A Forest of Owls: Reflections on healing dreams and their attendant, and rewarding, lexicons

Abstract

You may read, within my journey, of a resonant landscape in your dreams – perhaps intimations unheeded, messages waiting to be deciphered, signs worthy of your exploration, and curiosity. It is my experience that our inner and outer worlds share a common vein or seam, and that the two are luminously interwoven. Within, there is a hidden life that offers a rich resource for understanding, realignment and healing; within, the history in our bodies has a voice. Our dreams have the ability, and capacity, to forge a reconciliation with, and forgiveness of, the past – so that we can move forward into a more vibrant, graceful, and potent present, and future.

Affiliation: Barbara J. Genovese is a writer, ESL teacher, and crayon artisan. She lives in southern Oregon, and has kept a dream journal since 1976.

Contact address: bjgenovese@msn.com

They come in the night, and sometimes during the day – wisps of images, or strong

bounding visuals. They whisper, or they don’t, when their terror draws sounds from us

we would never vocalize in our waking hours. They inspire, motivate, release, haunt,

tease, perplex, and sometimes – they follow us into the light, their ragged edges tugging

at our sleeves and nipping at our heels.

They bring back people we miss, people we know, or don’t know, or will know; and

people we thought we had vanished to the far reaches of the mind and the heart’s

galaxies. They make us fly, or slog so heavily through a terrain that our progress is like

maple syrup dripping from trees. Sometimes they bring us in contact with the animal

kingdom. Sometimes they introduce us to characters so hideous that we squirm under

their gaze and hope we do not remember their visage when we open our eyes. And

sometimes they imbue us with such feelings of light and magic that we fight not to open

our eyes, but when we do, to make sure that we take from the land we have just exited

something of their essence to carry in our pocket.

These are our dreams. These are also the dreams of our Planet, our ancestors, and the

great stream of life from which we have emerged, and, they are the record of our

evolution, the weavings of a dimension inside that cannot be claimed by a photograph,

yet prompt us to capture their essence in our lives, our culture, our arts.

Lately, I’ve noticed a change in my dreamscape. Prior to last year, I rarely remembered

dreams early in the night. Now, sometimes after only a few hours, I see their characters,

like fledgling actors in a play rehearsal, and I’m privy to their initial fumblings. And like

fledglings, awkward with lines and staging, these dreams look different. They’re not

from the usual vocabulary and dream parsing, and, I’ve discovered, they’re usually

harrowing; some have caused me to turn away or stop the dream. Have I glimpsed

something too early in metamorphosis to understand? Have I tripped over a subtle

patterning, a new snowflake design? Have I wandered into Dr. Frankenstein’s

Laboratory while the parts are still being assembled? Have I stumbled into a mystery?

I’ve noticed something else about this new crop of dreams, the ones early in the night,

and the later ones: some have a strong physical, intense touch or sensation that goes on

for a long time. I don’t know what it means, but I have an hypothesis: in our world that

moves with increasing speed, and much too fast sometimes – [I sense that my brain

wants back its Zen space, my quiet garden’s meditative wavelengths] – perhaps these

sensations are trying to recapture something lost, or about to be. Even though I’ve

practiced meditation since the early 1970’s, I sometimes find that my sometimes

shortened attention span wants nothing of it. So what if I limit my time on technology?

Will that recapture my Zen wavelength? Will my dreams then reveal deeper mysteries?

I have a second hypothesis: as I am recording these dreams in an astrological calendar,

I’m aware of some of the planets’ positions and meanings; however, as we are in the

midst of some game-changing planetary shifts and once in a lifetime planetary pairings,

it’s difficult to assess the eye of the hurricane when you’re in the eye. I will leave that

assessment for another time, or to interested dream researchers. But I do wonder, and

entertain the thought, that some of the ground shifting energies of the planets may be

finding their way into our dreams.

