Like hundreds of clients I bring my dreams to Marc Bregman. I know there are ways that I think and feel about myself , others, the world and God that just aren’t true. And I suffer. So, every other week I meet with Marc and we talk about my life and my dreams. I know it sounds like therapy, but what we’re doing is different, essentially different from any therapy or spiritual discipline I’ve encountered. Maybe it’s unique.
The work we’re doing is alchemy. We are working to transform our dull, base, leaden, ill selves into selves of gold. I believe we’re doing the essential work that Jesus Christ asked us to do: to open our hearts to God, to walk in love with God and to obey God.
I’m writing because I find it difficult to talk about this work. And this work is very important to me. I am called to write mostly late at night or in the middle of the night. I believe this call is from God.
I first began recording my dreams in my twenties, long before I’d heard of this process. I don’t remember why, I suppose it was an extension of the journaling impulse that hit me then. I had never been involved in therapy though I read therapists’ writings. I figured I was too together to go to therapy and the expense seemed unjustifiable. But it did seem like it might be fun, an adventure. My dreams were certainly adventurous. They were spectacular. I was a great hero; flying, kung fuing, fucking.
Going further back I recall quite a few childhood dreams. I remember learning to fly in a series of dreams. It took quite awhile and I wasn’t so hot in the beginning, but with practice I became very good at it. Anyway I’ve paid attention to my dreams for over twenty five years. Much of that time I thought they would probably make great movies. They were long enough and they sure kept my interest.
Ironically it was my interest in my dreams that kept me from seeing Marc when I first heard of him. People said he had very strong takes on dreams and I wanted mine to be treated with the respect, appreciation and delicacy due a work of art, after all they were my creations weren’t they?
Turns out they weren’t. They aren’t.
Jung spoke of the collective unconscious as the source of dreams. Marc speaks of the Archetypes - the faces of God that we are able to behold - as the source of our dreams. In this work every dream is a message from God calling us, instructing us, warning us, loving us. Many of the details of the dreams are shaped by our personalities, memories and predilections but the essence of each is that message from God. Marc’s job is to cut through the details and discern this message.
At first these messages are hard to hear, harder to take in and harder still to incorporate. Doubly so for me since I was very attached, like a screenwriter, to all the marvelous details of my nightly visions, each loaded with momentous significance and import. I was proud of my dreams. My pride was one of the first things that Marc and the Archetypes tore into. I will write more about the Archetypes later. Suffice it to say now that they are figures in our dreams that mediate for God.
I’m writing now to the man I was in my twenties, hanging out in the East West Bookstore in New York City looking for solace and meaning from Jung, Krishnamurti, Ram Dass, Joseph Campbell, Gail Sheehy, Alan Watts, Erich Fromme, Freud, Jane Roberts, Adler, Fritz Pearl, James Hillman, and many others. I felt such peace, and hope and a sense of being seen and understood in that bookstore and in those books. I would pull them with great expectation from the shelf and begin reading, then buy one, read as I walked down the street, continue on the subway home to Brooklyn, read as I waited for the greasy fried chicken and fries at the cheap neighborhood Chinese take out, read as I ate the food at home and finally read in bed. I consumed these books, shoveled in great heaps of them, and finished them off one by one. In the aftermath I would carry the glow of each for a day or two until the warmth faded and I needed, desperately needed again and again a new peace, new hope and a new sense of being seen and understood.
When I read these books I felt that their knowledge and wisdom were my knowledge and wisdom This belief would quickly crumble any time I tried to describe the book to a friend. Their questions and comments would invariably extinguish that glow of salvation. The knowledge wasn’t mine after all. So I would buy another book and begin again seeking that easy buzz of read wisdom.
I’m writing to that man I was in my twenties to say: “Listen, you can’t get what you hunger for from a book, not from those books not from this book, probably not from any book. But there is a way and I want to tell you about this way. You have to suffer, you have to die and you have to do the work.”
I’ve been doing the work for nearly eight years.
Eight years ago I was well out of my twenties and though I still saw myself as a quirky hero, I had suffered enough to sense that something was off, something smelled funny.
