PSI Symposium Annual Journal 2006-7

Dreams of Journey and Transportation

by Rosemarie Smurzynski

Greenfield Group - December 2005

 

A Dream

I came face to face with a person.  When I awoke I knew the person was either my spiritual advisor of 11 years or a spiritual organizational consultant I work with. This was to be our last session, the person, and a woman, told me.  “Go. Be.” she said as she handed me a 16 by 24 diploma, covered in brown parchment paper and tied with hemp.  We hugged. I left.

I was off next to an appointment, I wasn’t sure of the appointment, but later I knew it to be a doctor’s appointment to get a flu shot.   I got on a trolley outside the building.  The trolley, overhead for a while, soon went underground.  I was busy looking at the diploma but got as far as recognizing a cup of coffee in one corner.  Time passed.  I looked up.  The trolley was in Chelsea.  I only know three Chelseas: one in Mass, one in NYC and one in England.  Chelsea was not where I wanted to be.  I got off the trolley befuddled.  How could I have traveled so long in the wrong direction?

The tracks and platforms at the station were set out side by side, just like at Charring Cross, and there were many.  At the station I meet a woman who was dressed in a conductor’s uniform.  I tell her I am lost.  She takes me behind the tracks to a tram.  “Here, sit here,” she says, pointing to the last seat in the tram.   In a moment I am whisked back to the station from where I started.  There I take a bus.  The bus barrels down a highway.  I know this is not the right path either.  I ask woman sitting next to me about the right bus to take to get to my appointment. She ignores me.  But the bus driver, a jolly, round faced man about fifty, turns around and smiles: “Over there”, he says: “That’s the bus you want.” I know I am on the right path now.

I wake up to the smell of coffee.   Tom, who had gotten up early, has just made me a cup of coffee which he is bringing to me.

At crossroads times of my life I dream of myself in transportation vehicles-- buses, trains, airplanes.  For example two years prior to applying to and being accepted at Harvard Divinity School I had two dreams in which a train and then a bus I was on stopped at the Harvard Square station.  The dream I’ve told you about is telling me I have graduated from a level on which I lived and am now on another.  It’s also telling me-- being who I am a “ready, fire, aim” sort of person. I will sometimes barrel along in the wrong direction, but that I have the wisdom to adjust, and that, more importantly I will have the wisdom to find wizards and wise ones along the way to assist in pointing me in the direction I need go in next.  And in this dream to, yes, get that flu shot which will protect me against viruses.  Is the flu shot “self-definition?”

I wished this dream was like Jacob’s--climbing her ladder to God.  But it isn’t.  Or like Martin Luther King’s dream, finding the path to bring justice to the world.  But it isn’t.  My dreams are horizontal--direction finding journeys. 

Journey though has been the operative word in my dreams.  And I have been blessed every since I was a child with words from my “deep center” which sends me messages on where I am and where I am going and when I am on the move! 

My dream life was nurtured further in a class I took at B.U. School of Theology before I entered HDS.  There I took a class on Jung and was required by the professor to keep a dream journal and to write a final paper on where my dreams that semester were directing me.  Needless to say I dreamed Jungian that whole semester.  At the time I was also  immersed in Eastern Religions:  Buddhism and Hinduism fascinated me.  My first dream in that class was one in which I wanted access to a road, a path, to begin a journey. What journey I am not sure.  A Buddha guarded the road and told me I couldn’t go if I couldn’t leave my children behind. I told the Buddha the condition of my journey was that mychildren went with me.  The year was 1972.  My children have been and will always be central to my understanding of my life.  I was no Abraham who was willing to sacrifice my Isaac to God or career.  The Buddha let me pass; I have traveled that road all these years. The path has been filled with ordinary joys and sorrows, some perils, mostly

Self-inflicted as ego asserted itself over common sense. 

A mystic I have always been.  Dreams are my entrance into that realm. They come from the deepest place in me.  They have offered me insight and correction in my journey, made me aware of wrong turns and helped me make decisions.   As a former Catholic who retains the ritual meaning of that religion though not its theology I am moved to my knees: “Thy will be done”, I instinctively understand what it means. Who or what is “Thy” is another matter.  I am not sure.  I rest in that Thy though, which gives me guidance not in a supernatural way, but in guiding me to reach out to the wise ones who surround my surround. I just need to pay attention to what my inner eye sees and inner ear hears.  That consciousness in my inner core tells me that the core of me is bigger, more courageous than my waking life knows.  That is, it contains wisdom far greater than the waking life tells.  And it knows the steps I need to take as well. 

I suppose it is no coincidence that in the very beginnings of my life I played in my grandparent’s hallway in which a copy of a Renaissance painting was hung.  The image was of the journey of souls--of the wide and narrow path-- to heaven. I, even as a child, was intrigued by the narrow path, the one I interpreted as more challenging.   

My dreams connect me to a center I trust that helps me stay grounded in the journey, nay that even tells me the twists and turns of that journey.  Yes, I have graduated.  Yes, I am on the move again. To where, I don’t know, but I trust that it is where I need to go next in this life I am living.