Dream:
I was 19 when I had this dream. At the time, I couldn’t hear the undercurrents of warning when Marc said to me, “He comes because He doesn’t want you to be seduced by THEM.” Certainly he didn’t expect me to be unmoved by flashing skirts when I was riding on my adolescent hormonal peak!
I was more interested in the power that this figure, this black man, implied: and I told Marc so. He immediately leaned in with the bait. “Believe me, if it’s in your dream then it’s there, for you, in your psyche. If the child had stayed alive in you, this is who you’d be today.” Then he chuckled and made another assertion that I wasn’t prepared to assimilate: “But nobody survives their childhood. We’re not MEANT to survive it.”
Despite these cryptic sounding statements, I was now hooked. All my life I’d felt disempowered. I’d been a short kid, athletic but not particularly strong; skinny and whispy. I was passive and shy nearly to the point of invisibility, overlooked (and, sometimes, taunted and ridiculed) by many of my peers. My one girlfriend in high school had been dominant and manipulative. Undoubtedly, this black man would never have been walked all over like I so often had been.
And now, I had an opportunity to grow and become more like Him!
As weeks went on, the Animus continued to ride my projections; and the dreams rolled on with Him appearing in an array of potent guises: cougar, hunter, Oriental swordmaster, sharpshooter, King Arthur, Gandalf, Obi-Wan Kenobi...
I did my homework religiously, but I felt no stronger or more decisive than before. One session (it embarrasses me to say) I burst into a tirade. “Dammit, Marc, I’ve been coming here for nine months now! WHEN is it going to happen?”
Not long after that, something profound did happen - but it was light years removed from what I’d been expecting. One quiet evening when I was home alone, I broke down and utterly wept like I never had since I’d been a small child. I can’t recall my thoughts or any specific provocation, but it felt as if my heart was a water balloon that had just burst inside me. There I was, after having striven so hard to metamorphosize into some cinematic hero who’d never take shit from anyone, crying like a baby.
I stalked into my next session with Marc and demanded to know what the fuck was going on.
“I’ve been waiting for this to happen,” he told me, not batting an eye. “You wanted to feel powerful, right? How can you feel power if you can’t FEEL at all? How can you feel loved and supported?
“See, the process is a genius. They said, ‘Okay, we’ve got this kid...he’s into fantasy...we’ll appear as these mythic heroes and he’ll want to follow us, want to open up to us. And by the time he figures out where we’re taking him, it’ll be too late to stop it.”
Then, seeing me so broken, his tone softened. I heard empathy in his voice, the empathy of a man who’d once been broken himself.
“I can’t help it that your heart is filled with pain. But it’s YOUR HEART. It’s beautiful. Don’t you see that?”