What Story Do You Want To Tell?
There is a wild cat on the loose. It’s huge—bigger than the average tiger, disheveled, and vicious—a savvy predator looking to hunt down and tear apart anything that moves. It’s terrifying. My family and I are staying in an unprotected space and we have two small dogs. The wild cat has not made itself known to us yet but its threatening presence is felt in the periphery. I am desperately trying to secure the area with netting to keep it out and everyone safe. As I am trembling and fumbling to fasten the final piece of the net, a calm voice appears and says “we can have the wild animal jump out right before you secure the last bit of the net—that is, if you’d like to make this a good story.” Instantly, the urgency evaporates and my fear subsides. I then look up from the task at my hands and see the big cat close by, unaffected, and walking calmly back and forth. It was as if the the cat is off screen like an actor, waiting for their cue for how and when to perform. And I, I am in fact the director and an actor in this thrilling movie. I get to decide and experience what happens next. Then I wake up.
I believe dreams are symbolic of whatever we’re going through in our lives—they reveal themes, archetypes, and emotional states that are bubbling up from our subconscious and asking to be integrated. I also believe all elements in our dreams are representative of pieces of ourselves.
I had this dream about the wild cat a few nights ago has been an incredibly profound reflection for me. It is partly the explanation for why I’ve been dawdling about writing this edition of the Floral Overtones bi-weekly journal entry (thankfully you’re not seeing all the stops and starts, deleted sentences, trips to make tea, get a snack, or walk the dogs, but I can assure you that’s whats been happening in the background).
I’ve had a lot of seemingly interesting themes popping up in my life lately: a pleasure betrayal conflict, grief under anger, drawing a trauma family tree, using the sound of my voice as a healing tool, etc, but all of these experiences and stories have a similar timbre—similar to one another, similar in tone to what I so passionately wrote about last week, and similar to a lot of what’s being reflected back to me from out there. However, I can’t bring myself to expand on these themes. These are not stories I feel compelled to tell. In fact, they all of a sudden feel completely redundant or worse—like a limp handshake.
In my dream a calm voice stated, “we can have the wild animal jump out right before you secure the last bit of the net—that is, if you’d like to make this a good story.” Since this is the incident that compels a change in the momentum of the dream there are a few elements that seem worth taking a closer look at:
There is an objective narrator or storyteller (me).
When a choice is offered my emotional state is completely diffused.
There is a qualifier regarding what constitutes a “good story,” which I am currently interpreting as an indicator of my unconsciously preferred narrative of fear and surprise — quite interesting since I don’t like watching scary movies, I often say, “life is scary enough!” (But, isn’t it me that tells myself scary stories about life?!)
What’s also interesting is the theme I sensed coming up for July was inertia—I shared about it on my instagram stories at the beginning of the month. According to Wikipedia, “Inertia is the resistance of any physical object to a change in its velocity. This includes changes to the object's speed or direction of motion. An aspect of this property is the tendency of objects to keep moving in a straight line at a constant speed when no forces act upon them.” Though stories are not physical objects per say, had a narrator not appeared on the scene, the storyline of my dream would have likely continued on its trajectory and ended in terror and tragedy. Just the awareness of the presence of a storyteller is a significant force.
And so, in my life as in my dreams, I find myself presented with a choice point—a place where the momentum is changing. Where I’m realizing I am the narrator of my own show and the stories I’ve been telling are repetitive, redundant, and I no longer wish to tell them to myself or others. In some sense it feels like I’ve stepped into a void, where I’m reconsidering everything, questioning everything and recalibrating. I’m becoming aware of some of my default narratives and that there are other choices. And I am left asking myself the question: What story do you want to tell?
It’s a powerful and exciting place to be—at least that’s the story I’m choosing to tell about it.