This has been an unusually active dreamtime for me. Or at least I am remembering more than I normally do.
Tuesday morning, I awoke from what was truly a nightmare, not my normal "can't get from point A to point B" kind of dream. It has left me almost flattened for two days, functioning but absolutely (as my mother used to say) "not myself".
All I will say about it is that I experienced it as the reality of being, essentially, in the middle of a war zone. It is odd that it had the impact it did, given that one might say I should have "felt" several steps away from events. I don't fully understand the dream process, but in this one, dream "me" was watching a television show of people watching a television news report. Yet the net result was that I, the dreamer, ended up being absolutely in the middle of the violence. As someone whose only exposure to war and conflict has been second-hand (this makes me a most fortunate being, I know), it was as if my physical body was having this experience for the first time, and the pain and trauma were real.
Over the years, I have been teased for not going to thriller and action movies, or if I find myself at one, for averting my eyes. I avoid most television shows that portray violence. "It's not real, Liz, don't be ridiculous." And yet, I've always felt that there is a level on which it is real, that my body, at least, doesn't know the difference. Sure, I watch and read more innocuous mysteries, the ones where someone stumbles across a body and the emphasis is a more cerebral solution to a problem. Yet at times, even those are too distressing.
As I start to pull myself back together, I just find myself wondering, why do we humans inflict such hell on one another, whether it is in war, on the streets, or one-on-one? And then even more perplexing, why do we inflict this experience on people as "entertainment"? Even movies aimed at children seem to contain gratuitous violence, perhaps numbing them (or addicting them?) to future lives of violence. People might say, "this is reality", but as a woman and as someone trying so hard to access the values of the divine feminine, may I say, it is not my reality. And it doesn't have to be our communal reality; we are choosing it. The dream helped me to feel and fully understand the insanity of it all.
