Tag Archives: dreams

Delphine.

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terra

“Terra” by Jenndalyn, Etsy.com

While I was in therapy a couple of years ago,  my therapist asked me to keep a dream diary.    I noticed that I actually seemed to remember more of my dreams while doing this.   I used to write about my dreams often on this blog, but even more often on another blog (Down the Rabbit Hole) I started around that time that focused on my therapy and the things I was discovering about myself and relationships with others.  I took that blog down about a year ago (it still exists, since I didn’t want to delete it, but I set it to private, and then stopped paying for its domain so it’s out there in WordPress Limbo somewhere but no one can see it, not even me unless I decide to revive the domain, which I doubt I’ll do).

Also about a year ago, I stopped going to therapy (I no longer felt that I needed it) and I stopped keeping  the dream diary, which was probably a silly thing to do.   Since then, I haven’t been paying much attention to my dreams and hence, I remember few of them.

But this morning I had one that was quite vivid and actually woke me up.  The dream seemed to have deep meaning and also a message that is important for me to remember, so I wrote the dream down as soon as I woke up.   My most  vivid dreams are always in the early morning, and this was no exception.  I consider this to be a very positive dream, though I’m not sure of its exact meaning for me.

I was cleaning apartments in a two story apartment building.   The apartments were almost identical and they were small.  The apartments at the ends of the hallways were a bit larger and had a different layout from the ones lining the hallways.  It was the end of the day and I was exhausted.  I wanted to go home, but I still had one more apartment to clean, on the second level.  It was one of the end-apartments, so it would be one of the big, rambling ones.  Ugh.  I hoped it would be one without pets or kids, maybe with a single old lady who barely touched anything in her home.   I was so tired!

Wearily, I headed toward the apartment.  Before I even knocked on the door, a woman who appeared to be in her late 30s or early 40s opened the door and ushered me inside.   How did she even know I was there?  She wore a wide smile and bohemian looking clothing.  Her hair was long and wavy, and tied in a messy ponytail with tendrils that curled around her cheeks.  She was a pretty woman, but seemed a bit frazzled.

It wasn’t hard to understand why.  Behind her, down a long messy hallway, I saw 4 or 5 kids, ranging from about age 3 to 12 chasing a large dog around.   Oh great, I thought.   Pets AND kids.  I’d be here forever.   No, no, no.  I wanted to go home.

The woman offered me some iced tea with lemon, and put out a plate of cookies, which I accepted.   Two dirty faced kids came running in and helped themselves, stuffing their faces with cookies.  The dog, some kind of sheepdog/retriever mix, came shambling in behind them, and barked a few times.  One of the kids offered him a cookie and off they went again, running back down the long hallway.

The woman, whose name was Delphine,  projected a bohemian friendliness, warmth and empathy.   I could see she was exactly the type of person who would feel right at home in such a messy, large, disorganized apartment.   The place was so huge and rambling that it seemed more like a house than an apartment.  It was much bigger than the other end- apartments I’d seen earlier, and seemed to have hidden rooms and all kinds of nooks and crannies that seemed utterly impossible in such a space.  It seemed as if it might be separate from this world and therefore not really in that apartment building at all.   The entrance to her home might have been a portal to another dimension.

Delphine showed me around the place, which seemed to ramble on endlessly.  She joyfully told me stories about the rooms and the children and animals who lived in them.  She also  showed me which rooms to clean, but there were only three I’d need to worry about.   I felt that she could sense how exhausted I was, and was trying to help me out by not overloading me with work.  The bedrooms I was to clean belonged to three of her children (I never did find out how many she actually had), but they were pretty well kept, so all I’d really be doing was vacumming the rugs, dusting, and straightening the beds.

The work went fast, so fast I can’t even remember doing it.   But Delphine wouldn’t let me leave.  Or more accurately, she didn’t tell me I couldn’t leave, but she kept showing me incredible, magical things that made it impossible for me to leave.   I noticed Delphine didn’t walk: she floated.  Although I could see her bare feet under her long Indian print hippie dress, she seemed to not really be using them at all.   What was this woman?

We were walking along some kind of half outdoor wooden catwalk to another part of the huge apartment (don’t ask) and growing directly out of the wooden planks was what she called a lotus bloom.  It was in some shade of purple but looked grayish too.  But its color wasn’t what made it so otherworldly and incredible.   I  bent over and looked closely at it.  I saw that the whole thing was moving, almost vibrating, and embedded in its whorl-like petals were other, identical, smaller blooms also vibrating.  Within their petals were even smaller blooms, on into infinity.   Magnificence in fractals.  I couldn’t stop staring, but t Delphine had other things to show me.

