The Moon + Gestation and Dreaming of Dead Poets
A Tarot offering for Pisces Season
“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.” — C. G. Jung
I was eight months pregnant, attending a pre-birth information session at my O.B.’s office. A tall, no-nonsense labor and delivery nurse gave a lobby full of parents the rundown on the stages of labor and explained the spectrum of pain relief available for navigating the most-challenging “transition” stage. Because I am a good little student, the nurse only confirmed what I had already read up to that point. Then—she went off book. She explained about the nightmares.
“I know it’s hard right now,” she said. “You’re exhausted, uncomfortable. You can’t wait until the end of the day when you can—literally—crawl into your bed and sleep. And then what happens?” Her wide eyes swept over the expectant mothers collectively holding their breath and their pee. “You have the most vivid, horrifying dreams of your life.”
It wasn’t just me?
“You’re not crazy. The dreams are not a sign that you’re falling off the deep end. It’s just hormones and being pregnant.”
I gripped my belly—expansive, wide—as if I had swallowed the Moon.
The Moon who rules—
the Realm of Dreams.
the Subconscious.
the watery depths of the Oceans and the rolling of its Tides.
Imagination.
Intuition.
Menstruation.
all Earthly cycles of Death and Rebirth.
The Moon had made me her Mirror.
While my body swelled to take her shape, the Moon flooded my mind with nightly visions of my most secret longings and bone-chilling fears. Dreams that followed me into my waking hours. Making me jumpy. Paranoid. A prequel of the postpartum anxiety that would sharpen into a thousand points once the tasks of new parenthood overwhelmed me.
The blessed utterance of that nurse: “You aren’t crazy,” served as a life raft. She normalized my experience—paving the way for me eventually to see my doctor about a prescription for Zoloft and a therapist-rec for some much-needed postpartum support.
Today, with my youngest child having just turned 9, pregnancy is a distant memory. (Most) of the frightening images cooked up in my waking and sleeping hours during that time have receded. Yet, I will always respect the capacity of those Dreams to knock me off center, even now as I practice a more playful engagement with the Moon and its symbolic landscape: the Dream World.
When you draw the MOON card
The energy of the Moon comes to us cloaked in mystery, pregnant with possibility, and tinged with danger. Perhaps that’s why it is a favorite emblem of witchcraft and divination. It promises insight that cannot be grasped by the rational mind and sheds its murky half-light onto what remains hidden, sacrosanct, illegible.
The Moon in a tarot spread indicates that something from the subconscious depths of your mind is rising to the surface asking for your attention—not to be understood, because there’s no promise of resolution here. The Moon asks only that the shadow of the Self be acknowledged, allowed, and (best-case scenario) accepted. When you pull this card, you are asked to make note of your Dreams.
But a quick note of caution—this shit can get freaky real fast.
I mean, look at the Moon card! What are those slavering hounds? Werwolves? (They’re actually symbols of our animal nature—one tame, one wild). And what about that giant lobster creeping up from the depths? (The shell-shedding psychopomp, traversing the liminal space between land and sea). Why are tongues of fire raining down on the landscape? (It’s just weird!) Under the Moon we encounter the strange and uncanny. We are plunged back into the amniotic ocean of our making, acting as both mother and midwife in an unending process of re-birthing ourselves.
You are invited into Dreamwork
You can’t keep yourself from dreaming, but you can opt out of Dreamwork.
I did not “work with” my dreams as a pregnant mother. They were too triggering. But by baby #2 I had learned to accept their appearance as part of my experience, then to release them. I think it’s fine to respond to our subconscious with the message—“thanks for bringing this up, but no thanks.” Sometimes it actually cues your brain to try a gentler approach. And sometimes your hormones really are just making your visions whack. Part of the difficulty of the Moon and its Dreaming is that it can be hard to discern the Truth from within the rolling tides of fantasy. Hence the traditional association of this card with delusion.
But there are treasures in the surf.
Even if you—like most folks raised in modern western culture—have learned to dismiss dreams as trivial nonsense, the chances are still pretty good that somewhere down the line a friend or family member pulled you aside to whisper: I had the strangest dream…
A nocturnal vision that later surfaced with a sense of déjà vu in waking life.
