A Really Big Dream : My Journey

Life in Ubud is filled with dreamers, shamans, healers, artists and average people just trying to make a rupiah or two and get by. It's amazing how our days are filled here and what seems common place around spirituality, the afterlife and respecting the Balinese balance between the physical life and the spirit world. The spirit world is real here, it's a part of daily ritual and routine and must be respected. The Balinese believe this is what keeps the balance. Life can never be all good, there will always be evil, but maintaining a balance with respect to evil spirits and gods is how they find their feet firmly planted on the ground. There are lower animal spirits under the ground, one has to be careful they don't enter you through your feet, when you're not paying attention.

I've always had really vivid nocturnal dreams.  For as long as I can remember I would wake up with a full memory of lots of details happening in my dreams. Sometimes they would mirror waking life, sometimes they were just confusing. For years I've been keeping dream journals on and off, writing it all down in the middle of the night or in the morning. I never know what to do with them after, I keep them in a journal feeling like there's something important in them and one day someone will help explain them to me.

Ubud is filled with people who delve into anything spiritual, energetic & psychic. My friend Jane has studied dream work for years, so she was happy to help me talk through dream after dream, unpack some of the hidden meaning and then work on creating a dream journal I could use.

A couple of weeks ago I had a really big dream. Jane's comment was, "Carl Jung would call this a really big dream, I would call this a really big dream." It was filled with me going through doorways and portals, revisiting my old grammar school, my brother calling me on the phone as I was about to head down a terrifyingly steep hill on my bike. Then, as I turned off to avoid going down the hill I ended up in some one's front yard and as my brother was still talking to me on the phone about the hill a guy came out of his house because he heard me fall. He was someone who had appeared in previous dream and Jane called him a "gatekeeper or the trickster". In this dream there were two gatekeepers I encountered. I also had a magic skirt that changed colors from when I originally bought it and would disappear and reappear as I left certain rooms and went through doorways. Symbolism for my life journey, this trip and nourishing my soul with new challenges and relationships appeared throughout the dream.

Then as I woke up I saw this block of cement when my eyes were closed and I heard someone say, " It's like this" and the cement block transformed and became this beautiful carved statue of a lion still keeping the same basic shape. I felt like it was showing me how the mind transforms things.

Part of my follow up in unpacking this dream was to go to one of the stone carving villages and buy a statue of a lion that resembles what I was shown in the dream. So last week I hired a driver and we went to Silakarang for 2 hours and just drove around visiting about 15 different stone carvers. Agung, the driver was so sweet and in the car as we were setting off he asked me what I was looking for. I was feeling a little silly and shy about why I was doing this, but I told him the whole story about the dream and seeing the lion statue at the end of the dream. He thought this was a great idea, completely normal. He completely agreed this was a good way to honor the dream. After two hours when I still wasn't finding many lions, Agung offered to help me have one made and he handled it for me. Negotiated with the stone carver, went to pick it up when it was done and delivered it to my house. He suggested what kind of basket to have it sit on and where to put the incense.

My Lion

Jane and I are still working on unpacking the symbolism in this particular dream, it's going to take us awhile. Now every morning  I see my Lion statue and believe it is my new animal ally that was brought to me in a dream...I'm starting to bring my dreams to life.