Psychoanalytic Expressions:
A Journal of Art and Words.
All of our writers and artists are members of the IEA community.
Chapter 6, Emotional Storm: Dream Images
Michael Eigen, Ph.D
Dream: An oldish woman who, to my surprise, appeared to be pregnant. A pregnant old lady. She seemed lively, moved around with a lot of energy. Maybe something funny about her. She seemed nice enough. Sincere, a slightly humorous tinge. Active, on the go.
She reminds me of a chemistry teacher in high school who looked hill-billyish. I half-expected her to start fiddling or burst into cheery song, even though she was serious, worked hard, presented the course straightforwardly. She had a gawky, homely strength and energy which, without my quite realizing it, felt life-affirming. Reminds me of a comedienne when I was young whose name I don’t remember, maybe Fanny Bryce. Similar bone structure, homeliness. She got laughs making fun of her looks.
I could tear the dream to pieces with associations, trauma, wishes, life events, all the things that one can do with dreams, or connect it with creative urges, possibilities of growth. I’d like, for the moment, to pare away as many of these associative branches as I can, and stick with the surprising energy the dream evoked. The dream was alive, breathing, this old woman a surprise in every sense, her age, her pregnancy, her sprightliness. Now that I think of it, she seemed almost ready to move in all directions, as spirit moved her.
I feel a tinge of humor thinking of biblical angels on some kind of ball with proscribed possibilities of motion. If my pregnant old lady, at first glance an earth figure, were an angel, she’d be a more whimsical, less forbidding figure than awesome prophetic presences. Nevertheless, she is mysterious, startling, dumbfounding. She leaves me speechless, fascinated, not totally without foreboding, but generally light and good. She is puzzling but not ominous.
I mention “foreboding” because I am sensitive to trauma waves in dreams. Dreams give form to a kind of formless annihilation dread that is part of the background radiation of the psychic universe. Dreams express myriad creative and destructive possibilities. On the latter side, dream-work brings intolerable emotions into focus and tries to mediate digestion of troubling events and feeling. At times, dream-work seems to spin its wheels, portraying overwhelming and damaging stuck points. My pregnant old lady melded creativity and trauma, a dense packing that pressed experiential nerves. Mostly, she jumps out at me, slips into openings of self I didn't know were there. Where does she come from? Who is she? What can she want, if anything? What is her destiny, if any? What does she say about life, my life, our life?
I feel a certain adolescent and child energy in her, as if her skin were tightly drawn around excitement that bubbles into anxiety like juice through the skin of a plum. Her skin doesn’t exactly sag like an old person’s and is not exactly tight. Maybe it feels tight because of the shower of electrical shivers that leak through it. Movement emits feelings, leaks feelings.
She is definitely not the image I would have thought up for "soul clap hands and sing." Just hand clapping, body moving, aliveness buzzing - one hand clapping. Energy too much for body, body too much for mind. Child energy, teen energy, old age energy. Raggy filaments too hot to touch one moment, feathering you the next. A sense of the whole universe, all of us crazily jumping up and down - all one hand clapping.
Old lady phallic energy jelly bean belly in your face going about her business propelled by forces that don't come from you, that you don't understand, autonomous, self-directed currents of her own. I've seen bugs dart around like that, especially when I tried to kill them. But there was no killing in the dream. This was, unbelievably, a non-violent dream. A packed, darting energy, at once dense and mobile, unpredictable, a lot of potential energy with no one getting hurt.
The Bible tells us about old ladies getting pregnant. Moses didn’t begin his birth of a nation work before eighty, perhaps about the same age that wild, kindly, almost son-killer Abraham circumcised himself, cutting himself into newness. Freud tells us that circumcision was a way that ancient Egyptians demonstrated their superiority. For Abraham, it was part of a marriage contract between soul and God, a devotion, a promise to bring forth souls more populous than the stars. An association between cutting, purity, bonding, binding, offering, promise, re-creation of self and peoples. A mixture of freedom, difference, newness, and service. One catches glimmers of all this in cutters and self-mutilators today, a kind of skin or organ anorexia that promises more for less.
