Listen to Toko-pa speak on Dreams

Chris Gibson interviews Toko-pa on Dreams for CJLY’s Psychtalk.

Dreamspoke

Dearest Readerfriends;

After a year of publishing the weekly Dreamspeak column, it is time for me to take hiatus.  Other projects, which will have some of the same flavour, are calling for my attention.  I may return to this weekly tradition at some point, but for now need all my extra energy reserves. It is with great gratitude for your reflections and submissions that I take my leave.  Let me remind you that I am always available for one-on-one dreamwork, and writing commissions.  Just email your requests or call me at 250-551-0729. Also, archives for Dreamspeak can be found in their entirety here.

If you’d like to show your appreciation for Dreamspeak or the new projects it may birth with your support, my tip jar is here.

Much love and thanks for accompanying me this far,

Toko-pa

Albert Camus said, “A person’s life purpose is nothing more than to rediscover, through the detours of art or love or passionate work, those one or two images in the presence of which his heart first opened.”

Dreamspeak: Falling the Stone Wall

Dear Toko-pa; In my first dream, I am married. I am at my parents’ helping build a stone wall and this spouse-person keeps calling and asking where I am, telling me I am the type of person who only does what is best for me – how I am unreliable, ambivalent and untrustworthy – but that he still loves me. My father is building the wall all wrong – it keeps falling down. He doesn’t listen to me or admit that the plans I’d drawn up were functional. Sweat in my eyes, arms aching, hands bleeding, I throw down my load of rocks. This isn’t worth it, I say, none of this is worth it

In the second dream I am traveling in high desert country alone. Rocky and gray. Carefully, I select a chador; it takes me a great deal of time to figure out the proper way to wear it and the relief as I finally cover my hair, wash my face free of make-up, is palpable. The air is cold and thin and I walk through a market and buy food from women then ride in a truck with men and guns. In this dream, I feel so safe. – Alma

Dear Alma; Your stonewalling project make me very curious about the origins of your ambivalence towards relationship. How much is your dad’s example falling apart for you now? The blood, sweat, aching suggest that your strategy is taking more effort then it’s worth.

The desert setting is that aridity I was talking about last week, in Feelings Are Your Friends; the place where feeling wants to flow, where grief is untapped. The chador is such a complex symbol – does it stand for feminine sovereignty, or is it a patriarchal imposition? Either way, the sexuality is cloaked. You feel safe inside your protections, weapons drawn.

On hand there is an empowerment in this, your obtaining nourishment from women (in the market), maybe finding affinity in your relationships with women at this time. There is great relief in not having to negotiate the sexuality game. On the other hand, there is a growing exhaustion from the stonewalling you’ve been doing. The emotional climate is dry and cold. Is ’safe’ where you need to be right now? Or is staying hidden taking more energy than you can bear?

You know, the literal “stone-walling” aspect didn’t even occur to me? My parents’ relationship is tumultuous, passionate & consuming; looking at their early relationship I can see that even though I sympathized with my mother, I identified with my father. Anger/control/distancing made him less vulnerable, less prone to being “stuck.” The perceived softness and weakness of my mother – she was always on the verge of leaving but never did – kept her trapped. In addition, my dad is one of the most intensely self-protective people I know – It’s crazy that I’ve never thought of this before. So the stone wall, falling. Wow.

The chador and the desert are really confusing to me. The disparity between my surroundings and the feelings I had -the ambiguity of the symbols themselves. If look at the interactions of the last few years – they’re almost entirely about safety and security. Not the traditional kind, but the kind where I know going in that if there isn’t going to be much asked from me, my own desires will never grow out of control. There’s a lot of compartmentalizing, and you know, aridity, (creative/emotional), has absolutely occurred to me before.

Given your elucidation about your parents’ relationship model, the dream continues to reveal its great poetry. By virtue of taking your dad’s self-protective, stonewalling approach, there is an automatic denial of your own (and mother’s) emotionalism, which is seen as weakness. Without the emotional life, there can be no vitality and the inner-landscape becomes a desert. Ideally, you’d like to get some emotion-flow happening there, which might mean touching the inheritance of (y)our mother’s grief. Weapons are hardly ever a good way to achieve sovereignty, since they invite opposition and defensiveness.

