17 Dream Logic

One way to interpret a dream is to imagine that whatever you dream is significant and contains a message from your subconscious. The language of dreams is visual, but also draws in the other senses: a feeling or an action you witness and may also be a part of.

For years I dreamed of running to catch a plane and either I just missed it or I mistook the date and arrived a day too late.

To make sense of a dream, we use the same method we use to make sense of our waking experience: we tell a story about how one thing is related to another.

Since this dream is one I can remember and it was a recurring dream, I took it to be particularly significant — as if my subconscious was really trying to the through to me.

My guess is that this dream was showing me how much I feared missing out — being too late and not being able to “take off” and fly to my intended destination.

Images often speak in metaphors. Unlike a Hollywood movie that attempts to create a series of causal connections — this thing happened and because of that, this other thing happened — metaphorical logic is more akin to dream logic — the connection between seemingly unrelated things is based upon emotional associations, memories and leaps of imagination that express poetic truths.

The connections between things in a dream are not linear, and like stories themselves, you can return to them and connections and meanings you did not notice before, which deepen the story, or suggest a different story.

Dreams, like paintings, are open to a multitude of interpretations, which is part of their fascination and richness.

As a child I knew the world was much bigger than what I could see with my physical eyes.

I learned to accept the version of reality that everyone seemed to agree upon, but I still sensed that the world was much larger than the stories and concepts and theories we’d devised to make sense of it.

And sometimes it’s helpful to perceive our waking realities as dreams, with images and people and events that might also be connected in surprising ways. Being able to see new connections and to tell a story that empowers us is part of how we heal the traumas we’ve inherited.

So much of our “real” world exists beyond what we can see or sense with our physical senses. Atom for example, or electromagnetic energies or gravity are things we can describe and understand the effects of but we don’t perceive it in the same way we perceive the physical world we know with our senses.

To perceive what exists in the nonphysical, we need to develop a different way of knowing.

Instead of relying on what other people tell us is true, or what is commonly agreed upon, we must use our inner senses, we must learn to know what is true for ourselves, arriving at trust without needing others to agree with us.

It’s scary to know or want to know something other people don’t recognize exists.

Sanity is after all, a widespread collective agreement about what is true and what is fantasy.

But for those like me, who believe the world is much bigger than I can understand or explain, the lines are not so clearly drawn.

Did I fantasize that the spirit of Hilma af Klint was speaking to me? Or was her spirit really there?

I felt a lively presence beside me and within me a enthusiastic desire to stretch myself towards what fascinated me in Hilma’s work, and in these strange paintings that seemed to be pouring themselves on to the page.

Speaking of dream logic, I noticed a progression in the paintings, and a the beginning of a story emerging.

The first channeled painting in what Hilma told me was The First Series began with a Cosmic Birth where a tiny planet in seen in the far distance coming closer.

This painting, the fifth in the series, also seemed to be a birth, but the perspective switched. Instead of witnesses a world being born, it was as if the viewer was inside the birth canal making its way into this world.

I laughed as immediately Diana Ross song I’m Coming Out began playing in my head. In the 1980s in gay bars this song was often played at the end of the night, a declaration and an anthem of collective self acceptance and love. 

In this painting, which I interpreted as a would a dream, searchlights in the distance criss-crossed the sky, like a old Hollywood movie premiere, welcoming  with great anticipation this new star making her debut .

What is this new star was a new earth and this new earth was us, in the final moments of the passage from one dimension into another?

Even the lyrics from the song seemed to fit :

I’m coming outI want the world to knowI got to let it showI’m coming outI want the world to knowI got to let it show

The time has come for meTo break out of the shellI have to shoutThat I am coming out

Here’s the song, just in case you want to take a dance break, and consider what in you might be coming out, what it you is ready to be seen, welcomed and celebrated.