Being in the Dream

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I borrowed the title of this article Being in the Dream from a modern paraphrase often attributed to Rainer Maria Rilke that translates Being in the Change. As much as I love this phrase – and I do love it – I tried mightily to find exact references to this phrase in Rilke’s writings particularly in Letters to a Young Poet and in Sonnets to Orpheus. Not there.

However, for all you Rilke lovers you know that he sprinkled his letters, poems, and other writings with words like wandlung or change. Werden or becoming. Verwandlun or transformation.

His recurring theme, I believe, is that we are all in the act of becoming. So, he encourages that we live as if the place of transition is as important as change itself. “Try to love the questions themselves,” Rilke said, “Like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers…At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer….”

When are we taught to love the transitions in life? Or to stay with the uncomfortable bits and consider transition as the preferred place to be? In my experience, I was taught that some kind of life plan methodology was best. Create intentions, focus on an objective, figure out a strategy, and forge ahead until the goal is met. And, often once one goal is met, press the rewind button. It’s a continuous rinse and repeat cycle.

To underscore his point Rilke advises, “Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart...live in the question.”

Living the Question in Dreams

Dreams can be thought of as nighttime moments of some brain activity and therefore easily dismissible. Or they may be opportunities where inner wisdom gets to come out and play. Either way, we may find that we’re so committed to the rinse and repeat method that we experience our dreams as part of our goal strategy. That is, set an intention for a dream and then expect some kind of outcome.

Alternatively, if we take a deep breath of patience we may find something else present. What if the dream-place is a temenos, what the ancient Greeks thought of as a sacred enclosure. When we explore our dreams with a sacred space perspective, it can feel like we’re stepping into one of earth’s energy vortexes.

If we have ever visited one of earth’s energy hot spots, we likely paused to feel the vibrations below our feet. These spots are “thin” places where the boundaries between waking time and sacred time seem penetrable. So, we’re inclined to wait and watch carefully for a “presence” to make itself known. Dreams can be places like this.

John O’Donohue, the Irish philosopher and poet, once wrote about inner and outer landscapes like they were energy vortexes. I first heard him speak of his understanding of landscape as a sacred space on Krista Tippett’s program On Being. He spoke of the landscape as alive with an energetic stillness that has transformative power versus an empty, stagnant terrain to get from here to there. Essentially he said that the act of stepping into a meaningful relationship with this sacred outer landscape requires that you first enter a threshold of deeper understanding.

Dream as a Threshold

So, what if the sacred enclosure of our dreams have various layers? What I mean is the whole imaginal dream realm offers an inner AND outer landscape. The outer-dream space, if you like, acts as a transitional or threshold layer? And this initial energetic part of the enclosure (prior to getting into the dream story to decipher its elements) is not meant to penetrate quickly. What if we are being encouraged to pause and patiently wait for “presence” to show itself more clearly before passing through into the dreamscape?

In the moment when a decision is made to acknowledge our dreams as holding important messages, there is a realization of movement. There’s a sense of being pulled toward the dreamscape. There’s a longing for greater clarity, an awareness of inner wisdom speaking. The pull or movement may be hard to pinpoint or describe yet it is very important to learn to notice it.

I use the acronym PACE (yourself) to help explain what is happening before we transition fully into the dream by first approaching the outer-dream space. It can be parsed out in four subtle steps:

• Pause: Do you recognize the pause in yourself when you see the dreamscape threshold as it appears to you in night dreams or in waking visions? It’s like lifting your head and seeing something off in the distance. First we pause and bring our inner vision into focus. Nothing more than that.

• Assessing: Your body assesses and then takes its first steps toward this entity. It could be the whole dream that is pulling you to itself. Or it could be a portal inside the dream that appears. A dream fragment or dream character that arises. Whatever it is, you sense your entire body moving forward.

• Change: Now you’ve stepped into a threshold toward the dream or dream fragment. You notice that something has shifted, changed. It’s like being in a misty place – somewhere between here and there. You’re in the moment that’s described as the Rilkean style of “being in the change.” This is the temenos. There’s no need to figure the dream out yet. We’re pausing here to let whatever comes forward to register in our body.

• Embody: Through our calm and still equanimity we begin to embody the dream’s threshold. We’re a part of it. We are in the transitional liminal space that we are only beginning to appreciate. Here we don’t have a desire to go any further. Because now, we are in that sacred place that the ancient Greeks, O’Donohue, and Rilke all spoke of. This place of the in-between, the transition, is a sacred landscape in its own right. No need to rush toward our strategy to figure out what the dream is saying. Not yet.

These subtle steps can happen very quickly or we may decide to take our time. What’s clear is that we’re “being in the change.” We are living the question. We are allowing our body to feel the subtle shifts. We are honoring the vibrations of the dream vortex. This outer-dream transitional space is key to what we are about to experience inside the dream itself. We are “being in the dream.”

Rilke advises in his Sonnets to Orpheus (Sonnet 4, Part 1). “Step now and then, you gentle-hearted, into the breath not breathed for you, let it blow over your cheeks, and, parted, quiver behind you, united anew.”