On another catwalk hung an intricate bamboo cage and inside the cage was the most incredibly colored bluebird I’d ever seen.   It was alone in the cage but didn’t seem lonely.   The bluebird was  colored blue and bright red (instead of the rusty color normal bluebirds have on their bellies).  The colors were of a brightness that that could be considered neon.   His feathers glowed and shimmered like LED Christmas lights in the middle of the day.

The bird looked directly at me and smiled.  No, it didn’t have teeth or lips, so I can’t explain how it smiled, but it did.   Somehow, I knew the bird knew me from somewhere before, but I couldn’t remember from where or when.  He seemed familiar and I felt good around him.  I couldn’t bear to leave.

I woke up at that point, and sat there for several minutes feeling awestruck.  I was trying to hold onto the memory of the dream before it fragmented and faded away forever , and then decided to scribble it down so I could write about it here later.

2 weird dreams I had as a kid.

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An oldie but goodie.

Lucky Otters Haven

steel_wool 

I was a weird, sketchy kid who had weird dreams. When I was about 5 I had a dream about something called a “clout” that looked like an oversized steel wool pad. It was sitting on the small rug in front of my bed and I was too scared to put my feet on the floor because that clout thing was evil. It just sat there on the rug, in all its black malevolence, not moving, but I knew it was alive and meant to kill me.   I knew if I put my feet on the floor the clout would suck me down into the Hell-portal it must have come from.

When I was around  the same age, one morning I woke up doubled over with laughter.   My dad asked me why I was laughing, and I remember saying, “someone was throwing mud at my door.”  …

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Composing music in a dream.

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Credit: Stacy Martian, Covermyfb.com

I’m not at all musically inclined.  I’ve never even played an instrument.  I can barely sing.   I’m always in complete awe of people who can just sit down and come up with the music for a new song and then set lyrics to it (or write the lyrics first and then hear music for them inside their heads).  It’s an ability that seems so mysterious and out of reach to me, almost bordering on the supernatural.   I always marvel, how do they do that?

But a few times in my life, I’ve actually been able to compose music in my head — well, maybe.  It happened to me again last night.   Very occasionally, I have a dream in which I hear a song and then I wake up and realize I’ve never heard that song before.   I dreamt I was riding in a car and a pop-rock song came on the radio and I turned it up, saying “Oh, I like that song.”   The song itself was unremarkable and sounded like a lot of other pop-rock songs, but was very catchy, with a sort of ’60s vibe to it.  I can’t remember much else, except the chorus contained the words, “mister, mister.”

Google is a godsend for checking lyrics online.   I typed in “mister, mister” which was all I could remember, and while there is a group called “Mr. Mister,” there doesn’t appear to be any song that has those words in the lyrics.  So I concluded that what I heard in my dream  must have been an original song, at least lyric-wise.  Maybe the melody was someone else’s and I had heard it a long time ago or something and just can’t consciously remember it.  Unfortunately, there’s no way to check a melody on Google the way you can check lyrics.   I don’t consciously remember ever hearing a song with that particular melody though, even it was so similar to a lot of other pop-rock songs (like I said, the style of the song was pretty cookie-cutter).   No wonder so many musicians get sued for copying someone else’s melody.   They probably didn’t really steal it at all, but unconsciously used someone else’s, thinking it was their own.   It’s completely understandable why that happens so often.   How would you go about checking something like that?

The few times I’ve “composed” songs in my dreams, I’ve always really liked the song.  A couple of times the songs have been absolutely amazing.   I’ve always wished I knew how to write music or play an instrument, so I could wake up and immediately pick out the chords on a guitar or tap it out on a piano, and then write down the music for it.

I imagine this is how some musicians come up with the music for a song.  I think it’s largely a function of the unconscious (all creative pursuits are), and probably comes in the form of dreams a lot.   Other musicians say they think of the lyrics first, and then a melody for them just sort of comes to them.   That would also be the workings of the unconscious.  I think it’s such an awesome thing to be able to do that.

The fact I have these dreams at all makes me wonder if I have some latent musical talent that I just never developed or knew I had.  Or maybe they happen to everyone and it’s nothing all that special.

