free onierocritical therapy

What a day. I feel like everything has changed. I can't remember the last time a day hasn't felt like this, and it keeps getting more intense. So I guess it must be true.

A long night of wonder, little sleep, crazy dreams, and heading over to the bookstore early for the meeting of the street health empowerment network, or the community health collective, or whatever we end up calling it. I can't believe how smoothly things ran, like an intimate conversation where we shared our stories and hopes and ideas for dealing with becoming a viable resource for helping us learn to support the health of ourselves and the people around us. I feel good about this, really good. Certainly it's a big task we've set out for ourselves, but personally it feels like a challenge I've desperately been needing to take up. And this is the time for it. The next meeting may focus around our experiences with dealing with mental health issues and crises and could feature some more of the roleplaying that played such a surprisingly insightful role in today's session. Giving reign to a creative chaos sometimes accomplishes so much more than any well ordered process, and the tangents offer a break from our routine ways of handling our lives. Perhaps psychotherapy could benefit from such an approach shift as well.

After my evening siesta I enjoyed the last bit of sun on the porch, reading Peter Lamborn Wilson's book on initiatic dream traditions in sufism and taoism, "Shower of Stars", as I have taken on a renewed focus to processing the contents of my dreams. Not only do I find some of my best inspiration from the oneiric realms, but regularly use their symbolic content to analyze and gain just a bit more insight into the often subconscious tensions that build up through each day. And with this recent relapse of intention I am beginning to suspect that I can use my dreams to get beneath some of the deep set fears and inhibitions that have plagued my life from an early age. What if I were able to turn this outward and develop the skills necessary to help others break through there own processing blocks with the keys they have already been given? The symbology of our dreams is radically subjective, as they seem to spring from the personal meanings we give to the experiences of our lives, so that no two people have the exact same imaginal constructs of any given concept. Which of course has kept anyone from writing a good dream dictionary or symbol directory. There may be some generalized collective interpretations, but a bee may not represent wealth or labor to someone who had a trauma of being stung by one as a kid. But many cultures, as far back as the sumerians, have employed dream interpreters that played a large role in determining the secret desires of people and kingdoms, using not only these archetypal interpretations but a long time report with the personal sybology of the specific dreamers they are working for. I don't know whether dream analyzation plays much of a role in modern psychotherapy, but I imagine as a culturaly-necessary position, the dream interpreter has gone the way of palm readers, tarot readers and other such divinatory oracles.

Personally I suspect the bubble's going to burst on the whole post-modern 'appearence is appearence devoid of meaning unless we put it there ourselves' take on life, and people will move on to taking their own subjective interpretations of reality as the standard with which to live their lives. Fostering a sense of the individual's own story and desires as being just as vaild, if not more so, than the consensual (and monoculturaly proscribed) norms. In such a world maybe there would be a place for onierocritical therapy, and a simple dreamer like me could find some honest work doing what he loves. At least until people learn to unpack their own dreams.

Right after I put down the book, Z called and told me about a dream she had last night of dropping two apples and not being able to pick them up, and asked me if I knew what it might mean, even before I could tell her about my schemes. But she's just intuitive like that, and would be the first person for me to practice on, since our relationship runs long and deep and I already have a bit of a lead on what her take on these symobls might be. And later J told me his dreams, and both seemed satisfied by my interpretations (well, J seemed much more blown away than just satisfied), and it occurs to me that people often share their dreams with me unprovoked. I guess the next step would be to start paying a lot closer attention, and do some research on previous work in the field.