September 2007 - Dream: I am walking down Second Avenue in New York and Liev Schreiber passes by me. After He’s gone, I realize that I would have liked to have talked to Him.
Shift
I am biking on a dirt road with a man. My bike rolls backwards and I fall. It feels silly and I am glad the man is there to help me. I look down the side of the road and I see a man with a gun; I think He’s a hunter and it’s not safe for us to be here. I feel scared. I turn to go in the direction from which we came and a man turns the corner, facing me from a distance. He’s carrying a huge gun, about twice His size. He points the gun at me and tells me to freeze. He says, “I’m serious!” and asks me if I’ve ever played assassin. I feel terror.
Dream:
I am trying to get ready for my wedding. I am feeling overwhelmed and intense pressure. I see Amy. She tells me that we already got married, that Denzel Washington performed the ceremony.
Dream:
James Brown is dancing wildly on stage. I’m watching Him from the first row.
Dream:
I am looking up at a very tall man; I think He must be at least eight feet tall. I am drawn to Him.
Where I am in my work right now is a constant state of being in- between gravity and inertia. My entire life I have been stuck in inertia: feeling pressure, anxiety, stress, frozen, unable to make decisions or take action. I have missed my life. This state has been the result of my separation from God, which I think happened when I was around three. That was when I became very scared and was not able to tolerate it, so I projected my fear—the fear of a small, abandoned boy—out onto the world which became an overwhelming place; too much, too frightening, a place where I believed I could get no support and could receive no true love. An intolerable place.
To compensate, I have tried to make my life, myself, through action in the world. I have felt pressure to be someone, to do things in order to be someone. The blessing is, ultimately, it hasn’t worked. I wasn’t able to become “someone.” Trying to compensate created pressure that has been too much to bear, to the point where being alive felt like being crushed, with no room to move or breathe.
Until recently I have mostly been oblivious to God being right there with me. I have passed by the Animus so many times, not realizing that I have missed anything; been so wrapped up by inertia, by anxiety and pressure, that, like in the dream, I miss what’s happening around me. Or even worse, I have known His presence and have spent so much time standing, watching Him, not trusting Him, dissing Him, feeling scared and being frozen. Life has been going on and I have been inert, watching and waiting, confused, feeling overwhelmed, being willful in opposition to gravity. If I have acted, it’s been boneheaded and wrong, decisions made from a place of smallness and anxiety. It has been trying to force things to happen from a place of pathological fear, a place where I have no connection to Him.
The Animus has His huge gun and He is ready to assassinate the part of me that is foiled by inertia, that gives in, that believes the pressure, believes the projections, the place that watches as life and energy surrounds me everywhere. He is there with me. He wants me to join Him onstage and dance wildly with the same sort of energy He has. He is performing my wedding ceremony. He is here with me, here to support me in anything I do—falling from my bike—and ultimately to kill all the parts of me that believe my projections about people and pressure and getting things done and having to work to be someone in the world. He is ready and what I have been doing is jumping away, from the fear, from the commitment, from His love. That is the edge I feel when I do my homework, the edge of inertia—jumping away, suppressing the fear, feeling that His love is too much—versus falling into the gravity; feeling the fear, trembling in my core; knowing His love.
When I feel His presence, when I get up on stage with Him, when I feel the fear of knowing that He is going to shoot me, I am in a state of gravity in which things are effortless, in which I am able to act with immediacy, in which I am able to recognize when I am projecting and that it is absurd, in which I am able to feel the terror of being led by forces into a place that I know nothing about, a place where I am in connection with Him.
My wedding day I was in the gravity, feeling His love. It was timeless and full of deep feeling. I existed in the moment and I felt the love radiating from myself towards Him and everyone there and from Him and everyone there to me. I was there, the boy longing for him. Thank God. Unlike in the dream, I did not sleep through it, did not have no memory of it.
This is scary, to submit to gravity. It is scary to see Him with His gun. My history of inertia has been the result of not feeling the fear. When I have gotten scared, my knee-jerk reaction has been to suppress it, push it down, go into a state of dissociation, or bail on what responsibilities I might have. It is a place of inertia, of pressure, of being unable to do, of deep depression, of watching others and thinking they know, they are better than me, I should just shut up and stay small.
In order to reach this place of gravity, of feeling the fear with Him, I’ve needed to become the boy, longing for the father, looking up at Him. It is only as the small, scared boy—not the frozen, diminished one—that I can be in relationship with him, that I can fall, be assassinated and submit to gravity.
