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Juan Ponce de Leon who arrived with Columbus, never found the legendary “fountain of youth,” whose waters prevented aging. Currently, medicine is the geography in which that goal is still sought. Human beings always seek outside of themselves that which resides within: “I kept reaching around for you, but you were inside my hand.” (Rumi)
Inside everyone, as if stored in the “deep freeze” of the unconscious mind, is any potential we have failed to actualize in our waking lives. We are all, to some degree, “failure to thrive” adults. Dreams are one profound tool that access these untapped resources. Dream images birth into our awareness the talents, capacities and energies stored within us. One extraordinary case made this abundantly clear.
June S. began exploring her dreams at age 68, when she was markedly declining. Her early dreams excavated the interior forces active in the present and eventually addressed her earliest roots. Her childhood in the deserts of Utah was rugged. Her sister did not survive childhood… and many parts of June did not either! Various non-essential qualities and their attendant life-force simply did not emerge from the unconscious.
After several years of intensive dream work, June reported a dream that changed her life–and my own understanding of dreams: June is holding three babies and is feeling a radiant joy filling her heart as she cradles and loves and adores these three infants. In dream-like logic, they are wrapped in lettuce leaves.
“What does this glorious dream mean? she inquired.
I said I suspected these were three aspects of her own psyche which had not survived her first year and were only now–7 decades later–ready to be born!
“Why would they be wrapped in lettuce leaves? she asked.
“Probably, to see if you’re a vegetarian yet,” by which I meant, that this new energy is not to be consumed directly and applied to more of whatever projects the ego already intends. It is new life meant to grow on its own terms.
I had no idea what this remarkable dream foreshadowed, and I have never seen another case so dramatically clear, though this process is very common in dreams. It is why late bloomers benefit so much from the midwifery of dream interpretation.
Within a year of this dream June called to tell me she was having a bit of a “problem:” while her peers were growing visibly older by the month, she was growing visibly younger. And gaining more energy and more enthusiasm and was developing new interests she had never had. She made it clear she would be happy to cope with this new “problem” however long it continued!
I lost track of June for several years, but got occasional reports when she resumed dating (and affiliated activities she had assumed were long extinct). I remember her joking about how all the “middle-agers” would tire from dancing (she was taking lessons) and from partying (she was giving lessons) long before her energy ran down. Then she returned to school to study mystical and spiritual topics and writing and poetry and art.
Next I heard she had completed the 400 mile peace march across Russia! When she started her Sunday evening poetry salons I attended and was amazed that her energy and life force had continued to strengthen for years after the famous “3 babies” dream which she marked as the turning point in her transformation. It seemed that three separate one year old aspects of her psychic energy had been “averaged in” with her 70+ year old self, resulting in reverse aging. Too bad Ponce de Leon died seeking the fountain in Florida, when it was within, all along.
Virtually every cutting-edge lecture or performance I attended for years revealed June S. well ahead of me in line or already seated somewhere in the front row. I remember telling her at a Robert Bly lecture, the best thing I could do to further my spiritual education would be to steal her daytimer.
When I last saw June she was in her eighties and still so full of life and enthusiasm and playfulness, I could not believe this was the deteriorating 68 year old I had met, long ago. I now know that unlived potentials reside within every person. Whenever we fail to thrive, we store that life force, and if we do the work to reclaim it, we find ourselves as poet David Whyte says, “growing younger each day toward death.”
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