Eco Dreaming

I just wrote a long post about archetypal dreams and ecopsychology over at my dream studies site. Check it out; this is an important meeting grounds of ecology and dreams.

In the past, most communities listened to the dreams that bubbled up, especially during hard times. One of the interesting elements of human leadership is the dream-vision that speaks for the community at large. For better or worse, charistmatic leaders often used these emotionally powerful visions to stir up action, or face something that they could no longer afford to ignore.

That's where archetypal dreams come into play, socialized and legitimized by their authenticity.

Just a Smattering of Shadow Work

I'd like to share some fascinating site statistics about Dreamcrisp. The average length of time real people look at this blog when they click on a google link or some other referring url is 14 seconds. Not coincidentally, four out of five unique visitors find this site after searching for porn space.

Evidently, these folks don't find what they're looking for. In honor of my most popular post, I recently updated it to help them along on their noble quest: check it here and review the first paragraph's new link.

Other popular searches that result in people stumbling onto Dreamcrisp include:

poop piles
meat helmets
suburban fetish

and my personal favorite:

don't taze me bro t-shirt

Now, if that isn't a business opportunity, I don't know my ass from a pile of meat helmets. This statistical farce evidently shows that one of the major, as yet unstated, themes here at Dreamcrisp is the human shadow.

Robert Bly describes the shadow as that invisible bag we drag behind us, where we keep all those things we don't like about ourselves, our culture, and our humanity. It's the Dr Jekyll to our everyday ego. You know, the dark side.

I'm all about the dark side. You have to be if dream research is your passion. My focus on perpetual culture shock is actually an attempt to own the rejected parts of myself and society, and call them out when I see them play out on a bigger stage. It's creepy, yes, and it makes me laugh.

This is the dreamwork, ya'll.

The landscape dreaming

Faithful readers,

it's time for a quick update on my adjustment to life in the southern hinterlands. North Central Florida is a place of delicate beauty, most of which has gone unnoticed by me as I tend to focus on picking the sand spurs out of my feet and the ticks out of my various nooks and crannies.

But check out this sleepy eyed view of a local cementary, complete with banana spider:

and just so there's no question as to the mythological framework of this place, ie the dreaming of land:

This is a place of fragrant breezes, big skies, and quiet mornings. It's also a place of stories, deep roots, and long memories. My friend Raven lent me the book Cross Creek just before I left California, and this book has turned out to be a spiritual guide to this area.

Here is what Marjorie Rawlings sez about entering a grove - she's talking about orange groves but I feel it with the live oak savannahs too:

"Any grove or any wood is a fine thing to see. But the magic here, strangely, is not apparent from the road. It is necessary to leave the impersonal highway, to step inside the rusty gate and close it behind. By this, an act of faith is committed, through which one accepts blindly the communion cup of beauty. One is now inside the grove, out of one world and in the mysterious heart of another." (p15)

A big theme for us has been walking down the trail and running straight into spider webs. The spider webs on the trail are thresholds like Rawling's rusty gate, and they are showing up in dreams too as signals to pay attention. As it turns out I'm not the only blogger paying attention to spider webs and dreams either. They're more than a call to alertness, but also a reminder of interconnection.

On the interpretation of dreams

Before I build my castle of words
let me say that this dream
I am about to verb-alize
is not really a story
even though it will begin, introduce
some tension and then conclude,
poorly.

Morever, this dream really happened to me
and it happened before
the tricky puns begin to eat at the froth of detail
left behind when the tide of my voice
falls back,
not yet expressions of my sexuality or
life choices or
perceived difficulties with networking at social events
where cheese is cut into cubes.

There is no sex, actually, or froth, or even
clean moist stacks of cubed cheeses,
only a few remembered moments which scratched an itch
before I could disarticulate the sensation from
The Word, the muscle from the hide.

So before I build this castle of words
let me say that this dream existed
before I skin myself like a rabbit
hung from a rafter exposed,
glinty, drying in the air.