This past weekend Kent Dobson presented an introductory workshop on Dreams and Dream Work at Dominican Center Marywood on Aquinas College campus. According to Kent, “dreams deliver material in poetic form.” He shared many insights with the group of participants. When speaking of the soul or “psyche” he stated “the soul gives us clues or glimpses of our own essence.” The unique spark of the Divine that resides inside each one of us.
He encouraged the dreamers to “stay curious” and relax, not to try to figure everything out but instead to trust the dream imagery. Dreams offer a “backdoor to what is going on in the unconscious and can offer us a way that leads us to humility.”
Kent concluded the workshop with this beautiful poem:
What to Remember Upon Waking
In that first hardly noticed moment in which you wake,
coming back to this life from the other
more secret, moveable and frighteningly honest world
where everything began,
there is a small opening into the new day
which closes the moment you begin your plans.
What you can plan is too small for you to live.
What you can live wholeheartedly will make plans enough
for the vitality hidden in your sleep.
To be human is to become visible
while carrying what is hidden as a gift to others.
To remember the other world in this world
is to live in your true inheritance.
You are not a troubled guest on this earth,
you are not an accident amidst other accidents
you were invited from another and greater night
than the one from which you have just emerged.
Now, looking through the slanting light of the morning window
toward the mountain presence of everything that can be
what urgency calls you to your one love?
What shape waits in the seed of you
to grow and spread its branches
against a future sky?
Is it waiting in the fertile sea?
In the trees beyond the house?
In the life you can imagine for yourself?
In the open and lovely white page on the writing desk?
-- David Whyte
