Sacred Seeds

Dreaming with MCS as my co-pilot

“Dreamweaver” by Brian Froud

I’ve been thinking about dreaming and dreams a lot lately. In particular I’ve been trying to sort out what the heck my dreams are on the other side of life with MCS.

I used to be the kid who dreamed all the time. And by dreaming I mean DREAMING in big Broadway lights with glitter and follow-spots. There were Tonys and Oscars, huge houses, dress and shoes and horses, unicorns and fairies – you name it, I dreamed it. I even dreamed a few normal things like being a Marine Biologist or a Veterinarian, and I even went through the doctor-president-empress of the universe phase. But mostly my dreams, like my life, stayed rooted in the arts and entertainment world.

As I grew into my spirituality, that passion for entertaining blended with my love of ritual and lead to the creation of Magical Acts Ritual Theater. For eight years I spearheaded a crazy band of volunteers in exploring the line between ritual and theater. It was amazing, insane, back- and heart-breaking work, but it was wonderful. I stepped down as the companies Artistic Director at the end of 2002, just in time to rest up to get sick. There was some odd hand of fate in that I’m certain… I’m just not sure where or why.

After I got sick and then got diagnosed with Multiple Chemical Sensitivity I shut down pretty much everything in my life that wasn’t about healing. The dolls came out of my need to focus the residual creative energy somewhere and because really they were a heck of a lot of fun. But over the course of the next few years I closed off more and more of myself as the grind of chronic illness ate away at my heart until one day I realized that I had stopped dreaming.

Both realizing that I had stopped dreaming and finding my way back to dreaming came about through the gift of a smile and the infectious enthusiasm of a guiding spirit who wandered into my life just at the right time. With that spirit’s smile egging me on, I found a way to challenge my own assumptions that MCS had to own my life and dictate what I could and could not do from here on in. I took a chance and whispered a dream to the Universe.

Of course, in true Aries fasion I figured that would be it. Dream stated, I’m done. All I need was to do the work and I’d good. What the heck was I thinking? NOTHING in my life is ever that simple. For one thing my dream was a little too specific and needed reformatting. So for the last six months or more I have been wandering around with this thought bubble over my head with this jumble of notes about dreaming. And in the meantime, life happens.

Today though, I think I have a clue, or at least a better clue of what I want. Something broader, more “meta” if you will, that allows for more of who I am to come through. It’s incredibly simple really- I want to get the stories out of my head.

So what the heck does that mean? It means telling stories however they show up, as novels, short stories, rituals, stageplays, screenplays, and yes even dolls, because I realized today that the dolls I create are a form of story telling. Each doll tells one part of the story of the Deity/power they are embodying, one part of their myth, one part of their life; they are a story in three dimensions.

Some parts of this dream are going to be easier to do with MCS in my life than others, and that’s where dreaming is going to have to become faith. For each modality there is a point when I will have to step out of my safe haven and risk getting sick out in the world and/or find ways to work with and around my disability to get the job done and stay safe. The stepping outside of my box scares me silly. It is so easy for me to get sick in the world outside my air purified and non-toxic home, there are so many chemicals out there that I can’t see or smell that will knock me on my ass without warning. And yet, staying hidden in my house isn’t the answer either. Like I’m always telling my kids, there has to be a balance. So part of my dream is to find a safe balance between the haven I have created at home the toxicity of the world beyond my doorstep.

I am learning that dreams may present me with new challenges, but that they are only impossible challenges if I let them be impossible. MCS can only run my life if I let it run my life. I have to respect the limits it places on my health and well being, but within those limits, I intend to find the room to fly as high as I possibly can.

Tags: challenges, disability, dreaming, dreams, mcs, Multiple Chemical Sensitivity, ritual