The Shape of Things to Come:
Creativity, Dreams and the Afflictive Emotions
Two nights before my birthday concert, the following dream occurred: I arrive to a venue where I’m scheduled to play and sing. It’s my first public appearance. But I’ve forgotten my guitar. I awaken as the audience is gathering, facing the distressing prospect of telling the event organizers that I won’t be able to perform.
The birthday concert itself was a beautiful event. Thirty-five or forty people crowded into our living room to listen attentively as I shared some of the songs I’ve been receiving over the past couple of years. Singing these songs publicly was a new venture for me, a sort of coming-out party.
During the several months prior to the concert I’d periodically find myself full of fear in anticipation of the event. At those moments, the prospect of performing in front of a group of people seemed a likely occasion for embarrassment, if not humiliation. The very idea of inviting a captive audience to come and listen to me perform felt shameful and indulgent.
When these attacks would come, I’d sit quietly with the thoughts, feelings and sensations, meeting them softly and gently. Through this practice an important distinction became increasingly clear to me: the difference between performing and offering.
The word performing as I’m using it here is meant to mark a particular context where the primary relationship is with an audience. The audience may exist in material space, in imaginal space or in fantasy. The central feature, though, is playing to the audience, with the attendant concerns over how I’m received. Within this context, the response and reaction of others looms large. The songs themselves are weighed and measured by way of those responses.
An offering is quite a different situation. It’s rooted in a sense of these songs as given, and the primary relationship is to the songs themselves and to the source of song. The image here is of a medium, vehicle or channel that carries and circulates a gift.
It was in response to an internal pressure to offer these songs that I ventured the concert in the first place. For it seems to be the nature of something received in this way that it, in turn, be given. There’s a beautiful poem from the great Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore, a poem that I sing. It expresses the dynamic nature of what comes as a gift and the need for the gift to be in motion, to circulate. The poem is called My Songs, and goes like this.
My Songs
My songs, they are like water weeds.
Born in one place, but from it freed.
They have no roots, just flowers and leaves,
That dance like sunbeams on the waves.
Dwelling nowhere, hoarding nothing,
Unforeseen guests, ever roving.
When the river swells with the monsoon torrent,
And bursts its banks with its current.
My water weeds, mad with need,
Follow the floods along strange roads
From land to land
Float into a myriad hands.
The poems or songs do not belong to the poet or singer, but have a life of their own. And it is this life, the life of the creative spirit, that the poet serves.
In light of this distinction between performing and offering, we can now return to the dream and see how supportive and orienting it actually was. At first hearing, it may appear to bode ill for the upcoming event. But remember the context of my forgetfulness in the dream: I awaken in fear, anticipating telling the sponsors that I won’t be able to perform. The dream was a reminder of the distinction I’d been studying over the past several months, and it helped me remain within the context of an offering. As a result, I was able to step into the event with confidence and relative ease, feeling that I was simply doing my part in a process that is not primarily about me.
As an aside, it’s worth noting how important attention to detail can be in entering into relationship with the guidance of a dream. I speak about relationship here because I want to suggest that dreams come as a kind of other, seeking engagement. As with any other vibrant relationship, the creative, generative, unpredictable potential is limited by the presuppositions, prejudices and formulae with which we approach, or react to, this other. I hope this will become more apparent by way of the next dream that I’ll mention. But before that, let’s briefly return to the concert and its aftermath.
As I’ve said, the concert went well. I wasn’t gripped by anxiety, and many of the folks who came seemed moved by some of the songs. But most important, I was able to remain within the context of an offering.
Two of my sons and another three friends had come from out-of-town to join us. So we had a houseful of guests. Four of them left the day after the concert, and that evening I had the opportunity to be alone and sit quietly for the first time in several days. What I discovered was that my whole thoracic area was contracted, as though I were protecting myself. In effect, I seem braced for an attack.
There are a number of ways in which that reaction might be explained. And it would be an interesting exercise to line up some of these ways, side by side, and explore the difference that different perspectives might make. But that’s another study. In fact, my practice was to simply sit quietly with the uncomfortable feelings and sensations without trying to explain them at all. “Braced for an attack” was the extent of my understanding.
Having gone to bed that night in touch with this contraction, I awoke early the next morning within the following dream:
The world is under attack by alien, machine-like creatures. Everything is being indiscriminately destroyed. Panic and pandemonium are everywhere. People are running and screaming , trying to escape these gigantic machines that are relentlessly crushing everything in their path.
For a while, we’re able to stay ahead of the destruction, but eventually find ourselves at an impasse. With one of the machines bearing down on us, the only apparent avenue of possible escape is to dive into gooey mud beneath a crumbling building that’s at a tangent to the path of the machine. Maybe, just maybe, I can tunnel through to a clear space on the other side. I dive into the thick and viscous darkness and awaken in a fright.
