Soul recovery through the portal of an "old" dream

Soul loss, as shamans know, is at the root of many of our existential complaints - of chronic fatigue and depression, of addictions and autoimmune problems, of creative blockage and even "bad luck". If we are missing vital soul energy, how do we get it back?

     Our dreams will show us, if we are able to remember our dreams and willing not only to read them carefully but to take action to bring their guidance and energy into our lives. If we are suffering from a prolonged dream drought, that is almost certainly a very strong indication of serious soul loss because it suggests that we have lost contact with the part of ourselves that is the dreamer. If this is our situation, the essential first step towards soul healing is to find the ways to end the dream drought. I have offerered simple and practical advice on how to do that in my book Active Dreaming..

     In working with thousands of dreamers over several decades, I have noticed that there are five types of dreams that very frequently offer clues to where soul has gone, and invitations to bring it back:

Dreams of the old place

Again and again, you dream you are in the old place - back in the home you shared with your ex, or the office where you worked at the old job, or at grandma's house, or in the school yard. Maybe you'll want to ask yourself: did I leave part of myself behind when I left that old situation?

Dreams of a younger self as a separate person

You dream of a same-sex companion, notably younger than your present self. You may not recognize this person to begin with, or you may confuse him or her with a younger member of your family - with a child or a cousin, for example. Look again, to see whether that younger dream figure is actually a part of yourself who appears as a separate being because he or she is not currently a part of your life, having separated from you during a crucial life passage.

Dreams of animals

The state of animals in our dreams often represents the state of our vital energies, and can show us the natural path of our energies. Such dreams may also offer an invitation to connect or re-connect with our animal spirits. This is one of the quickest ways I know to restore and raise vital energy in our contemporary lives.

Dreams of shoes

Shoes, I've noticed, are often an analog for souls in our dreams. You can hear the homonym; shoes have "soles" which sounds like "souls". Whe you dream that you can't find your shoes, or that they are lost or missing, ask whether you are being given a message about soul loss - and perhaps a clue to where to go to locate what you lost. If you dream your shoes don't fit, ask where in your life your situation no longer serves the needs of your soul and your creative spirit.

Dreams of the unexpected visitor

The surprise caller at your door in your dreams may be a messenger from your Great Self. Maybe you resist that visitor, trying to bar your door. Of course, it is always important to discern the character of the visitor and make sure that you are not going to entertain an intruder.

      You'll want to remember that the little self, the ego self, is always terrified of being overwhelmed by the larger Self,  and that to claim a relationship with greater powers we are required to brave up. So when you are surprised or alarmed by that unexpected dream visitor, you'll want to look again, by getting your head back inside the dream and asking, Who are you?

     Here, as with all five types of dreams reviewed here, the royal road for turning a dream suggestive of soul loss into an exercise in soul recovery is to learn to re-enter the dream and  operate consciously within its space.

     You may find it extremely helpful to undertake this form of shamanic lucid dreaming with a partner who is willing to accompany and support you on your healing journey.

For much more on this subject, please read my book Dreaming the Soul Back Home: Shamanic Dreaming for Healing and Becoming Whole. Published by New World Library.

Art: "Dancing with the Bear" (c) Robert Moss

The state of your soles

Walking a lake shore, I come upon something small and white and solitary on the wet sand. From my original angle of vision, it looks like a tiny ribcage. When I come closer, I see it is a sandal with many straps. I feel I am looking at a symbol from a dream. Abandoned between the confident lakefront mansions and the cold lake, looking so much like part of a little person, the lone sandal makes me think of soul - a part of soul that has been left somewhere away from home.

      In dreams, the state of our footwear often suggests the state of our souls. You can hear the echo of "soul" in "sole". A dream of lost shoes may invite us to think about where on the roads of life we may have lost or misplaced soul. Sometimes you can reach back into that kind of dream in order to look for lost shoes, and that search may take you back to a place in your life where you lost something more important - vital energy and identity - that you can now reclaim.

     Shoes not only have soles. They have ties, and the state of your laces or straps in a dream may say something about connections - "old ties" or new ones. A woman getting ready to attend a high school reunion in Manhattan dreamed she was urgently seeking shoes that would be comfortable for walking yet smart enough to suit her taste. A salesman in Bloomingdale's persuaded her to purchase a pair of sneakers with laces made of genuine, but flexible, gold. She smiled at the thought that after all the years since graduation, her ties to her classmates were "golden", and that she would be comfortable with them in the big city.

    A Freudian psychiatrist I know dreamed that her shoes were far too tight; they were torturing her feet and making it nearly impossible for her to walk. When she reflected on this, she realized that her Freudian approach was cramping her ability to do her job. She expanded her studies, embracing Jung and other approaches to the psyche and its healing. Now, in her dreams, her shoes fitted just right.           

    In some dreams, we find ourselves wearing shoes that would be highly unlikely in regular life, except at a costume party. We seem to be cross-dressing, or wearing the footwear of a different historical period, or dispensing with shoes altogether in a primal landscape. When we inspect the bodies we inhabit in dreams of this kind, we sometimes discover that our dream self slipped into someone else's situation, in a different place or a different era. The state of our shoes in such dreams (and other details) may be a clue to connections within a soul family that includes personalities in different times.

     That thought has been of great interest to me since I dreamed that I visited my favorite professor at a research institution where he was doing some remarkable work that involved pairs of shoes. The professor is Manning Clark, the famous Australian historian, who was a great friend and mentor to me when I was a student and a precocious lecturer at the Australian National University. Manning died in 1991, but I have had many intriguing encounters with him since.
     In the dream involving shoes, Manning showed me that he is now busily engaged in studying "parallel lives". This meta-historical approach seems to involve tracking how choices made and actions taken by two people living in different times impact each other's fortunes, by a process of causation that you can only grasp if you can step outside linear chronology. One of the pairs Manning had selected for study was Lenin and Dionysius of Syracuse (a tyrant of ancient Greece). Each time the professor finished work on one set of parallel lives, he moved a pair of shoes to a different position on the far side of his desk. This was evidently a kind of tally, but I felt the shoes signified something more.

    I am thinking now of that lone sandal on the lake beach. There is a sandal angel, very important in the pathworking and astral travel protocols of certain Mystery and kabbalistic orders. His name is Sandalphon. He wears sandals in the presence of his Maker, and leather footgear in the presence of Shekinah, the Divine Feminine. Some say he was once the prophet Elijah, or Elias. He presides over the astral body and the soul journeys we make in this vehicle. Some believe he watches over the big journeys that precede birth and follow death, which involve putting on and discarding "garments", like soft shoes.
    I think also of the symbolism of everyday life. The other day, I noticed a pair of women's high-heeled shoes, muddied and scuffed, abandoned under a tree on a gritty urban street. And I thought again about those dreams in which shoes that are lost or abandoned can reflect soul loss. 

    In my book Dreaming the Soul Back Home, I discuss shoe dreams as one of the main categories of dreams that encourage us to ask where soul has gone and make sure that we have proper grounding when we are walking our soul paths. The state of our soles may indeed reflect the state of our souls.

Abandoned shoes (c) Robert Moss