Dreams
How a University of Colorado Hall of Fame runner found himself through recording his dreams.
Interview and film by Brendan Davis
Illustrations by Ping Zhu
Michael Sandrock is a journalist with the Boulder Daily Camera in Colorado as well as a University of Colorado Hall of Fame runner.
“I have run almost, almost every day since 1973,” he says, way back when he was a walk-on for the CU team. He didn’t let up after college either, running with Rob de Castella and Steve Jones in Boulder. “I was good enough to win some local races and get some trips,” he says. “I was always just interested in traveling.”
He’s still running today, and although his best times are behind him (14:48 5k, 30:23 10k, 2:24 marathon), he has no intention of quitting.
Sandrock’s writing extends far beyond his weekly running column for the newspaper, or the work he does as a tutor in the University of Colorado. Much of it is deeply personal, recording and reflecting upon his dreams, and contemplating the rich relationship between a body and mind in motion. That is becoming his life’s work, and where he finds wisdom. What follows are his own thoughts in his own words. Dive in, explore, dream.
What's the meaning of life? I know lots of people ask questions, just like, what's this mystery? How did the earth form? Where did consciousness come from? All those questions. I never realized my potential as a runner, but that wasn't really my path. So it has always been a lifelong journey of trying to find my calling in with the overall goal of just saying, ‘Hey, I just want to get the most out of life,’
I always had that drive. I kept training and that was back in the 80s when Boulder was the center for all the best runners in the world. I actually ran with the training group of Rob de Castella and World Record holder Steve Jones. Deke used to say, ‘Yeah, Rocky's a 2:17 marathoner. Just hasn't done it yet,’ because I would do the workouts and keep up. I kept it going. I ran.
For many years, I would wake up and the first thing I would do is go on a run. It's a routine. Now, instead of waking up and going on a run, I wake up and go through my dreams. I remember, write down the dreams that I had that night, then sit, do my meditation and go through the dreams that I wrote down during the night. While I do the meditation, thoughts come up, everything slows down. Then when I'm done with that, I do a little bit of stretching, a little bit of yoga, then, I go do the run. That's the routine.
Jung calls it the individuation process. Joseph Campbell calls it the Hero's Journey. You have to put it all together into the gestalt… one big, big picture. When I was younger, like a lot of runners, I was just running all the time, running 100 miles a week. That was too much – so out of balance. How do you find the balance? Well, it's inside of us. It's different for everyone.
One of the running motifs that I had in my dreams is being a runner. I had different running themes over the years. One of them is running shoes: piles of running shoes, one running shoe left, several left shoes, right shoes. If you pay attention to the unconscious, which comes through in the dreams, that's how it communicates to intuition. Sixth sense dreams. Then imagery coming through tells you what the message is. In this case, it was that message of finding a balance. Finally I did that.
I had an image in a dream in the last couple of months where there was a pair of running shoes, with no marking on it at all. They were blue running shoes, but a blue that I had never seen before, sort of a translucent outer space blue. The shoes I had the sense that the shoes fit just right. So in a sense, I found that balance. You can’t run too much, you can run’t too little. You can't work too much. So it's that whole idea of the middle way.
Dreams use a vocabulary we already know. So mine have memories from running. But since we're all human beings with the same life pattern, it takes the archetypes of the collective unconscious, as Carl Jung called them, and uses the running symbols. Because that's what I know to manifest and explain the stages of life. One of the themes was running races. As time goes on, you're not a competitive runner anymore. Well, if we fight that, we fight what is.
I want to keep doing it.
My ego says no, I want to keep being a good runner.
I want to run master's races.
I want to do this.
But time changes and everything changes. In the dream there's a start line. It was the New York City Marathon. The race started when I wasn't there. That’s the way the running imagery comes through. Because that's what I know and what explains that life process.
I wasn't on the start line.
So it's time to give up that competitive thing.
