A Dream for Michael

Tuesday, September 14, 2010

On a ship’s deck, I see the captain standing there, a good-looking man in his 30s or 40s, serious but not mean. He is looking straight ahead into the distance. His hair was blondish brown and longish. Beside him was a small boy huddled in a squat on top of a section of a tree stump, like a round block of wood, just to the left of the captain. He was hunched so I could only see the top of his flaxen head. It was not safe where he was so I went around behind him and picked him up, stump and all, and carried him over to the right of the captain. I remember seeing the captain’s name ‘in print’ in my mind’s eye; it was William St__rn, and where the space was, was a symbol for passageway, or bridge, or viaduct, shaped like 2 square brackets but turned outward. I ‘knew’ the letters that were supposed to go there were “ea” or “ia” – Stearn or Stiarn.

DREAMWORK:

I talked to Michael about this dream, seeing that it was meant for him. (A few days ago I had asked whether there was anything I ought to do to help Michael with what ails him – physically, it is the crippling pain in his right knee, and the guidance was that I ought to dream a dream for him.) In the telling I realized a couple of things:

First, the captain’s last name - Stearn, and my impression of him – stern, which is also the rear of the ship where the rudder is. (Why wasn’t his name Stern, I wonder? Because that’s not exactly how he is, even though he looked that way?? He is what he seems...?)

Second, the boy is on a tree stump – he is stumped, blocked, hence the resigned or withdrawn, and inert posture.

Now I drop the dream into my body...

This is the voyage of Michael’s life, the way he sees and feels it. Alone in the big, wide ocean, alone with the responsibility of a ship with no one except the little boy (they are closely related somehow). He has set his sight on higher things, and he is very preoccupied by them, even though at the moment he’s just standing there. He is man with much on his mind and no time to lose. He does not feel he needs help, not having had any. He’s used to doing it alone. You can focus better alone. It isn’t that he doesn’t like or want the boy, he just doesn’t know what to do with him. He cannot find it in himself to communicate to the boy, for fear it brings out problems he can’t handle. He doesn’t like not knowing what to do.

The boy has pulled inside himself, there was nowhere else for him to go. He is also stuck, like the captain, trapped and incarcerated on his own little ship – except his is even smaller, only a stump of wood – in the middle of the cold, indifferent ocean. He wants his mother, he is only a little boy after all, that’s why he’s sulking, and that’s why he was on the left side of the captain. But that’s not what the captain can give him. He is a man, and what he can give the boy is mentorship, guidance and knowledge about the world, discipline, the confidence to do things, to build, to destroy, to hunt, to survive, and to protect what’s yours. How to steer your ship. That’s why I moved him to the right side. Perhaps I am to steer Michael to the ‘right’ side, the side of the good masculine, the Good Father.

This morning (2 days after this dream) I had the feeling that he ought to talk to someone about what troubles him. Someone who is meant to help him with it. I felt quite strongly it could be Sonam, a Tibetan Buddhist Monk who he met a few years ago and has much respect for.

But what about the symbol of the bridge or passageway in the middle of the captain’s last name?

It is indeed a passage he will pass through to get to ‘the other side’ of this place where he feels trapped, stumped and blocked at. It cuts through the heart of the ‘sternness’ of his outlook of life, the joyless austerity and the inflexibility of discipline, and the barren isolation inside those walls where he is alone in his pain.