Egyptian Dream Travels Part 2

As the 2012 trip unfolded, I kept coming back to this first dream of the journey, checking the experience against current events in waking life, sitting with the energy of it – the metaphors and memories of the dream narrative. One of the things I love about being in Egypt is waking up quite early, sitting and having my coffee in the Arabic-style cafes and allowing the dream world to ferry its voice over through the thin fabric between worlds. The first week of the trip I’ve done three times over now is usually spent adjusting and adventuring around Cairo. It’s also a time for getting to know one’s fellow travelers.

Folks from all around the world still travel to Egypt to explore the amazingly in tact architectural and cultural marvels of a high past spiritual civilization, which hints at vast wealth on much more than simply a material level. The people I’ve been fortunate enough to travel and do ceremony with have come from as far away as China and from several places across the U.S. and Canada. This time, my roommate happened to be a young man in his early 20’s from my home state, Colorado. We made a quick connection on a variety of levels, including a deep interest in mystical traditions and practices.  As the days unfolded, it appeared that the trip was more than a bit overwhelming for him and despite clear requests for the group to stay together and to be attentive to one’s surroundings, my new friend began to trail off at odd and inconvenient moments. He also got himself into engagements with locals that left him bewildered and confused, despite our attempts to suggest he do otherwise.

The other folks on the trip made every effort to support this youth and certain of our group expressed paternal levels of care and concern, myself included. The leader of the trip, a woman who has been taking groups to Egypt for over 10 years, and myself, as the experienced hands on deck, noted that our young compatriot seemed to need a little extra support and prompting to remain focused. We both began to wonder if something else might have been going on. My approach differed from the woman leading the journey, in that her feeling was to leave him to his own devices and to hope that he would ‘get it’. She even remarked to me that she didn’t want my enjoyment to be weighed down or affected by any sense of needing to look after this young man. Yet, I felt happy to relate with him and sought to offer some helpful direction and support.

Intuition is my strength. It’s the way I’ve navigated through the world and led my life for forty-one years. When my hunches start to ‘tingle’, I have learned to pay attention – of course, I do sometimes miss the boat as well. As the soup of our journey together thickened and our outings became ever more stimulating, I was reminded of the dream. But I also had an increasing sense of something not adding up, yet also adding up in a direction that smelled as if a surprise of some sort was on the wind. The other travelers approached me more than once, worriedly asking about my roommate. In our down time, he and I had conversations that began to paint a picture of more than a little concern. I learned that he had been using medical marijuana back in the States, but had suddenly quit just prior to our journey due to the obvious dangers of trying to take this across foreign and domestic borders. He was asking me if I thought it might be safe to buy some here and smoke to cut down on the feelings of craving he had begun to have and which seemed to be getting quite acute. That didn’t seem like a great idea to me. One of the other folks – a woman who came on the trip by herself had also begun to cause some concerns, in the sense that she also was deciding, at times, to carry out her own agenda and return to the group on her own schedule which was truly in conflict with our initial agreements and a real pain in the neck. When traveling together in an unfamiliar land, certain consensual arrangements support the ability of every individual to enjoy the various delights on offer. Well into the first week, things were starting to feel more than a bit tense with these two individuals acting out varying degrees of ‘drift’ away from the overall cohesion of our little band of travelers.

I continued to review my “Swimming Beach Below the Mountain of the Ancestors” dream. In this exploration, I began to notice a connection between the ocean waves speaking to the sense and reality of feeling knocked over by forces stronger than my self in certain ways. As Rilke has said, “This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively, by constantly greater beings”. In my own personal mythology at least, when waves appear in the dream, coming with a force upon the beach, as they do while I am swimming in the ocean in this one, some unexpected and potentially overpowering event is likely to reveal itself in the near future. At the same time, I began recognizing that the leader of the trip could be seen and experienced as my ‘boss’ – the one ultimately in charge and to whom, like it or not, I felt I had to give sway to. My dream seemed to be showing me that there would be a kind of conflict ‘at the back of things’ (just like the sore on my old boss’s back) and that aspects of the trip had quickly taken on a ‘pain in the butt’ flavor. I also saw that this new arrangement in waking life Egypt resembled important aspects of my former waking work relationship with the boss in my dream. The feeling of needing to go for nourishment (the food invite from friends) described the tension over confronting the ‘sore’, trying to get ‘to the bottom of things’ and dealing with the ‘annoying boss’ versus going for a relaxing and delicious meal.  It also matched the feeling over certain dinners, which we often share while on this trip, where everyone comes together and imbibes food and conversation after some private time at the Hotels and a days worth of adventures. Such occasions on this journey became increasingly tense at times due to the dynamic of the group and folks within it.

