Dream Animal Wisdom

Preface In my mind I can still slip back into my front row chair in a spartan church classroom, on a blustery fall Saturday in 2003. Surrounded by my classmates in spiritual director training, I listened to a wise and funny Episcopal priest’s spellbinding presentation about dreamwork. Dreams had made little impression upon my life before then … well, except for that one little recurring childhood nightmare. But on that day, something buried within me snapped to attention and responded with a resounding YES! In an instant I intuitively knew that dreamwork was destined to become a core spiritual practice for me – as essential and as integral as prayer. This is exactly what has happened. At the time of my spiritual director training, I’d been living the Twelve-Step recovery program for more than 20 years. Those familiar with the Twelve Steps know that a rigorous commitment to that process can lead to dramatic emotional and spiritual transformations, and I’m sure I was a bit complacent, maybe even a bit arrogant, about the level of self-awareness and personal growth I’d already achieved. Dreamwork was about to thrust me into a realm of self-discovery that I hadn’t known existed. My new commitment to dream-tending burst open the channel from conscious to unconscious, which had been trembling for years with pent-up truths. With my newly awakened recall, the Dream Maker began delivering up images like a spongy layer of grass in my backyard where I feared someone might step, plunging into the ominous chasm I knew lay below. Frustratingly the new dimensions of awareness arrived enveloped in metaphor. What does this mean? What kind of weird dream is that? But I persisted, motivated by the conviction that every minute spent journaling and reflecting upon my dreams would be worth it – somehow, sometime, in some mysterious way. Soon I found myself sharing my nocturnal adventures with a variety of creatures. I knew that my dream animals were bringing messages, which I couldn’t begin to decipher on my own. Working solo in my early days, I turned too quickly to dream symbol books – something I adamantly discourage today as the starting point for anyone. While I found some dream animal interpretations interesting, much of the material I read was far off the mark for what I sensed was true about my own dream creatures. Even learning that animals typically represent our deep instincts or energies wasn’t particularly useful. How was that supposed to help me in my waking life? Being a perpetual student, I dove into the writings of dreamwork pioneers like Morton Kelsey, John Sanford, Robert Johnson, Jeremy Taylor, and began exploring the foundational wisdom of Carl Jung. I attended workshops and conferences brimming over with rich material about dreams in relation to myth, religion and fairy tales. While I learned that many of my own dream images like a square spiderweb, a two-headed frog and a mothering snake have their roots in archetype, I longed for something less lofty psychologically and academically, a more down-to-earth entryway to working with my dream animals. How could I, an ordinary dreamer well-grounded in my faith tradition, more fully engage my dream creatures and their energies? How might I invite a dream creature to help illuminate my way of being in the world, of relating to myself, to others and to the divine? Most important, how might these internal energies in animal garb encourage me forward on my journey of individuation, of becoming the person I was created to be? This book is my attempt to address these questions. It is the resource I wish had been available to me when I first began dreamwork. In this compilation of animal dreams, I seek to demonstrate a variety of ways that a dreamer may welcome and embrace the creatures within. The book is divided into two sections: Part I offers chapters focused on some of the most common dream creatures; Part II explores in greater depth a variety of topics and themes that I believe warrant close attention and shows how a variety of dream creatures help to convey those themes. The dreamers who’ve joined me in this endeavor range from new dreamworkers to those who’ve been dream-tending for decades. The result is a broad spectrum of dream processing – from the straightforward, beginning level, to the deeply profound. Always emphasizing the dreamer’s personal associations, interpretations include insights from research and archetypal studies when those levels of meaning emerge organically and in due time through the dreamer’s own experience and development. A supremely invitational truth about dreamwork: we can begin at any time, right where we are. It is my hope that this book will serve both as a primer for the curious and inspiration for the experienced dream-tender who may never have paused to fully engage the animals who claim them as they sleep. Whether you read the book chronologically or use it as a reference, may what follows meet you at levels from the ordinary to the marvelous. May the dear creatures who’ve gathered here along with their dreamers beckon us all further into the truths of our own deepest selves. # MoleCat’s Revelation This is the story of MoleCat, an appalling creature who burst from my unconscious in a shocking nightmare in 2006. I’d gone to bed blithely anticipating a peaceful night. I was, after all, in the serene setting of a prayer retreat. Instead I received a series of nightmares that included a collapsing ceiling in my house, the threat of a serial rapist, the inability to find my car, my fruitless struggle to report the missing car problem and finally escaping the danger of a fire started in a general store. It was not my best night in the dream world! Out of that chaos emerged MoleCat in a formidable dream that inscribed every detail into my memory and trailed its haunting affects through subsequent years. I attended to this Big Dream the best I could at the time, filling the margins of my journal pages with diligent processing notes. While I uncovered many useful insights, the nature and purpose of the composite creature central to my dream continued to elude me for a long time. ….