When the Door Opens for the Rogue
They locked you up for being a rogue. Now the door is open. Will you walk through it?
I sit with someone in session, and an image begins to form at the place I call the third eye. It feels like a story waiting to be told. The underlying reality is true, as it is in all my stories, though I am drawing on no one person’s literal experience—not a patient’s, a friend’s, or a family member’s. Years of listening, dreaming, and living gather their energy into an image. Then the image begins to speak.
Someone tells me a dream.
The dreamer and a companion visit a man in prison. He is late middle-aged, rough-looking, with cropped gray hair and the bearing of someone who has lived by his wits. He carries his meal in a small, cloth-lined wicker basket and walks toward an open door.
The dreamer knows he is a rogue. That is why he is there. He has been imprisoned for thoughts that refuse to conform to convention, for living outside what society deems acceptable and bland. He asks questions that unsettle people. He has a way of seeing through things they have agreed not to examine.
And there he stands, plate in hand, the door open.
I find myself lingering over the plate. It is such an ordinary thing. The man is going about the business of eating, of keeping himself alive. He has not become a grand symbol of rebellion. He looks as though he has had a hard time and still has to carry his own supper.
A prison can teach a rogue to watch his words. After a while, he may begin to do the jailer’s work himself. He learns which thoughts to swallow before they reach his mouth, which intuitions to set aside, and which parts of his nature are likely to cost him love or belonging. The bars become harder to see once he has grown used to living behind them.
I know something of that inward prison. Many of us do. A wild perception arrives, and we explain it away before we have listened. A dream disturbs the arrangement of our lives, and we hurry back to it. We sense a false note in a person or a place, then wonder whether we are being difficult. It may feel easier to call the rogue troublesome than to hear what has troubled him.
In the dream, though, the door is open. I want to know whether the man can see it. Perhaps he has walked toward it a hundred times, only to be turned back. Perhaps freedom has come so quietly that he does not yet trust what lies before him. His meal is still in his hands. No one has told him what happens if he crosses the threshold.
This is where the image begins to work on me. I can feel the urge to rush in and declare him free. Yet he may need a moment to recognize the door as a door. I might, too, if I had spent years believing that every exit led back to a cell.
The rogue has a place in the psyche. He strays beyond the path we know. He notices what the rest of us pass over, sometimes because we are afraid to look. He can make mistakes; he can get lost. He still deserves the chance to walk into the forest and discover where he is. Keeping him locked up because he might lose his way leaves all of us poorer.
The dreamer has come to visit him with a companion. That matters to me. Someone has made the journey to the prison, has seen the man at the open door, has stayed long enough to remember him. A witness cannot take his steps for him. A witness can let him know that the door is real.
I wonder where this story finds you. Perhaps you have already caught sight of a door in your own life and feel strange standing before it. Perhaps some part of you has been called unruly for so long that you have begun to believe the name is a sentence. The dream offers an image to sit with: a rough man carrying his supper, the familiar prison around him, daylight at the threshold.
He may take another bite before he goes. He may look back. Then, plate in hand, the rogue steps out.