End of Part 2 – More dream exploration and travel tid-bits to follow!

Egyptian Dream Travels, Part 1

For the last three years, I’ve traveled to Egypt as a ceremonial guide, sound healer and dream worker. My role in this has been to offer music, poetics and support for groups of individuals taking a soul-journey to an ancient land of rich, surviving spiritual wonder. Over the course of my sojourns, I have been mindful of paying attention to my dreams and learned much about the ancient world. Through this course of trips, I have also found inspiration at home and abroad to learn as much as possible about the various connections between music and dreams – both in ancient and contemporary times. Various threads of curiosity have tickled my attention as they’ve woven across the loom of my adventures. I find them still, composing a wild and unfinished garment of experiences I have been about discovering on my travels in this fertile, surprising land.

In 2012, I had a bevy of dreaming and waking serendipities, which I feel  illuminate the way that creative and attentive work with dreams benefits both the dreamer and his/her community on many multiple layers of meaning and experience. While on a short layover in Jamaica New York on my way to Egypt this time around, I had the following dream:

“Beach Swim below the Mountain of the Ancestors”

“I find myself at the beach, with others, including my waking life partner. We’re playing in the waves, and I sense this is a place somewhat like Hawai’i and/or Mexico – somehow a combination of both. We’ve been to the nearby mountain. This high peak reminds me of a place I often visit in dreams and which I connect, on one important level, with the energy of the Ancestors. It rises up into the sky just above a wave-lapped wall up from the surf where we are swimming in the ocean. It’s time to go for a bite to eat. As I have this thought/realization in the dream, my former boss from many years ago (also a good friend in waking life to this day) shows up along with one of my former work-mates – they are both women. Their names, I discover later, mean ‘the forest’, and ‘of noble birth’. I see the mountain up beyond the beach where these two individuals have suddenly appeared. There is a ring of cloud around the top, a ways below the summit. It seems like bad timing, as the woman who was my boss has a sore on her lower back and is asking me to help her with this, or is complaining about it to me. She’s uncharacteristically ‘trashy’ and seems ‘needy’. My attention is distracted away from my friends, by her unexpected presence along with the other woman. At this moment, I get taken under by a big wave, eventually come up and look at the whole scene as before. The beach, the wall and the mountain behind the other figures are stil there; my friends are irritated with me for dilly-dallying and paying attention to this woman, rather than going with them to get some food.”  End of Dream

At the time of this recollection, I paid special attention to record it in my journal, ponder it and turn it over in my mind and heart. I had very little idea of what to make of the experience (something we’re all prone to, when working dreams alone, due to a phenomenon known as ‘unique blindness’ which says that it’s often difficult for us to ‘get’ the meanings and messages spun through our own dreams, because it’s hard for us to see ourselves – as if we’re looking from within and seeking a clear view from without). No less, I spent time with this dream reality and came back to it as my Egyptian advent unfolded. This begins to describe the way that ‘Dream Catchers’ – folks who work and play with our own and others dreams – seek to make a healthy habit of tending a nest for the strange and wonderful, sometimes confusing productions of the psyche. With dreams, it’s as if one has been given the charge to look after a burgeoning garden. Even after the starters have been planted in the soil, much care and attention is needed for the growth of a healthy and diverse harvest. The vital living forces of the dream garden are to be watched, felt, watered, fertilized and nourished along the way to any crop that might be taken in when what is grown and greened becomes ‘ripe’. Over the years I’ve learned not to put away images and events that enliven my nights during sleep just because I don’t at first understand their meaning or import to my life. As Carl Jung has said, the more we turn such energies around in our waking awareness, “something almost always comes of it”.

The story of my 2012 Egypt trip continues in Part 2, “coming soon” All Blessings, 13 Thank Yous! Travis W