Understanding Repeating Dream Motifs

Have you ever had a dreams with a repeating image that is strange but seems important?  What can you do?  With Integral Deep Listening, we assume that we are getting a wake up call, and our response is to listen to it.  We do so becoming the dream character, interviewing it, and applying in our lives those recommendations that make sense and seem useful. In this case, we learn how our potentials are born and awaken within us and how we can support their development by listening to them and following their recommendations.

What are three fundamental life issues that you are dealing with now in your life?

1. Increasing Income

2. Increasing meditation

3. Increasing marketing of my work

Tell me a dream you remember.  It can be an old one, a repetitive dream, a nightmare, or one that you’re sure you understand.

I am looking at some strange projectiles.  They are basically round, silvery objects, but have bands of metal of the same color around them, giving a three-dimensional relief.  They are curious enough to get my attention and cause me to remember the dream image.

Second dream:

I am crossing a fairly narrow isthmus that connects two larger land areas and lies between two bodies of water.  I don’t know if they are salt water, lakes, or one of each.  Across the isthmus I am noticing furrows or rows of an artificially distinct and repetitive nature.  They are alternating raised and flat and lowered and flat in something reminiscent of a Greek key pattern, but are part of the natural landscape.  They are curious enough to cause me to wonder about them in the dream and to remember them when I woke up.  During the dream I was remembering that my daughter goes to medical school on an isthmus between the ocean and a large lagoon, but in the dream I decided this was not where I was and that location was not what I was seeing.

Why do you think that you had this dream?

I don’t know about either one.  I am assuming that this motif is basically the same as the one with the projectiles.  I am also assuming that these were wake-up calls of some sort, designed to call my attention to a degree that I would remember them and listen to them.  We will interview the repeating motif or pattern and see what happens…

If this dream were playing at a theater, what name would be on the marquee?

A distinctive, repetitive pattern.  After the interview:  Understanding an Emerging Lattice for Growth

These are the characters in the dream, beside yourself…

The projectiles and the bands that are part of it.  The landscape in which these objects fly and lie.  In the second dream, we have the land and the bodies of water and the rows or furrows.

If one character had something especially important to tell you, what would it be?

Bands/Rows

Now remember how as a child you liked to pretend you were a teacher or a doctor?  It’s easy and fun for you to imagine that you are this or that character in your dream and answer some questions I ask, saying the first thing that comes to your mind.  If you wait too long to answer, that’s not the character answering – that’s YOU trying to figure out the right thing to say!

Bands/Rows, would you please tell me about yourself and what you are doing?

I add strength to these projectiles.  I also make them expandable or collapsable.  In other words, I make them much more versatile.  As rows or furrows, I am intensive, highly refined gardening/agriculture, providing extraordinary yields.

What do you like most about yourself? What are your strengths?

I am very adaptable, flexible, useful, and abundant.

What do you dislike most about yourself? Do you have weaknesses?  What are they?

I don’t have any.  I am actually a very versatile, adaptable, and strong microscopic molecular structure that has been duplicated to the place where the crystal lattice structure can be seen in the macro-world as crystals or as the geodesic structures that are based on molecular “bucky balls.”

Bands/Rows, you are in Joseph’s life experience, correct?  He created you, right?  Bands/Rows, what aspect of Joseph do you represent or most closely personify?

An intrinsically adaptable, flexible, useful, and abundant natural structure that is becoming objectively evident, where before it existed only in unknown interior domains.

Bands/Rows, if you could be anywhere you wanted to be and take any form you desired, would you change?  If so, how?

I can be used anywhere my qualities are deemed useful, which means just about everywhere. I am so fundamental that I am beneficial for just about any circumstance, condition, or situation.

(Continue, answering as the transformed object, if it chose to change.)

Bands/Rows, how would you score yourself 0-10, in confidence, compassion, wisdom, acceptance, peace of mind, and witnessing?  Why?

Confidence: 10 What’s there not to be confident about?  I do not exist as any one particular; those come and go; I much more exist as a universal that cannot die. Also, I have no doubt about my value or usefulness.


Compassion: ? I just want to be used. I just want to be useful. If you want to call that compassion, I’m extraordinarily compassionate.  I’m totally selfless.

Wisdom: 10 I am intrinsically wise, in that my structure is good and it works.  However, this is not about knowing or informational content; it’s about the intrinsic wisdom of a perfect form, like the fibonacci sequence.

Acceptance: 10 What’s not to accept?

Inner Peace: 10 What is there not to be peaceful about?

Witnessing:   ? I just am.  I don’t think I witness.

