Entry for 7-11 March 2012
This year I finally made to the Full-time Counselling Diploma course residential. Thursday
night, Maggi ran a workshop on working with dreams. Here are my notes on the dream I
worked on:
I have a recurrent dream in which I'm on a long run: I'm out in the country, on a country
road, but there's little or no traffic, and the day is sunny but not hot. Maybe there is a
light breeze, just enough to keep me from overheating. I run for miles, without getting
tired, swooping down around bends in the road, running, running, feeling the ground pass
beneath my feet, moving through the countryside, running into new places where I haven't
run before. Sometimes I get a bit lost, but I keep running, and eventually find my way
back. It's a feeling of flow. I have a feeling of exhilaration and freedom, and it feels like I
could keep running forever, just flowing along the road.
I'm aware that I don't have much interest in interpreting this dream; I just want to enjoy it.
I suspect that it comes to me now perhaps because I've been doing interval training lately,
increasing my speed by sprinting for one minute out of five. But that is pretty hard work –
in fact that is the point of it, to build capacity by pushing myself to my limit. The dream is
different from the actual experience of running, because it feels relatively effortless. There
is no jarring sensation of my feet hitting the ground, no careful monitoring of my body's
state and my surroundings. Instead, in this dream, I have the opposite feeling, of flow.
In fact the dream is more like the dreams I used to have as a kid of flying through the air
as if swimming, using the breast stroke, but instead in this dream I'm running rather than
swimming, and it's easier than the swimming in the childhood flying dream was. However,
the exhilarating feeling of swooping, gaining speed as I drop down through small dips in
the road and the centripetal force of rounding tight corners, that is part of the flying dream
also, and fills me with joy.
What in my life is like this? Of course this is like the feeling of finishing one of my long
weekend runs, the burst of speed at the end, or even more the afterglow of enhanced
aerobic capacity that lasts for several hours after I've successfully stretched my capacity, a
sense of accomplishment, of enlargement. But I think more generally it's about the feeling
of flow, when I'm immersed in meaningful work, whether it be a good therapy session
where everything seems to come together, or a productive bout of writing where the ideas
and words just flow. Heaven!
1 comment:
For shure it´s a good thing. Only the brave minds can fly in their dreams and if you feel a similiar feeling while you are running, for me sounds good. I recently achieved a bigger step in self-consciounes dreaming, move objects, change the cenario, like in the movie "inception". This seems a crazy talk but in the last years of dreaming i can actually think something like this "i am dreaming, the dream soon will end, i´m free to follow what i want because i´m in my own incounciousness but with some conscience so i can do whatever i want". Flying is the thing i like most. I can remember many dreams, many trips. For me, this power of self consciouness started when i was maybe 13 ou 14 and i was tired to run away in dreams of monsters. Fear fear fear and one day i started to get angry and face the monsters. What happened was that the monsters started to went away....! By my 16 i was flying. Now i´m trying to master the moving and creation of objects but seems a very hard task coz i need more time dreamings and more balance between consciouness and incounsciouness coz if i start to think "i want this and that and when i woke up i have to do this and that" my counsciouness wakes up my mind. It´s a very sensitive point or bridge between de dream and reality.
Of course this is just a curiosity and maybe someday i will talk with a jungian follower :)
Never quit to run for your dreams Elliot :)
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