Written by Guest Blogger, Marian Enochs Gay
How do you know?
Surely all Rodger’s clients learn to expect this disconcerting question when discussing their dreams.
In one dream, a father and his daughter ignore me and don’t want me near them, so I keep my distance. In another, a woman shouts for what she wants, because she’s rude and mean.
How do you know?
I know because….I just know. Because I dreamt it — it’s right there in the dream. Because I think so.
In other words, because I made up a story.
Sometimes my stories are about myself. In one dream cars are being tested for damage but pride says mine is fine. I don’t need any help.
In another, the Animus asks me to read aloud but I say my voice isn’t good enough. Rodger startled me by pointing out this seeming humility was in fact arrogance, because I was presuming to know more than the Animus.
Over time I began to hear this question not only as a challenge to my assumptions but literally, with the emphasis on “how.” How do you know? Do you know through thinking or feeling? From your head or your heart? From pathology or your soul?
I began to see how this storymaking of mine, often projection, operates in my waking life. I’ve begun to learn the difference between this and the kind of deeply felt knowing that can be trusted. How do you know? has become a very useful question to ask myself on many occasions. The answer often surprises me.
Which brings me to the experience of connecting with Kathy, and the underside of the stories I make up: What I don’t know.
Kathy and I “met” through our client statements for Rodger’s website. I connected deeply to hers and thought briefly now nice it might be to know her, but it never occurred to me I could ask. She fell into that general category, “Rodger’s other clients,” and I didn’t want to intrude on that. I had made up a story about this, a rule, and forgot to ask how I knew it.
Thank goodness Kathy had no such rule in her head. With disarming directness, she asked Rodger to forward a message to me, her feeling right there on the page. Before you knew it we were emailing. Just like that. Apparently if you want to connect with another client all you have to do is ask. That wasn’t in my rulebook.
Among much else in Kathy’s statement I loved this: “I see it as teamwork. Rodger, the dreams, and I work together to open the door to my inner life.”
Yes, that’s how it was – these three crucial elements work together. But now that I was in touch with Kathy there seemed to be yet a fourth element for me, changing the chemistry: another client, who over time has become a friend, though we live far away from one another. We began the work around the same time and have much in common. The way she “gets” things can feel uncanny. This fall we are hoping to meet in person, which makes me feel a Girl excitement.
What surprised me was not only how much I enjoyed knowing another client but how blind I’d been to that desire. Once Kathy and I connected, I realized for the first time how lonely and isolated I’d felt doing the dreamwork with no “dream buddies” to talk to. This shook me up and made me ask: What else don’t I know about my desires? Maybe my storymaking took up so much space that What I Don’t Know had grown very large.
By now I knew pathology hid in my blind spots, and its appearance in my dreams was often scary and upsetting. But now I saw more clearly how big desires waited down there as well, in this case a desire for relationship. Rodger had suggested this but now it hit me hard.
I think the dreamwork had prepared me for this moment so I could be vulnerable enough to receive the gift when it appeared in waking life.
Recently I had a dream in which the Archetypes are working hard to repair my heart, and in the process a bird bursts forth and flies away. Rodger said this is Girl energy being released through the work. The experience of meeting Kathy felt like this.
Soon I logged onto Dream For Your Life. Believe it or not, this was my first real blog experience. Maybe another of my dumb rules: I didn’t read blogs. In a not very “green” moment, I printed out the current section, all 42 pages of it, and bound it into a book to keep.
And I loved it. Anyone wishing to get a feel for the dreamwork experience from a client’s point of view, the shape and rhythms and feelings of the dream journey on a weekly basis, would do very well to look here. Or anyone seeking a more feeling life, for that matter. I look forward to each posting.
I feel more deeply into my own dream journey by sharing Kathy’s, and I don’t feel so alone. It helps that Kathy is also Rodger’s client, a relative beginner as I am, and we’re in direct contact. Her dreams feel uniquely hers but in a way familiar, too. Through knowing her, I feel more part of a dream community, and this touches feelings I didn’t know I had.
Kathy told me how she began her blog as a way to share the dream journey with her husband. I felt how lucky he and their daughters were that she felt this generous desire, what a gift it was. This struck a chord with me and set me off balance. I began to feel a second big desire for relationship I didn’t know about.
In a recent dream session some of Rodger’s questions had prompted me to admit something that surprised me. I found myself saying I felt sad, because while enjoying a close loving relationship with my husband, I had never shared much of the dreamwork with him, this work that meant everything to me, that felt like the most important part of me. How could that be? But true to form, I quickly pushed this aside into “someday,” and my pathology muted the desire. I told myself I didn’t know how to bring it up, how to begin.
But here in Kathy’s blog was the “how.” With a beautiful natural clarity she shared highlights as Rodger guided her through dreams. She conveyed the images and the feelings that came up, how these affected her waking life, her relationships. Apparently the way to do this was just….to do it.
I didn’t know how much I wanted to share my work with my husband until this moment. I felt this as an excruciating loneliness. I burst out with it one evening. First I told him about my connection with Kathy, about her blog. He was receptive, excited for me. A few days later, during a long driving trip we discussed the dreams. This was very scary for me. Heart pounding, I used Kathy’s blog as my model and went through my dreams from the previous week. My husband listened attentively, and we then talked for a long time. Feelings and experiences not shared before came up for both of us. Doors were opening left and right. Another bird flew out of my heart.
For the most part these doors have remained open. One night a week or so later I asked if he’d like to hear about a few more dreams. “Didn’t we do that already?” he asked with a grin. So instead we watched The Closer on tv. That was ok. It doesn’t have to work every time. We enjoyed seeing the case solved and the bad guy nailed within the hour. But soon enough we talked again. Now such moments are becoming more natural, part of the fabric.
All this as a direct result of Kathy’s blog. All this from a person who recounts her very real struggle with hiding, but who for me often seems to do just the opposite. For me she’s a kind of pioneer.
I never talk to my husband about the dreamwork without saying a silent thank you to Kathy. She started out with this desire to communicate with her husband and had no idea her words might affect another person, whom she didn’t even know, in such a profound way. That’s pretty cool, if you ask me.
When I first started the work I thought about the word “client.” It sounded so impersonal somehow. What exactly is a client?
Like Kathy, I love words and their etymologies, which penetrate layers of meaning to the original felt or core meaning. Much like the dreamwork, come to think of it.
I looked up “client.” The first meaning cited was “suitor.” I liked that. I would be a suitor of the soul. The original meaning came from the Latin: “to hear.” A client is “a hearer, one who listens.”
To live as a client, I need to listen, with body and heart, not just head. This means listening to the dreams as Rodger guides me through them. It means clearing my head of stories, so I can listen attentively for all I don’t know yet, for all I once knew and have forgotten.
And now I know it means listening to other dreamers share their journeys and sharing mine with them and with loved ones. It means being vulnerable enough to receive and be changed by the felt experience of another person.
I thank Kathy for taking the risk to connect and for showing me vital things I didn’t know, which are changing my life. I thank her for sharing her dream journey in this wonderful blog, and for allowing me to be part of it to
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