For the present, I focus on the first hypothesis, and began to shift my involvement with

technology:

My mobile resides in the bathroom so a) I’m protected from its radiation; and b) I have

to make an effort to get to it. [I do have a landline.] The mobile is always turned off so

my peace of mind is intact and not subjected to annoying sounds with a [usually] false

sense of urgency. I use my mobile to query the web or check email or telephone

messages to see if something needs my attention. And, I rarely take it with me when I

leave the house, unless I’m traveling a distance. As to my computer, I use a timer.

When the timer rings, I finish the task, and log off. My technologies are only tools and I

refuse to be attached to their umbilicals.

I wonder if younger generations are losing their imagination because technologies are

doing their imaginings for them.* I wonder if our younger, more innocent dreaming

selves don’t want to lose the components which encompass all of its senses. I wonder –

are some of our senses going over to the other side and becoming lost in our

technologies?

[*Technology has its place and its imagination and not all imaginations are being co-

opted by it, but – I worry about the amount of time we spend plugged into our

technology and not plugged into our souls.]

1976

A thread which began to weave itself into dreams when I started to write them down in

1976 was the presence of animals. At the end of the year, I would re-read my dreams

and notate and tally – patterns – what was repeating itself? How many times did

certain animals appear? Or certain images? Were there premonitions? Anything else

stand out?

I immersed myself in animal lexicons. When I had a dream that included an animal, in

the astrology calendar where I recorded my dreams, I included words about that

animal’s energy or medicine – to teach myself, and, to tune into what the animal was

communicating. And the animals have never been wrong.

There are many examples but a pivotal one happened last year when I had a dream

about a forest of Owls so densely packed that I could not count them. [I’ve never had a

dream like this with so many of the same creature in it.] When I read the lexicons about

Owl – I began to grasp its “healing and tuning medicine” and why it had appeared. I

began to make adjustments in my life where I was not giving credence to my intuition,

not trusting myself. I started with what were, to me, the small things, which turned out

to be not so small.

Examples: I obsessively check and double check. Have I have turned off the water?

Have I locked the doors? When I became aware of how much energy this rechecking

was draining from me, Owl focused my attention: I checked a faucet once. Slowly placed

my hand under it. Was it dripping? No? Hold that. Remember that. Check the door.

Hold that memory of checking. As I did this, I noticed that every time I gazed, in my

mind’s eye upon the forest of Owls, they had begun to thin – confirmation that that

muscle of trust was strengthening.

My upbringing was such that I did not always trust what I saw, felt, perceived. I too

readily and quickly gave people the benefit of the doubt, not wanting to believe they

were up to what I painfully realized later they were up to. Not wanting to believe the

truth, as I saw it, the first time. I could see people’s blind corners, and upon reflection,

realized that I always could, that I had keen insights. But this was a threat in the family

I was born, bred, and buttered in. So my seeing went underground where I could keep it

safe until it was time to dig it up. And dig it up I had to. It has taken years, and the

excavation is not complete. Will it ever be? But this dream of Owls was a pivotal axis

upon which I could securely ground and center myself.

It then occurred to me that there was a third hypothesis for the change in my

dreamscape, and it was: what happens when your truth, your knowing, your intuition is

silenced for most of your life?

In the 1990’s, when I began to explore deep tissue body work, the trauma that had been

residing in my body, in soma memory, was beginning to release; memories and feelings

were beginning to awaken. My body often shook and became cold as the layers were

accessed and began to release. Like a dam that has held back too long the force of the

water pressing against it, the body has the same capacity.

I realized that the same was true about what began to be released when I began to

reclaim my knowing, my truth, my perceptions, my intuition – as I began to tell more of

the truth of who I am, rather than who I was raised to be, who others wanted me to be.

When a forest of Owls appeared to tell me that there was much work to be done in

reclamation, that if I wanted my knowing, my truth, my perceptions, my intuition back

– in full force – then I would have to work to thin that forest of Owls. That each one

represented an experience where I had not spoken fully what I knew.

