When I first went to see Marc, I was looking for help in making a hard decision. Although I’d recorded dreams for more than ten years, I had no idea how to understand what they were saying to me, or how to work with them. I thought Marc could help me wrest the answer to my problems from my deeper consciousness through the dream images.
It quickly became clear that we were not going to pose questions to the unconscious as a way to solve problems. I was only two years out of law school and had become used to using the strength of my mind to analyze and evaluate most all situations. So it was a jolt to realize that problem-solving was not on the agenda. I would have to use my mind to pay more attention to what I was really feeling, and give up the constant mental habits of staying-in-control and keeping-it-all-together.
This would be a process, a journey. My work with Marc was exposing the ploys that my personality had constructed – ploys made, I thought, with the good intentions of just getting along in the world. It took a little while for me to see that those ploys – everything that I felt I had to do to feel “safe” – not only kept me safely distanced from others, but dangerously distanced from myself.
Living day to day, I didn’t like to think that my real self wasn’t available to me. I accepted that I didn’t engage the world or even the people that I loved, from this place of my real self. But it seemed scary to think that I might be separated from my real self. The dreamwork guided the integration of my feelings gradually back into my daily life. Sometimes I wanted to reject the feelings that were revealed in my dreams – because they didn’t match my concept of who I was, or who I wanted to become. But I couldn’t deny that they were my feelings.
I valued authenticity in myself and others, but keeping myself “safe” had resulted in a kind of numbness. It was as if the effort to hide my feelings of despair and anger from others had effectively hidden those feelings from myself. The dreams gave me access to those feelings again.
Dream:
I’m beside a quiet pond. There is a young girl on one side and a wolf on the other.
To feel what the young girl is feeling is to be vulnerable. I think of the wolf as being dangerous. I am afraid for the girl – the wolf might hurt her. Marc asks me to feel what the girl is feeling. The young girl’s vulnerability feels like a deep well of fear and sadness. My mind tells me that I have a choice. I can choose to stay on the side of the water where I think that I am safe and alone. But the dreamwork is to feel the feelings of the young girl near the wolf, feelings of fear and sadness and abandonment. When I feel those feelings, there seems to be nothing else, it is a totality of feeling. It’s an act of faith to allow myself feel this, believing that facing my pain will not condemn me to being alone with pain forever, but that it is the only way to move forward toward knowing who I truly am.
I took a break from the dreamwork after this dream, and continued to work with it for months. When I would remember the dream – I would be myself, across the pond from the girl and the wolf. Safely out of the water, distant from the fear of the wolf and the vulnerability of the girl. I would need courage to go forward with the dreamwork, willingness to separate from my concept of who I was, and to fully identify with the feelings of the archetypes in the dreams. After about five months, I began again.
Dream:
I’m driving a car on a road that I know well. The road dips downhill around a curve. As I drive down the hill, the road floats up into the air with my car on it. I have no control where the road will take me. I feel afraid.
This dream showed the fear that I had been avoiding– and gave me the opportunity to feel it, to pass through the fear to an awareness that was not definable. But it changed how I saw myself, because I realized that I didn’t have to fight against fear, that fear was leading me to a deeper way of knowing about how to be.
In my life, I thought that if I could stay in control that I could keep myself and my children safe. So I tried to arrange our lives so that I could avoid fear, checking out all the worst-case scenarios before making plans. Because it was as if I felt that I would die if I had to feel the fear of not being in control.
A man who I saw for awhile couldn’t get into the life that I had built up for my family. When he told me that I had constructed a “complete ecosytem” for myself and my children – I felt proud, satisfied that I had successfully insulated our world.
I began to understand that I would have to let go of all that. Because a part of myself would need to “die”, the old habits of being, the old concepts of myself - but who would I be without those habits and concepts? I realized that if I demanded guarantees about who I would become, that I couldn’t continue the dreamwork. So I faced into my fear.
Dream:
There is a huge ocean liner in a storm, the ship is going down. I’m with a man, we jump off the boat together. I float down under the water, but I don’t drown.
The intensity of the storm is how I feel when I am struggling to stay in control. When I jump off the ship and allow myself to be submerged in the water, I have a sense of calm, the usual anxiety is gone.
