Sunday, September 20, 2015

Hippies

Something has triggered a couple of intense dreams for me lately. The last one, apart from a lot of unrelateable strangeness, had me somehow winding up in a neighborhood of sorts which turned out to be an informal community of hippies and lefties and somewhat disorganized, impractical people.

Do you notice an air of judgement in that? Well, it was there in the dream as well and I got schooled on it, being confronted with my own sense of superiority. We must all have some of this but I am, in fact, pretty judgmental. I have always identified with authority and loved standards and structure. 

I think I'm comfortable with that generally but that, in times of stress or confusion or vulnerability, those deep attributes which define us to some degree can become our enemies, by being too extreme and becoming a way of protecting ourselves by being less free and open in our daily lives. 

By being more compulsive and determined, that is. I have always been an energetic, creative, improvisational person. Can you see it in my writing? I think the love of structure and standards is connected to that, to keep me from flying off into space, kind of, in some sort of semi-ecstatic state. 

Anyway, I recall feeling superior to the free-spirits in that informal community and I think it's just the fear of my own freedom, that I'm more like them than I think. Late in the dream some beautiful young women started dancing loosely in the street, on their way back from shopping or somewhere.

It looked right out of Isadora Duncan. It was beautiful and such a simple expression of everyday joy. "Joy." These words don't serve us well, sometimes. Whatever it was it was essential, like food, in the dream, or more likely inevitable, if someone lives fully inside of their humanity, without fear. 

I doubt I'll move to that community, in my head--it doesn't live anywhere else--but I'll take my practical self there and befriend them, maybe helping them build something, and they will admire me for my practicality and I them for helping me dance spontaneously a little more, if only in my dreams.

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