What am I running from?

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I haven’t posted anything about my therapy on this blog for a long time.   The truth is that lately I’ve been losing interest in my therapy and haven’t even been wanting to go.   Since my sessions are never unpleasant or traumatic, I really don’t know why.  I know I’m not cured, though that thought occurred to me briefly.    Sometimes uncomfortable emotions come up in session, but I actually look forward to those, because it means we can work on them.  They’ve never been cause for me to want to run.

But recently, even while I’m in session, I keep talking about things that have nothing to do with therapy, or even with me.  My therapist correctly pointed out that he sensed I was avoiding something that’s coming up.

In our last session we began talking about an early childhood trauma involving my mother, when I was about 5 -7.  I skirted around the issue and told him I couldn’t give him details, but I was starting to get emotional.   It’s not something I’m able to talk about yet, even with my therapist.  Not even here.  It brings me too much shame even now, but I remember exactly what happened as clear as day.   He wants to explore this with me and I do too, but…I’m afraid to.   It’s too shameful.    But the avoidance started several weeks before this.

So I’ve been losing interest.  This week I felt too tired to go so I didn’t.  That hasn’t happened before.

I just had a dream that may shed some light on what’s going on, because the real reason is occluded even to me.

The dream involved a usual theme that occurs in many of my dreams. Somehow, in spite of my limited income, I had come into ownership of a vast house, so vast that I kept discovering rooms I never knew existed and had never seen before.  Exploring my new home was exciting, but in the back of my mind I knew I really couldn’t afford this house.

There were strangers in the house, as if it was some public place.    I walked through a doorway that opened out to a huge industrial kitchen with huge flat stainless steel cooktops lining an entire wall.  All these random people were cooking — bacon, eggs, steaks, you name it.    I turned to some stranger and told them I owned all this.   I told them that before, I had lived in a one bedroom apartment (my actual place has two bedrooms).  I admitted I wasn’t sure I could afford all this but that I would try.

One of the strangers I met was a very attractive man in his thirties.  (In my dreams I am always younger than my real age).    He seemed interested in me and kept following me around, trying to start a conversation.   I was interested but reticent, so I may have seemed disinterested, even though I wasn’t.   We found a room with tables that had numbers on them, as you might find in a restaurant.

The man invited me to sit down at one of the tables with him, Table #30.   Reluctantly, I did.  He was friendly and asked me many questions.  I was attracted and interested, but also afraid.   As I am in real life, I felt threatened by his interest in me.   But I was willing to get to know him better.  My attraction overrode my wariness.

I admitted to him I was afraid of relationships but that I’d be willing to give one a chance under the right circumstances.   He seemed understanding.

I got up for some reason that I can’t remember and then came back to Table 30.   He was gone.   A woman sitting at a nearby table told me she had seen him leave and drive away.  I was disappointed.  I wondered what I’d done.  I knew I’d never see him again.

I wanted to write this dream down before it fades from my memory, but I haven’t thought about what it could mean yet.    I’m going to mull it over today and if I figure it out, I’ll write another post later.  Right now my brain isn’t working and I just want to go back to bed for a few more hours.

That “off” feeling in dreams.

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dreaming_person

Have you ever tried to explain something that can’t be explained?   Well, this subject came up in my post from last week about my subway dream (I have a lot of subway dreams even though I haven’t lived in a big city in many years ; vast-house dreams probably come in second — my dream houses seem like they go on and on for miles).

Most, if not all, of my dreams have that weird “off” feeling about them.   I don’t know how to explain it at all. It’s very strange, but not necessarily unpleasant.   It’s a kind of flatness but it’s not really that either.   Maybe “otherworldly” but that doesn’t really describe it either.   It’s not really an emotion, though it is kind of a “mood.”

My dreams aren’t especially surreal, except for that weird “mood.” Most of my dreams take place in rather boring but realistic locations — like vast houses or subways, or city streets at night.   I don’t dream about fantastical creatures, demons or fairies, or fantasy realms.  My dreams are prosaic: peopled by real people, or by no one at all.    Sometimes I dream about being in space — and in those dreams, the universe seems even more infinite than it actually is.   I don’t know how to explain why or how I feel that way either, since real space is freaking huger than any of us can imagine.

Sometimes though, everyday reality in my dreams is experienced as somehow enhanced — the grass in a field is greener, the house I’m exploring is endless, the streets I wander at night are more ominous, the mountains in the distance are higher.   But that doesn’t really explain the weirdness either, though it may be a part of it.