Perhaps the shift in my dreamscape – the now remembering of early in the night dreams

or shapes of dreams to come or that were releasing or about to be released, the

sensations that rang through my sleeping body sometimes like a great structural shaking

– is akin to the body work I experienced, but now, through the avenue of a pivotal

dream. And the shift in the dream scape is the upheaval of all that it held back and is

now releasing. And the shift in the dreamscape is also the roiled emotions of knowing

that whenever I told the truth or spoke what I saw, I was wacked, threatened, or

punished. So memory of the repercussions is also in soma memory.

For me, this releasing holds more than a modicum of truth for there are dreams now

that I don’t bother to write down because I know they are the detritus of what is

breaking up, and breaking down. I know it because I know it. I can read the

dreamscape as a jumble of images and sometimes nonsense, and I know not to record it

because as soon as I try to remember it, it disappears like a magician’s sleight of hand. I

know to record what stays, and what asks to be written down. And I trust this.

Maybe this is my life’s work. Maybe the Owls in the forest will become one Owl that sits

on my shoulder. But for now, there are still many Owls in my forest. Their healing

reverberates through layers and armor, rippling out into my ocean of mistrust. Yet it’s

also true that the old energies [of mistrust] will always try to pull you back, and they will

scream and kick and buffet what confidence you thought you had built, recovered,

restructured – this is to be expected. But I have found that when I persevere, knowing

there will be “tests” – I succeed. It’s a natural rhythm – change and then that change is

questioned and challenged by what has worked [apparently, though inadequately] up

until then.

In Greek mythology, Athena, the goddess of wisdom, had a companion Owl that sat on

her shoulder to reveal unseen truths. So not only is it an animal lexicon but a mythology

that dwells deep in the human psyche, a dwelling that our ancestors and the great pool

of humanity that preceded us, intuited.

That said, to each their own: for me, it’s animals; for you it might be the presence of

plants, trees, or geographies et al. I believe we all come in hardwired to living lexicons

that have the ability to inform, teach, inspire, heal, and evolve us.

The animals, for me, shift in their appearance. Sometimes an animal will repeat itself

two nights in a row, and sometimes more than once in one night of dreams. I have a

record of animals that have appeared only once; or animals that repeat at intervals of

time. I have a veritable animal kingdom of wise counselors who seek to fine tune, warn,

support, teach, and help, and – to connect me with animals that have not made their

presence known in dreams, but rather in the three-dimensional world. My horizons

expand, and I learn to read and listen to the tunings of that three-dimensional world of

Spiders, for example, who are uncanny in their appearance with an insight or the

confirmation of a decision, an answer to a problem, and sometimes an epiphany. I’ve

learned to trust when Spider shows up. And it has shown up in some magnificently

grand ways.

And so it was after the dream of the forest of Owls that I arrived at a place where, for the

first time, I was deeply grateful for my dreams: one morning, I sat up in bed and realized

the wealth of this space in the night when I close my eyes, and suddenly – I felt grateful.

It was a feeling unmistakable, palpable, limned with joy, and enough to want to write

about it.

I have also noticed a curious sidebar – in dreams, I have now developed a sense of

humor. With aching slowness, I have been developing one in my three-dimensional life

but to see it traverse space into my night is heartening. Perhaps it’s a function of age, or

wisdom, in learning not to take oneself so seriously. And in that voice that could never

speak up before – that voice is finding its voice in humor. I smile because in dreams

where my humorous commentary is part of the dream it makes me smile. Perhaps that

is the deeper, healing medicine – one’s own sense of humor.

I will leave you to discover the meaning of what appears in your night and dayscapes –

be it two or four legged, wild or domestic, finned, scaled, winged or otherwise. Your

lexicons, your glossaries, your vocabularies, your dictionaries – they will find you.

Enjoy the discovery.

Our dreams are rich, laden and replete with symbols, maps, blueprints, and signposts.

When you avail yourself of them, the three-dimensional world, as well, opens its vistas,

expands your horizons, and reveals a Universe of meaning.

For the presence of all, in whatever dimension they appear, I am grateful that they are

there, and here.