Video written, narrated, and edited by Monique Gaboury
Winter’s Dream:
Stepping Beyond the Border of Sense-Making
The dream of life weaves heaven, earth and the underworld into an ever-evolving story. Our dreams come from the invisible depths of our own inner world and from furthest reaches of existence itself, leading us out of the confining structures of conditioning to be re-formed in the vast expanse of a more universal, multidimensional consciousness.
Dreams show us something of our own paradoxical nature and contain medicine for the whole-earth community. By developing a curiosity and patience with paradox, we make ourselves available to the genius of life’s complexities. Instead of delineating and defining from the dualistic perspective of either/or consciousness, we make our home in the mandorla— the central overlapping space between dualities where endless possibilities exist and the truly new is able to emerge of itself.
The lucid dream in the video (and in written form below) is a living, holographic story that still informs me since its arrival twenty-four years ago. Instead of analyzing it into some sort of fixed meaning, I have nurtured an on-going friendship with the dream and its images. Each component of the dream reveals a multiplicity of meaning and an intelligence of its own.
The overlaying of two voices in the video represents the dream self and waking self each entering the dream at different times and from different realities, yet able to harmonize, converse, and experience together in the ever-present now.
New awarenesses enter the place where the dream and waking fields overlap and intermingle, widening and deepening the original dream story. We are changed much in the way that the hard stone is carved over time by water consistently flowing over it.
As we enter the realm of winter—cold, contraction, gestation—we find ourselves at the threshold of a different kind of consciousness. Much like a dream, winter’s energies take us below the surface of what is definable down in the depths of what lies just out of sight. One that requires stillness to be known while we sense into the unknown.
Winter is associated with the fluid matrix of the water element—a shape-shifter that changes shape according to its container, changes states (solid, liquid, vapor) in response to its environment and flows to the lowest of places toward the depths of subterranean realms. Water is associated with the bladder and kidney organs, the emotion fear, the gift of wisdom, descent, darkness and the zhi spirit which embodies the will.
Winter asks us to use our will to bring our awareness inward to water’s source, conserving our energies so that our bodies and inner world will be nourished. In this middle place between death and birth, winter is an ever-present threshold or consciousness that lives deep within each of us year-round. Continue reading “Winter’s Dream: Stepping Beyond the Border of Sense-Making”