I'm at this stage in my life, not 27 anymore. By following the dreams and letting them come up, seeing the emotions and coming to grips with the emotions that are represented in the symbols, in the dreams, then I can be comfortable with that. Not have anxiety about it. Feel just fine as it is, and then actually feel happy about it. You have that center, that still point, the immovable spot that is talked about in the different traditions.
Immovable spot? Where's the immovable spot? Is it right over here, over the tree over there? It took me a long time to realize that the immovable spot is right here. Right here where I'm standing. And who's ever watching it sits right where you're sitting right now.
Immovable spot is a psychological state where you're not buffeted by the different emotions that come up. Fear, or fear that I'm going to get older and I'm not going to be able to run fast anymore. You know, anxiety. When you reach that point, that's all gone. And that gives the calmness, and the serenity, and the heaviness.
Running can contribute to the immovable spot if it's done in the context of where you're supposed to be in your life and not, it is done for the correct reasons. If you're doing it the right way, then running gives you that grounding because it gives you the routine. Running is what gives us that sense of being alive because we're animals, we are nature and running is the best, best way aerobic exercise. It’s the way that we can get that sense of being alive and in the moment, present moment. Because literally, as Chris McDougall told us, we were literally Born to Run.
It was Thoreau who said, “The mass of men live lives of quiet desperation and therefore go to their grave with the song unsung in their heart and soul.” And to uncover that song that's in the heart, is what we want to do. And so for many of us, running gives us the sense when we run that it's there, that's the correct path.
And so we know what we know. We're doing it, but we have to put it all in the balance. So there's many reasons why we run when we're starting out for unknown reasons. We just run because it feels good. I still remember the first one I did: it was in the woods outside Park Ridge in Park Ridge, Illinois, and it was just like this beautiful city that feels good in summertime and everything feels good.
Running is just a way.
So running is, as we know, running. The myriad benefits and the right reasons for doing it is because running lends itself to a richer, fuller, deeper life, both physically and emotionally. I've been running for almost 50 years and I'm just going to keep running, you know, slow down a little bit, but I'm just going to keep it going. I'll keep running and I'll keep dreaming and keep following the routine.
I always had a sense of anxiety, like I was a little bit of an outsider, not quite connecting with the whole meaning of life. Then one time I had some personal issues and woke up in the middle of the night. I was like, Oh, man. I always have a stack of books so I picked up one I hadn't read. It was Carl Jung's Memories, Dreams and Reflections. A journalist helped him at the end of his life tell his story and it's really a great summary of all of his work. This is what he would call synchronicity. I picked it up and I opened it up to chapter six. I can still remember opening lines, and there it is right after he had his break with Freud: Jung says he said he felt completely untethered, falling, just adrift.
I'm like, oh, man, this is how I feel. So if even Carl Jung felt this way, I had to ask myself, what myth do I live by?
What myth do I live by?
Those are Jung's words. And he said that he made it his life goal to find out what myth he lives by.
So that's what we have to do to get centered and grounded and that's the path of a lot of dreams. Jung wrote, ‘Until we make the unconscious conscious, it directs our actions and we call it fate or circumstances.’
Then I studied and did an interview with Joseph Campbell, and I think it must be the last interview he ever did right before he died in 1987. A lot of people know him from The Power of Myth, a great Bill Moyers series that was really a study of his work, and he had this idea of the hero's journey. Dreams are the hero's journey. If you follow them, then you're going to see the same symbols and myths, the same stories and patterns come through. And you see, you have these two types of dreams. I had a personal dream: a nephew living with me. I had to go find a place to live and to come through. You have to ask yourself what that really means.
Then every once in a while in Campbell's works you come across a collective dream. That's symbolic for everyone because we go through the same pattern: we're born; we’re dependent on our parents for 12 years, 15 years. Longer than any mammal by far, by far.
"I'll keep running and I'll keep dreaming and keep following the routine."
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This feature originally appeared in METER magazine, just one of the exclusive benefits available to members of HARE A.C.
