Lessons from the Spider Web — why not now?
The Dream
This week I told Spider-man that I want to write.
It was the day after Christmas 2018. I had been having what I call “successive missionary dreams”. You know there are successive dinners, where you go to one house for the entrée, then to another for the main course, and to a third house for the dessert course? These dreams were part of a succession.
I recommend that when writing about your dreams, upon waking, immediately give them short accurate titles to help decipher them.
17 December 2018 No support
I had a dream that I was shouting at someone saying I have supported you but you haven’t supported me in return.
19 December 2018 Foiled plans
I had a dream about trying to make plans for work and work not supporting me. They planned to move me. Then suddenly I had no home but I had a car. There was no place I could call home and then my car disappeared too. I planned to get public transport but there was none that would take me to where I wanted to go because I didn’t know where I was headed.
23 December 2018 Moving to where?
I had a dream that I was at work and had to move desks to another building. When I got there, it was all neat but someone else had that desk and even had their name-plate there. I said I shouldn’t have been sent there, but nobody listened. At first, I was patient then I started to get angry. I started shouting about how I felt, that I felt insignificant and that nobody cared about my feelings.
26 December 2018 — I want to write
Spiderman was the listener in my dream. I said, “I don’t write for money, I write because I love to write.”
I told Spiderman with passion “all my life I have written but always for free. Nothing has been seen by as many as I would like. One day you may wake up and see my writing everywhere and know that I wrote it and that I’ve made it.”
I had borrowed someone’s phone to talk to Spiderman! I noticed the supervisor looking at the phone and at the girl in retail, who let me use their telephone. The supervisor mouthed “time is money”. She had clearly decided that I had been long enough on the phone.”
I said goodbye to Spiderman.
For my whole life I have written as much as I could, because I love writing as I like to breathe. I have left a trail of writing behind me at the places I have worked at, and I began blogging with WordPress in 2012, before joining Medium in 2018.
These 4 powerful dreams, so close to each other, have been telling me a successive story. They are telling me that I should make more of my writing. I am interested in teaching and in editing and proof-reading and technical writing jobs. Sometimes our frustrations appear in our dreams. In my case, my feelings of making a livelihood from my writing, being suppressed, have come to the fore. I have doubted myself and been overly critical of myself.
Why Not Now?
I have more than enough to write about. I consider myself a dreamer and a creative and have been through enough experiences for several lifetimes to write about. My life has not been easy and sometimes I have asked myself “what if …?”
If you are asking yourself “What if … “questions, I advise you to stop right now. I have stopped asking myself this question because I have discovered that “What if …?” questions are strangle-holds. They do nothing to help.
The past is the past and we should learn from our pasts, rather than over analyzing our pasts and feel sorry for ourselves or have our heads stuck in the clouds (or in the sand) thinking if only I had met Mr. so and so or if only the other, then things would have been better.
Maybe there are major “nodes” or events in our lives, despite what has happened or not happened (as depicted by some of the fascinating movies about time). It’s the dreamer in me who imagines, that has in the past looked at the “What if” but the “what-if” has shape-shifted. These dreams eclipse a year that marks 55 years of living for me, with the question “Why not now?”
Part of my therapy, getting through adoption and child abuse, was learning about Jungian psychology. Using this approach I know that my dreams were about a conversation with myself. I love to help others and I try to do this unconditionally, i.e. without expectation of anything in return. Even so, I have somewhat desired feedback or acknowledgment for some of my writing, specifically for the content of the 8 blogs that I run, and recognition of my abilities and strengths at work.
But I have discovered that my wanting acknowledgment and credit for my writing is because I want to feel that I am a constructive part of the community or of society at large.
However, I had locked myself into demanding a specific way of feeling or experiencing this, through praise or feedback for my blogs.
As my self-worth and confidence has increased, I am more open to knowing what I want in the moment and to finding and accepting or using it. It has dawned upon me that I truly am a unique and important part of society at large, as is everyone.
I don’t need to prove myself
Because I have had to fight to survive in my own personal life, I had repressed my belief in myself as a well-known or well liked writer or as a professional writer. I have led a “Jekyll and Hyde” existence: the old me who put up walls to keep out danger and hurt was the personality that took over, and who neglected or did not acknowledge or support the true feelings of the whole person, the feelings that she wanted to write and could write and make something of her writing.
My first dream taught me that it is I who needs to be my own greatest supporter.
It was myself who foiled my plans. A house represents the self, and a car represents a main-stream mode or method for getting what one wants. At first my dream indicated that I still have my sanity or a standard mode of attainment in journeying through life, but I had no solid sense of Self. Then even my usual mode of getting through life vanished, and in the dream I was relegated to using more visible or outward methods of getting what I want, like being more in the public eye (by using a bus in the dream).
The trouble was that I still didn’t know my destination. I had been dragging my feet, switching modes of getting to vague destinations, always behind the eight-ball, and it was fear of success, bred from coerced contempt of myself that set me on the slippery slope.
The next dream reinforced for me that I won’t find my writing dream at my current workplace, and that I still feel frustrated with lost chances and events in my life where I feel that I had been neglected.
The Web of life
I love the Christmas Dream! Now Spidey knows that my passion is truly writing. Dreams have lots of layers of meaning, and in this one I was still having a dialogue with myself. This was a good dream because I was telling myself to believe in myself.
Time is money, and whatever else one makes of it. From one moment to another it is up to each one of us to choose what to do with it.
In the movie “Spider man” the father said with “great power comes great responsibility.” I am responsible, as each person is, for believing that I can achieve whatever I want. The spider weaves a web to catch her supper now, and the web is a sign of connectedness. We can keep shouting at ourselves or remonstrating with ourselves that we can’t do this or don’t deserve that, whether in our dreams or not; but the jewel in the web is the construction itself.
It is seeing that what you do does have a great effect in the world, even if you don’t have hundreds of followers or likes. Everything impacts upon the other, and like the spider, trust that your own web will catch what you need. I have had other powerful dreams before, and believe that through dreams we process unresolved thoughts and feelings.
My successive dreams have shown me that I can move from fear (of not being good enough and not succeeding and not being supported) to claiming and doing what I love. I know that I told Spidey a very involved or detailed story about my love of writing and that “making it” to me means valuing myself as a writer.
The time is now for whatever you want.
My mission is to be a writer who is read.