Bands/Rows, if you scored tens in all six of these qualities, would you be different?  If so, how?

The only one that I can think of changing would be witnessing, or objective self-awareness.  I think that by becoming an object of Joseph’s dream awareness I move in that direction; by him becoming me, I become him and his ability to witness.  Therefore, when he wakes up to me, I wake up within him as a part of him that has access to his level of development, and thereby gain the ability to witness, which I didn’t have before.

How would Joseph’s life be different if he naturally scored like you do in all six of these qualities all the time?

He would not get caught up in the particulars of life.  He would identify more completely with universals that are infinitely adaptable, abundant, useful, and flexible.

If you could live Joseph’s life for him, how would you live it differently?

I would infuse it with my characteristics and perspective.

If you could live Joseph’s waking life for him today, would you handle his three life issues differently?  If so, how?

1. Increasing Income: I am all about the repetition of a formula that is intrinsic and that works. There are countless of these in life, any of which he can tap into.

2. Increasing meditation: Similarly, successful meditation is about the repetition of a formula that is organic, primal, and which has my qualities.  Become me when you meditate to amplify them.

3. Increasing marketing of my work: I am interested in duplicating my presence and the qualities that are intrinsic to it.  Do that and the rest follows.

What three life issues would you focus on if you were in charge of his life?

Yours are fine.

In what life situations would it be most beneficial for Joseph to imagine that he is you and act as you would?

When he wants to address any of the three life issues above.

Character, do you do drama?  If not, why not?

What’s drama?

What is your secret for staying out of drama?

I stay focused in my structure and process.

Why do you think that you are in Joseph’s life?

To amplify in his awareness what he needs right now.

How is Joseph most likely to ignore what you are saying to him?

Leave this at the level of intellectual curiosity.

What would you recommend that he do about that?

Know that I am alive.  I am transformative.  I am working within you.  Partner with me and see what happens. What do you have to lose?

I think Joseph had this dream because

He will benefit greatly if and when he wakes up to my nature, presence, and qualities.

I think this dream event happened or (some character) was in the dream because…

The objects were like projectiles to throw my concept at him.  The rows were in the ground to suggest the fertility of life sprouting from within.

What have you heard yourself say?

Jeez. These abstract and very different images are connected and concretely relevant.

If this experience were a wake-up call from the most central part of who you are, what do you think it would be saying to you?

Focus on giving birth to, life to, these universal qualities within myself.  Trust that that is what I need to do. Trust that it is a valid, useful priority.

Notice that the projectiles and the rows don’t symbolize anything.  They simply say that they exist to wake the dreamer up and that their particular appearance is designed to do so in different ways.  One is by creating a somewhat threatening image, the other is to display an unusually organized pattern in the earth that supports growth.

When I set out to interview two different dream characters as one I suspected that they were related, but they could have said, “No, we are different, and we have different things to say to you.”  A more objective approach would have been to interview each separately, as in done in Dream Sociometry, and compare what they say.

While we are all familiar with the idea of the hidden within becoming expressed or manifested in our exterior reality, what is interesting about this interview is that it compares the process to molecular structures repeated to the place that they impact the macro or social realms.  It implies that this is the way that seed potentials sprout and grow within us.  Integral Deep Listening is designed to support and “fertilize” this process by becoming a co-creator with the sprouting of these potentials.  This not only speeds development; it reduces the amount of blockage and resistance to misperceived or misunderstood growth, similar to stopping an immune system response that is necessary to bring the body back into balance.

How can such an interview be practically put to use?  The suggestion is that if the structure is identified with when thinking about money, or meditating, or marketing (in the case of this dreamer) that the qualities associated with the Bands/Rows will be amplified further in consciousness: adaptability, usefulness, abundance, and flexiblility. It is an act of trust to put such recommendations to the test in one’s life, but it is not based on blind faith.  Instead, it is a transrational rather than a prerational trust, in that it is based on a rational methodology that lays out clear reasons for employing such trust.  Still, it is always a stretch to embrace incohate potentials, particularly when they manifest in ways that are not particularly warm and fuzzy, like these Bands/Rows.

As I listened to the Bands/Rows I was reminded of the medieval dispute between those who upheld the primacy of universals, such as Platonic forms, and those who insisted that there is no existence apart from particulars.  These are the nominalists, and the debate continues today between the Rupert Sheldrake’s of the world, who argue for the existence and reality of morphogenic processes, and those who believe development can be explained in terms of DNA and biochemistry.   Of course Wilber’s solution is to say that everything is a holon, consisting of both internal and external aspects, of individual and collective aspects.  We can spot all four quadrants in the comments of Bands/Rows.

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