We celebrate curiosity’s role in discovery, and regret its potential for damage. Mature curiosity demands that we embrace the confusion, doubt and anxiety inherent in engaging new ideas and complex problems. Social curiosity requires discernment: are we genuinely and empathically interested in others, or simply indulging voyeurism via social media?

Curiosity can lead us into thrill seeking, but lack of it dulls our libido for life. Is it grandiosity, ambition, or impulsive desire that is tweaking our interest—or is curiosity leading us into purpose, service and the numinous? We need to be curious about curiosity: what are we enacting–and why? In the unrestrained theater of our dreams even the most disallowed outer-world scenarios are played out. Dreams can do much to satiate and integrate the shadowy curiosities of the inner world if we remember, record, and reflect on them. 

Dream

I am in a dreary kind of industrial place full of single-story warehouse or farm type sheds/buildings – everything is grey. I don’t relish being there but I am resigned to it. I look up again at the shed I’m standing next to and am surprised to see a beautiful mural has appeared on it’s concrete apex (the triangular bit under the roof) – I don’t remember exactly the image but it is full of blue and movement.

I walk on to the next smaller row of sheds and in one I find skeletal figure of a man who is very sick and being tended to. The man is more skeleton than person, he has no eyes, only eye sockets for example, and is blackened/scorched: parts of his flesh seem about to fall away. I remember him as a famous actor, someone once very charismatic and good-looking, it is terrible to see him reduced to this. He is being moved from bed to chair by two nurse-type figures whom I do not see clearly. I go to help and hold his head – I am disgusted a little but also terrified that his head will come away in my hands if I am not careful enough. Once he is installed I move away.

I find myself in another larger room next door where a group of people I do not know are gathered for a purpose I do not understand. I leave and go back out into the grey yard, but then feel an urge to reconnect with the man. I find another of these nurse-type figures who tells me he is with his wife and family now. I feel a little disappointed/left out but also glad for him that even in his repulsive/decrepit state he is surrounded by loved ones and is cared for. 

If you would like to learn more about working with your dreams, join us in Dream School.

References:Giorgio Tricarico. Lost Goddesses: A Kaleidoscope on Porn.

Verena Kast. Father-Daughter, Mother-Son: Freeing Ourselves from the Complexes that Bind Us.

Far From Heaven (film with Julianne Moore and Dennis Quaid).