Listen to Your Sleeping Dreams
Martin D-18
They often contain messages for you, things you need to grow.
I mentioned in yesterday’s post that I played guitar without much attention or discipline when I was a kid and young man. Then I stopped for thirty years. How did I come to play again? Here’s what happened.
In 2020, during the pandemic, all at once I became a little less busy with my company’s work and, of course, I became a little more socially isolated, spending less time around people other than my spouse. All of this, combined perhaps with a bit of middle age change as I entered my fifties, led me to begin to have vivid, more memorable dreams more frequently. I had also begun daily journaling late in 2019 (that should become its own post). So maybe the journaling had primed and prepared me to be a bit more attuned to my thoughts, feelings, and maybe my dreams.
My overwhelming urge to buy a guitar, prompted by my recurring dreams, led to this delivery on November 4, 2020.
Anyway, sometime in the summer, I don’t remember exactly when, I had a dream that I was playing guitar. It was vivid and it stood out, because I hade not held a guitar in my hands since my early twenties. I mentioned it in passing as a curiosity in my journal, and that was that.
Then a few weeks later, I had another guitar dream. It was not the same but I don’t remember it. I don’t remember the specifics of either dream, just that in both I was playing guitar smoothly. I vaguely recalled the second dream as I was waking up and then I went on with my normal life.
Then, on Friday night October 30, I had another one. I woke Saturday morning with the very clear sensation that something inside me was pushing me. My husband and I alternate nights of the week cooking, and Saturday is my night. So, my Saturday routine includes a trip to the supermarket. On Halloween, Saturday October 31, I made an extra trip to a local Guitar Center store, not with any intention to buy a guitar, but just to put a guitar in my hands and see if my hands remembered anything. Could I play at all after thirty years?
To my surprise, I wan’t good, but my hands could still form the basic chord shapes, and I could finger pick a little, roughly. That surprised me. The brain is an amazing thing. I still had some old neural pathways in place to guide my finger movements. Surprised, even a bit startled, by that, I went on to do my shopping for dinner.
But I’d been bitten. My mind could not escape the idea of playing guitar. I spent the day researching guitars. I tried to resist the temptation to make an impulsive decision, but the feeling grew overwhelming. I ordered a guitar on Sunday November 1st and received delivery on Wednesday November 4. I’ve been playing, practicing, and improving my guitar skills virtually every day since,. More than that, I’ve grown as a self-taught musician and home studio producer and mix engineer. Music is so much a part of my life now I can’t imagine being without it. It’s just part of who I am now, my identity. I don’t do it for attention or recognition. I have no illusions of being especially good, though some friends like me to play for them sometimes. It’s just a creative pursuit I do mostly for myself, my enjoyment, my wellbeing.
Looking back, what happened was that my dreams alerted me to a part of myself that I had, over the years, left behind. To be a complete version of myself, I needed to bring that back. I had not realized that I was missing it and I was already a happy person in 2020. I had finally become more economically secure than I had ever been and by then I had been happily enjoying life with with my parter of (then) eighteen years. I was already so lucky and I knew it.
Sinkhole
But… I was also going through some changes and had experienced some close, personal losses that had affected me over the years. Through it all I kept working and life went on as normal during 2020, except for the pandemic, but inside me, what Carl Jung would describe as my shadow self was insisting I pay attention. When this happens, it’s a bit like cracking up or falling apart on the inside. It’s like a subsidence at the surface of the once stable earth that opens up a great hole due to pressure underneath. Everything goes into flux and becomes less stable until a new equilibrium takes shape. That was me on the inside of me in 2020. And that’s how, by listening to my dreams I was able to reclaim and integrate a lost part of myself, a forgotten or never really developed musical person and artist, something I had always been either too busy or afraid to develop in the years before.
Since finding and reclaiming these parts of me, I’ve become a more complete and whole person, and that has spilled over into all other aspects of my life, including marriage, friendships, and work. I am emotionally more present and balanced with and around other people. I wasn’t really bad in that way before, and my whole career had been based in no small measure on these abilities, but with this change in my life, I have enjoyed greater access to my own emotions, and have become more creative, playful, and present in my interactions. Life is just richer and more enjoyable this way.
So the lesson from my story is, listen to your dreams! I’ll write more another time about Jung’s concept of the shadow self and similar ideas, but I’ll leave it here today: what parts of you might you have left behind, things that make your heart sing and that help you connect with yourself and with others? It could be anything; we’re all different. If you don’t know, but you nevertheless feel a kind of nagging emptiness in living that you can’t quite define, the clues you need may already be in your own dreams, if you can learn to listen.