Here we come to another important distinction that I hope to make clear:
awakening within the dream and awakening from the dream. When the action or story of an affectively intense dream abruptly ends, the feeling and sensate complex persist and carry over. So while our eyes may be open and we struggle to find our bearings in our familiar surroundings, the heart is still pounding, the breath is short and labored and we remain, for some while, in an activated state.
The reflexive reaction is to distance oneself from the dream, to awaken from it and re-orient to the familiar, daylight world as quickly as possible. Over the years I’ve come to feel that this common reaction often undermines an opportunity for growth and learning, and perpetuates a more general tendency of avoidance and repetition in the more challenging areas of one’s life.
So awakening within this dream, panting, sweating, in a fearful, activated state, I am also aware of my situation and separate from it. Remaining within this discomfort, I consciously move back into the imagery, beginning to navigate this frightening situation by way of my breath: long, slow exhalations that have some settling affect on the physical and nervous being.
I’ve worked with this discipline over a long period of time, awakening within a dream and remaining within it by way of attention to the activated physical and emotional state. As the imagery, context and action of a dream returns, and as I once again come to that place in the dream where the action was interrupted by reflexive, avoidant waking (which, seen from a certain angle, is a way of remaining asleep), usually something novel, completely unexpected and expansive occurs. A door opens and a previously unimagined, and perhaps unimaginable possibility emerges. This is a familiar motif in myths and fairytales: if one is to find the treasure, the wise person, the necessary knowledge, the beloved, one must first go through an unthinkable, seemingly impossible ordeal. The key is that one consciously assents to the discomfort, that one remains present and attentive in the face of danger.
In this particular dream, something different occurs that I’ve never experienced before. There’s no way out. As I lie in bed, breathing attentively, the organism goes through a violent, suffocating death. Two levels or streams of consciousness are simultaneously active here. There’s the organism undergoing this intense and frightful experience. And there’s a calm and still attention that witnesses the organism’s agony while remaining poised. From within this latter stream, I find myself reciting the Lord’s Prayer and Hail Mary, then moving into a steady recitation of the Gayatri mantra.
Attention to breathing, the prayers and the mantra occur within the dream space as ways of imaginatively navigating this fearful and difficult territory. There’s a different kind of center here, whose nature seems to be inherently calm yet dynamic. Try to pinpoint it, to define or formulate this center, and it quietly disappears, elusive, even playful, not bounded by identity as normally experienced.
Still in the power of the mantra, I get up to use the bathroom. As I’m returning to bed, I’m startled by my wife, whom I hadn’t heard get up nor seen in the dark. And though I’m immediately gripped by fright again, the stream of the mantra is only momentarily interrupted. With just a brief pause in the flow, it resumes, and the magnitude of the fright is quickly moderated, even at the physical level, the intense experience of this night resolving back into the contraction that I’d begun to notice yesterday.
Earlier I indicated that one of the distinguishing features of this dream is that there was no way out. Perhaps we can refine that description now and say that there was no way out for the dream ego, or that the dream ego went through something it needed to go through. At any rate, what occurred wasn’t an opening within the narrative of the dream, but an opening into a wider consciousness, at once in touch with the experience of the dream ego and separate from it.
I’d gone to bed that night with the sense of being braced for an attack, which in fact occurred by way of the dream. Having weathered it, as it were, and a much more intense attack than I might have imagined, I find myself once again within the grip of this contraction. Throughout the following day I remain in touch with these feelings and sensations, not trying to eliminate them but to be present and engage with what is so rigid, frozen and unresponsive. As in the dream, there was no apparent way through.
I explore various ways of navigating. I meditate. I do some cleansing and purification practices. I make a devotional offering of music. But there is no engaging other than simply being in contact with this constriction and contraction.
At some point, as I’m sitting with my guitar, I begin to feel the prompting of a new song. As I attend it, I notice some movement, a softening in the contraction. And over the next hour or so, as this spontaneous, creative impulse unfolds into a song, the contraction completely transforms, giving way to a sense of lightness and openness.
The song is called Joyous Dancer, in reference to one of the eight trigrams of the I Ching.
Joyous Dancer
She dances on the water,
She rides the evening clouds,
If you give yourself completely
She’ll remove the darkening shrouds.
She is nearer than your heartbeat,
She is joy beyond all ken.
Fling open your arms
In the face of these storms,
Enter deep within.
She is beckoning you softly
Into her lovers play,
In a fragrant, flowering meadow,
In the light of a new day.
She will enter you completely,
Brighter than the morning star,
Join earth and heaven
In the truth of who you are.
You will know her,
You will be sanctified.
You will fall down on your knees.
It’s been so long,
She has been crucified.
Still she moves with such a graceful ease.
She wanders in the forest,
Free of every care,
Known to every spirit,
Every instant far and near.
She is the bright horizon
Toward which you’ve always yearned,
And the smallest start
Of you sacred art,
The heart of all you’ve learned.
And she knows you,
She is your guiding star,
The mirror that will set you free.
And you shall know her
And know who you are,
Step into the center
Of the ancient mystery.
She is soaring with the eagle,
She is falling with the snow,
And she holds the subtle visions
That the mind may never know.
