Last night I had a dream that was not the usual midnight fiction.
In my dream, I am riding around on my bike in a downtown metropolis. It is a moody, dark wasteland painted in washes of deep blue, olive green, mud brown and metallic gray.
I am looking for the one I love. I have just left a movie theater playing a montage of painful, invasive memories—both real and imagined. Everyone in the theater was a doppelganger of people I used to know watching a film of my life that is counterfeit. So I leave.
I start collecting trash, and as I do, it is getting harder and harder to balance everything I pick up. I struggle for a long time to pedal and remain upright. Finally I see a patio full of hippies hanging out. I stop and ask them if it’s okay to drop off some of my trash. They say yes, and that I should go upstairs to the roof. I leave some of the trash and go upstairs with the rest.
As I go upstairs, I see a water jug cooler. I am thirsty but I can’t figure out how to get water. There is a cardboard sign taped to the water fountain with two cups. It says “Think In --><--and Out<----> with arrows pointing to each like this. So I press down on one of the levers and it releases dirty brown water into the cup. I look at the water before pouring it back out, confused. I try the other lever. It fills clean water into the cup beneath it. I drink from the cup, then press down on the other lever and it fills water into that cup. I set down the rest of my trash into a bin. I figure out that only by balancing the water levels in each cup am I able to get the water and be quenched. Only after I drop off the trash was I able to figure that out.
Rarely (but fortunately) my subconscious will send me a message as clear as this—I’ve got to recycle my trash: the mental, spiritual and emotional garbage I’ve been carrying around with me, as well as the physical. The whole time I was looking for balance and a way to unload myself while still remaining upright. I realized that’s hard to do when I was the one that kept adding to the pile and holding onto things I did not need.
This dream wisdom fits with the theme of holism that I’ve been thinking about lately. Holistic theory maintains that the universe consists of a series of systems, interacting wholes that are more that the mere sum of their parts. This can apply to large-scale social phenomena as well as microscopic changes individuals experience on an internal level.
I’ve encountered this idea most in therapy school, where we were taught that all events, relationships, cognitions, physical symptoms and feelings in one’s life are somehow interconnected. The mind, body and spirit are meant to work in conjunction with each other, and when one part of the “system” fails, all others are affected. I’ve been struggled to strike a kind of balance in my own life lately, so it makes sense that my subconscious would produce such a powerful sunrise satori in response to the recent state of chaos in my waking life.
I’m reminded of recent words from my grandmother’s wise but colorful Bosnian doctor: You’ve got to make conscious choices about your health each day and stick by them no matter what. This little lecture by the doctor really hit home for me in an unexpected way. (Although with everything else that’s going on in my life right now, it strangely fits and makes perfect sense.) The importance of making conscious choices definitely applies to mental health as well as physical wellbeing. In our increasingly fast-paced and distraction-prone lifestyles, it’s an easy piece of advice to forget for a time. But life always will find a way to remind us.
So I am going to make that choice (again) going forward: to be more conscious of releasing toxic trash and choose instead to take in the good. I'm so ready to manifest some new good.
