August 2008 - My work recently has been to be the boy who is in relationship with the Animus. This feels brand new, yet it is where I came from. When I am not him, I am in the pathology of pressure and control. This feels old and comfortable. This is where I have been for almost my entire life.
Dream:
I am sitting across from the Animus. There is a group of people sitting around the table. He looks to me and raises his wineglass to clink mine. I do and say, "L'Chaim."
It feels sweet and I feel vulnerable once I realize that he wants to clink glasses with me. I am there with Him, not just one in the crowd at the table. He is actually there with me, there for me. In this dream, in this kind of relationship with Him, I am the boy. The boy is available for guidance, is loved, is there with his sword out, fighting pathology.
My edge, when I am the not-boy, is when I am in the pathology of pressure and control. I have spent my life as the not-boy, feeling the pressure and anxiety I learned as young, young child who lost his connection with god and felt no support in the world. I needed to cope with having a rageful, emasculated father and a controlling, anxious mom. In this world there was no support, only fear and anxiety, which, suppressed, resulted in pressure. This oppression was on me all the time. As soon as I had words for it – going to therapists by the time I was in third grade – I called it depression.
That was the word with which I was defined, by others and by myself.
What I have learned more about recently is how this pressure comes from needing to be in control, needing to manage my fear. When I get scared, when I reach a point when I don't know what I am supposed to, the point when a boy goes to his father for support, I jump away and try to control the situation. I have controlled things by "knowing"
what to do which is essentially not feeling the fear, not feeling support. I want to argue. I am passive-aggressive. I am not vulnerable. I am not with Him. Then I am gone and in a world of pressure and worry.
Dream:
I am watching a group surround a young man. It seems like the men are trying to intimidate the young man. One of the men in the group starts having anal sex with the young man.
The control is the demon raping the young man; it is the anxiety that something bad is going to happen and the pressure that there is no support, no help.
When I am with Him at the table, the need for control falls away. I can then feel vulnerable with him, which leads to the sweetest feelings of being loved and supported, and knowing that He is there to take care of me. I don't need to know. I can turn and say, "I don't know."
Three more dreams, which reveal where I can be when I am the boy with
Him:
Dream:
I watch a young boy being restrained. I yell for the people restraining him to get off. I play a board game with the boy, but then he picks up a sword and is swinging it around. I tell him I'm not going to take the sword from him, but some other people might.
Dream:
There is a group of men in a wild fracas. I feel like some of them are brutally beating on others. I feel scared and want to get away, but am afraid the group will come after me.
Dream:
There is a machine gun going off wildly in a room. I am trying to get the others in the room to get out.
When I am with him, I am in the potency of the boy with the sword with Him at my back. This is the energy of the boys in the fracas, out of control and full of wild energy. This is power of the machine gun, letting loose with a stream of bullets, wild, uncontrolled, like a boy.
In this world, the true world of my soul, there is no pressure.
The pressure is just a tool the pathology uses to keep me from the boy. It is a contaminant in my psyche. It does not come from the external world. I forget this all the time, believing the lie that some issue in the world is causing it, that there is something to worry about. The boy, my soul self, my true self, does not worry. He knows that all he has to do is turn to the Animus.
The oppressed false self, the one that feels the pressure, the one that I have lived with for 38 years, this is part of me that still needs to die, to be wiped away by the wild boys and the machine gun, sliced off by the boy with the sword. When I sit with Him in my vulnerability at the table, when I jump into the fracas, when I feel the power of the machine gun, I know that this part of me is dying.
Then I am the boy in His love that I am becoming, that I truly am and always have been, that I am returning to being. It is as the boy that I can feel deep, deep love; love for my wife, love for my seven month- old son, love for my brothers and sisters in NOE, love for the people who send dreams for me to help them with, love for the suffering children I work with, love for my friends who are in joy or pain.
L'Chaim.