Self-confrontation

Sometimes, I think dreams are not meant to be forgotten. Their meaning has such significance that they should be documented. This is one of those dreams. After I woke from this dream, I was compelled to write it down into my word program for later analysis. Alot of this makes absolute sense to me as it describes much of what is going on within myself at this time. Some though, seems like utter nonsense to me. The relevance I have yet to still understand, (if there is meant to have any at all. Possibly not).

My dream:

I was a struggling artist. Trying so hard to find my place, where I belonged.
I was in a motel room, or something similar, filled with incomplete pieces of my work. Art supplies everywhere.
I’m frustrated…pacing, angry, confused. Trying so hard to understand why I am not successful, though trying so hard to be. I’ve spent months, if not longer in that room. Piece after piece trying to tap into where my center is, still unsuccessful. Tension mounting daily.

Someone comes over to visit. Checking up on me. I think, concerned for me. She’s aware how over stressed I’ve been and how I’ve been pushing myself so hard for such a long period. I’m at my wit’s end. She tries to reassure me that all will be fine.

A friend of hers stops by. She enters the room. Expressing how bad her day was and that she was looking for a night’s stay in the same complex I was in. That she was in need of refuge to escape from something that had just happened. Something tragic that happened within the very same complex I was in.

Although she had just experienced something so traumatic, she was unusually calm…collected. Emotionally removed.
She says that there had been someone shot and murdered on a couple floors below my room. There was complete mayhem about the place and she couldn’t get any rest, so she came upstairs to my floor in search of some quite space.

She looks about my room and notices the condition its in. She comments on the work I have about the place and asks what I’m doing with it all.
Frustrated, I tell her that I didn’t want to talk about it. That it was none of her business and to just pay no mind to it.

She then asks me to see one piece that I feel is my best work so far, finished, or not. I point to a piece I did of a silhouette of a woman. It was a rather dark, depressed piece, but I felt was a piece that tapped into my ability the best.
She tossed a glance at it from a distance, turned to me and asked again…what piece have “I” done that I feel is of my best work. I point again to that one piece, telling her it was that one. Without looking at it a second time, she tells me that that isn’t one I’ve done from my real self.
I disagree with her, insisting that it was my “own” work.

She raises a brow, rolls her eyes and shrugs off what I had just told her as she is still insisting that what I had just chosen as my best is not my real work.
She then approaches a sort of white-board hanging on the wall and begins to tell me a short story as she begins to “doodle” on the board.

She begins to say, “To capture the essence of who you truly are, you must first be honest with your own self”, as she is quickly stroking onto the board short little lines which initially look like mere scratch.
She continues, “So long as you insist on fooling yourself, it is only you who remains the fool”, including more lines into its development..
She adds, “To find your place with yourself, you must first realize you are seeking it”.
As her picture begins to take shape and she is attending to detail, she continues..
“Success isn’t in what we think we want to do, but in who we believe we really are”.

She circles around the board, she’s so quick with her strokes that it almost seems as though she’s throwing on scribble, making certain that with each of my attempts to see, she blocks most of the view.
She adds, “To discover best what we are most, we must not attend to that which we are least”, as she passes the front of the board one more time.

She pauses, steps aside and says, “Sometimes, the furthest answer from us is closest one before us”…and there before me is my own work. MY real work in its completion.
I was stunned. Shocked. Feared. How did she know? I began to cry.
I look at her, completely speechless. How? I thought…how did you do that?

She approaches me, faces me and reaches out her hands and places each on my shoulders. She looks straight into my eyes and says to me, “Love yourself. Have faith in the wonderful person that you are. You have a purpose and you are entitled to it for your OWN self”.
“So long as you continue to trace the outline of life for what you think you should be for others, you will never finish your work because you are not yet whole for yourself. In order to finish your pieces, you must first start with yourself. Find your true self FOR yourself. Have faith in yourself and you will succeed to find your center. Begin to live before you die, and your work will find completion”.

She hugged me. Held me tight and whispered into my ear. “My job is done here. Have faith in yourself. I do”.

I looked over at the white-board for a confirmation of what had just happened.
Her sketch was gone. She was gone.

I turned to my friend to ask her what had happened. She had no idea what I was talking about.

I then saw myself sleeping. I was standing over myself, gently shaking my shoulder to wake me. I was facing myself…preparing myself in my own dream.
“Mary”, I said. “Mary, wake up. But, before you do, I need you to know that I am not a dream you are dreaming. I am real, yet once you awake, I will seem like a dream. You will remember my visit, but uncertain of its realm. Once you wake, you will feel great sorrow. As though you’ve encountered an enormous emotional loss. Know that you have not lost, but have obtained a great gain, and by doing so, it will be so emotionally draining that it will seem like you’re feeling sorrow as a result. When you wake, you will cry…..you will sob…you will feel such sorrow…such loss….Know that your sense of loss is in fact, a sense of rebirth of awareness of yourself”.

I begin to wake as I’m hearing myself waking myself in preparation. And I was right, I began to cry..to sob uncontrollably before I even woke.
It was as though I was consciously stepping out of one subconscious realm and into another.
End.

I woke by my daughter shaking me. I was saturated in tears and still sobbing uncontrollably…as though I encountered a great, sudden loss. I thought I dreamed about my own death. But instead, it was a message to myself.

June 29th, 2010: 12 am Midnight

Shangrala

Shangrala, thank you for sharing your dream! I agree, some dreams can be important turning points in our lives; I have one of those. Other dreams don't get completely figured out and are there to be niggled at over time. I had a dream where Elton John used a machine gun to take down a fence and, at the end of the dream, a voice urgently told me, "Don't you know? There are no fences in San Francisco!" LOL I'm still working on that one (probably the last place I saw my mother before she died was in San Francisco so you can see how that could impact me).