Dreaming the Spirit
Angela Arnold reflects on some dreams and their meaning
Dreams can be a lot of things. Joyful ‘nonsense’ unrelated to daily reality – like the one about practising new dance steps with an elephant…when I’m really not the dancing type (or personally know any elephants). They may be an anxious reprise of the day’s hazards – I might mention the recurring nightmare about a Business Meeting gone terribly wrong! Some dreams even seem to plan themselves out in detail ahead of the dreaming, thrillers with every clue in place from the beginning, in retrospect. They are enough to make you wonder what happens when we’re asleep.
But can we have dreams that literally speak to our condition, that broaden our horizons, maybe sow healthy doubts in our waking minds? I think so. Some months ago I dreamt a very strange two-parter. Some of it I thought I understood, the rest continues to niggle and challenge.
First, there was a river, with a raft slowly drifting past. On it stood or sat a group of people, quite artfully posed, as in a tableau. They were saints: the kind of fact one just knows in a dream. The Virgin Mary was there, and other saints grouped around her, all looking across at me – rather pointedly, I thought. No matter how much I protested, in my dream, that I didn’t believe in saints… there they were, alive and real and gently challenging my perfectly reasonable preconceptions!
This was followed by a different vision: a vast amount of milk was pouring down from above. What it poured into was a long row of plastic milk containers. They were pint size – the see-through sort with the hollow handles that fill with milk. And then I woke.
I instantly knew what this last bit was telling me. The milk represented (nurturing!) Spirit, the pint bottles us: our so-shaped minds that are unable to conceive of Spirit’s vast and fluid nature.
And the word ‘denatured’ came to me; Spirit losing something of its true essence as it takes on a distinct material ‘shape’ – limited, atomised, no longer the magnificent and boundless no-thing it really is. We are poor little containers. What we receive depends very much on how we have been shaped by our culture…but whatever the shape may be, it is always only that: a material(-ising) shape.
But what of those saints? Having encountered them ‘in the flesh’, most annoyingly, now I can’t quite seem to shake them off. They have left me this gift of a lasting feeling of (yet again) increased uncertainty – or at least a hands-off respect for the ‘impossible’, of a kind that I could not have thought my way to – a strange, and rather awkward, new kind of openness.
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