A nighttime visitation from a deceased loved one.
A creative tip for a poem or a song they were writing remembered upon waking.
Maybe something like this has even happened to you?
If not, then you’ve probably still heard about Einstein’s dreams—where he generated his greatest scientific discoveries? Or of Harriet Tubman’s narcoleptic visions—which guided her path along the Underground Railroad?
I loved reading astrophysicist Stephon Alexander’s account of a dream that lead him to a key insight into the nature of cosmic inflation (the expansive propulsion set off during the Big Bang). Alexander writes: “Perhaps dreams are an arena that can enable supracognitive powers to perform calculations and perceptions of reality that may be incomprehensible in our wake state.”
We’re taught to chide ourselves for ‘spacing out,’ but recent studies have revealed the intellectual benefits of “robust daydreaming” as it correlates to “superior intelligence.” Some thinkers employ a practice of dream-seeding, a ritual method of prompting the mind to solve specific problems in the dream-state. Since the 1990s, psychologists at the Tavistock Institute have been working to develop a method of social dreaming, which asks members of a collaborative group (employees of businesses/schools/churches) to share their dreams with one another in a process aimed at co-creating new, wholistic approaches to their work. Tricia Hersey, author of Rest as Resistance, advocates for the importance of preserving the DreamSpace, that realm of the imagination, reached through rest, that holds the key to imagining true emancipation from capitalist and white supremacist culture.
Many indigenous cultures (as well as those in the ancient west) honored the visions and messages of our slumbering psyches as portends from the Spirit Realm. These practices were codified in ritual and religious ceremonies that persist in practice to this day despite the modern tendency to dismiss dreams as a form of temporary luna-cy. Many Latinx families begin their days by detailing their dreams over breakfast; perhaps your family does this as well? I love the crackling energy that arises between me and my children when we exchange retellings of our dreams. The laughs we share over their comic absurdities smooth the edges of the more troubling images that sometimes come forward. My daughter and I encourage each other to adapt vivid dreams into comic strips or story scenes.
If you have ever kept a dream journal, then you have probably shared my experience of rediscovering dreams—totally forgotten, yet eerily etched in your own hand—whose details jump from the page with revelatory insights months—or sometimes years!—after the dream occurred.
Carl Jung theorized that to dream offers us a field through which the unconscious and conscious mind collide, possibly generating a more authentic, self-actualized version of ourselves. He even gave this process (individuation) a sexual-creative dimension by (cis)gendering the conscious and subconscious, as the anima and animus, which through their coupling create the ever-evolving whole of the Self. Remember what I said about midwifing your own rebirth? In dreams, we all swallow the Moon.
Our Collective Dreaming
Jung also taught that the dreamscape was infused with images from the Collective Unconscious—that our visions spoke to the fears, hopes and concerns of others as much as ourselves. The process of sharing our Dreams, then, offers a potential site of collective healing and transformation.
In this last week of watery Pisces season and the wake of a lunar eclipse, let’s make a trade then—a dream for a dream. If you keep reading, you have to agree to write down a dream of your own, even if you burn it after.
Deal?
My Dream of Matrilineal Mentors from 2019:
I am attending an academic conference in a city unknown to me. I’m not a participant in the conference, having left academia several years earlier, but I have been invited there to meet up with old friends. The hotel where they are holding the conference vaguely resembles the modern apartment complex in Toronto where (in real/waking life) my family and I spent a week after the birth of my second child. I recognize the glass-walled exteriors of the upper floors that look out onto a gleaming courtyard.
A former advisor of mine, Professor T, invites me to a social gathering in her private suite. IRL, Professor T served on my dissertation committee and helped me secure funding for my studies through WashU’s Olin Fellowship for Women. (I was oblivious to such avenues for support and she had suggested I apply). Professor T’s DreamSpace hotel room is furnished with two double beds, a T.V. and a lounge area set with a table of hors d'oeuvres and populated by former classmates of mine who went on to academic careers after graduation. I’m glad to see them—but a little nervous. I haven’t been around and I feel a bit of an outsider.
