Windsock
I was newly awake but had not opened my eyes for as my consciousness rose to the surface, I found myself staring at a wind sock, in the shape of a koi fish, blowing in the breeze behind closed lids. I pulled the covers tighter around me and continued to watch as the fish filled to capacity and danced with ease from one stream of current to another - up, then down, side to side. Sometimes it spun in place , never getting tangled in its own string, while at others it emptied and snapped like a flag before filling again with wind. It was a hypnotic kind of dance, peaceful, as was the knowledge that came with it: that I was meant to be more like a windsock. But more on that later.
I didn’t often have interesting or helpful dreams before my parents died. As a kid they were straight up nightmares, no doubt helping me to process various childhood anxieties about living life. Chief among them were two recurring ones about monsters. In one, I ran through my neighborhood in the grey light of pre-dawn, past all my neighbors’ houses with darkened windows, and under trees where even the birds still slept. The only sounds were the soft earthen thud of my footsteps and my breath, which came ragged and panicky. I was searching for a place to hide from a full-grown, bristling silver-back gorilla who was galloping behind me. I could never quite get out of his sight long enough to hide, though, because while he was able to run at full speed, I was running in slow motion. In the dream I was frantic, terrorized; there was no salvation or resolution. I just ran and ran, scuttled under bushes, and made dashes for it until I eventually awoke, never more thankful for morning.
Another recurring one involved coming face to face with a crowd of vampires blocking my way. I had two choices: either succumb to a ferocious attack and become one of them; or move toward them, though my fear. As I got closer, fear intensified to terror. Their glittering eyes and coiled, predatory tautness showed me just what kind of mortal danger I was in. But lo and behold, if I continued to walk, at some point I found that the pack parted and let me through, bringing me a mixture of euphoria and apprehension. As I continued to walk, leaving them further and further behind, I came to understand that, simply by facing and then leaning in to them, I had vanquished them, rendering them powerless anymore to do me harm. The task, though, night after night, was to get to that point where the menacing clump blocking my path would part. It was never any different, never any easier, and I never felt in the dream “Oh I’ve been here before. I know what to do.” It was a lethal conundrum every time.
As a young adult, I stopped remembering my dreams at all, probably beating them out of myself, through the ambition, anxiety, lack of sleep, and terrible eating and drinking habits that went along with my going to grad school and trying to first establish myself in the world.
In those ten years or so, I really remember having only one dream, and I set it aside for a long time as one of my old childhood anxiety dreams again, albeit an especially fearsome one. Mom and I were at the family cabin in Vermont. The sun was streaming through the window behind us, as we leaned against the dining room table, wrapping us in a veil of golden light. She had poured us some orange juice and handed me a glass. All appeared normal on the surface, but it was not. She was dead and her soul had come to comfort me and tell she that she had to go. While the “action” of the dream was quite serene, the emotional substrate was forbidding. I cried to the point of gagging and begged her not to leave. It shook me. I awoke with feelings of doom that never fully went away. It had been so real. It caused me to think on Mom’s mortality in a way I simply never had before - a healthy woman in her 50s! I was so concerned with losing Dad first (as I wrote about in Mothers Don’t Die), that Mom’s mortality wasn’t even a blip on the radar. It became one, though, after that dream. Just a blip, to be sure, but a blip nonetheless. My consciousness had been pierced.
When she got her terminal diagnosis, some 8 years later, I found out for the first time that she had known this was a possibility for years but had decided to keep it from me. The doctors had found proteins in her blood and urine that had had a 2% chance of developing into the incurable cancer known as Multiple Myeloma. She didn’t tell me because I was at such a critical time in my life, she didn’t want me being distracted by fear, especially when the probability of its developing into something serious was so low. But now that it had come to pass, I learned that they found her elevated protein levels at about the same time I had had that dream. I shivered in recognition and remembrance.
After Mom died, I prayed for her to visit me in my dreams again like she had with the orange juice, but she never did, not until 6 days before Dad died - the only time I have ever dreamed of her, though she has been gone for 8 years now. I dreamed we were together in my kitchen while the boys scampered rambunctiously around our feet (aged 4 and 18 months, as they had been when she died). She tiptoed this way and that to let their squirmy bodies run by, chuckled with pleasure, and snapped pictures of them, repeatedly and from different angles, smiling at me as she did so, as if to assure me that she hadn’t missed a thing. This was hyper-real, in a way that you sometimes see described by others as “a visitation dream.” I am hopeful, anyway. And when Dad died less than a week later, I began to think that what she had really meant for me to know was that he wouldn’t miss anything either.
Nevertheless, Dad’s death was the “shot heard round the world” for me - a spiritual sonic boom that shattered me like a glass flute dropped on a stone floor, reducing me to glittering, atomized powder. Nothing I recognized about myself remained; I didn’t know how to exist in a world without Bob and Karen Chan. And so began the slow and painful process of figuring it out.
As an archaeologist, I have spent thousands of hours in the laboratory, mending glass and ceramic sherds into plates, glasses, tumblers, teacups, chocolate cups, milk pans, butter pots, and punch bowls; as well as bottles for gin, French wine, English beer, and port. Green glass is just green glass unless you can identify the form it once belonged to, to talk about date, function, use, and meaning. The thing about mending something that has been broken beyond all recognition is that it never goes back together quite the same as before. But in the mending you discover the meaning.
I have found that, in my own mending, my seams are no longer air-tight. There is a looseness, and openness, to me that I didn’t have before my parents died. If the absolute worst can happen, so can everything else. So can anything else; my disbelief has been permanently disabled. It’s freeing, empowering even, if you can let it be. There are times when I have found it to be downright magical.
