Thinking and talking about dreams
I read tarot cards at a house party a while ago. It’s a thing I do for fun. I dread small talk and reading tarot cards has become a reliably good way to escape the drudgery of small talk. Anyway, at this particular house party, there were maybe about ten of us sitting in a circle and I was planning to do a dream-themed tarot card spread for each person. A young woman with long dark brown hair was eager to go first. I can’t recall the specifics of her dream, but I was relieved when she volunteered to go first: dreams aren’t usually discussed openly, so when someone jumps in, it breaks the ice. And that’s pretty much what happened: after reading the young woman’s tarot cards, her friend volunteered to go next, and the dream readings steadily continued.
Sometime after midnight, people seemed to be in different stages of it’s-time-to-go-home-or-elsewhere mode and the circle came to a close. But the young woman with long dark brown hair came back with a confession. She admitted that the dream she shared earlier wasn’t especially meaningful to her—and somewhat sheepishly, she asked if we could do another reading. There was another dream she really wanted to talk about, and she explained that this other dream was much more important.
This took me by surprise. When I do dream-based tarot readings, my only request is this: choose a personal dream or goal that you’re working towards that you’d like to discuss. In theory, people can talk about anything… but this interaction shows that it can be a lot more complicated than that. Afterwards, I had a lot of lingering questions. Why didn’t the woman feel comfortable talking about her more important dream first? Was she worried about how this dream would be perceived? Furthermore, why was her first dream so easy to share—and why was her “real” dream buried under this other dream? I realize that I’m talking about one interaction with one woman, but I think about this interaction a lot because I can imagine myself—and other people, especially other women—in her shoes.
Dreaming is actually hard work. It’s easy to confuse ideas about “success” conveyed through social media and elsewhere with our own dreams and there can be pressure to prioritize other peoples’ dreams at the expense of our own. I think that’s another reason why I like the dream-based tarot readings so much. No matter how outlandish or impractical a dream might seem, talking about our dreams nudges us to think about them. And thinking about our dreams forces us see and imagine them—and this can make them less distant and a little more real.
