Getting ready (followed by the lyrics for "By my side" from Godspell) followed by notes

By your side
By your side
By your side

........................

This concurrence of dream, poetry, and artistic license is what keeps me going as a poet and a dream-worker. I'm going to keep this simple: When I had the dream (upon which my poem "Getting ready" is based), I did not know what the rock in my shoe represented. I only knew it was important or significant. I didn't know what it meant that I was joining a march when I wasn't sure what we were protesting. (refrain:) I only knew it was important or significant. I didn't know what it meant that there were other stones in my shoe or that my wife called me on my phone after I removed the stones from my shoe. I only knew that it was important or significant. In other words, knowing that there was something archetypal going on in my dream, in writing my poem, I trusted the archetype to go ahead of my propensity to have things make logical sense. So much so that I posted the poem without having any clue as to what it meant. I trusted that it would make sense eventually, in the sense of attracting meaning to itself. All I needed to do was let it fly into the world. It didn't have to make sense. It felt right and it felt credible, as a dream feels credible. Supporting adjectives for "credible" here are "authentic" "self-sustaining" "expansive" "teleological" "intuitive". I received confirmation of that within less than an hour. When I read the poem to my wife, Shirley, she said that it reminded her of a song in Godspell, "By my side", which she proceeded to sing to me! Then we googled it and listened to the original soundtrack.

"Let me skip the road with you
I can dare myself
I can dare myself
I'll put a pebble in my shoe
And watch me walk (watch me walk)
I can walk and walk!
(I can walk!)

I shall call the pebble Dare
I shall call the pebble Dare
We will talk, we will talk together
We will talk about walking
Dare shall be carried
And when we both have had enough
I will take him from my shoe, singing:
"Meet your new road!"
Then I'll take your hand
Finally glad
Finally glad
That you are here
By my side. . ."

Walking, in this lyric, is an act of power. Like walking in a protest march. When you join in a protest march, you are not actually marching, you are walking in power with others who feel like you. In the dream I am on the fringes because I don't know what we are protesting. (That is descriptive of how many of us feel these days, that we are in the right in protesting what Trump and other right-wingers are doing, in deconstructing democracy, but we aren't focused or cohesive as a social / political / conscientious movement.) When I step into the alley I become aware of the stone in my shoe, which is the size of a "juniper berry". I remove the stone, which I picture as a juniper berry. Here is an instance of the dream and the poem collaborating . In the dream there was a small stone and then more stones in my shoe and in the dream the stones that fall out of my shoe are stones that were once meaningful to me. In other words, they were stones that helped me on my journey in the past but now they are irritants if I don't remove them, which I do, with gratitude. In the Godspell song the singer names the pebble "dare", because while it was in their shoe (not sure of the gender of the singer), it gave them courage to continue. The song is about the singer's arriving at a moment when the stone is no longer needed because now there is a "new road" to walk. They don't need courage to walk this new road, because they don't have to walk it alone. The last lines in the song are: "Then I'll take your hand / Finally glad / That you are here / By my side." The parallel in my poem is, after he has removed all the stones from his shoe, his phone begins "chirping".. It is his wife asking where he is. He tells her he has been taking a break, but actually he has been doing a lot of inner work. He needed objectivity. He needed to look at who his fellow marchers are, and he needed to listen to what they were marching for -- "Justice, Freedom, Peace". His wife tells him that she will soon be "coming by". The poem ends with his statement, "I'll be ready." I take that to mean, he will be ready to walk with her, on the new road, side by side.

I hope this explains how a dream and a poem and the song sung to me by my wife, who is in the dream, concur, thereby affirming the larger meaning that comes whenever we amplify an archetype. See, an archetype is quantum. It is not just in the poem or in the dream or in the Godspell song. We can picture it as an energy field that attracts content to itself when the archetype is constellated. If this resonates with you I invite you see how you might also be marching and chanting "Justice, Freedom, Peace" in your own dreaming. Because dreams are archetypal they carry a lot of potential to become real because they are, as I suggested earlier, "authentic" "self-sustaining" "expansive" "teleological" and "intuitive".