I take reassurance from Professor T, who presides over us all with a kind of benevolent appreciation. Eventually my former classmates are called away to attend a conference panel. As they leave, Professor T turns to me and explains that there is someone she would like me to meet.
The door opens and in walks Mary-Freaking-Oliver.
I am appropriately star-struck. Perhaps on some level my semi-conscious mind remembers that the Pulitzer Prize winning poet died recently and this meeting is impossible on many levels; either way, even my ‘dream ego’ knows that this is a special meeting. I want desperately to impress her, or at least impress upon her how much her poetry means to me. I know that the (pretentiously academic) way to do this is to quote some obscure line from a little-known poem of hers, but in my excitement I can’t think of anything Mary Oliver has written except the old stand by, “Wild Geese,” which I’m sure everyone must ask her about.
A typical fangirl crying out for the hit single, I still try to connect with her, fumbling over my attempt to formulate the lines of the poem through the haze of the dream. Mary, with her wizened face and grey eyes, listens graciously. When my words finally stutter and stop she places her hands on my shoulders.
“Rest,” she tells me.
I laugh uncomfortably, “ok, yeah, sure,” exchanging a glance with Professor T, who looks on with the same benevolent approval as before.
“No,” Mary Oliver insists. “Rest.”
And when I squirm, the poet presses my shoulders downward, guiding me toward one of the double beds in Professor T’s room until I am lying, rather uncomfortably, next to her. (Who knew Mary Oliver could be so pushy?)
“Rest,” she tells me.
I am uneasy—but I do my best
to sink into the mattress,
relax and rest.
When I succeed at this—I wake.
On waking, I had the immediate sense that this dream arrived to offer me matrilineal support. Professor T and Mary Oliver appeared as maternal archetypes, (in German—my area of study—the word for academic advisor is Doktormutter), exuding nurturance and care. The fact that their real-life counterparts never had human children is a good reminder that we all mother by creating and shaping the world within and around ourselves. In their own way, each of these women irrevocably shaped me.
And let’s not forget the poem I struggled to recall in the dream! “Wild Geese” — a verse all about BELONGING TO THE GREATEST MOTHER of all, the wild, spinning planet Earth. It opens with the audacious claim: “You do not have to be good.” A relief for this dreamer, who has been struggling to “be good” most of her life — good kid, good student, good wife, good mother, good friend, good writer. And—even in the dream!—a good Mary Oliver fan.
If “Wild Geese” reminds me that being good is not a prerequisite for belonging, Mary Oliver’s dream-presence encourages me to surrender to the needs of my “soft animal body.” Rest—she said—and open to the “harsh and exciting” possibilities of the imagination. The realm of the Moon.
This is one of those dreams that, like a folktale, a tarot card, or a favorite song, accrues meaning the more times that I revisit it. After all it’s not every night that I receive a visitation from a dead poet! But anymore, I am struck by how clearly the women in the dream represent two sides of my own creative process—intellectual rigor and intuitive release—the latter of which I was only just beginning to appreciate when this dream arrived for me.
I like the notion that dreams help us build our own personal mythologies, symbols and archetypes that we can return to for support, as I return to this dream when I’m caught in the habits of overworking I learned as a student.
Your Dreams—
Try the following tarot spread to help you unpack your dreams in the final, potent days of Pisces season:
CARD 1 — What are your dreams asking you to acknowledge?
CARD 2 — What are your dreams encouraging you to release through the next lunar cycle?
CARD 3 — What new version of you is Luna helping you to gestate in the Dream World?
Your dreams don’t have to be particularly memorable or vivid for this spread to work, though you may experience an increase in your dreaming if you do it! Any kind of dream work sends a message to your subconscious that you are open to nightly insights, making it more likely that they will come in the future.
My hope is that your nights be filled with marvelous dreams and divine visitations until we meet again. BUT—if you stir up a nightmare or two, remember what the labor nurse said: “You are not crazy.” You are a brilliant, shining mystery—gestating something new.
I’ve been learning a lot about the moon lately. Thank you. 🌙
I loved your vulnerable sharing in this post. I always value knowing more about you, sweetheart.