Alone With Our Dreams

I just had a realization about the summer season happening in my part of the world. The word alone and another word slow seems to pop up. Interesting because typically these are words that appear for me in autumn when the cold weather prompts introspection. That’s when something takes over and I begin the anticipated inward journey.

Spring’s warmth ever injects me with adrenaline and sends me on long slow walks in the woods. And Summer, I’ve always thought, is more of the same. Sunshine, outdoors, volunteering in the neighborhood garden. But when I wrote the title of this article, something else came. What does it mean, this idea of being alone. It’s not an aloneness that brings sadness. And it’s not the same as autumn when spiraling into shadows and inner magic happens.

Instead, I find my toes sinking into a wet, sandy carpet as I walk along the Lake’s shoreline. It’s squishiness noticeably slows me down. On sand it’s harder to keep up a driven intentional pace. Instead, I find I’m sinking into a kind of awareness that notices aloneness has a flip side. The aloneness I’m talking about recognizes that it’s outside with others around. It’s a kind of “together-aloneness” that is a necessary place to be. It’s summer after all! The solitude of this “together-aloneness” happens at the same time you and a passersby share a smile, or when a stray dog runs up to you on the beach for a reassuring pet. It’s a state of being that doesn’t need to wait until we’re by ourselves someplace.

So, for me, being alone in summer feels different from winter’s contemplative retreat.

A Gift from the Sea

On my summer reading list is a book called Gift from the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh. I just finished it…again. The book was written 70 years ago. Millions of copies later it is still being actively sold as if recently published. True, a few of the author’s references bring us back to the 1950s. Yet honestly, the beauty of this book is that she touches a part of the human experience that lives eternally. The devastating experience she had as a young mother is a tragedy that stabs into the heart of her writing. Miraculously, her voice as a writer emerges with comfort and reassurance for the rest of us as we all – continuously and in our own way – navigate our own ebbs and tides.

Morrow Lindbergh’s whole thread is about the need for solitude in order to see ourselves more clearly. She suggests that solitude is more than being by yourself. It’s not determined by the place we find ourselves. Instead, it’s the awareness that we need to spend time paying attention to the forces pulling on our feet to slow us down. She calls this practice “the art of solitude.”

She speaks of solitude as a process that moves us from the noise of “endless distractions” (whatever that looks like for each of us) toward something more liberating. Morrow Lindbergh mirrors back to us what we already know that “so much of social life is exhausting; one is wearing a mask.” She reflects in her book as she walks along her island beach, “I have shed my mask.”

The Wilderness

“If one is out of touch with oneself, then one cannot touch others,” she continues. She agrees that being out of touch is like wandering in the wilderness. This truism she speaks of is as key now as it’s always been. Morrow Lindbergh knew as other sages before and since that we humans need to find a way to tap into our irrepressible parts to release the burdensome energies we hold.

Creative beings such as Morrow Lindbergh guide us over and over again to find a way to shed what’s unwanted so we can finally see our truth emerge out of the shadows. Of course, and not surprisingly, it occurred to me that another way to tap into creative imagination and recognize our truth is to be alone with our dreams.

Alone with our Dreams

Sure, our night dreams and waking visions can be as distracting as the social life noise Morrow Lindbergh refers to. For sure it’s a kind of wilderness. Looking at our dreams in this way can be exhausting. In this light the dream process appears to be a chore: incubating a dream, remembering to record it, going back later and “working” with it, letting it rest and then going back to revisit the dreamscape. It’s no wonder that to some of us this seems like troublesome noise.

Yet taking advice from Gift of the Sea, there is a flip side to this noise. Patience. The kind of patience that solitude gives us, if we allow the sand to pull on our feet. It takes so much less physical and mental energy to rest along the shoreline of the dream or vision and welcome a gift given from its continuous waves. That is, if we intentionally practice readiness.

Oftentimes we need to be reminded that we are creating our own inner noise. For instance, given the pace of our ego-driven lives we might think through and predetermined a dream meaning – before we hold it in silence for a while. It’s hard to sit, wait and remain open to welcome the unexpected. To allow it to wash up at our feet in its own time. Morrow Lindbergh calls this state of readiness being open to “adventuring in the chartless seas of imagination.”

Being alone with our dreams – whether solitary or in the together-aloneness of a Dream Circle – is the solitude needed to find our hidden treasures. So, as we patiently practice listening for the unexpected, here’s a rephrased question from Gift of the Sea, “What does the open dream-sea hold for you?”