Dweller On The Threshold
by Patti Allen
"I’m a dweller on the threshold and I’m waiting at the door.
And I’m standing in the darkness, I don’t want to wait no more.
I have seen without perceiving, I have been another man.
Let me pierce the realm of glamour, so I know just what I am."
Van Morrison
We live in post-Freudian times and many of us grew up learning that dreams were the “royal road to the unconscious”. And they are, but they are more than that. The first time I became aware that dreams were hinting at something larger than my own personal psychology was in an unlikely place for a revelation. The year was 1997 and I was sitting by the hotel pool on a very hot Philadelphia weekend. Danny Stein had just celebrated his Bar Mitzvah and my kids, numbering four, were cooling off in the pool along with all of Philadelphia it seemed. I sat in a lounge chair, watching the kids, watching people and reading Joan Borysenko’s “Fire in the Soul”. In it, she wrote, “A Parable: Safe Passage Home”. I read it and gasped. Then I cried under my sun hat. Somehow, in a few words, I found out why I was so interested in dreams, why I was a dreamer. Borysenko wrote,
"The fledgling souls took many roads Home. Each Way had its own Story and each soul responded to that Story with the gift of free will, embroidering new stories on the dream-tapestry of the One Great Dreamer."
With that sudden understanding, I could now see what wasn’t there a moment before. In that moment, I reconnected with my Creator, with myself and to all dreamers in a way that I wasn’t connected before. Before, I felt like an orphan; now, suddenly, I belonged. Before, there had been an intellectual understanding of the psychology of dreams, now it was personal and it was spiritual.
In that moment by the pool I realized that I dream—you dream—because God dreams. Being “created in God’s image”, a familiar passage from the Bible, now took on deeper shading, as the idea took root in my heart and in my soul. Life was a noisy, hot day by a pool one moment and reality was where I had left it. Yet, a moment later, my eyes were opened to a broader perspective and I understood. I dream because God dreams! I was born of the One Great Dreamer and to dream is my birthright and my gift. At the same time, it is both natural and supernatural. My fascination with dreams had come into alignment with creation. Yet this sudden spiritual awakening —my poolside satori—threatened to dissipate as I struggled to understand. Am I dreaming all of this? Am I dreaming my life? My children? (My deliberation paused as I counted heads in the pool.) And if, like my Creator, I dream or create my world, are my own children, or anyone else for that matter, dreaming a different dream? Are common dreams what creates community and binds societies together? If my mind can play with the possibility that I’ve created my own reality, and I’ve dreamed this life of mine, then I have to also consider the possibility that God is a dream as well. Who’s dreaming whom? (And is it time to get out of the sun?)
I have been searching, and I still search, for the One Great Dreamer. At first, in my fascination with dreams, I mistakenly thought that dreams were both the means and the end. If only I could understand the message of a dream, if I could crack the code, then I would know myself better and understand dreams and their messages. I scratched in the dirt like a dog following the scent of a buried treasure. At first, the treasure was simply to understand dreams. I hoped that if I could learn to understand dreams I could understand myself. Socrates would approve. For me, dreams were the technology for self-understanding. They still are, yet in that moment by the pool, when I tried to visualize what all this would look like, I suddenly saw that self-understanding was but the outer ring in a series of concentric circles. At first I thought that dreams should be the core circle, and expanding outward from the dream, I would find dream-understanding, self-understanding and so on, in an outward expanding movement. But when I started working with dreams, their movement drew me inward and the center circle, the core of the matter, was God. My search moved far beyond the need to understand myself, taking me into a world that was not visible to the naked eye, and where dreams were the technology for understanding both Self and Spirit. It was what I was searching for all along. Dreams were the means, not the end.
Dreamers often awake with a sense that they were dreaming without being able to remember the details of the dream; that there was something there, if only they could remember what that was. This is not a new phenomenon. In Plato’s Republic we learn of the Myth of Er, where Socrates tells of a man called Er and of his journey into the next world after dying in battle. Er tells of the rewards, the punishments, the judgments that a soul encounters, the choices a soul must make and finally, of the River Lethe. It is this River of Forgetfulness of which the souls are required to drink, causing each to forget everything they had experienced between death and rebirth.
Judaism, too, tells of forgetting. In the Talmud it is told that before an infant is born the child learns the entire Torah (the five books of Moses) in utero, but as the newborn is delivered, an angel taps the baby on it’s upper lip, causing it to forget (and thus explaining the indentation we all have under our nose, on our upper lip.) Throughout the ages, there was a sense of there being something that we once knew but have forgotten. There is a word for it, anamnesis, which is a kind of remembrance, and means the remembering of things from a supposed previous existence. Although this is often a reference to Platonic thought—that learning is the remembrance of things forgotten but once known by a soul—this idea shows up with little variation in medicine, religion and psychology as something previous known that is recalled to memory. So we spend our lives searching for what we suspect we’ve forgotten and surely, we’ll know it when we find it. Or will we have forgotten how to see as well?
In my search to remember what I already know, I am searching to find my way home, as Borysenko’s parable tells us. I know that there is a “me” and a “home” that will take me far beyond my ego and personality and ordinary life as wife, mother and therapist, as surely as I know anything. But can we possibly remember the very thing we drank from the River Lethe to forget? If the angels have programmed us to forget, can we ever know God? Intellectually and academically, perhaps that is best left to philosophers and theologians to debate, yet we still are left waking up every day from our dreams—or in our life—wondering what we have forgotten.
In some small way, I might say that my life is the story of one woman’s journey and search to remember the dream she had of herself, of God and of all creation, all while cooking dinner, raising four children, running a psychotherapy practice and dream groups. And these essays are my field notes from the road because as I write this, I am still searching and still dreaming. I’ve been a “Dweller on the Threshold” with one foot in the dream world and one foot on the ground of daily life with its pleasures and its pains. Ironically, the more I dwell in the dream world, contemplating its insights and adventures, the easier it is to access its wisdom and guidance as I find my way in the waking world. I’ve seen the reports of other dreamers and I know I’m on the right path, tracking my Self and Spirit, however many potholes and detours I encounter. We are all Dwellers on the Threshold with a foot in both realms, but who has the courage to step over the threshold? Dreamers do.
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"Patti's knowledge and wisdom in DreamWorks has guided me in understanding my higher self. Patti brings comfort and ease to her groups without feeling inhibited. Patti is true leader in dream work and I am honoured and grateful to have met such an inspiring individual that I can call my friend." Anna O.