Life-stage dreams
Margaret M at 75 was in good health, and actively getting on with her life, including some professional work, when she had this dream. She had been thinking deeply about the meaning of growing older, while living fully and developing new initiatives in life.
Dream report: Fulfilling a Life
I dream a longish dream. I am being asked about myself and my life. I am at the centre of the attention and being interviewed in an enquiring way. I am asked about a number of things. I am asked if I want to have, or have had, children. I think, and start to say, No, not yet, then remember I’m past childbearing age, and then I remember, Of course, I’ve had four children! – and feel so content and happy about them. Then or before, I’m asked if I’ve loved a man. Yes! I am and have been passionately in love with a man, and I’ve lived most of my life with him – and I’m so content about that. And what have I done as work? So I talk about homemaking, counselling, training – and I’m content and pleased.
Now I fly through the air. I’m accompanied by someone, a comfortable person, but not familiar to me. We fly high over trees and grass and gardens and houses. We swoop and soar for quite a while. This is beautiful!
Then I’m back on the ground, in present time. I think, Yes, all that is very good, and I feel fulfilled and content. And now I am here. So what shall I do now, at this time of my life? So far, so good. And now it’s a new time of my life to live.
I felt deeply fulfilled after this dream. I had been reading about the developmental life-tasks of older people, especially the task of making sense of, and valuing, one’s life up to now. My “interview” enabled me to do this in a rich, structured way – they were wise people, with some sort of authority, and they questioned me in a sensitive way, in a respectful, dignified process. The wonderful flying reminds me of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem, The Windhover: “in the rolling level underneath him steady air… My heart in hiding stirred for a bird – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!”
My inner spirit in the dream seems to be affirming my hypothesis: yes, there is another whole stage of life available to most of us after our sixties – a next stage of growth and development towards richer maturity and fulfillment.
The dream is not only delightful in itself, but also has a wider relevance, in that it highlights a new historical development: the increasing proportion of elders in our society who are healthy and active in body and mind, and free from full-time work. Notice also that the interviewers follow a woman’s perspective here, in asking her about her relationships before her work – valuing the range of her experience. The question is there for us all. What significant roles could this life-stage offer?