Dreaming
May 15, 2007 at 13:05 When I woke this morning, I had fragments of a dream clinging to the cobwebs behind my eyes:
I was living in a medieval building constructed of ancient stone. At some points in my dream it looked like a castle or fortress. At other times it looked like a European cathedral.
I am coming down the stairs when the earth shifts subtly beneath the building, not with the dramatic shaking and quaking you see when earthquakes are represented in movies but more like the quiet slump of a mudslide.
The entire building begins to fall apart, walls tumbling in and out, the roof sliding off, slabs of stone collapsing. It was like a house riddled with termites that looks sturdy on the outside but then unexpectedly disintegrates and gives way.
There was both a sense of alarm and a sense of inevitability related to the destruction. Part of me wanted to flee but I didn’t. Instead I stayed inside for a while, dodging falling debris and trying to maneuver around the damage, making plans even as the ceiling was falling.
Finally, I realized I had to leave, and when I glanced back at the building, it looked like the ruins of the Abbaye de Villers that I visited a month or so ago. 
As I emerge from shock, reality starts to sink in. I’ve lost everything! I tell the family I’m staying with that night that I need to go back into the ruins and retrieve my children’s photo albums and my jewelry box. I’m convinced I know exactly where they are and that I’ll be able to reach them.
Interestingly, I’m not afraid to re-enter this structure that is falling apart. It’s as if I recognize the danger but don’t feel it will affect me. I’m ready to wade through the rubble when...
The alarm clock goes off and pulls me out of my dreamscape.
I carry bits and pieces of it with me all day, and continually revisit the dream in my mind.
In quiet moments, I push and prod at my life, my relationships, my faith.
I’m looking for cracks.
I’m searching for fault lines.
I'm wondering what makes stone crumble.
May 15, 2007
Reader Comments (12)
By the same token, even in one of the original 13 colonies, our history is no comparison to what is over there.
Looking through a sacred ruin for your treasures...This struck me so hard. There is a new book out by a mystic that I read, Caroline Myss, and the book is called "Entering the Castle". The castle is the soul, the inner self, the personal holy self. It speaks of all the ways "real life" messes with our holy inside place, and all the tresures that get burried in ruins over time. But how we know where they are, if we are willing to look.
This dream. It sound so much like the idea of this book.
Whatever it means, it sounds very vivid and important. If you stay with it, I beleive the meaning will become clear. Maybe even in another dream.
You have been thinking about where your life should be lived. Perhaps it is a lesson in that you have "lost" your treasures-- the the people, memories, time with family-- amid all the ruins of the old land you are living in now. Just a thought...
;)
Staying at an old hotel in America for a conference or something. The hotel is white clapboard. I'm gathered with a group of people that are acquaintances, not friends, in the lobby, and we end up having a church service there, with the hotel staff providing music. Old hymns I know. We're sitting on folding chairs amid all our luggage. The collection is taken and we're told it's to support the Christian school my children attended when we lived in the U.S. I am struggling to find my wallet in my bag while the guy with the brass collection plate waits. He says, you only have to give a dollar. And I say, no, wait. I want to give $20. I have a twenty in here somewhere.
Then we're outside, just me and my family on the grounds of the hotel, which has a spire, a bell tower. Lightning strikes nearby and I see an electrical surge travel up a wire and hit the spire, which bursts into flames.
I run into the building yelling "Fire! Fire" and I'm struggling to haul our luggage out of the lobby. It's heavy and some of our belongings aren't packed. People don't seem as concerned about the fire as they should be. They're moving slow. An employee is quietly packing up all the candy in the hotel gift shop. I (we? E is in this one...) struggle outside with our stuff. We never see firetrucks arrive to put the fire out.
End of dream.
Whether you love or hate Sigmund Freud, in his "The Interpretation of Dreams" and "On Dreams" there may be more structural answers to be found, although much of his work is currently no longer up to date.
Quote from
http://www.freud.org.uk/indexdream.html
"The main things to remember are (a) that everyone dreams, (b) everyone recognizes that some of the things in dreams are connected to what has happened to us in our waking lives, and (c) everyone has some obscure notion that dreams must 'mean' something.
Dreams are a product of our own minds, so no matter how weird or 'alien' they seem they are a part of us and can tell us about ourselves. The 'interpretation' of dreams is the way Freud turns this 'alien' thing back into a familiar one - even if sometimes we would rather not hear what they mean."
I guess it's a classic: the ruins obviously show that nothing lasts forever, and yes, sometimes our subconscious tries to remind us.
Freud's theory pages are worth reading, but I for one still enjoy wandering through the ruins of the Abbaye de Villers - it's a great place. Even if it turns up in one's dreams a month later :-;
Your writing about this dream was beautiful, though, which helps to keep it in the foreground...