The image for this post is one I made in Midjourney in tandem with having a significant dream. I was trying to create a picture that mirrored the way I was feeling and when I finally got the image right it was so satisfying. I made up a new word for the feeling: “Raveldrift” - An emotional unraveling and the feeling that you are coming loose from your moorings, untethered from reality, uprooted from the place you were planted, and are drifting away.

Marie Louise Von Franz, one of Jung’s most able analysts, talks about the idea that some dreams contain seeds or a “germ” of an issue – physical or psychological – that could grow into a large-scale problem if left unidentified. She urged that special attention be paid to such germ images in dreams because it allowed the dreamer to take a proactive approach to the inner conflict, and by making it conscious it relieved the need for the body or mind to become ill in order to get our attention on the problem.

Do not ever dismiss your own dreams as being insignificant. They will always carry some message from your deeper, wiser self to your waking consciousness, and they may also partake of aspects of “Big Dreams” that are relevant to your family, your community, your nation, your planet. You are intimately connected to the center and whatever you nurture and allow to bloom from your center, blesses all.

We live in an era unlike any before. The old dream-books are fascinating, but they cannot suffice. The task now is not so much to predict harvests or expose repressions but to discover the sacred within the human heart. In this sense, we are pioneers, standing on the frontier of a new sacred geography.

“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.” So said C.G. Jung, one of the foremost interpreters of dreams. He counseled that nightmares can be worked with actively; not merely decoded, but dialogued with. The moment when a dreamer turns to address a disturbing dream figure is the moment the alchemy of ego and shadow can begin.

Feed the life that is yours to live, says the dream. Say no to what starves you. Bring your energy back to the table of your own work and life.

Underwater - in the unconscious - life continues, but differently… creatively… secretly. This is the psyche’s way of saying: “Even in oppression, something in us remains unconquerable, imaginative, and in defiant communion with others.”

The quest for clarity presses upon us like an urgent drumbeat. If only we could be certain—of what is true, of what is good, of what we want. . . If clarity has a shape, it is a crossroads. There are four great signposts—questions that haunt our days and nights, that shape the map of our knowing. . .

Some forms of courage leave no footprints in the ash, no ripples on the water. They are the quiet, invisible forces that shape a life from the inside out. . .