For example, one thing that has changed dramatically for me in the mending is that my dream life has become rich and varied and not at all frightening. My dreams have emerged in my new state of openness as a mysterious but reliable source of kindness, care and wisdom. It’s why I have a whole “Dreams and Visions” category on this blog! If you go dip your toe in the magic there, you may reemerge heartened and amazed, as I have been.
“The thing about mending something that has been broken beyond all recognition is that it never goes back together quite the same as before. But in the mending you discover the meaning.”
Heat Wave
This summer I have experienced a heatwave of an unusual sort. Acute feelings of anxiety, fear, grief and betrayal have run roughshod over my spirit, as the infernal hellfires of Trumpism rage across the country. Of course it’s been dark and terrible times since election day, but this summer, I think it is safe to say, has been particularly painful for people of color. “Send her back,” they have screamed in their chilling rallies, reminiscent of Nuremburg. We live in a house of mirrors now, where treason is confused with patriotism and patriotism with treason; where racists call their victims the “real racists,” and the real Americans “un-American.” Black is white; down is up; three-year-olds are national security threats; foxes guard the hen house in every major government agency. We are under active attack from a foreign adversary while the administration tells us there’s nothing to see here. 1984 is now reality, the dystopia is here.
When Dad was a young man, he carried a notebook around with him, to scribble deep thoughts, clever insults and humorous observations in. Finding it right before he died was an incredible gift to me and let me “spend time with him” in a special way. I was healed, invited into the inner workings of a unique and brilliant mind, scribbled and/or typed on these brittle little yellow pages. I regaled myself on them. And if ever I am really missing him, he leaps to life when I open his notebook. “Every man should have a wife, preferably his own” was one memorable one. “Here’s champagne for my real friends and real pain for my sham friends,” he wrote another time. But there was pain and sorrow and introspection in there too. Philosophy and poetry.... I am always charmed as well as reverent before these pages. They are the closest thing I’ll ever have to a prayer book.
This summer, the one I keep returning to is this:
“Mankind was dancing - unmindful of the fiddler’s recompense.”
Normally a fairly resourceful person, with plenty of coping mechanisms for all kinds of challenging situations, I lost my balance this summer. I have felt emotionally unsafe, distrusting of my fellow citizens, wondering particularly where the outrage, or even concern, was among certain white acquaintances and colleagues, who have seemed to skate breezily along, untroubled by what the people of color in their lives have been experiencing, uncommitted to seeing an end to it. Silence is its own kind of betrayal. It was unnerving, and I could feel myself cramping up over it, clamping down around the feeling, contracting, and recoiling. The wall slamming down around my heart felt like an actual, physical thing. And as for the rest of me? It was all on fire - searing, scorching, melting fire. I felt hot in ways I couldn’t quite articulate.
But then I had that cooling dream about the windsock.
Cooling It Down
What I wordlessly understood, before I even opened my eyes, was that I had been holding myself apart from, or outside of, the real current of life for a good while after Mom and Dad died. That was a necessary part of my healing, but as I discovered and wrote about during my recent trip to Egypt, I have been invited, and been feeling empowered as well, to step back into the full current. No more clinging to the banks and splashing in the shallows like a spiritual invalid, where the water flows less forcefully but I also don’t get anywhere. Like the windsock in a storm, life demands a return to whole immersion. The image I saw in my dream showed the wind filling the sock to maximum capacity, rushing over it, around it, but most importantly — through it. Aye, there was the rub, and the real insight of the dream.
I had been stepping more boldly back into life, yes, but I was contracting over the painful feelings I encountered there, and in effect, trapping them within myself. A windsock only works because it is open on both ends. The wind fills the sock, yes, but passes through it. So, too, can we work to let uncomfortable feelings pass through us, instead of over-identifying with them, clamping down on them to “stop the bleed,” so to speak, but creating a blockage in the process that prevents them from ever healing or dissipating. I remembered that the pain of childbirth was infinitely worse when I allowed my muscles to contract over the pain instead of consciously releasing the tension and remembering to breathe. In one scenario, the pain could pass through me; in the other, it filled and threatened to replace me.
Now here is a pro tip: if you convert the wisdom you receive from your intuition (be it in waking, dreaming or meditative state) into real-life action, you will soon find yourself living your best life, regardless of external circumstances. So the first thing I did, upon receiving the dream of the windsock, was go online and order some Koi-shaped windsocks for my deck.
I chose them, in what felt like a random manner, in shades of blue, green and red. They looked festive and summery and I felt a spark of joy at each of the colors. However, when I checked, on a whim, the meaning associated with each of these colors, I was delighted (and a little bit amazed) to learn that blue - the color of the throat chakra - is associated with fresh air, openness, and liberation; the perfect antidote for my cramped spirit. Green - the color of the heart chakra - is associated with love, relating, integration and compassion; the perfect antidote for my walled off heart and suspicion of friends. And red - the color of the root chakra -is associated with feelings of security, safety, belonging, and pioneering; the perfect antidote for my feelings of fear, endangerment and retreat. How ya like them apples?
In the week or so since the windsocks came and I hung them on my deck, I have felt called outside to watch them on numerous occasions, often when the news cycle has delivered another killing blow, and I have felt the old spiritual cramp trying to take hold. I watch the windsocks spin and blow and dance; I breathe deeply and fill my own self with air, and I feel myself opening to the cleansing power of the wind. I feel the cramp, it fills me whole, and then I let it go.
Try it. If I may paraphrase the inimitable Bruce Lee for my own purposes here: “Be like a windsock, my friend.” Okay, that doesn’t quite roll off the tongue, does it? But what wisdom or guidance have you ever gotten from dreams that changed your point of view or baseline for action?
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