ridiculously long dreamwork post

over the last week i have had three dreams pointing to the value of something i called felt sense, a term from some therapeutic techniques from the 70s humanistic psychology movement

in the first i was being ignored and dissed at a tennis game (i was replaced while chasing down a ball) and then at a party in my own apartment...the interesting thing being how normal it all felt, which triggered a remembrance of what it was like growing up in my family...this is something i have been aware of in my memory, but having it come up in dreams brought a different vividness to the memory of feeling nearly invisible and generally unworthy of consideration, a quality allowing me to seamlessly connect a host of issues in my psyche, by way of this sense of feeling or felt sense

the second involved me leaving an army boot camp and being checked for ID i kept thinking i had, only to have the documents i handed over turn out to be a library card and other random stuff, prompting me to say to the guard, "Real ID is coming soon anyway...and i'll be elsewhere!", only to have her call my bluff on actually leaving the country, and hearing myself meekly admit "yeah probably"...this all reflects the powerlessness i often feel in regards to personal power in this increasingly fascist society, and in particular a recent NPR report lauding our NM senators for assuring us new mexicans we would be able to travel across state borders this holiday season despite being behind in our institution of national ID cards...now i want to make it clear this NPR report was real waking life and not a dream, but so bizarre i must have needed to process it in dreamworld, the most bizarre part being the unspoken understanding that i/we have all understood this is already happening and agreed to!...perhaps this is how the news works these days, as another avenue for big brother psy-ops, the felt sense of both this dream and report being a growingly familiar sense i could call cognitive dissonance

the third, last night, involved following on the heels of a leader i admired moving quickly up flights of stairs, helping a few others carry some of his furniture, and while i couldn't see his face, i think it was JFK, which was confirmed by the posters of him in my hand...the main aspect of the felt sense was an immense quality of internal support...it was profound to feel the presence of someone so committed to human progress, who i really hadn't been thinking about recently except in the general sense of seeking mentors and benevolent examples of authority, yet who i now feel more personally connected with...

the dream continued into a scene of him resting to pull out a flask to have a drink, his face had grown a little more hick-ish, with a beard like mine, so ironically resembling castro and che (who was a doc), the drink anyway represented his acceptance and even indulgence of his own shadows, and thus while surprising seemed no less leaderful, yet he was called to medic tent at that moment (like a scene from MASH) and so spilled his drink on cue on his shirt and collar, it being red likely symbolizing his assassination...so he instead of drinking, pulled a cig--a set of which he had magically stashed in his mouth between his cheek and gum...i think the felt sense here is my own need to claim both my own leadership and shadow in the midst of a growing relationship that offers so much but whose structure may challenge my expressing these particular core aspects of my own power

the dream turned nightmarish as hick-JFK was now driving a carriage with a horse whose legs were looking dangerously ready to tangle, and as my friend and fellow conspiracist jai and i watched, as JFK attempted to use a lance (like a knight?) the carriage reached a tunnel and mangled chopped up horses started flying around, and i couldn't look, so i ran to my room growing up, and tried to close the door which despite using a chair, pressed back open with a force i could not control, so as i screamed on my bed, jai came in agitatedly yelling "1/70th of a meter!", with my response of "yeah?" sounding incredibly wimpy like a sad broken child, and expressing the felt sense of powerlessness

and i woke--oddly to an NPR interview with wife Vicky about Ted Kennedy's autobiography and life--to think what was 1/70th about, and asked myself what happened in 1/70...along with it being the beginning of a new decade with the 60s being over, it was the month after my family moved to Seaford, and i was placed in the same bedroom with my younger sister, a situation that would last until i was 13, leading (i have realized through therapy and self-analysis) to a definitely repressed public expression of my sexual side, out of the safety and respect needs of those many years being in close quarters with my sister...the uncloseable door = unmet needs for privacy = missing self-empowerment particularly manifesting as codependent boundaries, which are all probably also coming up in terms of burgeoning relationship and the question of how to be myself within it

all of this helps to unlock one mystery of nonviolent communication practice--why it is sometimes profound and sometimes completely unmoving, the dialog level of human needs sometimes offering a deep window into what is going on inside for us (in my three dreams: respect, integrity, and support respectively), the difference between the mundane and profound experiences of nvc connection being whether we are just finding the words that match our experiences or finding the connections within--the felt sense--that those words point toward