Spiritual Messages from Torah and Dreams: Living Waters, Lizards, Broken Pencils, and Mourning Doves
It started with a dream I had last week, during the weekly Torah reading called Korach, when Korach and his supporters are swallowed up by the earth for rebelling against Moses, and the “Living Waters/Chayim Mayim,” are used as the final purification rite for those in contact with the dead.
What is dead now? What needs to be purified?
The dream:
Two Iguanas with spikes on their backs. They’re somehow my pets. I feel responsible for them and I don’t want them. I’m afraid of them. I also realize they’re not on leashes, so they can easily get away, which would make me very happy. I’m sitting on a rock, the two of them in front of me, one closer. It tries to snatch my pencil, an old #2 yellow pencil, but I kick at it. It doesn’t succeed in taking the pencil but it does break it in two pieces. (That image still floats in my mind, of a broken #2 pencil floating in the air.) Then the two iguanas slip into the beautiful water to go hunting, and I’m free! I go prancing off to hike in the forest, overjoyed by my freedom.
Why two? Why Iguanas? Why the pencil?
I hope I don’t offend anyone with what may seem like cultural appropriation, but a few years ago I was introduced to the idea of Native American Medicine Cards and Spirit Animals. I include my experience with these because I believe that all spiritual paths lead to the same place ultimately, we are all fundamentally connected, and I have found them useful and enlightening. I include my experience with the utmost respect--and my story wouldn’t be a story without them--or it would definitely not be as good.
I read about the medicine of lizards first. According to my book, they come in dreams, are the medicine of dreamers and can help you see differentiate the shade from the shadow. The shadow can be your fears, hopes, or the very thing you are resisting, and it is always following you around. For me, they were the fears that are always following me around--about my health mostly. The broken pencil was the old story of my childhood, and the fears I inherited from generations of hypochondria as a survival mechanism, I’m guessing. Broken because it’s an old story, but it’s still mine and can’t be taken away from me. I can now write a new story. I am free to do that.
We talked about my dream during a Zoom Shabbat morning service last week and someone brought the idea of two doves into the conversation as a somehow substitute for the iguanas. Then I responded, and another person pipes up and says, just as you were talking, two doves landed on my deck.
