Tag Archives: family

Does your mother dream?

March 28, 2018 Jenny Alexander 11 Comments

I recently read a really touching article called Mother daughter dreaming on Tzivia Gover’s blog, Waking up to your dreams.

Tzivia describes how she discovered her mother had been a prolific dreamer, but it was too late to explore their shared interest because, by then, her mother had slipped into ‘her dream of dementia’ and lost the ability to communicate in speech.

It made me wonder whether my mother dreamed – or rather, remembered her dreams. I would think not. But what about my father? My sisters and brother? My grandparents?

It struck me how rarely most of us talk about our dream lives, even with those closest to us. I’m glad I’ve always had that conversation with my children, and these days, also, with my friends.

It’s fun, intriguing and sometimes reassuring to talk about the places we go and the experiences we have in our dreams. For me, it’s like talking about great movies we’ve seen, or wonderful novels, or little pieces of poetry we’ve chanced upon and felt inspired.

I think one of the reasons why it isn’t part of our culture to talk about our dreams is because psychology has hijacked dreaming and shaped our view of it into some kind of secret code that makes us vulnerable to being exposed.

For me, my dreaming is a rainbow of emotions, themes, images, characters and stories that show, not my deep unconscious analysable life, but the moving colours of my psyche.

Next time you remember a dream, try sharing it. If you still have your mother in your life, perhaps you could share it with her or, if she has already left, you might invite her to visit you in dreams, as Tzivia has done.

Do you talk to friends and family about your dreams? If not, what would hold you back? If so, how does it make you feel?

Archetypes, Creativity, Dreams, Psychology, Spirituality, Symbols

A dream of darkness

November 15, 2016 Jenny Alexander 6 Comments

A few days after I last blogged, way back in May, I went to Iceland. I’d always been drawn to the North, so Iceland had been on my must-see list for decades, but what made me actually go this year was a series of dreams I had around the time of my mother’s death last November. They were ‘big dreams’ – dreams that had a momentous quality, a deep sense of mystery and meaning.

They were a call to ancestors, to the place beyond death and, specifically, to Iceland. So like all dreamers, who have learnt how and when to listen, I followed the call of my dreams.

Being in Iceland felt, to me, like being in a dream. I had completely underestimated the size of the island, and the sparseness of the population; I had not expected the vast tracts of volcanic deserts and inaccessible mountains. I hadn’t noticed that the key on my map had only three kinds of terrain – places where something’s growing, places where not much is growing, and places where basically nothing is growing at all, which was about 40 percent of the land.

Ice, water – and fire too. In Iceland, the hot water in your shower smells of sulphur, because it’s piped straight out of the volcanic ground, and when you’re walking in some places, you can hear the gurgle of water boiling and bubbling, breathing out wafts of sulphurous steam, and then the earth feels like a living being. You can absolutely understand why Icelandic people believe in earth spirits – you can believe it yourself.

Land of fire and ice, and of light and darkness too. I visited several art exhibitions which explored the creative sensibility of the peoples of the North, shaped by long dark winters and summer months of continuous light. They made explicit how this environment can drive a psychological rhythm between extremes of celebration and isolation, of joy and depression.

I felt these extremes in myself, the whole time I was there. On the surface, excited and enchanted by everything I saw and everyone I met, but sensing all the time, the darkness moving underneath. A few days in, I had this dream:

The car is packed for the next stage of my journey and I’m having a last cup of tea with my hosts. Looking out over Rekjavik through their big window, I see a sudden darkness coming across the sky – clouds?

I see black clouds rising along the edge of town, pouring up into the air from the ground, and as I watch, a sudden column of sparkling fire shoots up, exploding in a great shower of sparks, orange and red, filling the thick black cloud that’s covering everything.

‘What is that?’ I gasp.

‘The volcano’s erupting.’

Black soot is falling everywhere, covering everything, but it doesn’t matter. This is what I’ve come for. The darkness. Not just fun and distraction. I always knew it.

It was the beginning of what has been, for me, a difficult summer. I went to Iceland following the kind of dreams that will take you deep into your own darkness, as well as bringing you, eventually, to wonder and light.

I had expected to meet the black dog, but black dogs come in different shapes and sizes. This one turned out to be huge and hungry, feral and strong, and he was never going to settle for living in my house like a sad old labrador for just a few weeks or months.

It’s been a long and exhausting trek through his cold darkness but, last week, I woke one morning with a great sense of relief, after my first full night’s sleep for months, and a bright thought filled my mind like a sunrise, ‘It’s over now.’

I’m sorry I was away so long, but very happy to be back.

Dreams

Coming up to Christmas, a gift from my dreams

December 24, 2014 Jenny Alexander 4 Comments

I had a complicated relationship with my mother for many years, although we’re a little closer now. So it was wonderful to have this gift of a dream in the run-up to Christmas.

It was just a cameo, the briefest of scenes, but very vivid. We were in an open field on a bright sunny day, my mother and me, with green grass and meadow flowers all around.

In the middle of the field, there was a big scrubbed wooden kitchen table, a free-standing cooker and another smaller table with a red and white checked tablecloth flapping in the breeze.

My mother was making cakes, stirring the mixture, spooning it into the tins, putting them into the oven and bringing the ones that had finished cooking out.

She was too busy to talk to me, or even look at me, but I felt very happy to be there, helping. I cut the freshly baked cakes into squares and arranged them on my mother’s beautiful cake stands and favourite china plates.

The ‘I’ in the dream was so happy that I, the dreamer, noticed it and realised why. It was because my mother was young again, just like when I was little. I looked more closely, I savoured the moment.

A dream like this is a gift because when you are aware in the dream, you experience it exactly as if it was real life. I didn’t just dream about my mother; I was with her in a bright meadow, making cakes.

It reminded me of Christmases when I was little. My mother was always frantically busy, because she worked full time and had four children to look after, yet every Christmas day the whole family came to our house; uncles and aunties, cousins and grandparents, all squeezed in around every table and chair we could find or borrow.

Those childhood Christmases were my mother’s gifts to me, and I’m sure they were the seeds of my love for all things Christmassy today even though, because of our long estrangement, I planted them so far away.