Beach Dream

Walking along a promenade. A summer day. There are people lying out in the sun, feet facing the water. It is some familiar town and the beach curves away into the distance with people all along it. After a while I notice there are some naked people in amongst the people taking the sun. No-one seems disturbed by this. The nudes seem welcoming and friendly and this I take as some sort of a sign. It is time to stop, get undressed and go swimming. So begins my most frequent recurring dream. Often it stops around this point. I wake up feeling very content. Sometimes the water is too shallow for proper swimming. Sometimes it gets deep and then shallow again. But if the dream continues further it goes like this: Diving down beneath the water, there are ruined buildings. Somehow it is possible to go inside and walk about. The water is kept out and there is air to breathe. For the most part he rooms of the buildings are empty. But occasionally there are rows and rows of clothing on racks, like in a store. The clothing looks to be theatrical or fancy-dress costumes. If the dream gets this far, I wake up feeling a bit frustrated! Three seems to be quite a build-up in the dream, only to find empty rooms and costumes. I’ve spent many years pondering the meaning of the dream. But then I read that finding an ‘official’ interpretation is maybe not such a useful thing. Perhaps instead we should just live with our dreams and let their stories inform us. The messages of a dream may change over time and bring us new insights. How does the dream sit with me right now? Well, to start off, those nude people on the beach suggest some kind of acceptance. We accept ourselves, I think, partly because the people around us are open and honest. With luck, this will be our parents, but it might also be friends or some other supportive people in our lives. We see them unafraid to be themselves and that, in turn, gives us the courage to be who we really are. Sometimes it’s enough to stop with this, just as the dream often stops at this point. After all, having the courage to be who we really are is a huge step forward for a lot of people. When I first began having the dream this was indeed as much as I could aspire to. But the rest of the dream suggests to me a more complex message. Most of human interaction is not about the literal truth, it seems to be saying! I don’t mean that we are always lying to each other. What I mean is that we are hooked on stories. And the most addictive of our stories are the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and what our lives are really about. So, finding our ‘true’ self – what we have been talking about up to this point – might actually still be a fiction of sorts. Or we might describe it as our ‘core narrative’ – the story that sums us up best, or the story that is closest to the ‘real truth’, if indeed that even exists. So here is the tricky move that the second part of the dream is pointing to. Most of us adopt one or more stories about ourselves unconsciously. We don’t realise we are just playing a role and sometimes that role can be very harmful to ourselves and to those around us. But what if we got beyond that point – through the nudity (being able to be our ‘true’ self) and through the underwater chambers (the wealth of alternative stories open to us). And then finally we can put on a role consciously rather than unconsciously. What then? This is where I’m at with the dream right now. You may think – just as I have worried – that this consciously putting on another self is a bit of a lie, a bit of a gimmick. Perhaps it is even dangerous or foolhardy. We may be misunderstood – we may harm others when we really intend to help them. But still the idea sits there as an intriguing possibility. The idea of putting on a false persona links closely with a way of looking at art. Art can be described as ‘power-under’. What do I mean by this? Well, the artist loves the world – for it’s beauty – but has a problem with the world – in that all forms of beauty are being destroyed by the dominant patriarchy of human culture. How might the artist resolve this? The artist can deliberately adopt a false persona, as an act of play, but with the deadly serious intent of challenging the power structures that are currently destroying the planet. This is what I mean by power-under. You know what? I think I’ll give it a go.

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