With the new comes the inevitable dying away of the old. As Leonard Cohen’s famous lines portray, the crack is where the light gets in.
We have left much behind and continue to do so. A lot of light has been coming into the world’s cracks in the last years, illuminating our individual and collective shadows, inviting us to clear them out and embrace a brighter, more expansive way of life. There is grief in the process, inextricably mixed however with the necessary release of free energy that enables us to create and feel gratitude and joy once more. A constant paradox without which true change cannot come about. We can move wherever we like and do whatever we want, we always take ourselves with us. Our habits, our sense of self and what we know how to do, the ways in which we make sense of the world and choose what to do. Perhaps they are useful and supportive of our new reality, or maybe they need a real transformation. Often we don’t realise that until it’s too late and we have inadvertently created just what we wanted - or had to - leave behind. I know I have, many times, until I realised what I was doing.
We are not our habits, those are things we learn in the places we live in, our families, schools and colleges, workplaces and communities. They arise in our culture, whether at home, in our free time activities or the organisations we work for. Culture emerges in the spaces between us as we come together as whoever we bring of ourselves into those places. We often believe, and indeed experience, that things happen to us, from outside ourselves and beyond our control. That may be true but we can also always choose our response. Most of us, yours truly included, react to whatever we experience, instead of being able to respond from a deep, stable place within. We make all sorts of assumptions about our experience, tell stories about it, look for people to affirm our own so we can feel we belong. We rarely question those assumptions or seek points of view and experiences that are very different to ours. We may purport to be inclusive and equal, until we need to change something that is dear to us and keeps us safe. Then our best intentions become something closer to signalling our virtuous behaviour and telling others what to think, feel and do. The ghost of eugenic thinkers still roam widely among us, embodied in some of the louder mainstream narratives about the big challenges for humanity.
Photo credit: Asha Singh 2023 (of ‘Holding Openness’ by Alan Rayner)
My dream also felt like a message from my depths about how I have experienced moving on from the work I used to do. Old-school traditional organisations and the ways in which they prefer to develop themselves feel irrelevant and redundant in an era of AI-dominated, late-stage capitalism and accelerating existential risk for humanity, irrespective of cultural values and political views. That kind of leadership and collective development is anything but life-giving for me as a practitioner, or as an employee in the rare moments I have gone back to full-time work. At the same time, I miss some of the good years, people and opportunities I encountered when those organisations were really looking for transformation. The transition away from work I once loved and out of a reasonably successful small business to the great unknown where anything is possible has been a bumpy one, for many others I know too.
And I sense my nightscape is signposting how my system is responding to our upcoming new chapter of life in an area we don’t know, largely out of necessity and respect for what our ancestors worked hard to grow. I don’t know that we would have chosen to be there otherwise, as happy as we now are about the move. Too little time to choose the things I want to keep and people taking them away from me remind me about the importance of non-negotiable values, primary relationships and activities that fill me with energy. A lot of stuff and certain relationships have probably served their purpose, for all concerned.
It’s always really interesting to see who and what comes into our life when we create the space to do so. For me, that has been much closer and happier key relationships, a wonderful new creative partner and good friend, Josselin Butte’, a transformation of my work that is now our work, our soon-to-be new home and the emerging seeds of artistic performance. My health is processing the shifts as it needs to, periods of ease and smoothness interspersed with more challenging ones. My system is quite literally upgrading. So much is still possible.
I am now officially operating as Restabilize and changing my branding here on Substack. Restabilize is a body of practice for developing our capability for reflection-in-action so that we can better navigate the paradox and polarity we increasingly encounter today. Whether that is in our formal positions of responsibility, our families or society at large, Josselin and I offer:
self-paced digital learning in an online adventure called MEET, where you will explore fundamental practices for becoming more stable that you can use straight away in your own life
guided one-one or collective support to discover those practices together
You will be able to enrol for these from the beginning of March.
We will also be holding regular online events to look at why it is so useful to become more stable and how. You can already sign up here to join us when we start. There is a short introductory video and a downloadable pdf too if you would like to find out more first.
And I’ll be writing regularly here on Substack about all things change, transformation, regeneration, practice and performance. if it feels right for you, please continue following me and share the invitation with your friends and colleagues who might also be interested.
I look forward to engaging with some of you along the way.
As always, thanks for reading.