Why not weigh the paradox; the force which feels like safety is also oppressing your feminine/feeling. To my feeling, the redemption in your dream is the wall falling down and the recognition growing in you that self-barricading isn’t sustainable anymore.

This is so clear-sighted and true: “the force which feels like safety is also oppressing your feminine/feeling,” that it’s taken me aback. Seriously, that’s exactly what the chador is! Like, I think I’m going to write that down in my little carry-with-me notebook, to remember it. And I do want emotion-flow, I do, as much as it scares me.

It’s really interesting how sometimes dreams just seem like a mish-mash of unrelated trivia from the previous day, and then sometimes so lucidly meaningful, with a little bit of digging. And you know what? Since reading your dream column, I’ve been paying closer attention, and it seems like the latter-type dreams are showing up more frequently. Thank you for that, too, and for this. You have a gift Toko-pa, you surely do, and thank you for sharing it.

Related articles:

• Feelings Are Your Friends
• Finding Your Other Half
• Participation Mystique
• The You in Me
• In Tandem, or Codependent?

If you have a dream you’d like to share or question you’d like to ask, email me at dreamquestion@gmail.com. You can also arrange a private dream interpretation session with me at the same address, or call 250-551-0729. Dreamwork can be done in person, over the phone and via email. For more info, visit the Dream School website.

Dreamspeak: Feelings Are Your Friends

In dreams, feelings are our greatest allies. They show us where our energy is being concentrated and which way it wants to go. Like signals from the unconscious to the physical body, feelings show us where our needs are.

Sometimes they warn us to retreat from dangerous situations, other times they magnify where we need to continue working. While joy and enthusiasm are the kinds of friends who show you what you love, so are disappointment, jealousy, irritation and fear. They serve you to progress beyond your limitations and strengthen your patience with discomfort.

Unfortunately, we have learned from a culture that altogether devalues feeling, to ignore and override them. On their own, emotions can overspill, drowing us in havoc and confusion. But if cultivated in tandem with the other faculties, discernment and action, they serve as our instinctual barometer.

By respecting your feelings as intelligent instead of depressing them, they will begin to alert you to the areas of your life that need attention before it appears exaggeratedly in your dreams.

For instance, if you put too much emphasis on work and deadlines, you may be running a constant low-level anxiety which inhibits your spiritual growth. You may be so accustomed to it that you barely notice it anymore. But it isn’t lost on your dreamer; you might dream yourself late for an important event, unprepared, or simply running nowhere fast. If you’ve overridden your feelings for too long, the dreams may be more violent, expressed in images of rape, torture and neglect.

Though difficult to look at, these dreams amplify your soul’s need for greater tenderness. As with most things that are uncomfortable, we try to avoid them. But one of the great teachings of dreams is that by entering into that which is uncomfortable to us, we can reclaim the power contained within it.

Only by allowing ourselves to feel discomfort fully can we extract the sweet truth being held captive in it. In so doing, we drain the event or trigger of its feeling concentration, freeing up the trapped energy for our creative purpose on the planet.

A society which ignores its feelings ignores its nature. The consequences of this at the collective level are devastating. Despite having achieved obscene wealth, depression has increased tenfold since the 1950s. The World Health Organization (WHO) has predicted that by the year 2020, depression will be the second leading cause of the ‘global disability burden.’ At any given time, more than three million Canadians (around 10%) are suffering from serious depressive disorders.

Our disconnection from feeling has not only resulted in epidemic depression, widespread poverty and political corruption within the human community, but our seas, skies, species and forests are suffering the same plague of neglect.

Developing your feeling takes time, especially if it has been systematically discouraged in you. There may be a layer of numbness you’ll have to chip through initially and, underneath that, a backlog of feeling may need to be felt. But as you make the seemingly bottomless descent, it helps to remember that grief is the downpour your soul has been thirsting for.

