Issue 127, March 2009
Problem solved
©Jane Teresa Anderson, February 2009
Once a month, for almost 11 years, I’ve asked myself the same question. What shall I write for this month’s Dream Sight article? And once a month, for almost 11 years, an idea has come, though sometimes only at the eleventh hour.
Nearly every Dream Sight I have written has started as what I can only describe as a fast download into my brain. The whole article, from first to last line, arrives instantaneously, yet in a way that makes sense to me. Perhaps it’s like the way your life is said to flash before you just before you die. The articles flash in, I see and hear every word all at once, I chuckle at any funny or clever bits, I cherish the message and I wonder why this always happens when I’m in the shower or a long way from a keyboard.
So far, it all sounds blessedly easy, doesn’t it? But the download fades as fast as it arrives, and all I have left when I sit down to write is a first line, a message and a rough vision of how to link the two. I open a word doc and begin to type. Two or three hours later, I have a completely different article to the one that was fabulously and instantaneously downloaded earlier in the day. And that’s the article you receive.
This week though, the chances of a 127th download were looking bleak. Had the muse abandoned me, or had I abandoned the muse by failing to nourish and restore my receptivity after too many long hours of work? Was I just tired? In the past few weeks, I’ve published The Compass, written and created two accompanying websites, and designed and developed a Compass seminar based around a board game.
My mind was blank. I had a problem. What to do?
It was only then that it dawned on me that I’d been writing these articles for almost eleven years. I hadn’t realised this monthly discipline had been such a constant in my life for so long, a routine, a must-do, no matter what. But what, I wondered, would happen if I didn’t write an article this month? What would happen if I didn’t write any more articles ever? At what point, I wondered, had writing these articles become an automatic, unquestioned routine?
As the 127th article continued to elude me, I realised the same old question wasn’t working for me any more. It was time to ask myself some new questions. Like is 11 years enough to dedicate to the Dream Sight Collection? Is there a 127th story to tell? Have I said it all before? Shall I call it quits, edit and bundle the past 126 articles into a book, and leave it at that? Or should I just give myself a rest for a month or two? Or go quarterly with the newsletter instead of monthly? Or recycle some of the older articles?
So many new questions. So many ways to look at this problem of what to do about the 127th article and which direction to take Dream Sight from here.
I needed to make a decision, but to do that I needed to understand my situation more clearly. I took the day off and simply asked myself a question at a time, exploring many possible answers before moving on to the next question, and the next, and the next. Without judging my answers, I just kept observing them.
And finally, I went to sleep.
I dreamed of a woman who was sitting, cross-legged, yoga-style, in a meadow. She was looking at a colourful square of fabric laid on the grass in front of her. As she looked, the fabric loosened. The tight weave became a loose weave. She could see through to the grass between the threads. Then the loose threads began to dissolve into particles, as if a microscope was zooming in to examine each thread so closely that it revealed the vast chasms of space between the molecules that make up the fabric of everything that seems to be so solid in this world.
The longer she looked, the more deeply she saw, until that square of worldly fabric simply disappeared.
I woke up and interpreted my dream. The square shape was prominent. Had my dream been about the need to think outside the square when confronted with a problem? Not really. The woman was looking at the square, not outside it. But she wasn’t just looking at the surface of the square. She was finding a way to look into it so deeply that she could see right through it. So deeply that she could understand it. So deeply that it became transparent. So deeply that it disappeared.
Dreams reflect our experiences of the last 24-48 hours, and this dream certainly reflected mine. I saw the colourful square as the colourful routine I had boxed myself into over the years, the must-write-a-colourful-dream-sight-article-every-month routine. I had just spent a day asking myself many questions about this square, deeply pondering my answers, in an effort to understand my situation – my square, my box – more clearly. And in the dream, I did. I saw right through the illusion of the problem. There was no problem after all. In place of a problem, I had a solution. And here it is: Dream Sight article number 127.
Isn’t it interesting that dreams reflect the last 24-48 hours of your experiences yet it’s often not until you interpret a dream that you truly understand those experiences? I believe that if you have a mountain of a problem and you look deeply into it from many angles, you eventually see that a mountain is just a pile of sand, and each grain of sand holds a universe of vast space peppered with molecular particles. So the way to move a mountain, the way to solve a problem, is to see it for the illusion it really is, at which point it simply disappears.
In my tiredness I imagined that I had a problem. In my sleep I remembered that I didn’t. In my waking I had a story to tell you.
Be very clear. I am not saying that problems disappear when you focus on them. I am saying that solutions are found by asking yourself the right questions about the problem that seems to be blocking your way. It’s about focussing on new ways of looking, on answers. It’s not about looking at a problem. It’s about the problem of looking. Interpret your dreams to help you with your problem of looking. You’ll see yourself – and your world – in a whole new way.
Jane Teresa Anderson
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