The 9 Dreams: Exploring Thought Patterns That Keep Us from Moving Forward – As Both Individuals and Societies
An ennead of cultural misunderstandings
In 2020, I sat down to systemize the lessons of my reconstruction journey.
For the three years before, I had travelled around the world in an almost-desperate search for help, eagerly flipping around every corner of what I’d thought to be true in the search to retrace my life force. I had sold my home and used most of my savings for this quest, because I didn’t feel I had another choice - my life had hit a dead-end.
It’d been a tough journey, but also a life-saving one. Because somewhere along my road, I managed to let go of my depression and sense of utter hopelessness - and retrace my interest for life. It was actually quite miraculous.
When I returned to Norway to give my life a second go, I wanted to put into WORDS the madness I felt I’d walked out of. I wanted to give names to the structures that had prevented me from stepping into the director seat of my own life, thrown me into depression, and taken my life to a dead-end.
Inspired by the 9 archetypes of the Enneagram - and especially the 9 passions at the core of the types - I started mapping out 9 thoughts and behavior patterns that I experienced as the main predators to my happiness. I called these patterns: The 9 Dreams.
The interesting thing with The 9 Dreams, were that while I found them within myself, I didn’t feel the seed of them belonged to ME. Rather, I felt The Dreams were sort of collective misassumptions: that I’d been TRAINED to take on! In my experience, my society had never addressed these patterns as unhealthy – quite the contrary: it had encouraged them!
In a way, I realized, The 9 Dreams are collective wounds, very-problematic thinking patterns that has put down roots in our cultures and are being passed on from one generation to the next. Basically, they’re part of a faulty and destructive conditioning – that we DEFINITLY want to let go of!
Indeed, as I perceive it today, awakening from The Dreams is not only the key to individual happiness and maturity - but also to build our sane, joyful and supportive societies!
The 9 Dreams-project is my prompt to raise our awareness of core patterns that doesn’t serve us, neither as individuals nor as societies. And the beautiful thing is, that as we approach these misunderstandings consciously, they’re not that hard to let go of.
So, I thought I would introduce you to the 9 Dreams today! To not make this too long, here are the first 4 Dreams for today. And then I’ll share the remaining 5 Dreams in my next letter.
(Ps: Those of you that are interested in the Enneagram might recognize the Dreams as a deep-dive into the 9 Passions: the ancient core of the Personality Types. Dream 1 is an exploration of the passion of Anger, Dream 2 investigates the passion of Pride, Dream 3 studies the passion of Self-deceit, and Dream 4 explores the passion of Envy.)
1: AWAKENING FROM THE DREAM OF PERFECTION – HONOURING THE CREATIVE POTENTIAL OF ANGER
I think anger is greatly misunderstood. Sometimes, we even learn that our anger is “wrong”. It's not. Rather, anger is our most powerful creative resource! It's the energy to change and manifest things! When anger becomes a problem, it’s usually because we fuel it into what we DON’T want to happen, rather than into our upgraded choices. Basically, we see a situation for our inner eye that we’re not happy about, and then we use all our emotional energy to attack that picture. While maintaining the imperfect situation for our inner eye, we loop in frustration, telling ourselves: this is wrong, this is stupid, I don’t like it this way. But really, what we’re doing in this case, is just to keep that situation stuck!
Our visions have power. Because of that, our smarter choice is to envision our UPGRADED situation, and fuel our creative energy into manifesting that inner picture. And then, if we cannot se an upgraded situation, its usually better to take our emotional charge off it entirely, until we manage to visualize an upgraded potential.Do you get me?
2: AWAKENING FROM THE DREAM OF SERVICE – I HAVE TO START WITH MYSELF!
If we want to make a positive change in the world, the place to start is … ourselves. After spending years in the spiritual/self-help environment, I've seen so many examples of people aspiring to “rescue the world”, long before they even know the basics of taking care of themselves. In the Enneagram, the 2nd vice is Pride, and I think it’s pride that often kicks in when we want to be saints to our world. But really, if we’re here to make a change, just learning to love ourselves will make the greatest difference. Actually… that simple-not-so-simple self-love might be just the challenge our heart is yearning for.
3: AWAKENING FROM THE DREAM OF PERFORMANCE – ALLOWING MYSELF TO BE… ME
I don’t think it’s just me who entered adulthood with a sort of assumption that I had to be great - to be worthy. This assumption caused a lot of competitiveness and aggressiveness in me, and caused quite some havoc to my relating abilities. I've spent years unravelling that assumption, to allow myself to come back to simplicity: it’s enough just being ME. Actually, being myself is the greatest thing in the world. I saw this dream too SO CLEARLY through my years in the spiritual/self-help environment, but it’s at play in other layers of society too (social media anyone?). The Dream of Performance causes a hunger for attention and approval, and also self-deception, as we don’t feel we can allow ourselves to be the imperfect, simple, complex being that we really are. It's a very painful misunderstanding… that prevent us from exploring our beautiful - and totally unique - selves. Awakening from this dream is really a lot about seeing life as what it is: An exploration ground. Rather than a show-reel.
4: AWAKENING FROM THE DREAM OF INNOCENCE – MY POWER IS IN MY RESPONSIBILITY
It’s so tempting to always look around us to find the evil perpetrator outside – the one “who made us do like we did”. But eventually, we’re the main characters of our own lives. Of course, there are extreme situations where we are indeed the victims of harmful actions. But in more daily life situations, my experience is that the more responsibility we can take for how our life twists and turns, the more powerful we feel! By letting go of the righteous victim that looks for everyone else’s fault, and instead acknowledge our part in situations where things have gone astray, we’ll often feel much better! Cause then, we can grieve our choice - and upgrade it for next time.
So, this was the intro to the first 4 of the 9 Dreams! I'm preparing here to launch my first online course through Tunsberg Tantra. It's called Awakening Through the Enneagram – and it’s an introduction to the Enneagram of Personality Types, and to spiritual work through the 9 Passions. Send me a message if you're interested in joining us for the course!
How beautiful to look back on your experience and use the wisdom of the Enneagram to give it meaning. We have been trained in these dreams and they are fueled by fear. When you step out of them (as you have done), they lose their energy and power. They are no longer reality, only a dream.