It’s not that the dream content itself that’s weird (because usually it is in some way, though you might not realize it until you wake up), because even the dreams I have that take place in everyday places or where nothing really strange happens still have that “off” feeling about them.

On rare occasions, during dissociative episodes (derealization), I get that “off” feeling about reality, and everything becomes very dreamlike.   I haven’t had that experience in a while, but when it happens when you’re awake, it’s extremely unpleasant.  Not so much in dreams.

What the hell is that “off” feeling?   I’ve searched Google and found nothing about it.  Does anyone know what I’m talking about?  Is it just me who experiences this or does everyone?   I don’t even think I can find a graphic for this post that captures that feeling so I’m just using a picture of a person sleeping.

*****

ETA:  I just saw this under “related posts” — I wrote about this same thing almost a year ago.  Oh well.  I still wonder about it.

The Weirdness of My Dreams

Becoming real.

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stone_cat

I haven’t been posting as much about my recovery or therapy on this blog as I used to, because it’s grown so big and I feel more comfortable posting such deeply personal stuff on my other blog, because it’s so much smaller and has far fewer readers than this one does.

But I’m making an exception today, because of how important I think this dream I had last night is.

My subconscious mind seems to be revealing the most to me lately through my dreams. Later I tell my therapist about them, and we interpret them together. Sometimes though, the meaning is obvious to me and lately it’s getting easier for me to figure these dreams out on my own.

In my last therapy session, I was asked what my real self is really like.   I wasn’t able to answer very well.  I felt like I had to make things up.  Chair Girl (my inner child, who I have “sit” in a chair in my therapist’s office, which is how she got her name) is so elusive, and only comes out intermittently.  I know she’s shy and has the potential to be very loving, but sometimes it’s hard for me to capture her essence, who SHE is.

Last night, I had another beautiful dream that answered this for me.

I owned a strange object.   It was a cat made out of black stone.   But it wasn’t actually black stone.   The person who gave it to me explained that this object had once been a real cat, who had been killed during a plane crash (but whose body somehow remained intact) and whose owner, a man from China, had the cat’s body cryogenically frozen and sealed, much like those services that do taxidermy on dead pets and send your pet back to you stuffed and fitted with glass eyes.  But this cat wasn’t stuffed and it didn’t have glass eyes.   It was hard as a rock, heavy, and shone like stone.   Its eyes were sealed shut, forever sleeping.

I loved the cat anyway, and felt sad over what had happened to it.  I  liked to just sit with it and pet it, even though it was no more than an object and could never respond or give back any love.  I sometimes wondered what he had been like, and I named him Max.

One day something very strange happened.  I knew Max had been dead for years.   But on this one day, while I was holding it in my arms, pretending it was a real cat, I heard a small mew.     I looked down and saw that Max was trying to open his eyes.    I almost dropped him in shock, but instead set him down gently on a chair and watched in amazement.   I wasn’t sure what to do.   This was scaring me.  But I was frozen in place.   I couldn’t stop watching.

Max began to transform.   His cold stone body became a beautiful coat of reddish brown tabby fur, and his eyes, now opened, turned from black to brilliant blue.   He started to breathe.  He looked up at me and meowed loudly.  It occurred to me he must be part Siamese, with those blue eyes and loud, raspy voice.

I asked him if he was hungry, and he immediately jumped down and walked regally toward the kitchen, as if he understood what I was asking him.  He kept looking back at me, meowing.  I happened to have some cat food and he ate as if he’d been starving.    My shock having worn off,  I felt love overflowing for this tiny animal.   I picked Max up and held him and listened to him purr contentedly.    He was so tiny but so beautiful and I realized that somehow, it was my love that had woken him up and transformed him back into a living, breathing, loving cat.

One of my favorite stories as a child was The Velveteen Rabbit, and I think it’s because of the universal truth in that story:  that being loved is how one becomes real.

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Max is the real me.  By learning self-love and self-empathy, she’s waking up and making herself known. She’s becoming real.

Drifting.

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Credit: unknown.

Today I did nothing at all, and I didn’t even feel guilty about it.

I slept on and off all day, drifting in and out of dreams. Even awake I felt pleasantly sleepy,  almost as if drugged, floating languorously on the lingering fragments and eddies of dissolved dreams.  In between bouts of light sleep, I browsed the web, colored a little, and nibbled on leftovers and dark chocolate.