I’ve felt it. I’ve felt Him. I’ve been the boy who loves Him. I feel fear. The pathology will try to put me to sleep, make me believe my projections, suppress the feeling, try to control the boy.
Gravity vs. inertia.
That is where I am.
January 2006
Dream:
Driving in Brooklyn with a boy I work with. He gets out of the car and people start bothering him, picking on him, being aggressive towards him. It seems scary. I want to help, but don’t know what to do and am scared. I end up leaving, driving away.
Shift
Talking with someone about what happened. I wonder what happened to the boy. I think it’s strange, embarrassing how okay I feel about having left him there.
Shift
In a room, waiting for a doctor. Sue grabs my hand and she’s pulling me around the room directing me to do different moves. The room is filling up with people. I am pulling the boy along. I want to keep up with Sue, but holding onto the boy makes it difficult; I kind of wish I could let him go.
The resistance in me, my pathology, wants nothing to do with the boy. I want to leave him because he is a loser. He is me as the boy. I hate that part of me. I want to leave him behind. I want to have Sue pull me along, get me up and moving, without him, without the part of me I hate, that I think is a big, fat loser. My mother made my father look like an awful person. The father’s son is a loser like my dad. When I hate my father I hate myself when I’m his son. I hated my father. My father hated himself. My father scared me. The way to try to get out of the fear and aloneness I felt as a child was to hate my father. My mother gave me this way out.
I killed myself in that moment, I killed my dad. My mom didn’t want me to accept this part of myself, the part that I think is like him, my judgment about my dad. Bullshit judgment. Terribly destructive bullshit soul-wrecking judgment. I believed there was nothing about my dad that was special. I couldn’t see it. I couldn’t see the beautiful piano player, the man with a gifted intellect. I couldn’t see my dad. I just saw a big, fat loser.
I’m afraid of the pain of this. My pathology doesn’t want me to see it.
My pathology is destroying me without the boy, will destroy me if I don’t reclaim him.
I need to apologize to the boy in the dream and accept him. Turn to the boy who loved his father and say I shouldn’t have listened to my mother.
Dream: I am underneath a stage where Sly and the Family Stone are performing.
In the dream I am resisting. I am aware of the excitement up on the stage, but I don’t go. I give myself permission to not go. The boy would’ve gone up to the stage. There is no depression up there. I need to be the boy and go on stage.
I am still resisting and I want to complain about struggling, about not understanding what’s going on. My resistance really, really wants to use this—complaining and confusion—as an out.
I stay safe. I don’t go up on stage. Depression is safe. Talking about it is safe. Staying safe feeds the pathology. I am so willing to be depressed. I’m so willing to resist, to stay under the stage. I don’t want my pain. I don’t want my boy.
When I get up on the stage I am the boy. I am being asked to push myself here, to feel things that are coming up without knowing what the result will be. My pathology tells me I need the answers before I can do this; I have to understand what it means to be the boy before going on stage. That’s a dead end, a huge feast for the pathology. I just need to go up there. Religiously. Like a warrior. A warrior who will fight for the boy.
I just need to go on the stage and I am the boy. Take the energy I use complaining and give it to the boy instead.
Dream: I’m with Marlon Brando who I think is the Anthony Hopkins character from the movie Instinct [a wild, wild potent man]. He’s sliding around in soap so he won’t be able to be caught when they try to get him. I slide around in soap, too. He’s full of wild energy. We are outside and he gets into a bunch of fights, and is escaping. The scene is wild, feels like anarchy, chasing, fighting. It feels like I’m watching a movie. I watch as he gets his neck wrapped by a chain, I think I’m doing it to him at one point. In a room, I look out the window and there are skyscrapers on fire.
Shift
He and I are walking with the city in the distance. I see three glass pyramids and I think the city is Memphis. I say to Him, “That was more fun than she and I ever had there” talking about ex-girlfriend.
Marlon Brando is the Animus, full of wild, potent energy. I need to stay with Him. My pathology doesn’t want me to do this. It wants me to be reactive, filled with anxiety, thinking that the Dreamwork is bullshit and that the world is overwhelming. It wants me complaining and looking elsewhere for support, away from the Animus, continuing to reject the boy. This searching elsewhere for support is a dead end. I need to be with Him.