Dream: I am in a room filled with disabled people and their families. Many of them are in wheelchairs. Each person in the room is taking a turn to tell his/her sad story. One boy killed himself and there is only a cardboard cut out there of him now. His dad is there to tell his story. As each person tells his/her story, I am filled with sadness. I cry and cry and cry. Now it comes to the family sitting next to me. The mom comes over to introduce herself to me. She reaches her hand out and I shake it, barely able to speak my name because I am crying so hard.
Often, I deal with difficult issues in a “clinical” way. As a physical therapist, I have learned to evaluate all kinds of debilitating conditions. I have a way of staying that way in my life.
Clinical.
Clinical = stepping out of feelings. Observing.
But in this dream, I get pulled into the feelings of those in the group. I feel my heart opening up. Their deep sadness touches me and I become filled with sadness. This dream is helping me to feel. I can practice feeling in my dreams, for my life.
Rodger tells me that I don’t realize it but I am next to tell my story. Maybe it’s the story that comes up in the next dream …..
Dream: My baby was just born. They take it away from me and I fear something must be wrong with it. I ask my husband Mark and he tells me where it is. I go to a place that is stacked with small boxes with names on them. I find the one that says “Samworth” and I open it up. It’s the baby in there. It looks very strange – like an odd looking doll made of straw or something. I feel a rush of sadness that I never got to see it alive but that goes away quickly as I feel relief. There was something terribly wrong with this baby.
Babies in dreams often represent our soul selves.
My baby is filed away, dead in a warehouse.
Initially I feel fear that there is something wrong with the baby. This fear is confirmed when I see the strange looking dead baby. I briefly feel the sadness of it but then quick relief as I tell myself it’s just as well. I try to console myself, bypass the pain, by thinking that the baby didn’t have a reason to live since it had something “terribly wrong” with it.
When I ask Mark where the baby is, he is very matter-of-fact. He doesn’t feel my pain because he can’t. I don’t feel my own pain, so how can he? That is how it’s been in waking life too. Although through dreamwork I am starting to feel more deeply. This includes feelings of sadness and pain. But instead of sharing with him, I work hard at shielding him from these feelings. Sadly, isolating myself in this way keeps us from connecting more deeply.
At the end of the dream I feel relief. I quickly jump from feeling a rush of sadness to relief. This is a pattern with me. Anything upsetting that I see in the world…. bad news, suffering… I become clinical. Clinical is my relief. Clinical is making the assessment that the baby had something wrong with it anyway so there is no need to feel pain. Seeking relief instead of truly feeling keeps me from my soul. Relief pulls me away from feeling. It is understandable because who wants to feel pain? But pain is a doorway. It’s through the doorway of pain that we can feel love and other deep feelings.
Palliative approaches to pain are inviting and seem to make sense at first. People want to feel comfortable, at ease. Palliative comes from the Latin palliare – to cloak. Often we jump quickly to cloak or cover up pain. We all have our own ways. I use thoughts to justify not feeling pain. I pull myself into a clinical place hoping to find some relief there. Others may cover pain with food, alcohol or drugs. There are so many creative ways that people find to avoid pain. The idea that feeling pain can be a doorway to feeling love or joy is paradoxical. But that is exactly what the dreams are asking us to do.
Dreamwork is not a “feel good” approach. It asks us to face the fear and the pain that are often so far under that we don’t even know they exist. Until we dream.
Dreams are helping us to set our souls free. Our souls don’t want to stay locked up in a warehouse like my baby was.
So in that first dream, maybe I am next to tell my sad story to the group. I am certainly in a place of deep feeling at the end of that dream and so perhaps I could tell the story of the painful loss of my baby. If I stay with the sadness and the pain, maybe a door can become unlocked. A door to the next feeling.
Recent Comments