My first session was the week of my wedding. Ellen, my fiancee, had been seeing Marc for a few months and it seemed to me that she had gained perspective on her pain. Besides Ellen and I were committed to the notion, even from the hot beginnings of our love, that we needed help if our relationship was to last. We’d been enraptured and lost too many times before with too many others. We knew better but we didn’t know how.
In the first dream I worked with Marc, I’m fucking this very cute young woman who reminds me of both a student and an old girlfriend. Then I feel guilty as hell and I’m being chased by this pack of snapping dogs. I manage to fly just above their furious jaws. I end up on a bar stool on the dinning room side of a restaurant pickup window. A man’s voice from within the kitchen tells me he will show me the source of my pain. He says I must become a river of vomit that flows back to that source. Yellow vomit instantly pours forth from the window and cascades down onto the floor and now I’m vomiting, adding to the river of vomit that flows back from whence I came.
This dream says a lot about the man I was in my twenties and into my thirties. It says a lot about one battle I continue to fight; the battle to know, live out and express my own sexuality and my true passion.
Let’s start with my sexual partner in the dream. She was quite a bit younger than I was at the time. In describing the dream to Marc I felt that I had seduced her somehow though this seduction was not clear in the dream. Seducing a young woman in the world, especially a student of the seducer is a pretty bad thing to do. It would make sense then that in the dream I felt guilty and was punished by the pack of snarling dogs. But the world’s logic is not the dream’s.
In the world if I had sex with even a willing younger student there are power and role issues that contain seeds of suffering for both of us. Not to mention the fact that I’m about to be married. But in the dream... Well, the first question is who is this woman? This woman is a part of me and something more. What part of me is she? She’s the part of me that makes me feel guilty. In other words I know her by her fruits in me. In me she arouses desire and guilt. This thinking in the world would be solipsistic but in the dream its natural. In the dream she arouses desire and guilt. Why would she do these things? To control me. By making me feel guilty she can manipulate me.
When we begin the dream work the creatures and people of our dreams are far more sophisticated than we are in that inner place. We’re like an Aboriginal, leaving the forest and moving to New York City. We can’t even see the games people play.
Now this woman is not only in my dreams but she’s in my waking life as well. She’s even stronger in my waking life because she’s completely hidden. Now she can really do some manipulating like turning my gaze onto sexy women on the street, in restaurants and banks, in catalogs, magazines and the internet, then igniting a great hunger in me and whispering in my mind “if only...” or “wouldn’t that be amazing” or “just find some time alone and masturbate, come on baby.” She can run interference between myself and my perfectly legitimate sexual desires for my wife. She can make me see myself as undeserving and why not just give up everything in order to avoid feeling that guilt.
This woman is a demon. Part me, part more than me. I can never touch the part of her that’s more than me. The part of her that is more than me is the part of her that is spirit. Not imagination, which exists only in my mind, but spirit which exists apart from the world and the laws of physics. This spirit realm, and this is the tough part for a skeptic like myself, this spirit realm is as real as anything we can touch. And it’s where the real action is.
I can never touch the part of her that’s more than me But I can separate myself from her. And that’s the work.
And listen, it’s really, really hard. She’s been a part of me since I was a little kid. She’s informed my sexuality since before I was sexual. She’s a seductress, a bitch, a three thousand pound asshole that covers my head and makes me depressed, and makes me see things all wrong. But only if I’m complicit. She needs me to buy into her vision. If I don’t buy in she has no power over me. The problem is after eight years of hard work I still buy in. She’s very seductive, and I’m very weak. On my own I can never leave her. But the dream sends help. I thank you God for the cavalry: the dogs.
The dogs aren’t just snapping at me they are herding me. They force me to a very specific place. A student of Greek mythology would recognize them instantly. They are psychopomps. Guides to the underground. As seeing eye dogs guide the blind these feeling heart dogs guide me, the unfeeling. They take me to The Man.
I don’t even see the man. He’s hidden in the kitchen. I’m afraid of him but I hear his voice. He says he’ll show me the source of my pain and the yellow vomit pours forth - gallons and gallons and gallons of it because I am very very sick in my heart though I don’t yet know it. And my sickness returns to it’s source. It goes back in the direction I just came from. The river of vomit flows back through my fear of the dogs, back through my guilt, back to the demon. She is at the source of my suffering.
I’ve begun the work.