August, 2010 - Finding my way to this work goes back to 9th or 10th grade. Every morning I would sit with Jennifer Esway, a friend since childhoood, on the bus on the way to school and we would tell each other our dreams from the night before.
I looked forward to this ritual and on the few days when Jennifer was not on the bus, I was in a fog and lost.
Something about sharing our dreams helped me, strengthened me for the day. Without that, the swarming hallways of the school swallowed me and I disappeared completely.
There is a lot here I am not saying. Details. Jennifer was gorgeous and “popular” and one of the best people I have ever known. I was not popular. I was weird and by that time in a profound depression, which manifested itself as anorexia and intense despair. At night I cut myself and hit myself, bit myself until I bled. I was lost and felt entirely alone.
I appreciated Jennifer’s groundedness and quietness. She also had another quality I could not put my finger on, but now I know it and can say it was integrity.
Once Jennifer came onto the bus with a Dream Dictionary. It was my birthday. It is one of the best gifts I have ever gotten because it silently acknowledged our friendship and the ritual that we had developed together, and how important it was for me. How important dreams were and my dream life.
It’s funny, it wasn’t too many years later that I began this Dreamwork, but it feels like forever. My first kiss, my first love, losing my virginity, all happened after those bus rides ended.
I began this work because I was miserable in a very deep way. I knew something was wrong somehow, and though I had always been a “searcher,” nothing I did or read, no therapy I ever tried, ever did anything at all. certainly did not help. Could not reach the place in me that was screaming out, please. Please.
Still playing games with food and intensely consumed by shame and fantasies of suicide, when my friend Karla, very much a kindred spirit, suggested I try this stuff (Dreamwork) out, I actually called the number from the payphone in my college dorm. It was an easy number to remember and I already had it memorized even before I made the first call.
A lot of people remember their first dream, the first one they brought in and was used in their first session. I don’t remember mine. I remember 2 things-the first one was the realization that I could not bullshit here. There was no way to lie, no way to get out of anything. This was the scariest and best thing for me and even then I remember having the feeling in that first session that I was standing at the openening of a very dark, humungous cave in a dark forest and I took one step into the cave in that first session. A teeny step. looking back, I can feel the place in me that WANTED it. That wanted the cave and wanted the truth, o matter what. But back then, I was not aware of it.
The second thing I remember is that, after I said my dream, whatever Marc (my therapist) said after it, it was what I had been waiting my whole life to hear. He siad the thing none of the other therapists could ever say or ever get to or even close to in 4 years of doing different forms of talk therapy.
Whatever it was, it was something I already knew but had vowed never to say. It was the thing I was dying to say but didn’t dare. It was the thing I was most afraid of and most longed for.
I came every week after that.
Now it has been 20 years, and I am in such a different place it feels nearly impossible to describe in words.
Really, it seems impossible.
But I can say a few things. I am never alone. I no longer live in a constant state of anxiety and worry. I do not experience shame, except for some very minor moments, and I recognize the shame for the lie that it is. I no longer want to PHYSICALLY die, but I very much want the parts of me that are not me to die so I can live as my truer and truer self. I no longer avoid my feelings, rather welcome them, and know that they are my only and most important truth and the key to more of myself. More of me as the true woman of God that I am.