Here is what I dreamed the other night:
I was at a glamorous resort with some really glitzy, overdone décor, but I learned that I was only a short ride from Londolozi. I jumped up, desperate to get there immediately, and as I was trying to arrange a jeep to take me there, a beautiful black horse turned up instead. But as we headed down the road, somehow I found myself seated backward on the horse, facing Londolozi but looking down at the horse’s rump. The horse was walking backward, lifting each hoof slowly and awkwardly, and I was urging him on with great frustration.
It felt so real. It felt like something I was remembering more than dreaming. So, just like I do most mornings, I took out my journal and began to interpret it.
Using Martha’s method, I pretended that I was the different elements of the dream and imagined how each one would answer questions like “What is your purpose? What do you want? How are you trying to help the dreamer?” As I scribbled down their answers, I could almost hear how each one would speak. It was like having a conversation on the page. I’ve been doing this for a while now, and my dreams tend to cough up their true messages pretty quickly. As I lay down a habit of listening to my dreams, the dreaming part of me has begun to trust that my waking self will not mock or dismiss its nighttime messages.
I went through the ‘characters’ one by one. The ritzy resort, it turned out, represented success, performance, and pasted-on smiles—it was about a very socially sanctioned kind of success. As an element in my dream, it was trying to help me by getting me very close to where I wanted to be without actually satisfying my deeper longings.
Londolozi, which is an actual place in Africa where they have restored the ecosystem to health, and just happens to be a place I am ACHING to go to in real life, represented a new way of being. It was hovering nearby, just out of sight, vibrating with life and love. It represented harmony; it represented our true nature. Its purpose was to unite humans and earth and spirit. It was everything that I long for.
Then the dream interpretation slipped out of its familiar groove. Londolozi, see, had a question for me. This doesn’t usually happen during the dream interpretation, but I scrawled it out on the page like I was taking dictation:
“Dude–are you coming or not?”
At the time, I wasn’t even fazed by the fact that the deep beautiful harmonious nature of all things had just called me ‘dude.’ No, I was too busy checking my hair. You see, I was seized by longing, but also by an adolescent-flavored anxiety. I wrote my reply underneath.
“Isn’t it rude to just rock up without an invitation? I don’t want to intrude. On the cool kids. And stuff.”
An answer swirled out of my pen. “Ah. I see. Ok. Sure, you can wait for an invitation.” Then Londolozi twiddled its thumbs, gazed up at the ceiling, and hummed a little. “Or, you could just declare the truth, which is that you ARE the invitation. Tell me where I’m wrong.”
I swallowed hard. It wasn’t wrong. The invitation is coded into my very being. My longing is my invitation.
So I asked, with much angst and furrowed brow and melodrama, “But how do I get there? I have this horse, but I’m riding it backward.”
Londolozi said, “Why don’t you hurry up and ask the damn horse?”
Oh yes. I had forgotten about the horse.
But the dream interpretation exercise had moved out of its familiar formula and was scrawling itself out on the page. My pen looped and scratched, madly recording the dialogue that was taking place entirely in my mind and yet seemed utterly real.
The horse was describing itself: “I am black, gorgeous, powerful. I am neither male nor female. I want to run. (I can run really, really fast.) I am walking ass backward because you don’t know how to ride me. My message to her would be: Learn to ride!”
I asked the horse how to do that. It was growing impatient.
“Work with me here! Turn around! Stop trying to direct me. You’re telling me where to go– but have you ever been to Londolozi??? Hunh??? No, you have not. And I have! I know the way! Listen. All you have to do is come up to me, whisper, ‘Londolozi’ in my ear, and I will just take you there.”
I was still confused. I wanted instructions! Why are these dream messages so cryptic? So I asked it again: “But what does all this mean in real life? What do you represent?”
I swear to god, it snorted.
“I am your power. I am your strength, your speed, your beauty in motion. I know how to get where you want to go. You need to whisper in my ear, and then hang on tight. Remember how you felt when you were working with the real horses in Arizona? Remember how in order to get them to do what you wanted to do, you had to be very calm but also very fearless? It’s the same thing. When you whisper your destination, you must hold it in your body, see it in your mind, feel it in your cells. “
“Yes, yes!! I remember that feeling exactly!” I thought back to the blissful hours I spent working with Koelle Simpson in a corral, learning to adjust my energy until I could get the huge, beautiful creatures to follow my lead. “It was quieter than I expected but also bigger, more active. Okay, okay, I think I’ve got it. Stop pushing, stop bossing you around, turn around and face forward, and be utterly clear in my destination.”
“Yes.”
“Anything else?” I asked the horse. My pen was slowing down. I could tell that our conversation was almost over.
“Well.” The creature who had been so annoyed at me suddenly pawed the ground. “Well. I love you, you know. I’ve been waiting for you.”
“I love you too,” I wrote.
And then I was sitting in my Tokyo living room, blinking, my pen clutched in my hand, grinning ear to ear.
I walked into the other room to take a look at my vision board. There in the upper right hand corner was the black horse that I had pasted there several months ago. I had forgotten about it. I had been thinking that maybe I’d find myself cantering along the beach on this majestic steed, the salty wind streaming through my hair…
Instead, I got a magical dialogue with a cranky dream horse. A dream horse who kicked my metaphorical butt. For which I promptly did a jig of total delight.
So here is what I’m doing this month: figuring out where in my life I am trying to ride things ass-backward. Dreaming of Londolozi, a place and a way of harmony. And taking lots of naps. You see, I am getting the distinct sense that it is time to gather my strength for the journey that is about to begin.