Finally I’d drift back into sleep, trying to chase some faded dream from earlier, but another dream would fall into its place, distracting me from whatever I’d been seeking to recapture.

I never even left my house.

Days like this remind me of my younger years, when I would sleep on and off all day after a night spent engaged in frenetic activity, never worrying that such a reversal might be wrong or somehow immoral.

Maybe it’s the cold medicine I’ve been taking making me feel so gloriously sleepy.

I feel like my body and mind is in some healing process, and this do-nothing day actually was anything but that.  I feel like there was some profound purpose for it; some hard work was going on inside my soul, forcing my mind and body to rest.

2 weird dreams I had as a kid.

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steel_wool 

I was a weird, sketchy kid who had weird dreams. When I was about 5 I had a dream about something called a “clout” that looked like an oversized steel wool pad. It was sitting on the small rug in front of my bed and I was too scared to put my feet on the floor because that clout thing was evil. It just sat there on the rug, in all its black malevolence, not moving, but I knew it was alive and meant to kill me.   I knew if I put my feet on the floor the clout would suck me down into the Hell-portal it must have come from.

When I was around  the same age, one morning I woke up doubled over with laughter.   My dad asked me why I was laughing, and I remember saying, “someone was throwing mud at my door.”   I pointed to the door of my room and globs of gooey mud were sliding down its painted surface. I couldn’t stop shrieking with mirth.   I kept pointing but he couldn’t see the mud and told me to stop making things up.  “Look!  Look! There! There!” I screamed in frustration, but I was still laughing.   Then I woke up for real and was almost afraid if I looked at the door, mud would be on it. I was really awake this time, so there wasn’t. Relieved, I went downstairs for my Cap’n Crunch and orange juice.

Part Two: My HeartSync experience, including The Dream.

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Watching the sunrise off the back porch of the main building.

Part One described how HeartSync works and the theories behind it, so I won’t get into that much in this post, which is more about my personal experience.

This post describes the intense cathartic experience I had on the second full day, so there’s no need to describe that again.  However, that experience–which was both excruciating and awesome–opened me up to some odd and wonderful new discoveries about myself to come in the following few days.

First of all, the place where the HeartSync seminar was being held, at the Aqueduct Conference Center in Chapel Hill, NC, reminded me of a classy sleep-away camp.     It was basically a compound tucked deep in the woods consisting of a large rustic main house  (with all the modern conveniences) where all meals were served and where the bookstore and offices and general recreation areas were located;  and two smaller “cottages” each with a large living room with a fireplace and a kitchenette.  Each cottage (which were quite large) could house up to 16 people.    Gravel walkways connected the buildings to each other and also to the parking lot down at the bottom for easy access.

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There were four full days of training, starting on Monday morning at 9 AM after breakfast and ending at about 5 PM.  Lunch was served at 12:30 and was for an hour.   The food was excellent, much better than camp food (in spite of the camp-like feel of the place).

I was nervous about meeting Kate, the woman I had never heard of until two weeks previously, who first told me about HeartSync and so kindly offered to pay for me to attend.

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Knowing she was more well off than I was made me afraid my feelings of envy or inferiority might be triggered or get the best of me again, but what happened was only some slight envy that nearly disappeared by the last day.  Kate and I got along great and she seemed to like me as much as I liked her, and even told me so.  (That gave me a little more confidence about associating with people who “I perceive” to have more than/be more “successful” socially or financially than I am.)

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Each day was divided into two parts:  Learning, in which we read over the materials, watched audiovisual presentations, and listened to Father Andrew Miller (who developed HeartSync) lecture.    He’s a riveting and lively speaker, who is very good at engaging everyone’s attention.

The material is emotionally intense and can be very triggering (as well as extremely spiritual and often you feel touched or moved by the presence of the Holy Spirit) that it’s easy to get emotional even during the “classroom lecturing.”   Even though I didn’t actually get “HeartSynch’d” (there are separate seminars for those and there are people trained in this who can work with you individually), it’s still extremely powerful stuff and you walk away a changed person with a whole new insight into yourself.

There are exercises you are taught (such as the Immanuel Approach) and other prayer methods that you can do on yourself that help you release trauma and re-synchronize some of your “core parts.”   I was shocked by how well these techniques work, but I think the spiritual aspect and connection with God has a lot to do with that.     You have to be careful though.   A complicated resynchronization or a full self-resynchronization should never be attempted without a trained practitioner present.

