Eros-1FINAL.mp4

In Elizabeth Gilbert’s book Big Magic, she tells the story of how she got started writing one of her novels. Writing the novel would end up taking years of her life, and involving study, archival research, travel, the whole bit. But it started with something much smaller: “a whim small enough that I could have just ignored it. It barely had a pulse.”

That whim? “I just thought a garden would be nice.”

She started planting the garden, choosing plant by plant what she might want to include. Over time, she got curious about where all these plants had come from, where they were native to. She started researching their origins, then researching how they had spread. In the process, she uncovered a secret history of 19th century botanical exploration, a subject she hadn’t even known existed before. This became the basis of her next novel.

The keystone of this whole story is that original whim — her ability to sense that tiny, nearly imperceptible whim, to fan the spark into a flame, lighting the path in front of her one step further, one step further.

In general, most of us are pretty detached from our whims and desires. Many people have come to work with me because they have no sense of what they want out of life, and when we work on lowering the stakes, softening things down to “what do you want right now, in this room?” they still feel confused. They try things almost at random, looking for one that feels better than another. Lying down? No, not that. Stretching? Better, it does feel nice. Staring out the window and stretching while humming a tune? Ah, there it is, that is quite nice.

Getting back in touch with desire, with eros, it’s best to start small, to start early, and to start where you are.

What does all this have to do with dream return? There are a few answers to that:

1. I’ll admit that out of the 4 elements of dream return in this course (Waking Journal, Image Return, Somatic Resonance, Eros Tracking) this one is the least directly connected to the immediate practice of dream return. You could probably get by for awhile without it, if you were so inclined. I wouldn’t recommend it though, because
2. Having an intuitive grasp of eros and its navigation becomes maybe the most important element of imaginal literacy further down the line. Being able to sense the ‘flavor’ of different desires and urges, to have a taste for whether they’re coming from your own deepest values, or from advertisers, or from traumatic patterns, or from mammal urges that aren’t appropriate to the context… it’s an indispensable skill for navigating the world later on.
3. Also, sensing eros is useful in dream return. Many people get stuck wandering around an inner image, unsure what to do next. This happens less when you’re able to inquire Practice: What Does the Situation Want?, and to sense some direction for the answer, some dynamic that wants to be expressed.
4. And finally, even more so than tracking eros is useful for dream return, dream return is a useful practice ground for tracking eros. Dreams allow us a safe environment to explore the dynamics, directions, explosions, and eclosions of eros, before taking that exploration into the outer world. This final point is perhaps the most important:

It’s important to begin exploring eros early, in large part because if you don’t start until you must, you may be in trouble.

A helpful metaphor: imagine someone who’s been poor their whole life, maybe even homeless for stretches of time. Suddenly, they win the lottery. We’ve all seen cautionary tales, people who come into massive amounts of money very suddenly, and end up losing it all, or even ruining their lives and relationships. They buy mansions and helicopters and go broke in a few years. They can come to resent their family and old friends who come out of the woodwork asking for favors. They can become cruel and impulsive, now that they don’t need anyone else’s help, acting out their own old resentments on the people around them.