Montana gathering learns about living dreams

Prairie Mary (Mary Scriver) writes about a Thomas Moore dream lesson at a conference in Montana during 1983, "Logon '83: A Seed That Grew". At the gathering, two boys, who hadn’t paid to attend, shared a dream for interpretation. According to Scriver,

"Thomas Moore carefully and kindly guided them through free association: what snakes were there in their lives? What did the highway mean to them? As this whole new world opened up to these boys, their mouths hung open in astonishment. Others among us smiled smugly. Then the door burst open and in came the female registrar on the prod. She gave those two boys the hook -- they were outta there in a hurry -- and the class was aghast! We were all liberals, tolerant, inclusive, and so on.

So then Thomas Moore treated the occasion as if it were a dream. It DID have its surreal elements, so sudden and such a change in mood. What did we think of when we considered authority figures? What does it mean to limit a group? (There’s a whole body of scholarly comment on “fencing the Communion,” which the early Christians did -- only allowing baptized people to take the bread and wine.)

All of a sudden we realized that EVERYTHING is metaphorical, everything has both a personal history and a larger history plus relationship to old and deep patterning. And that much of the work of consciousness is bringing up some of that while maybe suppressing other elements we’re not ready to handle."

Prairie Mary is a member of Barque: Thomas Moore Forum and invites readers to consider a recent post in which she interprets Tiger Woods' accident as a dream.