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Archive Number 2432 | ||
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Date: Fri, 3 Jan 2003 22:17:11 EST
In a message dated 1/3/2003 3:50:53 PM Pacific Standard Time, SydSol@AOL.COM writes: > in the Fred Alan Wolf's book The Dreaming Universe, he tells of a theory of > why we dream. That we are dreaming to forget. We process the day and dream > about it to forget. Perhaps this is the same way with our personal stories? > Are we rummaging through them, telling them, writing them to forget? > He must be some boring dreamer! I don't think we dream to forget. We dream to remember - or at least we do if we honor our dreams. Dreams and stories come from the same place. And we tell stories to remember, also. If we wanted to forget them we would never. say. one. single. word. Telling the story honors the experience. It also puts the teller at one remove from the experience. It's very freeing to take what's in the gut and send it out on the breath. Telling/writing a story allows the teller/writer to obtain some objectivity - to observe and assess an experience - which, in the case of negative experience, is far preferable to choking on it. Reminds me of Clarissa Estes - somewhere she writes about women in some kind of therapeutic group making "scapecoats." Decorating old coats with things which symbolized painful experiences. The original plan (I think) was to burn or destroy the coats when they were completed. But when they got done, nobody wanted to do that. They wanted to KEEP those coats. Even hang 'em on the wall. Those coats represented the women that they were, the experiences which had made them. They realized it took some tough and powerful women to make and wear coats like that... We also tell stories to make contact with other people. "This is what happened to me...." and the listener replies with another story...... Kimberley | ||