Rain makes everything lush with life. The more excellently and prodigiously you grieve, the more growth and fertility you can expect. There is a future teeming with life beyond the spiritual aridity and meaninglessness of our time. If each of us has the tenacity to retrieve the elixirs of our discomforts, our combined medicine will heal the collective wound.

 

Related articles:

• Under the Override
• Grist for the Psychic Mill
• The Animal Heart
• Police State of Mind
• Flying with Both Wings
• Bleed Joyfully: a fresh view of depression
  

If you have a dream you’d like to share or question you’d like to ask, email me at dreamquestion@gmail.com. You can also arrange a private dream interpretation session with me at the same address, or call 250-551-0729. Dreamwork is available in person, over the phone or via email. For more info, visit the Dream School website.

 

Dreamspeak: Lights of the Night

Dear Toko-pa; what is the significance of the moon, stars and constellating night skies in dreams? – Astrodreamer

Dear Astrodreamer; This past spring I was invited to go caving with a friend of mine who is a seasoned spelunker. Naturally, I was terrified at the thought of going underground into total darkness to squeeze though cold, wet and tight spots.

“Where’s the appeal?” I asked him.

His face lit up like a ten year old’s and said; “Only 20-some-odd humans have ever set foot in this part of the cave, which we just discovered last season. The stalactites are over 6 million years old! The landscape is nothing you’ve ever experienced before; it’s like being on the moon.”

It was a pretty convincing argument.

Geared up with rubber boots, hard hats and rain gear, we climbed and maneuvered and shimmied down 30 foot long body-sized channels, all by the light of our headlamps. It was exhilarating. My downward-dog practice came in handy when we had to get under a narrow opening through which a freezing current was rushing through the caves.

Then, soaking wet in the subzero temperatures, scraped up, and very nearly wanting to turn back, it opened up into a cathedral of caves with 40 foot ceilings. We were somewhere, nowhere under the ground, and you could feel the ancient. That was when we decided to turn off our headlamps.

You expect your eyes to adjust, but it’s your mind playing tricks on you since there is a complete absence of light in these caves. The only adjusting one can do is to find some sliver of trust in utter darkness. After a long while in the silence, we began to sing.

It was a revelation to me to realise that when you are in darkness your inner light automatically comes on. Psychically speaking, we think of the shadow as possessing you entirely when it rears up. But what if the fear we feel can be flipped? If we cultivate the sensitivity of cats and owls, we may discover an ability to navigate the dark with our third eyes and ears.

In the dark, logic and plain sight are useless. The stars and moon don’t shed direct light, like the sun does. Their light is diffuse and reflective instead. Like the wisdom of Sophia, it is the deep knowing that lives in our bones, our wombs and in the earth itself. When you turn inward, it is what lights the way, even if distantly and dimly at first.

By moon and starlight, abilities you don’t use during the day come alive. Fear flips into instinct and the mystical pull of your feeling leads your way. You can sense the density of objects around you, hear the songs of stones and know things are coming even before they’ve left.

Your dreams are born by starlight and their stories are the constellations of your psyche. The ancient archetypes we live out today were written into myths under the very same stars by which we weave our dreams.

Despite all the convincing trappings of consensus reality, the lights of the night are remembering. They are sacred memory, distant visions across billions of light years making their way to you. And if you turn off your headlamp, you may just find yourself singing.

 

If you have a question or dream you’d like to share, please email dreamquestion@gmail.com. If you’d like to set up an appointment with Toko-pa, your can arrange it in person, by phone (250)551-0729 or email.

