Dreaming: The Moonwork of Winter

I have always kept a dream journal as a record of inner dimensions and a source of nourishing awe. The way our elusive DreamMaker works is something like a mystical mermaid – she knows where you are but you can never know where she is unless she offers a glimpse when you need her most. She dives especially deep in winter as the soul rests, sorts, and integrates for a re-launch in spring time.

In the cold months of winter I notice that a massage with warm sesame oil, a practice called abhyanga, induces the best-ever sleep and dream states. Doing more dreamwork with an exceptional therapist is also alchemically powerful. According to the amazing author and Jungian analyst Marion Woodman, “The more you work with your dreams and your unconscious, and honor it, the more you understand it and it understands you. When you develop a relationship with your psyche this way, you begin to carry that energy into Life and your relationships.”

In dream therapy groups, we often feel that we are dreaming for each other and not just for the self. With this in mind, I wanted to share a transformational dream that was more real than reality. How comprehensively kind of Existence to prune my ego in the dreamtime. This dream provided a visceral soul surgery that smarted for months and rewired my understanding of love and Life.

The dream is called: The Artist becomes Human through the Master’s Grace.

In my dream, the Enlightened Master comes to town and spends a great deal of time with me to shake me up and wake me up, so that I grow up before it is too late. He tells me he would be very sad if I did not flower in my potential. He is infinitely patient and sits receptively as I recount a personal calamity lasting over ten years, feeling very justified in my pain. He helps me sort the facts from fiction. You must take care of yourself, he repeats over and over. I had given up on Life.

Talking only of the practical, he helps me see my own arrogance and narcissistic reward in almost every problem I present. We fall madly in love to the point where the stars are singing to me and flowing through my heart. He sends me the spirits of Enlightened Saints who gift me with earrings made of stars, and a necklace made of the full moon. He sends me cosmic joys – Meerabai’s own dance and Kabir’s actual voice. He fills my heart with the full moon over and over again. He places a full moon in the tip of each of my fingers. He fills each of my cells with the full moon. We are one.

Because I love him and trust him utterly and completely, he can somehow break my lifelong, unhealthy trance. He escorts me out of the golden garden of perfection where all things are already whole, golden songs, shimmering poems, perfect romances – and together we walk out to a green, green park with tall trees and children’s’ laughter. This dimension of grass, sky, blood, and shit is far better. It’s safe to connect with real people. I must find the strength to ride a tsunami wave of hatred and violence that I insist is not my own, but it’s nearly impossible, and very uncomfortable and shaming.

I hate my Master translucently for purging my shadows and exposing my wounded darkness when I was at the peak of loving him. I feel betrayed and wounded. He smiles oceanically into my eyes and holds my hand to give me courage. “It’s better out here,” he says. “You can visit the golden plane of wholeness, but you can’t live there.”

Later on, I become terrified that he actually loves me. To my embroidered ego, that would mean entering the Death Tube. I become very toxic, suddenly out of control. I offer him my life. Then we fall madly in hate, and then the real love grows to such a point that it burns my heart. How can I ever thank him? He has taught me to utterly surrender and bow to my own darkness and the imperfect world without ideals, to embrace the non-ordinary ordinary, and to touch Life as it is, pulsing, surprising, more staggeringly amazing than an artist could ever imagine.

The dream whirls me to his burning funeral pyre in the Himalayas on a lonely night. The moon is warped and dull, only a third of what it should be for such a Master. The wind is ragged, whistling at times. No fanfare for him? No royal send-off? He certainly deserves one in my view. He shows me that we are sameness, two alones. We live from aloneness to aloneness. I hate this.

The snow-laced indigo mountains stare back at me with utter indifference and mirth. Millions should have been there, but it was only imperfect me who had the horrifying honor of watching his beautiful body blaze in the flames for hours and finally turn to ash. I accept the beauty and the unrelenting harshness of Life. I had wept when he told me his early stories of impossible pain. For Life squeezed him very hard at one time and now, does not make a fancy death display for a man most purely committed to love. This death show was only for me, one witness. Feeling entered by him, I wanted to watch well for him.

In pure electricity, I watched my Master leave form and burn down to the basic elements of matter. This is true intimacy. He is showing me the truth and that Life owes me nothing. Life shrugs my demands and blasts my expectations. Life is raw, unto its own Self. Have I been out of step my entire life? Yes. Life, he is showing me, owes him nothing. His humility once made me feel so uncomfortable, and now I know it was real. The privilege of each breath is real. This lifetime, use it well.

Could it really be? He is blowing his sacred ashes into my soul. I am his Samadhi. I gasp in a love-shock my soul has never known. We are one. He has entered into me permanently and now lives in my soul. I am touching Life now. His handsome face is in my heart day and night. I belong to him. I will honor him until I, too, burn to ash by myself, under a waning moon.

Article by Prem Geet
Illustration: Starry night in winter by Vicent van Gogh