Dreamspeak: A harmony named Desire

I once had a dream that a blind fool began wreaking havoc in my community with his eccentricities. He sang so loudly, people put their fingers in their ears. He danced like a madman and knocked things over with his drunken pirouettes. He really knew how to clear a room. Somehow, I was the only one who liked him. When we were alone, he turned to me and whispered, “Don’t choose things that are familiar to you, but don’t choose things that are disagreeable either. Choose things that are unfamiliar and interesting to you at the same time!”

As it turns out, the blind fool was a sage visionary after all. He was warning me not to become stagnant in familiarity, but to aspire to risk while staying in tune with my instincts. Somewhere between those two things, magnetic and unknown, a holy harmony named Desire can be struck.

My friend, a self-proclaimed Tantric Radical, says that the Transcendentalists had it all wrong; desire is not something to be ‘risen above’ as we’ve been routinely taught, but is the very meat of creativity. Desire is what propels us to evolve, which draws us into life, towards that which we love but don’t yet understand. Following our heart’s desires may take us away from security, but it ripens our character while keeping us deliciously alive.

Too many spiritual traditions place an emphasis on achieving ‘god-consciousness,’ saying that we must learn detachment from our desire-nature, which causes endless suffering. But the Jungian, Sufi, and Mayan teachings tell us to enter into that suffering, respecting it as the left hand of bliss that it is. It seems to me, instead of trying to live piously in “Spirit,” we might have better luck aspiring to be human.

When people ask me if some dreams are wish-fulfillment fantasies, I say that’s a slanderous rumour that Sigmund Freud started, from which the reputation of dreams has never fully recovered. It’s not that he wasn’t on the right track – we do indeed spin out our wishes in the dreamtime – but his reductionist approach suggested those wishes were disposable. Carl Jung, on the other hand, championed our madnesses as having an intelligence we would do well to heed. Wishes are born to be fulfilled.

As Tzutujil shaman Martín Prechtel teaches, our soulful desires are the very thing missing from modern civilization. The “indigenous soul of the modern person has either been banished to some far reaches of the dream world or is under direct attack by the modern mind.” Our desires live like refugees in exile from us, gaining resentment and grief, while we live in our gated mind-communities, homogenized of the very tension that invites progress.

Given how much we’ve tried to quash it, desire might ironically be just the thing that saves us. “For there to be a world at all,” writes Prechtel, “every indigenous, original, natural thing must start singing its song, dancing its dance, moving and breathing, each according to its own nature.”

So just for today, ask yourself what you desire and how you might take a small step towards befriending it. Forget how eccentric and blind it may seem at first, let it stumble out of you, let it knock things over and loudly pronounce its own name. You may just find your inner madman is crazy like a fox.

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 private session by phone 250-229-5670. If you’d like to attend an upcoming workshop or seminar, visit the Dream School website at www.herownroom.com .