I swear my dreams are listening to me, and maybe to you too. I have vivid dreams that reach far beyond my own life. This juicy, unignorable, perseverance watermelon dream speaks to every woman going through divorce.

The sensations of my thick wet curly hair in my hands and water dripping through my fingers woke me. My eyes still sleepily closed I saw the entire dream unfold. As Stephen Aizenstat describes in his book, Dream Tending, I welcomed each alive and embodied image.

Scrunching my thick wet curls, I walk into my childhood living room. My friends have left to go dancing without me. Instead of being upset, I am curious and astounded by a huge quarter of a watermelon sitting on the couch. I am drawn to its juicy red-yellow-green perfectness. Immediately I think of family picnics and seeing how far we could spit seeds. My mouth waters. And then, what is this?

A piece of white paper, unignorably stapled to the watermelon. As I pick at the metal staple with my nail.

“What are you doing Staple? Why are you here?” I ask.

The staple pops off but the paper is sticky stuck to the watermelon.  Just then there is a shift and I see out of the corner of my eye, beige fabric moves. My heart is skipping and then calm washes over me. A benevolent being. I am holding the sticky watermelon-stained paper. The wise being is smiling as I read to myself, “Tom wants you to call him. He wants to put his emotional needs first and his emotional needs have to come first.” Tom? My first love? Innocence and first blush of womanhood? After decades of life, I am happy remembering the tenderness and vulnerability. I sense the wise faceless sage is smiling.

The Transitional Space Between

The words overwhelm and white-knuckle fear both come to mind when I think about going through divorce. I often asked versions of “Who was I before all this? What part still belongs to me? And who am I now?” I felt lost. It took time for me to fully get in my bones that the ending is not empty space but a new beginning. That empty space wasn’t empty at all, but full of the most delicious, rich compost, and there were seeds there. Maybe even family and life-affirming watermelon seeds.

But before I arrived at emotional honesty, clear boundaries, self-preservation, and a new sense of happiness, I had to go through the desert, the dry, hard business, and administration of divorce. Mountains of paperwork, a cacophony of confusing words and terms, emotional excess, and betrayal of boundaries. And worst of all the robbery of the once loving life.

William and Susan Bridges, authors of Transitions: Making Sense of Life’s Changes, remind us of the difference between change and transition. Transition is the inner process of coming to terms with what has changed. Divorce may change our external lives, but the inner transition unfolds in its own time often guided by our dreams.

What happens when we are standing between the life we once thought we had, now ended, and the life that has not fully appeared? Our inner wisdom appears, we reclaim our emotions, cultivate our rind (our protective boundaries) and bring deliberate attention to witnessing the transition instead of being consumed by it. We sit on the couch and smile.

When Dreams Go Quiet

I shared this Watermelon, Writ, Witness dream with my friend Annmarie. She, too, had been through a difficult divorce and something she said caught my attention:

“I stopped dreaming during my divorce. I am just now starting to dream again.”

Annmarie was in a long abusive marriage followed by a prolonged traumatic divorce that lasted years. During this intense period, Annmarie said she felt she had stopped dreaming.

What happens to our dream life when our waking life spikes our stress and requires nearly everything we have simply to get through the day? Sometimes our dreams seem to go quiet especially during periods of high stress. During the last year of her divorce, Annmarie was introduced to Ayurveda, a holistic, balanced approach to health and wellness. She told me it was then her dreams started to come back.

Dreams As Companions Through Divorce

What if dreams themselves can become companions during life’s transitions? What if our dream life is still alive, even in the dry desert of divorce? That juicy vibrant self has not disappeared just because we are standing in the desert. In Dream Tending, Stephen Aizenstat describes discovering that when people begin listening deeply to the living figures in their dreams (the watermelon, the staple, the note, the sage), “…an authentic life emerged, one informed by the truth of what existed at the inner core of each individual” (Aizenstat, 2009, p. 7).

Tending Your Dreams Through Life’s Transitions

Keeping a dream journal and nightly dream ritual can be part of our hope journey. Dreams can illuminate our healing process as we reclaim and reimagine our lives. In the evening, when the day is done, I light a candle, say a prayer, and remember all I am grateful for. I invite in my dream life by stating, “I am here. I am listening. And what, dear dreams, do you want me to know?” Sometimes I plant a question or dilemma into my sleep for the dream to take up.  I might say, “I need help with…” before I blow out the candle and climb into bed.

In the wee liminal moments between sleep and awake I try to remember the dream that visited. Sometimes the dream scoots away in a puff. Vaporized gossamer. And other times the dream is a locomotive, with every screech, rattle and roll, smell of soot, and impressive detail shouting, “I am here.”

Other times I sit quiet and mediate with my dream and dream images like a cooing sleepy baby, soft, tender, and smelling fresh and warm from heaven. I am not always able to light my candle, but when I am able to slow down and take a moment before bed, I believe my dream life says, “Thank you, Betsy.”

In the morning before the woosh and rush of life grabs hold, I jot down a simple list of images and figures in the order in which they appeared in the dream:

Scrunching in my hands dark thick curly hair wringing wet

Water dripping on the floor

Walking into my childhood living room

Friends are gone

Very quiet

Watermelon, huge watermelon wedge sitting on a white couch (note; no plate underneath)

Note stapled to watermelon

Wise witness sage shrouded in muslin, linen, silk draping. Note: no face. Benevolent, calm, reliable presence.

Later, I first flesh out my notes, then write the entire dream down. While writing the entire dream down I notice how each image is alive and speaks to me.  My mind is curious, open, and ready. It reminds me of going to a dance and anticipating the new people I will meet there.

Hope

What transitions are you moving through? Maybe you are getting married. Maybe you are filing for divorce, or maybe you have just been served divorce papers. Maybe you are starting a new job or career. Any transition is a liminal space where the unknown and hope live side by side. It is that space between the old and the new and it is rich with possibilities. Tending our dreams keeps both curiosity and hope alive and helps us not only sit quietly on the couch and witness but also be emphatically and deliberately invested in our unfolding lives.

Perhaps tending our dreams is one way of tending ourselves while we are standing in the in-between place. We do not need to demand an answer. Instead, what if we remain curious about what might emerge from the uncertainty?

Sometimes hope doesn’t arrive as an answer. Sometimes it is already sitting on the couch, juicy, red, sticky, and impossible to ignore.

Source:

Aizenstat, Stephen. Dream Tending. Spring Journal, Inc., 2009.

Bridges, William, and Susan Bridges Transitions: Making Sense of Life’s Changes. Da Capo Lifelong Books, 2019.