“The soul can become a reality again only when each of us has the courage to take it as the first reality in our own lives, to stand for it and not just ‘believe’ in it.” – James Hillman

Dreamspeak: Revolving Door of Love

Dear Toko-pa: I dreamt that I entered a revolving door, in which I had planned to meet my sweetie, but then exited alone. I woke up shaking, like it was a nightmare, because I was desperate to find him there. We’d lost phone connection and I couldn’t get through. This dream comes up at a time when I have lots of questions about entering into a new phase of closeness with him. It’s loving and sweet but the level of my fear about losing him grips me sometimes. Have you written before, or would you consider writing about, the meanings of doors in dreams? – Spinning Lover

Dear Spinning;

I once knew a monk who used doors as cues for mindfulness. Each time he stepped through one, he’d notice his transition from one place into the next. He said it helped keep him in the Now by focusing his awareness on the nonstop transience of life.

The doors in our dreams are not dissimilar to waking life doors in that they mark the threshold between two spaces. The details of your door and how your respond to it says a great deal about how you cope with transition. Does your door open to the outside or the inside? Do you rush through it or are you tentative? Maybe you’re desperate to keep your door locked. Are you closing yourself off or are you receptive to change?

As your relationship enters a new phase, you are experiencing a symbolic transition. Given the nature of your door, it’s no wonder you’re feeling dizzy. The revolving door has become a colloquialism for transience. It was invented to accommodate a constant flow of traffic, remaining always open and always closed at the same time. The question is whether that’s a good or bad thing in love?

While a revolving door might mean a regular flow of fresh influences to the relationship, there is something to be said about the stability and commitment necessary to achieve goals as a couple. If you are choosing to keep your boundaries open and flowing, then good communication will be essential.

In your dream, the phone connection has been lost. Not being able to reach your honey might symbolize the need for more closeness with him. You might want to have a conversation about why your love feels like a high traffic zone and how you might create more security together.

You enter into love wanting to meet your lover, but you exit alone. While the dream plays out your great fear of loss, I wonder if it also asks the bigger question, “Are you are feeling met?”

Dreams sometimes play out our worst fears, but it isn’t to torture us. They are preparing us for every possible threat and relieving us of the pent-up tension that blocks us from going forward. So bless your fears for the signals they are and bring them out into the open where they can be addressed.

The revolving door, the lost communication and the ‘going unmet’ are all alerts from your unconscious. Ask yourself what you need to feel safer; what will help you move forward instead of in circles? It might be a good time to secure your boundaries, make your needs better known and see if he shows up to meet you. In the meantime, don’t forget to notice the momentous dynamism of passage.

 

If you have a dream you’d like to share, or have questions and responses to Dreamspeak, please email dreamquestion@gmail.com or set up a dreamwork session by phone 250-551-0729. If you’d like to attend an upcoming workshop or seminar, visit the Dream School  for more information.

 

Dreamspeak: Keeping the Seeds Alive

Dear Toko-pa: What happens when we turn away from something in our dreams, or hit replay on a dream and re-dream it, trying to change a component of the story? Can the conscious mind sabotage our dream experiences? — Kaleidoscope Mind

Dear KM: So often the two minds, conscious and unconscious, seem at odds. One runs the mechanics while the other spins out the substance; one is interested in keeping things in order while the other churns up chaos; one lives in the province of Know It Allcity while the other is leaping off its ledge. But while they appear to be pulling you in opposite directions, they may be stretching your reach.

It’s been said that the conscious mind is a like a speck of dust sitting atop a massive balloon that is the unconscious. Now, as much as I’d like to defend the conscious mind for all it does to keep us functional and grounded, it really has no business running the show with as much hubris as it does. It’s a little embarrassing, given how much less sophisticated than the unconscious it is.

In a single day there is so much that we miss, ignore and reject, due to how narrow a scope the rational mind has, that the unconscious acts as a kind of holding tank for all of those things across a lifetime. It is far vaster than we can even conceive, and is likely responsible for things like déjà vu’s, synchronicities and flashfire ideas.

So let’s begin by assuming that It knows more than we do. Those glimmers of light, those hints of clarity, those seemingly random sprouts of imagination that push through our concrete life are the seeds we need to keep alive. They are often weak at the outset and the temptation is to underestimate them. But the challenge is in keeping your energy at the task.