Each afternoon after lunch, we’d gather back in the meeting room to watch a live demonstration (for a total of four)– a “guinea pig” was picked out of the group to be given a 2 hour live Heart Sync session by Father Andrew.   They’d both sit up in front in comfortable armchairs, and Father Andrew would start asking them questions.   It was fascinating to watch these; they were just like watching therapy sessions, which of course they were–only Jesus was invited in to intercept between the “client” and the therapist.

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View of the back porch of the main building at sunrise, looking back toward the building.

Two men and two women got to be guinea pigs (I didn’t because I didn’t sign the list to volunteer — I’m nowhere near ready to be given therapy and possibly cry in front of 50 people!).  All four had emotional/cathartic breakdowns (intense crying), followed by a feeling of cleansing/healing/lightness, and even laughter.   Their faces changed from the beginning to the end, seeming to attain a sort of inner glow .  In two cases they appeared years younger.  Certain of their issues were resolved, and their faith in God was strengthened too.

Watching these was both fascinating and emotional.   I found myself becoming extremely empathetic, feeling the emotions of these four people as if they were my own, laughing and crying with them.    That’s never happened to me before.    But that all happened to me after my own emotional meltdown, which is described in the linked post in the second paragraph of this post.

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Sunrise on the last morning, just before leaving to return home.   It was like leaving summer camp.

The last night, which was Thursday, was not followed by dinner as usual, since so many people were going home that night (Kate and I stayed through until Friday morning since I cannot drive at night) but was followed by an outdoor liturgical service held on the large back porch of the main building, in which Communion was given.   Hymns and camp-like worship songs, and a few Christmas carols were sung,  and a lot of people hugged and tears were shed.   By then, I was pretty much out of tears and my eyes remained dry.   But the whole feel of the event reminded me of those poignant last nights of summer camp, when everyone is singing camp songs around a crackling fire, there’s a crisp undertone of fall in the evening air,  and there’s an unspoken knowledge that you may never see any of these people again once they load onto the buses or cars that will come for them first thing in the morning.

These kind of moments–where our paths cross briefly but intimately, like passengers at train stations or airports who confess their most cherished secrets to each other precisely because they are basically strangers who will soon be on opposite sides of the country or even the world and will never meet again — are always so lovely and bittersweet.

Afterwards, Kate, me, and three older attendees (who are all HeartSync practitioners in the Chapel Hill area) went out to a nearby Mexican restaurant in Carrboro.   I didn’t contribute much to the lively conversation; I was too exhausted, and when we returned, I conked out very soon after getting back to our room.

*****

The Dream

I woke up from a dream this morning which did not fade away upon awakening the way my dreams normally do.

It started with me finding myself at my own wedding.  I wasn’t sure who the groom was, and I remember feeling slightly apprehensive about this second marriage (having been married to an abuser in my first one).   I don’t remember if the groom had a face–I couldn’t even identify who he could be — but I was going through with this and was nervous and only slightly excited.

I looked down at my shoes under my white skirts and noticed they were black.  I took them off and put on a pair of white shoes.

Then I met my guests, including a sour-faced school-marmish looking woman who looked me up and down disapprovingly.   She looked like she’d been sucking on Atomic Fire Balls or lemon wedges without sugar.   I didn’t know who she was, but somehow I knew I knew her intimately and she was a very important guest.   Her cooperation meant everything.

I asked her why she looked so disapproving.  She just said she never liked me much or thought I liked her much, and was afraid that this time, we still wouldn’t get along because we hadn’t gotten along the first time.   (I’m not sure what “this time” or “that other time” referred to but I think it means “now” and “before I changed.”)

But she reluctantly agreed to try, and I remember shaking her hand and feeling its papery, cool, callousy skin.   She wasn’t the type you’d hug, but her agreement “to try” meant the world to me and meant I could get on with this wedding.

My Interpretation.

I think the emotional release I experienced on Tuesday prepared me for this dream, which I think involved one of my main Guardians (the disapproving school-marm) agreeing to change their role in my life from one of negative judgment to a more positive one, but who was not able to do this until after a lot of the corresponding childhood trauma behind that Guardian’s creation  (abandonment, feeling inferior, unworthy, and incompetent) was released.   I think this Guardian is the same one I previously called The Judge.

