In a dream the night before last, I pulled a very long hair from my nose. It was metres long, seemingly unending, and when I did finally pull it free, the pain woke me up.
We’ll get to the dream and what it meant, but I must begin with the story of driving home from yoga yesterday evening. During the class, I mentioned that an operation I had some twenty years ago to remove a piece of broken bone from my right knee prevented me from doing a ‘hands-free’ pose (King Pigeon) on that side, a pose I could do quite reasonably on my left.
I’ve believed, for quite a while, that my knee limited me from doing this pose, but as I thought about it at that moment in class, it didn’t make anatomical sense. Surely it was my right hip that needed to open a little more to give me that extra vital couple of centimetres I needed to get into the pose so that I could lift my arms and be hands-free?
I was driving home, thinking about this. The hip and the knee work together, so it might be possible that the aftermath of the knee operation had tightened my hip. At that moment, in slow traffic, I noticed a car with a personalised number plate in the oncoming traffic: HIP KNEE.
What are the chances of that?
It was a marvellous synchronicity, and one that had me delving deeper into the connection between my knee and my hip while overflowing with the mystical sense of meaningfulness that always accompanies synchronicity.
Yes, we’ll come to the dream about pulling the hair from my nose, and what it meant, but first we must meander with the hip and knee synchronicity.
I approach synchronicity as a reflection of a stirring within my unconscious, something beginning to rise into consciousness, to be known and acknowledged. In this way, synchronicity can also be seen as a waking dream, playing out more in the language of the unconscious than in the everyday language of waking reality. You might also say that synchronicity is a nudge from the divine, another way, perhaps, of describing awakening into fuller consciousness.
My personal story about my knee does actually begin with my hip. I was about nine or ten years old, playing with friends on out-of-bounds-territory, when I decided to walk along the top of a high wooden fence, hands-free. I fell badly, and gashed my right hip against a rough barked gnarly tree. I was in all sorts of trouble from my father back at home. I walked with a bit of a limp because of the pain for about three months. My mother had her reasons for not taking me to see a doctor or have an x-ray, and, after the three months the pain stopped and my gait returned to normal, or so I thought. Some thirty plus years later I suddenly had sharp pains in my knee, and it turned out that a tiny piece of bone that had been broken – the hospital estimated – some thirty plus years before, had dislodged and was trapped under my kneecap causing the now quite excruciating pain. The knee operation was to remove the piece of bone that had probably broken when I fell from the fence all those years before.
The HIP KNEE car number plate reminded me that my injury was to both hip and knee, and connected to a time when I was in trouble for attempting a ‘hands-free’ challenge beyond permitted territory. No wonder my body doesn’t open to doing that particular hands-free yoga pose. It probably engages both my hip and my knee in a way that reminds my body-mind of that painful fall.
The synchronicity resolved the anatomical puzzle and shed light on the underlying body-mind dynamics. I’m excited to see if this new awareness translates into being able to ease my way into that yoga pose now!
What I knew about my knee and that pose turned out to be wrong, whichever way you look at it. When I now think about it rationally, I can’t see any anatomical reason why my knee would be limiting the required flexibility and strength for that pose. My hip, maybe, but not my knee.
So let’s return to the dream I had about plucking metres of a seemingly endless hair from my nose.
In the dream I had climbed a neighbour’s fence, a rather wobbly fence, but I didn’t fall. “You know there are some things I’ll never be able to do,” I said to her, and she looked surprised. The dream scene shifted to indoors and I became aware of the hair tickling my nose and already dangling a metre or so. I pulled on it, it seemed endless, and eventually I plucked it free and it really hurt.
You’ll have noticed the dream references to the fence, the neighbour, and the limitation, echoing the childhood event. I had left the dream to one side to interpret later, but it had begun to percolate at the back of my mind and it would have been doing this during the yoga class. The pieces began to fall into place as I questioned my solid knowing about my knee limitation during the class and then followed the synchronicity during the drive home to the new knowing about my hip, and then, ultimately the knowing I got from looking back to my childhood fall and remembering the trouble that ensued.
The dream came up because I have been learning some new business skills, and learning often requires first unlearning what we think we know so that we can move on to know better. In my dream I needed to let go of an attachment to a knowing that had been with me seemingly forever, and that actually stretched back to that childhood accident. It was a complicated knowing about the potential fall out from taking certain risks.
I’m giving you clues left, right, and centre here. Why did my dreaming mind picture the attachment to a certain knowing as a hair attached deep in my nose? Because I’m a writer, my dreams love word play, and ‘nose’ sounds like ‘knows’. In my childhood, people where I grew up would often say, “I knows …” rather than “I know …”. It was part of the local vernacular. They would also tap the side of their nose to indicate what they ‘knows” or point to their eye then their nose to signify “I knows …”. In my dream, it hurt when the hair was pulled out because it was attached to the inside of my nose. The hair symbolised an attachment to knowledge I gained during my childhood, a knowing I have now released to leave space for new and wiser knowing. Letting go of any attachment is painful. I’m glad it’s done, and I’m very grateful to my dream for offering me the insight, and for synchronicity for stepping in when I was being a bit slow interpreting.
Growing and flowing in life is very much about unlearning what we think we know, and discovering wiser knowing, and our dreams, as well as the occasional synchronicity, are there to help us do this.
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