What’s the Box to You? Image via Pinterest
One of the best ways to get outside the box to discover new approaches and receive profound insights is to do dreamwork. There comes a time in our life when it becomes necessary to step beyond safe or confining boundaries because our world can no longer gives us the nurturing support we have come to expect. Sometimes our world, our box, often a fabrication of our making, can no longer give us the answers we need.
We grow up in a world that is our own box, at first sustained by family, friends and community, and then later by ourselves. We learn how to navigate through this world and work with its rules. As we become citizens of this box, and even experts and using it to our advantage, we strive to enjoy and run things in this world of our box, taking pride in what we can accomplish. But at some point, the box either gets too confining or we are kicked out by others who control the box, illness, old age or fate itself. We no longer belong in the box. This is when dreamwork can be very helpful because dreams can pierce the limitations of the box and birth us into a much larger reality. Usually this birthing is difficult at best. Dreams can help us by:
- Providing visions of what life outside the box will look like.
- Showing us the way to get out of the box if we are ready to leave it.
- Showing us what our role and contributions can be to those still in the box, and those ready to leave the box.
I have often thought that this is one reason why dreams can be so bizarre. They provide symbols that want to pull us away from the usual ways we perceive things so that we can look at something from a different and fresh viewpoint. I think they want to us to see beyond the box. For example, if I dream of a red eagle talking to me, I may try to imagine what the eagle is telling me beyond its words. How would the eagle perceive me? What is the eagle trying to tell me? Why is it red, and not the usual brown with a white head? Asking and learning from the eagle will provide a new perspective that is entirely out of the box of my conventional, waking mind. Heaven only knows what message will be given.
Fran Kramer 