Dream: I am with a man. He is older and seems wise. There is a room that’s empty with tables set up. There’s going to be a presentation, but first he wants to show me something. There are alligators there with big wide mouths and sharp teeth. As I walk by them with the man, I am afraid but then the man shows me that I have powers. As I walk up to each alligator it calms down and I have a sense that it likes me. My fear decreases as I realize that each alligator will relax when I come close to it and it will even become playful. With the man by my side, I reach out to touch some of them. Now, two of the alligators are fighting with each other using their mouths. Their teeth are touching. The man reaches over and grabs them right where their teeth are connecting. The alligators freeze and stop fighting. The man pulls his hand away. He realizes that he has gone far enough with this demonstration and he leaves them alone. I am in awe of what the man can do but I am also amazed at what I can do. Its like we are a team and he is my special teacher.
Dreams speak using images and in this dream, alligators are that image. Alligators hide in the water hardly moving. You could mistake them for logs. But then, they suddenly snap! Rodger suggests that in the dream, the animus is giving me a presentation of my own anger.
This is one of those dreams that I got completely wrong. Anger? Me? I don’t think so. I am a calm person. I do whatever I can to avoid anger. This doesn’t make sense to me.
Rodger asks if I’ve felt anger recently. Well, come to mention it, I felt it last night. My daughters were arguing. When I asked them to stop and they didn’t, I walked away to my room and slammed the door – a little too hard. The fact is that I did feel anger. It came up suddenly. It surprised me. When I heard the sound of my door slamming it showed me just how angry I was. It was then that I realized it and I started to come to my senses about it. Although I don’t want to admit it to myself the fact is that I do have anger. My way of dealing with it is to walk away and seethe. Since I don’t usually scream and yell, I guess I never thought of it as “real” anger.
Anger showed up in the “crying in the water” dream when I push the girl down the stairs. The dreams are showing me that anger is part of my pathology and it needs to be “outed”. Alligators are one of the least vulnerable creatures around. If I have alligators in my pathology, that shows that I am not vulnerable and in this work, vulnerable is where I want to be . Being vulnerable means breaking down the walls I have built around myself. Walls that keep me separated from the love of the animus. The love that connects me to my girl, my boy, my true self.
As I walk near the alligators with the animus, they calm down. In the dream, I think that I am the one getting them to calm down. I think that I am in control. But really, I don’t have that kind of power. I start to realize the animus’s power at the end when he touches the fighting alligators’ teeth. At that point I feel a sense of awe for him.
For my homework, I am to notice when I get angry. In addition, I am to notice if I feel fear right before the anger rises up. Fear is what is behind anger. Fear is the feeling and anger is the reaction to the fear.
As I do the homework, I am shocked at how much anger does come up for me. Fear shows up first and anger next. As I observe myself, I notice that I try pretty hard to keep the anger hidden from others and apparently I’ve been pretty good at hiding it from myself as well.
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