It’s April, 2020, and the pandemic just started.
People have stopped going to work, but I still go because I am a FedEx driver.
People still need their stuff.
I’m an essential worker.
I deliver toilet paper, dog food, kitty litter and a surprising amount of bullets.
Most of my deliveries make sense, but whenever I lug a heavy box of bullets up to a door, I wonder, “What do people think is going to happen?”
When I finish work and go home, there’s nothing to do.
Everyone is isolating.
Social distance.
No one to see, nowhere to go, which is fine by me.
I’m exhausted from FedEx-ing anyway, plus I’m an introvert.
I start going to bed early, like 7:30pm every night.
And the dreams start to come.
Every night multiple dreams, fast and furious.
I start to write them down even tho I’m not sure what to do with them.
Are the dreams trying to tell me something?
Why are there so many dreams?
In 2020, I’ve already been a Feldenkrais nerd for more than 10 years, so I have a sentence about dreams rattling around in my head:
“A healthy person can live their unavowed dreams.”
I always liked that phrase, unavowed dreams.
I like the feeling of it.
Mystery within reach.
If only I could avow it.
But I always thought “dream” was shorthand for something other than a dream.
Like a hope or a wish.
Like someone posts on social media, “This is a dream come true.”
Turns out they got a new job or they bought a house.
Or Martin Luther King Jr. had a “dream” of our nation living up to the true meaning of it’s creed that all men are created equal.
Like a “dream come true” is when the world lines up with what someone wants?
But when I start really dreaming, I wonder.
What are these dreams?
What would it mean to live these actual dreams?
Or live into them?
What can I do with this endless supply of strange stories, starring mostly me, that come in the night from God knows where?
I buy a book called “The History of Last Night’s Dream” by Rodger Kamenetz.
It’s amazing.
It helpfully frames many of the questions I have about dreams.
Like the title says, it’s a history about what western people, from ancient Jews up through Freud and Jung, have been inclined to do with these strange experiences called dreams.
Interpret them?
Control them?
Let them guide?
And he talks about a relationship he forms with a dream teacher.
As soon as I realize that’s a thing, a dream teacher, I think,
“That’s what I want.
I want a dream teacher.”
So I find Marc Bregman on the internet.
He’s the dream teacher from the book, and he’s surprisingly available.
I send him an email with one of my dreams.
Within a couple days he writes back with some thoughts.
He suggests we meet on zoom for a session.
I excitedly accept.
I learn quickly, the dream work has its own vocabulary
archetypes
feeling tunnels
the Animus and Anima
(many more fantastic words)
Marc’s Archetypal Dream Work suggests a new (to me) view of the Self and dreams.
our souls are more essential than we are
our souls speak to us through dreams
the inner world is more important than the outer
the outer world is mostly a set of surfaces on which we project our inner struggles
That last point about projection becomes more interesting as the pandemic drags on.
The world is a surface on which I project my inner struggles, eh?
Well my biggest struggle by 2023 is I want to get the fuck out of FedEx.
In the dream work, I sometimes project my hope for a different future onto Marc, because he’s living proof it’s possible to escape a job like mine.
He used to be a postman, very similar to FedEx.
He did it for 13 years, supporting himself, his wife and 5 step kids, while he was working on the dreams.
At some point, everything came together and in one month he got 40 new clients.
He had to quit his job at the post office.
Since then he’s been doing his dream work full time.
If I squint my eyes when I look at Marc’s journey, I see a wished-for future for myself.
Interesting, meaningful, off the beaten path WORK that works.
That’s what I want.
Until 2020, I assumed Feldenkrais would be that kind of work.
But I had never made it work.
To make a living doing Feldenkrais would be a “dream come true” for me.
If I could just get some clients, I thought…
If I could just avow that ‘dream,’ maybe I could finally achieve the middle class existence I think I want.
The so-called American Dream.
Get married.
Buy a house.
Have some kids.
But when I started listening to the actual dreams, they seemed to tell me other things my soul needed to deal with first.
Like distrust of the archetypes.
And a paralyzing sense of responsibility for other people’s well being, that covered up my own personal wounds and traumas.
The more I learned from dreams (and Marc), the more I started asking the question,
”Is what I think I want for my life actually what my soul wants, on a deeper level?”
This is me starting to write about the dreaming process I’m in.
This is part 1.
I don’t know how many parts there will be.
If I zoom out, I hope Skeleton School will be a place for me to explore how the dream work relates to Feldenkrais work, and how both of those relate this thing I keep doing, called Living.
I have spent a lot of time doing Feldenkrais lessons (15 years), and I am really excited about the Feldenkrais work I’m starting to do with kids.
At the same time, I have spent 4 years now doing the dream work, and I find it very valuable for staying closer to what is true inside me, regardless of what success I find (or don’t find) in the world or my so-called career.
I see significant overlaps between Feldenkrais and dream work. Each one:
takes me back inside myself (albeit through very different doors)
poses riddles of personal transformation
shows the importance of learning to trust deeper support structures (the skeleton in Feldenkrais, the archetypes in dream work)
depends on the imagination
On the other hand, I see significant differences:
Feldenkrais said, “Your skeleton will outlast your soul”
archetypal dream theories suppose essential, eternal Selves embattled by demons and deceived by pathological coping strategies
Archetypal Dreamwork looks at trauma as potentially stemming from past life experiences, so we might be talking bardo states and reincarnation
So I’m trying to get some pieces of this puzzle out on the table, to give myself a chance to put some things together.
In 2020, as the pandemic started and the dreams came to me, I didn’t know where it would take me to look deeper into dreams.
I’m still finding out.
I’m still dreaming every night.
Still doing Feldenkrais lessons every day.
And staying tuned to see what happens next.