The Doorstopper Method for Keeping Your Dream Gate Open

 

Here's one of the games I invented for retrieving lost dreams.
   Picture a door to your dream world.
   As you left, you stepped through this door, back into your body in the bed.
   Some of your dreams are fluttering around you. Perhaps you have some of them in your pocket or what you think of as a safe container. I picture a glass jar like the ones I used to catch fireflies on summer nights. Or you think you have alreday recirded them in your journal, or captured them with your cell pnone camera.
    But a strange thing happens. As soon as you step through the door, back into an ordinary space, your dreams take flight. They won’t stay in your pockets. The container won’t hold them. They wing away, like butterflies through that door, which closes so fast you can’t prevent them leaving. Your journal for the night is blank and there is nothijng new in your cameral roll. Now the door is sealed tighter than a bank vault and you can’t find a way to open it.
    Try this: as you return from your dreams, imagine that the door to the dream world stays open for a while, because there is a doorstopper. I picture this stopper as a black dog. He’s alive, of course, though he may remain very still while his role is to keep the door from closing. Gradually he will let the door close. This is what must happen, so your waking life is not so full of dream creatures that you can’t tell where you are any more and end up on the couch of the mad-doctors.
     But you have enough time now to catch some of those escaping dreams. You are permitted to go back through that ever-so-slowly closing door, go in a little ways, and grab what you can.
     When I first played this game, I was surprised to see that a flight of steps began at the threshold. When I climbed the steps, I found myself in a pleasant wooded setting, with dreams gathered on the branches or flitting about.
     I invited them to play with me, and some consented to accompany back to the ordinary side of everything, which gets less ordinary in their company.
     As I stepped back through the door, heading for my body where I had parked it on the bed, I patted the head of the black dog who had managed the portal. He had become bigger and even more noble, shifting from the role of doorstopper to that of Gatekeeper. 

Drawing by Robert Moss with digital colorization

The Alphabet of Blocks

If we can picture our blocks, we can move beyond them. Three examples, from different gatherings I have led over the years.

Granma’s collar is too tight

Mandy was terrified of speaking in public, even in front of two or three people. When she seized up in one of my workshops, I asked her if she could feel what was blocking her. She said, "It feels like a choke collar."
     I asked if she could see that collar.  After a moment, she nodded and said, "I can see it now. It's a collar of  antique lace. It's buttoned too tight."
    "Does that lace collar remind you of anyone?"
    "My grandmother used to wear that kind of lace collar."
     Memories started spilling out, of the grandmother who sternly upheld a family tradition that girls - and grown women - were not permitted to speak truth to power, that a woman's lot was to mute her emotions and never challenge the man of the house.
      Once Mandy had the image of what was stealing her voice, and the family history that came flooding back, she was able to work successfully to release herself from the choke-hold of a tradition that held that it is the role of women to suffer in silence. When she found an image of her block, Mandy moved beyond it and claimed her voice.

Releasing Dad

I was leading a short evening program for a large audience. I drummed for a while to help people call up dreams or images from any part of their life that they might want to play with.
     A woman I'll call Norma put her hand up and said, "I got nothing during the drumming.
    “So what are you feeling right now?” I asked her.
     “Frustration.”
     “Where do you feel this frustration in your body?”
     She indicated her torso.
     “Put your hand on that place. Now I want you to follow your feelings into that place. Can you pretend you are moving into that place in your body?”
      “Yes.”
      “There is someone or something there. Do you see it?”
      “Yes. It’s my father.”
      “What do you need to do in relation to your father?”
       “I have to find out whether I can forgive him.”
       “What would you need in order to do that?”
       “I’d need to get my little girl back.”
       “I think she’s right there. Can you see her?”
       “Yes.”
       “Can you welcome her back into your life, and release your father?”
       “I’ll try.”
       There were tears now, and a fierce hope shining through the tears. In that moment of revelation, and self-expression, we all felt the potential for deep healing. Later, Norma agreed to write a letter to her father (now deceased) expressing what she needed to say to him, and wishing him healing and forgiveness in his journey. And she readily agreed to do certain things in her regular life - eating a certain sugary snack would be one of them - that would convince her inner child she would now be fun to be around.

The Alphabet of Blocks

At the start of another gathering, I again drummed for a few minutes, inviting invited everyone to allow a dream, an image or a memory from their lives to come to them. A man in the group told us he got nothing, even though he had been doing inner work for a long time, journaling dreams for twenty years.
    I asked, “What are you feeling?”
   “I’m blocked.”
   “Where do you feel the block?”
    He indicated his heart area.
   “Can you describe the block?”
    It’s huge. It’s a cube.”
    “Is it like stone, or metal, or maybe wood?”
    “It’s wood.”
    “Could it be an alphabet block, like kids play with?”
    “That’s what it is. It’s an alphabet block.”
    “How old are you when you get close to this block?”
    “I’m four years old.”
    “Can you see yourself, helping your four year old self to make a word?”
    “Yes. We’re making the word D R E A M.”
     He readily agreed he would buy a set of wooden alphabet blocks later that day and that he and his four-year-old would play with them.

Don't confuse the map with the territory (including at the dentist's)

I go to the dentist for stage #1 of having a crown replaced. The assistant starts making a mold of a crown on the lower left. "That's mysterious," I tell her. "I thought we were going to work on this one." I tapped a crown on the upper left. "This is where I've been feeling the discomfort and leakage."
     "Nope," she shakes her head after checking my chart. "It says right here, number 21."
     We agreed we would check with the dentist. She took a quick look in my mouth and agreed that the work needed to be done on the upper left, as I thought. When she checked my record, she reported, "The digits got transposed." Instead of being tagged as #12, the tooth that needed work had been tagged #21. And work had actually begun on the wrong tooth.

    Now, I have high confidence in my dentist, and I am quite certain she would never have pulled a crown that didn't need to be pulled. Nonetheless, a message for the day (and for any day) was clear as a root canal: don't confuse the map with the territory.

No problems with removing the old crown. The dentist knew that I always refuse anesthetics, even for much more painful procedures, and the assistant had been briefed. But later she asked, "I've heard you've had root canal and oral surgery with no anesthetics. How do you do that?"
    "I put my mind somewhere else. A nice cove with pink sand in Bermuda. A white sand beach on the north side of Oahu. Sometimes I'm out on the African savannah, lazing like a lion in the sun while a slightly irritating long-beaked bird picks my teeth."

Ingres, "La Grande Odalisque" (1814)

     I did not tell her that because I was so often deathly ill and in terrible straits as a child, I had to learn to shift my awareness away from physical pain in order to get through. I did admit that sometimes the pain is so great that the only way to cope with it, in the absence of chemicals, is go into the heart of the pain and make that the meditation.
    On my latest visit, the imagery that came to me was from a city I have not yet seen, in this life, but will visit later this month. I found myself in the Sultan's harem in old Istanbul, and saw it very much as Ingres' imagination brought it alive, in the paintings of odalisques that excited me when I was a teen. When the dentist's attack on the base of the old crown dragged me out of the harem, I was in an earlier time, watching from the tower where the last Byzantine emperor and his friend Phrantzes saw Ottoman cannon bring down the land walls of Constantinople.
     When I first came to this office, many years ago, they had some great wall photos of woodland and lakeland scenes in Canada. I had no trouble stepping into these scenes while the dentist drilled away, and perhaps others were able to do the same. Alas, today my dentist's notion of room decoration is posters showing the progression of gum disease in gross detail; not where I'm going to go.