There are times in life when the sense of lack and loss is overwhelming, and there are other times when we don’t even have the chance to realize something is missing.

And so we find ourselves losing something or someone or someplace or sometime in our dreams, from our wallet, our keepsake, our keys, our phone, our ticket, our flight, to our pet, our lover, our house, our way, our dignity, our life.  We are all familiar with some version of this dream theme.  Realizing we have lost something or are missing something sends us on an adventure to search for it.  Facing the threat that we are about to lose something sends us on a crusade to attempt to avert the loss.

Even when waking consciousness will not allow it, dreamtime permits us—playfully, facetiously, frustratingly, distressingly, violently—the reality of our condition: we are on a quest for wholeness.  We are striving to feel most true to our nature, most authentic, most comfortable in who we are and how we are, and to identify and fulfill our highest potential.  This quest is never fully finished until it really is finished and life as we know it—with this consciousness, in this body—is no longer sustainable.  And, who is to say it doesn’t continue thereafter?  But that is not a question for this moment, even when it always is.

Oftentimes we are not aware we lost anything, and yet we come upon something in our dreams we recognize as a disguised treasure that is important, essential, imperative to our being and to our reality.  When we are not looking, we find something we covet or secretly snatch on impulse.  The elements we encounter on our dreamtime search journey, whether we are intentionally seeking or not, speak to our process and to our resources.  The hunt for the apparently lost item, place, person, or point of reference often reveals to us what we actually need to discover.  The loss and the wandering are strategies from the unconscious that get us to exercise and expand our shaper sense of perception.  In this way we uncover what is waiting there for us that was up to that moment hidden and unknown.  Unexpected revelations are regularly contained there.

Sometimes the sense of having lost something is an illusion—that element we are desperately searching for was actually never lost, but went out of sight for a while, unaccessible to our conscious awareness for good reason.  In these cases, investigating and understanding the reason for its temporary absence is part of the work.  Sometimes, we are relieved to have lost something.  In these cases, observing the feelings, stories, judgments that arise in response to our sense of reprieve is part of the work.

Dreams offer us the opportunity to experience, explore, express that much repressed aspect of our condition: we feel lacking or incomplete, and our life is the quest to find that which we feel separate from, to come into union with it, to integrate it back into ourselves toward greater wholeness.  Or, we need to lose something in order to achieve this wholeness, yet we stubbornly insist on retaining it because we cannot identify ourselves without it or we are afraid of the void we would feel if we lost it.  In these cases, becoming familiar with and accepting the temporary discomfort that loss evokes is part of of the work.

In many cases, the only way we will stop reverting to old tactics, beliefs, habits, attitudes, perceptions, and so on, is to have them removed altogether from our psyche.  If there is one of these in waking life we are in some way resistant to losing even with our most fervent intention to do so, rest assured the unconscious is helping us to let go of it with mystifying resolution.  Cherished elements are seized from us in our dreams—absurdly, abruptly, cruelly, mockingly, turbulently—and this propels us to resume our quest for wholeness.

The unconscious holds the darkness of the unfamiliar, that which we most often avoid in waking life.  Ultimately, we are on a quest for what we don’t already know in our conscious waking mind awareness, but which we have access to when we can move through our resistance to the unpredictable, the uncertain, the unforeseen.  Innovation, possibility, creativity are beyond what our waking consciousness is comfortable with.  Dreamtime grants us the opportunity to tap into that source of wisdom, inspiration, and insight through its relentless journey into the unknown and the unexpected.  It is always good news when we lose and search for and find something in our dreams.