This Guardian’s role in my life had been to defend me against having to take risks that might lead to me feeling the pain of failure or rejection.  She did this by criticizing my competence or just throwing out all the negative reasons why such a thing shouldn’t or couldn’t be done. She was basically an internalization of my mother’s nagging, disapproving voice.  This Guardian was negative, judgmental, punishing, disapproving — an old lady with a pinched, mean face — generally not someone anyone would like much.

When I released all that emotion on Tuesday, it had been triggered by old feelings of worthlessness, incompetence, and the certainty that I would be eventually rejected by everyone, all coming to the surface at once.    The emotional release lessened the charge of the underlying trauma just enough to allow the presentation of this Guardian (in the dream), who had already kindly stepped aside long enough for the underlying trauma to be released.  Now she was finally showing herself to me, and agreed (although reluctantly) to try to cooperate with me in this “new marriage”, which I think represents a merging of one part of myself with another.  (I’m not sure which parts though).

The changing of the black shoes to white ones seems obvious enough – changing from a dark and negative way of thinking to one with more lightness and joy.   Also “being in the shoes of” a person about to merge with someone else for life.  But that other “person”–the one I was marrying– seemed mysterious and unknowable.  But the disapproving Guardian provided a clue:  by deciding to cooperate with me “this time,” this seemed to mean she would try to stop being so critical of me (remember, she had told me we never got along).  This seemed to indicate to me that this Guardian was about to “flip her role” from one of negative judgment to one of wise discernment; that in my new marriage (to myself) she would stop being so critical and making me afraid to take any risks, and instead allow me to proceed forward and take a few smart risks, heeding her wisdom instead of her fear (the wisdom of better choices being made possible by faith in God). So the “other me” that I was marrying is the more competent, functional, confident Me who isn’t afraid to take some calculated risks, which includes reaching out more to others without fearing judgment, derision, or rejection.

Dream tsunami.

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tsunami

I just woke from an interesting dream.   I’m going back to sleep after I write this (I had to take a “mental health” day today), but I don’t want to forget it so I’m writing this now.

I’ve often dreamt about tidal waves, tornadoes and tsunamis.   I know these things represent my sometimes overwhelming emotions that seem to want to pulverize me.  Somehow in these dreams, I always survive them — or wake up.

In this dream, I was on a boat — maybe a cruise ship, I’m not sure.   It was very spontaneous.   I hadn’t planned to be on this conveyance, and was excited to going to wherever I was going.    I was talking to some older woman in one of the rooms, who was showing me a lot of old family pictures.  I wasn’t dressed or made up, then I looked out the window and saw people walking by on the beach outside laughing.    Because I was on a boat, I don’t know how that was possible but it was.

I decided to get dressed and go outside and join the fun.   Instead, I wound up in some food court where lunch was being served.    My table mate was none other than President Obama!  We just chatted like old friends — not about politics, just about the weather and other mundane things.  I wasn’t particularly impressed that I was sitting at a table with the president, talking to him; he was just a nice stranger.

At some point I turned around and looked toward the sliding glass doors behind me that led to the deck and couldn’t believe what I saw.    A smooth black wall of water, maybe hundreds of feet high, was headed directly toward us!  Because I was on a boat in open water, there was nowhere to run.   Obama looked too but didn’t seem scared.  He told me to put my head down, which I did.  I tried to relax and took deep breaths, bracing myself for the onslaught and certain death.   I prayed that Jesus would take me to Heaven.   I asked him to forgive me for my sins and lack of faith sometimes.  I kept breathing and trying to relax, but nothing happened.

Cautiously, I looked up and turned around.    The ocean outside was choppy as if after a storm, but otherwise looked normal!

“What happened to the tsunami?” I asked Obama.  He just shrugged.  I went back to eating and making plans for the day.

*****

This dream was different from my other tidal wave dreams for several reasons.

  1.  I didn’t wake up.
  2.  The danger passed without me waking up.
  3. I turned to God for protection.
  4. I didn’t panic.

I think this says a lot about my emotional growth.   The wave represents my emotions, but I have control of them now, and sometimes, things don’t turn out to be nearly as terrible as I expected them to.   Turning to God in moments of crisis can pull me through, as does mindfulness things like deep breathing.

It’s interesting about Obama.  I think he was there because this particular tsunami represents my emotional turmoil in the wake of this election.   Maybe he represents calmness to me.