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.
Dreams are fluid like water and follow a similar path between heaven and earth. Dreams and water both flow with and against gravity. First emerging from some underground source (wholeness), water travels against gravity (the unconscious) toward the realm of the heavens (conscious awareness), forms clouds (thoughts, reactions, possibilities), and returns to the earth (community) as rain and snow (nourishment from conscious awareness) in a continuous cycle.
Ancient Taoists teach that chaos, huntun, is the very nature of things. Like stars and galaxies, life is born from chaos and returns to chaos. Chaos can trigger immense fear, yet must be consciously endured if anything new is to be created. Our most authentic nature, both individually and collectively, cannot come to birth through rational thought alone. To fully midwife the murky, abstract, metaphorical images that emerge through liminal spaces requires the full engagement of all our bodily senses and intuition, to embrace not-knowing, and stay present in the tension between our conditioned (domesticated) and unconditioned (wild) nature. Over time, we can learn to trust the natural unfolding of an orderless order implicit to all of life.
To live solely on one side of these thresholds (order and chaos, wildness and domestication) is to become lost to our authentic self. We need both sides to be fully human.
Like the conception of a new life or creation of a work of art, a disruption to the outer shell of the known must occur in order to be penetrated by the unknown, and then marinate in a type of ‘cosmic soup’ to nourish the ‘sleeping hunger’ of soul. Our ‘sacred fields of flesh’ are ‘delicately tilled for planting milky seedlings’ through the disruption and overturning of earth (what is solid and known), exquisitely preparing the ground of our innermost being to receive and nourish the seeds of our truest nature. We must continuously offer fresh compost to enrich this delicate inner soil.
By tending the dream of winter from an embodied, open, multivalent awareness with all of our senses, we create sacred space for Order and Chaos to mix and intermingle. The lucid murmurings of Mystery defy the path of linearity and recognizable form in order to bring to birth the mythopoeic identity of our original nature in relation to all of life.
What might be possible if we refrain from defining that which we don’t understand? Even if just for a short while? If when experiencing something outside of our realm of comprehension, our rational minds were able to find enough restraint to allow a thing’s true essence to emerge on its own accord? What if all of this bewilderment is here to help us find the hidden blessing in not knowing instead?
Silently she screams through the holy chalice
blade striking for blood through rain-soaked garments
Silently she exhales through time-drenched space
searching for eyes reflecting timeless grace
Silently she crumbles whole pieces lost to sky
formlessly holding keys to lost locks behind invisible doors
and unframed windows
Silently she screams from the sacred well
holy water everywhere, yet no cup to drink
Silently she slumbers under black blankets of wonder
mixed with stars into cosmic soup to nourish
sleeping hunger.
Silently to silence.
Sliding down moonbeams to rainbow’s edges
where traces of grace
glisten upon sacred fields of flesh
delicately tilled for planting milky seedlings
Silently she screams and stillness freezes grace
into concentric circles, rippling and stilling simultaneously
Opposites uniting
Silently to silence
About the Author: Monique Gaboury is a licensed acupuncturist, in Freeland, WA, specializing in Alchemical Acupuncture. She loves sharing her passion for natural healing at her clinic and through writing her blog ‘Re-membering Wholeness, Belonging and Kinship Through Changing Times’.
Juniper Medicine Alchemical Acupuncture serving the greater Seattle area on Whidbey Island. To schedule an appointment call 360-672-1506 or email EMAIL.
