Joyful Oppression

An Intolerable Dream

created using Canva, resisting AI, professing Imagination is the highest intelligence

As a dream tender, I note images, figures, emotions, sensations, phenomena, songs, and all the details gifted by the dreamscape. To me, Dreamtime is medicinal. Images expand to lead psyche through healing paths. I’m not expecting to arrive at any particular destination; I’m waking up to Self.

The particular dream I’m about to share has puzzled me since arriving on November 26, 2024. Each time I pick it up, and turn it over, I feel the joy of the figures inside as if it were a cheerful village scene contained in a snow globe. Yet it is a dream of oppression. Curiously, as both observer and participant in this dream, I do not feel oppressed.

Lately, I’ve been practicing “the tension of opposites” within a Gratitude Project I initiated to help me and fellow veteran caregivers. To find resilience and growth through gratitude in hard times/circumstances, one must first find the opposite of gratitude. This is an individual response, an emotional thumbprint where no two are alike.

What does gratitude feel like in your body? What is its opposite to you? Can you sit with both and allow a third reality to open? The Gratitude Project asks us to practice awareness and cultivation of that third space within each of us between two opposing powers. Gratitude won’t shift our mindset or heartspace until we accept both its shadow and illumination.

If you want to explore this Jungian idea, Marion Woodman’s lecture, “Holding the Tension of the Opposites” is available on YouTube (free) or Audible (not free). As a Jungian analyst and author, she addresses the human conflict of spirit and matter. It feels appropriate for our current times.

I’ve been reluctant to share this dream but inner urgings brought me to the Sacred Grove on the night before the 2025 presidential inauguration. Dream images act as containers for us to explore—who is showing up, what is happening? When I share a dream even in a reduced 99-word literary format, it is now yours.

You can enter the dream and engage the figures (if intolerables be sure to bring your Dream Council, safe dream figures who have your back). You can write your own poetic or literary response through your imagination. If you wish to expand the dream, post a response or reflection in the comments.

What will I do now that Trump has hijacked my house? A good question I have no answer for beyond, “I’ll continue to dream, do my inner work, and imagine a new way to be homed in unsettling times.”

Joyful Oppression (from an 11-26-24 Dream)

Trump has hijacked my house. Tropicana bottles litter the floor. Cardboard packaging from the orange juice bottles teeter in stacks. Green plastic lids scatter as if children had tossed game pieces in jubilant destruction. I’m trailing Trump’s presence, watching. He’s smiling. Genuinely smiling. Middle-aged men scurry like happy minions. Joy resides in my house. I’m not joyful, not sad. A witness. Trump is outside nicking another home. Men toothy with smiles pump his hand. They’ve commandeered my bedroom, and in passing, without greeting or notice, one grabs my breast, squeezing it like a dog’s toy. Yet, I remain unseen.