One of my current school assignments is to “engage creatively” with one of my own dream images. I chose a dream I had a few years ago, which I remembered like this:

I’m walking down a glass corridor — glass floor, walls, and ceiling, but it’s dark outside. At the end, the hallway opens out onto a vast, starry field. Right in front of me is a huge transparent fetus, outlined in pale blue against the darker background.

Ok, first of all, we’re not talking about a literal pregnancy. Dreams happen in the realm of soul, so this is a soul baby. It’s new life in the world of the psyche, i.e. the inner world, i.e. the invisible world. So the image suggests things like growth, development, and imminence. The vast dimensions of the baby mean that all those associations take on a certain vastness as well. That fits with an excerpt from the first freewrite I did about the dream, imagining a conversation between the fetus and me:

Child: It’s about love. It’s about bigger love than you ever thought possible, given and received.
Joanna: How does one prepare for that?
Child: By loving, and by letting yourself be loved. I’m the child of the universe. And you’re part of the universe. Everyone is. That means I’m the child of everyone. All of you. Are you ready?

Are we ready? Hm. Lots to think about there. But then it occurred to me that I should go back to my journal and find the original dream. It was on September 16, 2010:

a long dim tunnel, at the end clear glass above, on both sides & straight ahead with a view into a huge dark blue space that is apparently a womb with placenta & fetus transparent but outlined in light light blue, not quite white. Tom Brokaw had died of a heart attack and so was doing public service announcements sitting in a chair wearing a dark blue fleece jacket covered with travel patches saying that the best way to avoid a heart attack is to love and be loved.

The details changed in my memory, and I’d forgotten about the ghost of Tom Brokaw. He’s an image of a wise old man, a voice trusted by millions, a figure who’s been all over the world and learned a thing or two, a representative of an older generation (older way of being) which is now ending and making way for the new. And he said nearly the same thing as the child in the writing exercise. All that love stuff is coming through loud and clear, yeah? I’m thinking the fetus is an image of vast new life and vast new love — love’s great capacity and potential on both the visible and invisible wavelengths.

And isn’t it marvelous how dreams weave the visible and invisible together? The visible alone is flat and inert, and the invisible alone is, well, invisible. But dreams use images derived from the waking world to create pictures of what’s going on below the surface, where normal instruments of measurement and analysis break down every time.