She is gently circling round you,
She is flowing in the stream,
The sublime embrace,
Oh amazing grace,
Oh the light within the dream.
I once heard a prominent psychoanalyst say that the mark of an effective interpretation is that what follows is a surprise to both the patient and the analyst. That is to say, both parties are engaged in a creative enterprise that has a life of its own. I imagine that Bion’s challenging advice for the analytic session, that the analyst abandon memory and desire, is meant to cultivate a space for something novel to emerge. Bion seems to have understood that our theories and interpretive devices, for all their virtues, are also defenses against the unknown and disturbing.
The approach I’ve been describing is less interpretive and more contemplative, less oriented by theory and more experiential. Instead of framing the troubling feelings and sensations along particular lines such as one or another theory of early development, astrological transits and progressions, or existential concerns, one sits quietly with the feelings and sensations, attending where they appear in the body. The mind, of course, is likely to become quite active in trying to explain and moderate the disturbance. In this approach, one recognizes this activity as a reflexive reaction and, without resisting the mind’s grasping efforts, keeps returning to the feelings and sensations themselves.
The reflexive movement of mental consciousness is to explain, account for and distance what is disturbing, anomalous or otherwise simply emergent. For most of us, perhaps, such reactions resemble instinct. As an interesting exercise, notice this tendency in yourself and in others in the ordinary course of conversation. Notice this tendency, and then experiment with meeting whatever occurs just as it is happening, without giving reasons why. Over time you may find a more immediate engagement with the world, i.e., an engagement that isn’t so heavily mediated by concepts.
When we meet feelings and sensations with attention and care, without trying to explain, justify or change them, when we meet them on their own terms, as it were, we often find that meaning emerges of its own. A door opens, and where before there had been contraction, blockage and repetition of patterned reactions, something new and surprising arises. We might say that there is a sort of hidden treasure within the afflictive emotions. If we approach them with openness and respect, the treasure may be revealed.
In a Russian fairytale, a young woman, lost in the forest, comes to the doorstep of a wicked witch. Bones and skulls are scattered round, the remains of previous travelers who had happened upon this frightful abode.
The young woman asks the witch for direction, who in turn poses three questions to her. If she answers them correctly, the witch will help her on her way. If she doesn’t, the witch will kill and eat her. As you can see, the stakes are high. What is particularly interesting here is that the questions require creative, non-rational responses. Try to answer logically, and you are dead.
The young woman does respond with the right sort of answers, whereupon the old hag spins around to reveal her other side, a wise and beautiful maiden who is an ally and a guide.
Similarly, when we bring quiet attention to disturbing and painful feelings and sensations, we often find them opening onto something expansive, beyond our previous imagining. The very feelings and sensations we have tended to avoid and distance from are in fact a doorway, and sometimes the doorway, waiting to open into a larger and more authentic life.
When we enter into this sort of welcoming, respectful relationship with the afflictive emotions and with uncomfortable and even painful sensations, we don’t know in advance what we’ll find. As in a marriage, if we enter it with the intention of changing or improving our partner, we’re likely to find ourselves struggling and frustrated in the same, recurrent ways. The kind of approach I’ve been describing is imagined in terms of a relationship where the other is acknowledged and honored as other.
Earlier I suggested that the dream comes as a sort of other. By this I mean to call attention to the fact that, most of the time, a dream isn’t something that we experience ourselves as making. This is a significant point, for we are used to referring to dreams as our own, and surely there is something accurate about the use of the possessive here. But what is it? What does it mean to speak of my dream or my pain? Certainly most of us don’t experience ourselves as making them. The attribution of agency is an interpretation and explanation of experience, not a description of it. When we actually attend our experience, we find that it is much more ambiguous than such statements seem to allow.
I want to push this line of exploration a little further and suggest, for imaginative consideration, that many of our feelings and sensations also appear as a sort of other. They are mine, but not because I make them. They are often the manifestation of an unlocateable intelligence that is wider and deeper than our ordinary egoic consciousness. This intelligence calls us into relationship, often one of ordeal, creativity and transformation. It is a relationship of guidance, by way of which we are better able to navigate life’s ambiguities and difficulties.
When I began to sit quietly with the contraction that followed my birthday concert, I had no idea, nor any intention, that this would lead to a new song. It was simply a matter of being attentive to what was arising in the moment and remaining present to it, in touch with it. This approach attempts to meet not only our dreams but also our feelings and sensations in a welcoming and respectful way. Like the gods of old who would sometimes appear in the form of a beggar or outcast, they come bearing guidance for those with ears to hear, hearts to feel and eyes to see.
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In a letter to his cousin, the poet John Keats used the phrase negative capability, which he described as the capacity of a person to remain in uncertainty, mystery and doubt without any irritable reaching after fact or reason. This is in contradistinction to the tendency to incessantly reach for explanation.
The Gayatri is one of the great Hindu mantras, a mantra of light. There are many versions of it. The one I sing is Sri Aurobindo’s.
