01 May 2019

A giant bears the message

The THING that appeared at my window
When I pulled up the shades after getting out of bed, I was shocked by the view of a colossus that totally dominated the landscape. It stretched across my entire view of the sky. And it set the tone for the day: the construction of the tower crane in the lot behind our apartment building the day before (which I hadn’t seen yet because I’d returned home in the dark of night) meant that the construction project next door has drastically accelerated.

Every time I passed one of our flat’s  back windows, the crane’s immensity impressed itself upon my consciousness. And an hour later, as I sat contemplating it while sipping coffee in my study, the meaning of its dream-like presence in my environment became clear to me.

But before I share that revelation with you, let me build the foundation (see what I did there?) on three pillars.

The first is a discovery I made about the relationship between dreams and life when I was still only 17 years old, and had only been recording dreams for a few months. I observed that there were occasionally, in my waking life, short stretches of time – an hour, an evening, a day – in which a sequence of events would occur that was pregnant with meaning and/or simply crackling with the energy of synchronicity. It felt like an invisible hand was arranging the people, objects and occurrences in my life to give me a message. And these sequences of events could be worked with and understood in the same way I understood my dreams.

Secondly, this neighboring construction site has been bubbling up in my consciousness for… well… over a year now. The one-family house that stood there was razed to the ground almost two years ago. Then they excavated and poured a foundation this last  autumn before the ground froze.

But in recent months activity there has picked up. And because I am a lover of the cold, I sleep with the windows wide open (all the way through winter). A few weeks ago the noise of the construction activity began disturbing my sleep on those rare mornings when I get to sleep in.

The third pillar is that I have been working my way toward big changes in my life for what seems like forever now. For some years now I’ve been preparing myself for a big life change, but whenever I assessed where I was in my process, it always seemed like I was still disappointingly unprepared for the big transition. “Not yet,” I kept telling myself. The slowly escalating pressure was enough to disturb my sleep and to generally put me on edge. But still not enough to feel like “the time has come.”

And then that Leviathan appeared outside my window. The building process has shifted into high gear.

It is an essential teaching of dreamwork that we must not content ourselves with merely understanding and interpreting our dreams (or any other potent symbolic message from deeper levels of reality). We are being called on to ACT!

To honor this “dream” of the crane bursting forth into my world, and the upsurge in building activity it brings with it, I am committing myself to increase the time and energy I put into building for the coming phase of my life.

The crane is telling me: the time has come!

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