The waters of dreams

In drugstore dream dictionaries we are told that water, as a dream symbol, is about emotions. Well, ye-es, it maybe, but what you find in your dream waters and what I find may be very different things. 

     As with any dream, a dream of water may be symbolic, literal, or an experience of a separate reality. I have dreamed, over decades now, of being able to travel to the sea floor without any breathing problems and of encountering a Mother of the Deep and various other characters who seem to embody the elemental powers of the ocean. I have dreamed of healing in sacred pools, and delight in mermaid coves, and the kind of inundation that brings fresh new growth bursting into the world.

     I have also noticed that some of our dreams of water may be both literal and symbolic. We dream of a tsunami or a hurricane - and that event turns out to be both a natural event that is played out in the world and a terrific emotional storm that blows up in our personal lives. 

     How water moves or fails to move in dreams is a very important source of guidance to me on the state of my body and my creative energy. Clogged pipes and logjams - in physical reality as well as in night dreams - alert me to the need to do some clearing and free up energy that needs to be in flow. 

     Water transforms, and it goes through its own transformations, from vapor to liquid to solid and back through the sequence. We come from the water, and our bodies are mostly composed of seawater. Our dreams may open us to the teachings of water: to flow rather than to push, to stream round an obstacle rather than charge it head on.
     The waters of dreams offer entry into a different element, sometimes a different universe. In the deep, we may receive deep healing or encounter sacred powers.

     In one of my workshops, a scientist from Virginia shared a wonderful dream in which he plunges deep into the ocean and then up into space, doing the butterfly stroke, repeating the motions until he is circling the planet. We didn't analyze this dream. We plunged into it and enjoyed its energy. With the dreamer's permission and the aid of shamanic drumming, our whole circle accompanied him back into his dream in a marvelous adventure in group lucid dreaming. Some of us met creatures of the deep beyond those chronicled in National Geographic, with mutual respect. Some joined dolphin pods. I enjoyed skimming the Pacific, in waters around my native Australia. 

     When I think of water, and the need for flow in any satisfying and creative life, I remember my favorite statement in the Negative Confessions that were made in the Halls of Osiris in an ancient Egyptian passage to the afterlife. In the presence of grim assessors, the traveling soul is required to swear that he or she has not committed various crimes and immoral acts. This is the affirmation I love best, as recorded in the so-called Egyptian Book of the Dead, whose literal title is The Book of Coming Forth by Day:

I have not obstructed water when it should flow.

I want to be able to say that on any day.

Hoping for Ma'at

London

A story can start from the oddest things: a magic lamp, a conversation overheard, a shadow moving on a wall."

- Ahdat Soueif, The Map of Love

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Back to the British Museum last night for a public "conversation" with a pair of contemporary novelists, the Egyptian Ahdaf Soueif (The Map of Love) and the Sudanese-British Jamal Mahjoub (Travelling with Djinns). Their books explore travel and identity and liminal spaces, and are said to contain echoes of the Egyptian Book of the Dead, described by the Director of the British Museum, in his introduction, as "the oldest surviving travel literature".

Ahdaf Soueif had some interesting comments about how, after the collapse of the Old Kingdom, the idea of Ma'at (truth, justice, fairness) was revived and "re-articulated" in Egypt. This produced a passionate statement of the need for social justice in an early Middle Kingdom text known as the Eloquent Peasant, which has come down to us intact because it was copied and re-copied over many centuries. Ma'at was personified as a goddess wearing the feather against which the heart of the deceased is weighed in athe Hall of Truth; if the heart, burdened by guilt and darkness, drags down its side of the scale, the soul is consigned to a hybrid monster known as the Devourer.

Out of the wreckage of an ancient Egyptain regime came the luminous description of the Negative Confession, in which the deceased person, in the presence of 42 assessor gods, must swear that he has not committed a long list of crimes or infractions, not only of the order of "I have not killed" but extending to "I have not caused tears" and "I have not obstructed water when it should flow". While it's clear from the surviving texts that plenty of Egyptians approaching the afterlife hoped to get around some of these provisions by loopholes, deals and magical spells, a vision of a last judgment "based on behavior, not belief" (as Ahdaf noted) has a modern and very progressive ring.

Naturally much of the discussion last night focused on the current state of affairs in Egypt and the less-publicized coming partition of Sudan. The novelists, correctly, did not purport to be social prophets. Ahdaf Soueif, who has been journaling her days and nights with the protesters in Tahrir Square, said of the Mubarak regime, "They've been messing with the soul of the country" and held out the hope of a coming order - informed by openness, diversity and the characteritic Egyptian sense of humor - where Ma'at will reign.