Your dreams will never give you more than you can handle. What comes to the surface is ready to be made conscious. So when you have a dark dream, celebrate your progress! By the same token, never envy someone with luminous dreams because they have wrestled tooth and nail to receive them.

You always have the choice to look for the light in the shadows or to turn away. Turning away might be exactly what you need in the moment, especially if you’re tired from toiling down in there. Trust that whatever you decide is the right decision. Also know that if the issue being presented in the dream has roots, it will keep returning until you’re ready to look at it.

Some say that through re-dreaming, lucidity and active imagination, you can circumvent the digging into your emotional history and get straight to the rewriting of new stories. While I don’t entirely disagree, I think there is a balance to be struck. There is no such thing as a life without grief and pain, but how we respond to it is what generates the value of our lives. Somewhere off the dichotomy of wallowing or denying, lives creativity.

If you’ve made an issue conscious but still find yourself repeating the pattern, it may be time to take a more radical step. Whether by any of the above-mentioned methods, or by enacting a ritual or leap of faith, the important thing is that you are taking the seeds of the unconscious and planting them into the earth. That is to say, making your dreams come true by enacting a response to them with your waking life. You’ll know you’re on the right track when you feel terrified and completely alive.
Related articles:

• Taking the Dream Wheel
• Radical Trust
• Yes and Let Yes
• Dream it Forward

Dreamspeak: Under the Override

There’s a great scene in Osmosis Jones, a semi-animated flick about the insides of zookeeper Frank Detomello’s (Bill Murray) body, when a serious virus hits “City of Frank.” Instead of going to see a doctor, he pops a flu pill saying, “Sick? I’m not getting sick! I have far too much planned.” Meanwhile, down in the ailing metropolis of Frank, the mayor (without due process) throws the Override Switch.

It’s remarkable how many times in a single day we do the same. If we aren’t ignoring the messages from our bodies, we are behaving oppositely to our feelings, doing what’s expected, staying in the canoe when we’d rather bail, acting kindly when we’re mad as hell, or putting on a happy face to mask the miserable.

Now, at first glance, overriding may not seem problematic. After all, we have to behave in civilized society. We can’t just throw tantrums in the grocery aisles when we feel tired and fed up. But when you consider the cumulative effect of a society of overriders, the results are staggering.

To understand what override looks like at the collective level, consider the sheer volume of people taking antidepressants (prescriptions for SSRIs in Canada increased from 3.2 to 14.5 million between 1981 and 2000), and then wonder why depression is still on the rise. Or ask why such a high number of sexual predators are associated with the religious and moral right. You might even begin to wonder what lives under our tendency to violence in this society.

“To make war is an inability with grief,” says poet and healer Martín Prechtel, “Shame and depression are an inability with grief. Grief is the source of art. The only source of art. Violence is an inability with grief.”

You can feel how infinitely more relaxing this story is from the one we’re normally taught. As I overheard a mother instructing her distraught toddler in Override 101 the other day, “Superman doesn’t cry!” The creative individual, Prechtel teaches, reaches into his grief and discomforts for poetry. Now while you may not consider yourself an artist, what is life but a sculpture of one’s choices?

Eckhart Tolle, author of The Power of Now, talks about override in slightly different terms. He says that most of our difficulties come from resisting the present moment. Resistances are normal, but instead of affirming whatever is coming up, we resist our resistance, placing another “no” on top of the first “no,” telling ourselves we shouldn’t feel that way, we don’t want that pain, we should be more evolved, less emotional, stronger, etc.

The first step to dropping resistance is listening to it. Until we can do that, it will keep coming up and we’ll find ourselves on the Override Loop, “Argh. I hate this situation! But I should be more patient. Argh. I hate this situation!”

Yessing the dilemma does not mean staying in it. But you can only take action to rectify your predicament once you’ve admitted you’re in one. From there, you can begin to drop that which is draining or embittering you and redirect your energy towards that which you love.

“You love what you love more than you love your hate,” Prechtel teaches. “If what you love is the divine, story, culture, children, then instead of blowing a whistle, you’ll strive to keep the seeds alive.”