Deborah DeGraff
Medium: Tempera Paint on Paper
Date Created: January 2010
I dream I am going fishing in a canoe with a man.
I worked with this dream at a North of Eden Archetypal Dreamwork retreat where we enact our dreams. As we set up the dream I remember more... I am sitting in the bottom of the canoe facing the man who is paddling, my back to where we are going. As we begin to enact it, the man paddles, the canoe rocks. Sometimes the water is rough and wild. I am scared not knowing where we are going. I know he is taking me on a journey. I tell him I am scared. He keeps on paddling. The canoe keeps rocking as we go down the river. The rocking of the canoe gets into my body.
When I get home from the retreat I can still feel him paddling me in the rocking canoe and my fear of not knowing where we are going. I tack a big sheet of paper on the wall and paint The Boat Man. I hang him up across from my bed so I wake up facing him, feeling the fear of not knowing where we are going as he paddles me down the river. This is the beginning of a new leg of my spiritual journey.
Medium: Tempera Paint on Paper
Date Created: February 2010
I dream I am in a three level house. I am meant to sleep on the bottom floor with a girl. I think she is angry and might slit my throat while I sleep. I feel scared and go up to the third floor where the mother is. She is also scary, but less so than the girl. I ask her, 'Can I sleep in a bed up here because I'm scared your daughter is angry and will slit my throat while I sleep.' She says, 'Yes'. Then I realize I have made a terrible choice. I see how fear of feeling my fear has lead me to choose the mother over my own soul and now I am really terrified.
Medium: Tempera Paint on Paper
Date Created: April 2010
I work with this dream for two weeks. The first week I resist feeling the fear of the girl slitting my throat. Instead I project that fear into my life, feeling the familiar anxiety that comes out as intense social awkwardness and shyness. By the second week I have begun to bring my fear back to the image of my dream. I imagine very specifically the knife tip cutting my throat, and I paint it. I start to accept how afraid I am of that.
Medium: Tempera Paint on Paper
Date Created: April 2010
I dream I am at a North of Eden Archetypal Dreamwork retreat and a man is leading the enactment of my dreams. I notice that there is a road next to the building and trucks are coming down the hill loaded with big hunks of rock like some big excavation is going on up there. When the enactment of my dreams is done, a lion is there. I climb on his back. He stands up so I am riding him and he walks towards the edge of the loft that overlooks the big meeting room. Then he leaps down to the floor below. I get off the lion and I am walking around. I have on a skirt and little girl shoes and realize I don't have on underpants. I wonder if we'll enact my dreams in the big group and if it's okay not to have on underpants. I feel very shy with the people who are there but still comfortable in myself. This is a different kind of shy than I am used to.
Medium: Tempera Paint on Paper
Date Created: May 2010
I dream I am at a wedding and a young man comes up to me and tells me he is going to count the spires on a butte. He gives me a card about it. He is pursuing me. I feel shy that I am so much older than he and that I like him. But it doesn't bother him at all. He wants me to go with him, and I do, not caring what others think. He presses a buzzer by a door and someone opens it for us. We go through the door and enter a garden that's an adventure land. He tells me there are snakes in here. We start exploring, climbing into and through things, closets, furniture, a fancy restaurant. When we climb through closets I ask about the snakes, feeling scared. He has no worries about them. I keep following him. As the girl is emerging in me I begin exploring this new world with him. It is visceral and alive. More and more in my waking life I feel myself standing in this place, at his side, in his world, where time stands still and everything is full of life. I am beginning to learn about not running from my fear. I am beginning to learn to stand with him and feel my fear.
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