Dream Work

 

 

I know a lot of dead people. I don’t mean to be morbid but at this age I know more dead than living ones now. I include neighbors, teachers I had, clients I once worked with, co-workers, classmates, friends and family. So my net is wide and it fills easily as time passes. 

I also dream of them frequently.

Plenty of those dreams are humdrum, a repeat of a memory from long ago. I’m not surprised. They were once in my life so I would remember them in a dream associated with some commonplace day to day life event.

Then some stand out..

I have had a recurring dream of my brother, on a Harley, doing lazy circles in the street. I’m on the front lawn, a much younger version of myself, just watching him. Then finally, he straightens the bike and takes off down the street. For good. He’s left. Never to come back.

It’s not scary, sad or whatever. It’s void of emotion. Just me watching him finally taking off.

But it’s not about his dying nor a symbol of it. The dream was, I think...my finally understanding a life long wish of his. To get the hell out of our childhood home.

He did achieve that dream for a bit when he joined the Navy. That sure got him the hell out. He was in his mid 20s, with him just spinning his wheels waiting for his life to take off, and tired of playing nurse, as I was as well, to a mother who was barely functioning day to day at times. Well, he finally pushed the issue. Running way to the circus or military can work.

Till he was sent home again on a medical discharge a year later.

Back home, he saved up his money till he had enough to get his own place in Providence and took off again.

I once had a near snarky argument with my Mom over which son was worth more, as she thought he was over me. I reminded her that Ken left seven months ago...and NEVER has visited. He lived all of 5 miles away too.

“Who shovels the snow? Who fixes the faucets, mows the lawn, fixes YOUR car? Balances your checkbook? “Not him” I said.

“You know why that is?” I ask her as I felt myself cocking back the hammer on a tirade I was about to unleash and fire upon her.

The look on her face told me she did not want to know. So I chickened out and didn’t fire both barrels at her. The blast of the TRUTH would have really ruined her view of her first born son.

When I saw my brother’s first place in Providence, it was just a single room, where you shared the bathroom down the hall. I was a bit shocked at the meagerness of it and kinda said a bit too loud to myself, “You must’ve really wanted OUT.” He caught that and said:

“And avoid her? Damn right!” he replied.

He was going to stay the fuck away by any means.

**

I once knew, what they call, an “eclectic therapist” at Rhode Island College when I was pursuing my psych degree all those years ago. In the field, therapists/professors steer towards one dominant model and stick with it. You work with what you understand the best. Vin Calia, the guy I knew, was adept enough to draw from all of them at will.

“You gotta be careful of dream work Ron” he once told me, as I related that motorcycle dream to him over coffee at the Student Union. “Dreams are highly personal and any symbols you have do not translate to grand universal ones and that’s makes it unreliable to apply it to everyone.”

“Are you sure?” I ask

“Yep, the science doesn’t back it up as a panacea to cure everything nor can it be unified and generalized to everyone...but...at times, it can widen one’s perspective on your past.”

He goes on to tell me of learning about “dream work” at the Esalen Institute when he was there, for a bit, back when it was THE place to go for the latest in therapies, trends...anything avant garde and cutting edge in how to improve life. It was THE center for the Human Potential Movement probably started by Carl Rogers. Human Potential Movement? You know of it...if you read any kind of self help book.

Don’t know the Esalen Institute either? Here’s some of the people who lived and worked there for a time.

Joan Baez, Hunter Thompson, Aldous Huxley, Timothy Leary, Susan Sontag, George Harrison, Neil Young and zillion others...and Vin, for a bit when he found out what they were up too and had to go see. If you were worth your salt in your field, you were accepted there to learn from the others.

Years later, outside of EastSide Marketplace I ran into Vin and told of another dream I had…to which he replied...”Don’t look too deeply into it...stay on the surface of it as you tell me.”

I was in a flat, Midwestern America field, alone, with the sky sprawling about me. I am walking through waist high weeds and dry grass. I’m passing pieces of shredded aluminum, electronic parts and pieces of aircraft wing, parts of a large plane that had long since crashed and spread itself all over. In the years since, the field had just grown up around the debris still left there.

“What are you doing there?” Vin asks.

“Nothing, I just happen to be there, looking, but for some reason I...me...was on that plane...and the only one to have walked away from the crash. I know all about this place for some reason.”

He then asks this out-of-nowhere question when it came to dreams.

“Who is NOT in the dream...What is NOT there?”

How do you answer that? It felt like I was being asked, “Tell me what the sound of one hand clapping is?”

I think, not hard, just letting my mind drift and I say, “My family.”

Vin’s leaning against his car, quietly, waiting and then prods me, “Go on, finish the story...finish your thought.”

“I’m dreaming...visiting the past again, seeing how the family I grew up in was wiped out...and how I am the lone survivor...beating nearly all of their life spans by 20 years or so.”

“And that’s as far as we can take that dream...that’s all it is.” Vin finally says. “We can’t dig any deeper as there is no “deeper”, and you know what it was about anyway.”

“Look Ron..grief, loss is a strange thing...you never really ever get rid of it. It’s like waves on the ocean during a storm. At first, they’re huge! But as time goes by, they become smaller and smaller but still lap at our ankles decades later...and waves never cease to keep rolling in. You own this experience….make do with it like you always have been doing.”

Parking lot dream work therapy, free of charge!

I still have all sorts of dreams of people I once knew. But I treat it as just a visitation, my time traveling which gives just some practical explanations of how things once were with the benefit of today’s 20/20.

 

 Esalen...built into the cliffs of Big Sur