The usual anxiety? I didn’t think of myself as an anxious person, but there it was in the dream. I started to understand that the need to stay in control had been a way to keep anxiety at bay. But the outer world had so many things that it was reasonable to feel anxious about – foods with pesticides and food that was genetically modified, water and air that was polluted to the point of making children sick, an endangered ecosystem, injustice, and an economic and legal system that continually impoverished the oppressed. Just to name a few. It seemed to me that it would be almost crazy not to feel anxious! How could I sort out where my personal anxiety ended and this free-floating societal anxiety began?
Was this dreamwork going anywhere? I had been meditating and doing yoga regularly since I was a teenager. I was a yoga teacher and yoga therapy practitioner. If I was anxious, I was able to handle that without anyone’s help. I worried about becoming dependent on being in therapy. I wanted to be emotionally independent. Again, I left dreamwork for several months.
Eventually, emotional fall-out from a sour relationship brought me back to therapy. After a few sessions, Marc noted that my pattern was to come back to therapy when I needed to “fix” something, and then to leave when I was feeling better. He suggested that I consider staying in therapy beyond the time when I had sorted out the difficulties of this particular situation, and to go deeper into the work.
I decided to stay and be in the process of the work, and my dreams changed.
Dream:
I pass through a country store, I’m following a man. I feel embarrassed, maybe he doesn’t want me to follow him. We go up the stairs in a small theater, he turns and pulls down a seat for me. I feel warm inside to be accepted by him. Near where we are sitting is a huge dropping off point into darkness.
In a gestalt, I ask the man, the animus, if he wants me to jump off the edge into the darkness, he says “of course”. I feel very afraid and alone. But I’m willing to go it. And I am surprised, because I find a sense of pure awareness in darkness.
This dream shows how I feel that I’m unworthy to be with the animus – I’m not sure that he wants me to be with him. When he acknowledges me in the dream, I have a sense of belonging.
But there’s no cuddling or settling in here with the animus, it’s all about jumping into darkness, and experiencing the void there. Having to give up my definition of who I am in order to go forward, letting go of who I thought I was to discover who I really am.
Dream:
I’m in a classroom, I fall asleep in my chair during a lecture. In a dream, I wake up sitting in the chair in a sunny meadow, there are several beautiful lions nearby. I stand up and chase them, I hit them with the chair.
This stance of holding up a chair to defend myself – it represents to me how I sometimes relate to my life, to other people. Because underneath, I felt that unworthiness in all parts of my life, and a defensiveness against the judgments of others. Now I can catch myself in that mental pose of defensiveness, and let it go as if putting down the chair in the field of lions. After all, the lions didn’t attack me, I attacked them with my little chair, and they didn’t hurt me. The lions are the courage that I need, to trust that I don’t have to fight them, that I can feel their love and strength.
That defensiveness can be present in my posture when I am driving my car – holding the steering wheel with the same intensity and shielding force that I dreamed I held the chair with when facing the lions. The archetypal lions in my dream are friendly, as it turns out. The afternoon when I was driving in a defensive posture was pleasant, friendly. I just had to let go of the habitual posture of defensiveness to feel it.
Dream:
In a big empty house, I find a baby. Oddly, she can speak, she says “my mother doesn’t care for me.” I hold her and tell her that my mother doesn’t care for me either.
In the dream, the baby girl’s mother doesn’t care for her, but the baby girl is vibrant and alive and connected. But my feeling is that because I’m not cared for by my mother, I feel shame, and I feel dead inside.
When I choose to feel what the baby girl is feeling, my breath deepens, my body relaxes, I feel like I am in a deep place, such as the womb, with no expectations or disappointments, just this moment and the next.
It’s as if there is alchemy of feeling, of being. If I make the effort, I can feel alive inside at almost any time. For me, this is the power of the archetypes, the transformative qualities of each image as it appears in a specific context in a dream, revealing the way to both releasing old negative patterns and opening to new and vibrant feelings.
Dream:
There is a young boy standing with a group of people by a stream. He becomes invisible when he is afraid. I am that boy.
The boy represents my soul. When I was a child, I guess that my soul would sometimes shine, as it does for most children. Now, even as I write this, I feel that I don’t want to let that part of myself be visible. It feels like an unbearable vulnerability.
So, this is my current edge in my dreamwork. It’s a sense of loss, a rediscovery of wonder, a fear of not doing it right. Feeling the fear and the loss and the wonder. Knowing that finally it is okay to feel my feelings. And knowing that while my outer life feels like the tip of the iceberg, the inner life submerged, I live in the mystery of the interplay of the two worlds.