Sunday, April 21, 2024

The "just so" feeling on leaving a dream



Feelings, feelings. I don’t want to discuss a dream experience unless the dreamer will talk about first feelings around it. I notice that quite often my own feelings when I leave a dream are neutral and detached. There is often a sense of “been there, done that” – that I have returned from an experience that in another world that does not have immediate consequences in this one.
    It may be an experience in one of many parallel lives. It may be a case of what the Jungians call compensation; I am engaged in a life unlived in my present reality but going on continuously in a realm of imagination. 
in Inner Work Robert Johnson reports the memorable case of a reclusive introvert who was leading a robust life with a voluptuous wife in an imagined Italy, where he spoke Italian, made love and had rows, and played with his kids, night after night. While these can be tagged as compensation dreams, we can also allow that they may be glimpses of a continuous life in a parallel reality where the dreamer made different life choices. 
    Then there are the dreams in which you seem to be in someone else’s body and situation. This is not unusual in psychic dreams.
    In a dream experience, I may engage in thrilling adventures, churning with high emotions. If I am calm and detached after coming back, I know I don't need to import these dramas and emotions into my regular life, except perhaps as stories to tell or write. Those dramas belong to another life, one of many I - and maybe you - are living in the multiverse, with varying degrees of consciousness.
     So when I record my feelings on returning from a dream excursion, the words I most often use are "just so," meaning "been there, done that" in a world and a situation that feel quite as real as everyday life, and sometimes more so. I may add the phrase "travel worn" because (for example) when I have led a three-day workshop in my subtle body while my body of meat and bones was dormant in bed for a couple of hours - and then had to fly back across oceans and continents - I can be somewhat jet-lagged. 

Journal drawing: "Bardo Hotel" by Robert Moss
        

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