After Woody passed I started dreaming very intensely. I discussed it with my therapist and my PCP. They would listen quietly but could offer me no answers or meaning. At the time I thought that dreams could be interpretive, maybe they can but for me, I was living the dreams when I slept. It was torture.
Three months after his passing I started to have the same dream every night. I was standing on a beach looking across the water. I could see Woody way out on the horizon; he never got closer in the dream. I would have the dream 3-4 times a night and wake up, sometimes in tears because I could see him in my dreams, but I couldn’t hug or hold him. Every day, I cried a lot in the morning after my wife left for work, I’d just sit in the chair in my office and look out the window.
My therapist recommended I work with a “dream specialist”. Ophilia Mandara. I spoke to her on the phone and we set up 10 Zoom meetings. Before she would work with me, she asked me to define my intent for this work. I spent the next two weeks defining why I wanted to work with her, and what I came up with was this, “It is my intent to grow through this grief into a more powerful and loving life”. It was really hard for me to define how I wanted to begin healing, I went through several legal pads of ideas before I came to my intent. It became the beginning of a life changing experience.
Ophilia began to guide me through my dreams. She asked me to accept the fact that when I was dreaming that I was out of my body, case in point, if I was in my body, I’d be dreaming about being in bed. That made perfect sense to me. She took me to the shore where I could see Woody way out on the horizon and helped me invite him to play with me. I can’t really describe what happened next, but he came to shore and allowed me to hug and hold him (or his essence). That night, the dream that I had been having for close to 3 months, vanished.
As my study with Ophilia deepened, we went to some very dark places. When I became afraid, she would remind me that the darkest earth was the most fertile and allowed for the most growth. I won’t go deep into some of this dreamwork here because I covered it very well in the book, Woody, My Journey through Joy, Grief and Healing with a dog”.
I dream almost nightly, some I understand, some scare me, and recently I’ve had another repetitive dream. In this dream I am standing in front of a never-ending box with divisions in it, like an old printing press shop would use for type, letters and symbols. I realized after the third night that I was dreaming that I was doing was sorting out feelings and emotions and putting them in the correct order. I have a lot of sorting dreams, and I feel they are now my guides and allies as I sort through my emotions and begin to understand what happened to me in my early life. I find so much peace and understanding through my dream life now.
Ophilia writes a blog published here, but to stay current, I’d direct you to her Instagram page https://www.instagram.com/dreamyourselfwild/
I wish you all courage and peace.
