Jim Borgman talked about his experience with his challenging work schedule as a political cartoonist for many years. He said he felt like Prometheus, having his innards gnawed out every day and trying to recover and fill the void every night. And it occurred to him that a better metaphor would be to think of himself as a flute, which isn’t consumed by the air that flows through it, and as he held that image in mind, the creative process stopped draining his energy. It wasn’t the first time I’d met the metaphor. I’ve often heard my dream sister, Suzanne Rouge, offer the prayer, “Let me be the hollow bone.” The image has been incredibly useful to me over the years. In my writing practice, I’ve long had the sense that the writing flows into the top/back of my head from someplace above and beyond myself, and flows out my hands. The other metaphor Jim suggested was that of a satellite dish—catching the creative vibrations and channeling them into something that could be shared with others. This also resonates with my experience—the “listening” that I do, the “tuning in” to what wants to flow through my head and fingers is very like being a satellite dish.

Yet even with that personal experience, I had only had glimpses of the epiphany that Jeff Lieberman offered from his experience. He talked about how he grew happier once he let go of the hope or expectation that the creative work he was doing would bring some future reward and just focused on the present moment, on the work at hand. I’ve certainly come to the conclusion that I write for the need of writing more than the hoped-for reward of recognition for the work, or I wouldn’t still be writing after a couple of decades without the success of, as I long defined it, getting a novel published by a New York  publisher. It’s tricky to have a goal and yet not be attached to whether or not it’s achieved. Lately, though, I’ve been able to let go of the attachment to that goal, as other creative possibilities have presented themselves. Hearing Jeff’s experience reinforced that for me, though I’m aware that the attachment of my own sense of self worth to the work that flows through me is a habit of mind and that I’ll need to notice when I slip back into it.

James Tanabe offered what was for me the most compelling metaphor of all. I’ve often said that my writing practice is like breathing, meaning it is as automatic and important to me as the most fundamental act of living in a body. Yet I hadn’t really thought of it as James expressed it. He said creativity is like breathing—we experience inspiration (of breath or idea) and must follow with the exhale (of breath or creative act) in order to breathe in again. I had such an “aha” moment when I heard that. It reinforced Jeff’s discussion of how the universe was creative long before we as humans were around to think about creativity, and that we are a natural expression of that creative impulse. Of course, creativity is as essential to our lives as breathing. When the ancient religious traditions speak of humans made in God’s image, they speak of our creative urge, more primal than fear, beyond the limits of language. Thinking about that helps me overcome the habits of mind that want me to hold back my creative urges out of fear. I can only be afraid of success or failure if I attach the doing of the work to the possible outcome—the ripples in the pond—of the work itself.

Thanks to all the panelists at CWA. I have plenty more still to think about!

I’ve had many dreams of being a man. Sometimes this is just a knowing I have in the dream, like the one where I was chasing a streetcar. All the focus was outward, but I clearly knew that I was a man in the dream. In other dreams, the focus is on the distinguishing anatomy, which carries further levels of association.

For the first kind of dream, for me the knowledge that I’m a man in the dream suggests that I’m integrating masculine and feminine roles or energies. While it’s a metaphorical construct to define masculine as action oriented and decisive and feminine energy as receptive and nurturing, it can be a useful construct for examining this type of dream. If I dream I’m the opposite sex, perhaps I’m discovering parts of myself that I somehow feel “belong” with the opposite anatomy. One suggestion is to make a list of qualities, faults, and characteristics you associate with “men” and “women” and to see what on that list feels comfortable and familiar and what feels more alien. Which characteristics come into play in the dream?

To dream specifically of genitalia can of course carry all sorts of personal associations, but on a more archetypal level, the penis is associated with the power to impregnate, to provide the spark that brings something to life. It suggests potency and the ability to take action. The vulva is receptive and/or devouring, the gateway of birth and blood. Depending on the context of the dream, of course, this suggests the ability to take something in and nurture until it’s ready to enter the world.

When I imagined cannibalism for myself, I thought about how our first nourishment in this world comes directly from the mother’s body. In the womb, we take in nutrients through her blood. We may have continued to eat from her body after birth, by drinking her milk, though that’s not literally true for every baby, since formulas were and still are used to substitute or supplement breast milk. But in utero, we were all, in a sense, cannibalistic. So the image for me represents those introjects, or beliefs about myself that came from outside of myself, that I received from my mother. Her fears, her joys, her attitude about being pregnant…all of these were emotions I experienced while in her body. Whatever these emotions imprinted on me might still be at the foundation of some belief I have about myself. The graphic horror of the dream image gets my attention in a big way, so this is something I need to know about myself.

The devouring mother is also an archetypal symbol—the Great Mother both gives birth and devours her children. So there’s a resonance for me with cannibalism in the dream, that I am experiencing something in my life that feels like the energy of the devouring mother. It’s an inexorable and inevitable process to grow and change and affect those around us in our lives, and the changes that take place sometimes are difficult to process, and may feel as repulsive as cannibalism. Challenges in life like the loss of a loved one, the shifting relationship to one’s family, the loss of a job, or a physical challenge, may be represented by the cannibalism in the dream. If I eat something, I have to process it; to take what nourishment I can from it and let go of the rest. That process can be difficult, even repugnant from my ego’s point of view, as it will inevitably change the way I understand myself, and the world. And so the dream may choose something I find repugnant in waking life to show me the hard work I’ve been doing.

When a tornado shows up in a dream, it often carries with it the metaphorical meaning of a message from the Divine, or our spiritual selves. Jeremy Taylor has a thorough article on tornadoes on his website, and states that in his extensive experience, “The dream ‘tornado’, over and over again, turns out to be symbol of the dreamer’s own personal relationship to the deepest unasked and unanswered psycho-spiritual questions is his/her life, and these issues always have transpersonal implications as well.” When I dream of a tornado, then, it’s worth asking what questions I’ve been grappling with, or should be grappling with, in my psyche or spirit.

We have many images of tornadoes in our collective awareness, from the one in The Wizard of Oz to the ones that are caught on video by bystanders and tornado chasers and news cameras. It’s easy to see how such an image could influence a dreamer’s night time dreams, especially if those images were first seen at an impressionable young age. But it’s simplistic to “blame” a movie version of a tornado for repeated tornado dreams. Millions of people have seen The Wizard of Oz, yet not every person who saw it for the first time as young child has recurring tornado dreams. A more interesting approach, to me, is to ask why the image captures some people’s imaginations so strongly, while not affecting others. My projection is that the tornado shows up in dreams because, as the dreamer, I have a spiritual calling or a deep issue within my psyche that needs my attention. The tornado gets my attention in a big way, especially if the dream feels nightmarish, and by its intensity suggests that the spiritual question is of the utmost importance in my life.

The tornado in the Wizard of Oz acts as a transformative agent, taking Dorothy out of her familiar life and depositing her in a strange world where she discovers that she has more power than she’d ever imagined. This symbolism holds true in many tornado dreams, where the new, strange world is a metaphorical one, but the dreamer’s ability to discover unexpected abilities and powers is literal.