I’ve dreamed I was waltzing with a beloved dance teacher who passed away years ago, that I was setting up speakers to dance with extended family in empty spaces in an airport parking garage, and dreamed of dancing that felt like flying. For me, dancing is associated with times of pure enjoyment, of the youthful joy of having a body that moved with grace and without pain, and of the stage fright and excitement of performing as a child.
When I dream of dancing, I think about community, especially if it’s a circle dance, and of partnership if it’s a couple dance. As a metaphor, dancing with something means engaging with it with a kind of formal intimacy. Dance is a form of self-expression, so to dream of dancing could be an encouragement to express myself in a way that doesn’t involve words (a challenge for a writer). Dancing is also something I do with my whole body, so to dream of dancing is a reminder to return to greater body awareness, to focus on how I move and where my body reacts with the desire to protect and hold, and where it freely moves.
There’s something extremely satisfying about dancing in groups, everybody moved by the same music, the same rhythm. Cultures all over the world use community dance to celebrate life transitions or just to have fun. I wonder if the joy found in moving as part of a larger group of dancers is akin to the sensation of being part of a flock of birds moving in synchronized movement, or of fish swimming in schools.
I didn’t train professionally to be a dancer, but if I had, dancing in dreams would carry associations of discipline and self-sacrifice in addition to whatever joy came from mastering movement as an art form.
For me, dancing in dreams is always a reminder to dance more in my waking life. It’s one of life’s simplest pleasures.
5 thoughts on “Dancing in Dreams”
I rarely dream about dancing, but I have dreamed about the old folk dance days with that beloved teacher. There was a feeling of Heaven to it, being with people I loved who I knew were dead. Or maybe the gift of being able to visit a beloved lost past. In that dream we were doing “Heilsburger Dreiek”, a set dance for three couples that we haven’t done in decades, because nowadays folk dancing is mostly Balkan circle dances, due to lack of enough partners. The last time I did that dance in real life was at Jim’s memorial service.
I always thought waltzing with a skilled partner felt like Heaven. All of my attempts to recreate or even simulate those old folk dance experiences have utterly failed, though. Some gifts just belong to a certain time of life, I guess.
This post has thrown me for a loop today. I realized that the only time dance shows up in my dreams are where it appears as the dancer’s equivalent of “the actor’s nightmare.” I was a dancer by profession for many years, and dance in my dreams often has pressure, unpreparedness, feelings of exposure when not willing or ready to perform, and ridiculous costume mishaps.
A typical dance dream for me is where I know I need to go on stage, but I have no idea where the stage is, what the choreography is, what I am supposed to be wearing, or if there will be any music. I immediately start talking myself into just going for it and looking confidant enough that no one will notice I have no idea what is going on.
That depiction leaves sad about (at least) 2 things: 1) Dance never represents the kind of fun free expression to me that it obviously does to the little boy you posted dancing the jive…movement for the shear love of movement.
2) There is a sense that I have to know what I am doing or at least appear to which feels like the death of all possibility for improvisation and richness.
This feels very important, and as uncomfortable as it feels at the moment, recognizing this, I also feel grateful for the light being shone into the darkness.
Whoa! Shortly after writing the above entry I opened a book that someone recently loaned me. Here’s what I read:
“I was surprised in those early days how hard it was to find spontaneous movement, as if my body could not hear itself and instead spoke only in other’s words or movements. Initially we felt we had to rinse ourselves of all the conditioning of our dance training. For a year martha and I immersed ourselves in the quality and detail of walking, sitting, running, rolling and we were enchanted by the wit and synchronicities of what grew from such simple beginnings. We were interested, not in the grand movements of a Dancer, but in the particular and personal gestures of the ordinary (extraordinary) body.”
from A Widening Field: journeys in body and imagination by Miranda Tufnell and Chris Crickmay
Maybe this is why I feel like I get so much deeper with writing prompts and dream language sometimes. Words are my second language; movement is my first. There is some spaciousness and freshness when I get outside my Dancer realm. Maybe I can use this syncronicity to immerse myself in more playful community dance. Thanks again, Laura.
Thanks for your input, Kim! I suspected your experience of dance in dreams would be different from a non-professional’s, and I really appreciate hearing what it’s like for you. This is a great illustration of why simply using a dream symbol dictionary is inadequate to fully understand a dream–we have personal associations that vary widely from one person to another in addition to levels that resonate for most people. That quote sounds like Feldenkrais practice to me, based on what I understand of it from your teaching. Maybe if we don’t call it “dance” but call it “movement” instead, it would be easier to let the performance aspect go.