Old ladies with special babies, God babies, blessed miracles, proof of God's commitment, presence, force. Goodness topping deprivation. God needs a lot of proofs of His existence and we need a lot of proofs of ours. A special moment should be enough but time moves too quickly, even for God. Down to earth old ladies baffling time. My dream lady was down to earth, practical like Biblical old ladies, although, perhaps, more comical, a little haywire with bouncy energy. Are people who are mysteries to others, mysteries to themselves? I suspect my pregnant old lady was as unknown to herself as she was to me.
My grandmother looked so old to me. I called her monkey. She died of cancer in her forties but her face was lined like my dream lady's. To me she was one hundred and twenty. Maybe I was four. She lit candles Friday nights, kept kosher. A few years before she died she nearly died and came back, speaking of beautiful, radiant men with prayer shawls. She was so happy to see them. They told her it was not time yet, she had to stay with us a little longer. She came back to tell us about them. Now she is back again, mediated by my dream lady, a lightning bug in my heart, making me smile as I puzzle funny turns. "You see, I did it," she might say. "Now I'm with them." She is with the holy ones. When I think of her I'm surprised to see a baby in a tiny boat darting in the water. It must be me in her arms, feeling precious and loved.
There is more - always more. Birth is not limited by anything you can think of. If my grandmother is pregnant with death, it is death pregnant with life. She comes to show me that life goes on and I can not understand it and neither can she. The dream figure is sheer presencing with a taste of incredible persistence and a taste of incredibly sweet joy.
I am drifting away from the puzzle, the unknowable pregnant old lady, energic force, creative urge. Trying to tame the startling. Flying sparks bait me. I see a pregnant old lady rocking a boat and I jump in and rock with her.
Old ladies can do anything. In the Bible and in Hollywood. Mary Poppins can do anything for a moment - almost. She comes to tell you anything is possible. My indestructible old lady is a bulwark against fragility, death, time. Almost a slide of pure strength. My grandmother, in contrast, was skinny, deteriorating, the disease eating her insides out. Not in dream life, not this dream. This old lady is a bit like a machine, an engine. She accelerates, not simply walks. She does not say anything. There is no speech in the dream. The dream is quiet but for the whir of energy and a mute insistence. Movement makes me hold my breath and watch. Am I listening for my parents sounds in the night? The force of the old lady's compact pressure going nowhere, here, there, like up and down bodies in the night. Their movement stops me.
My dream lady draws power from many sources but is nothing but herself. The definitive density of being only herself is part of the fascination, the liberation. How can one be only oneself? Waves of strength pulse through my body when I think of her. I feel more together, able, ready with anxious, steadfast energy that moves me I know not where. Able to come alive, fragile as a bird coming back year after year to the same site to nest. An old bird grown kindlier with age. But no, I'm confusing something in my own heart with the woman staring at me from the dream, eyes open, staring - just seeing, not me, nothing in particular. The force that works in this woman is not human. But then, there is much that is not human in us. Life does not stop, the psyche does not stop, not when we are dying or when we die.
My dream lady is not sentimental. Is she indifferent? Part of an indifferent force that does not care about us, part of the pressure of a universe that keeps universing? Part of the force that is the work of mothering tasks, someone who takes care of the baby without knowing exactly who the baby is? Is she a look and an energy I do not grasp? Why call her indifferent if she appeared? She came to show herself to me. A new creation using some old materials, a figure creating herself out of dream substance. She could have remained hidden, unborn. Her coming into my dream, becoming a dream image, is something other than rude indifference. She turned herself into a dream gift to ponder, to take me places. If indifference, then an indifference that is part of who we are. The universe may explode, collapse, expand, thin, chill, but my pregnant old lady represents psychic force with no end.
My father called my grandmother a force of nature. She, for whom I was so precious, so loved, traumatized me horribly. She killed my pet duck my father gave to me and served it when she thought it was big enough to eat. "That's what she did in the old country," my father explained. "That's what she knows. A peasant. A force of nature." "Why didn't you stop her?" I wanted to know. "How can you stop a force of nature?" my father replied. He pleaded innocence, like all men and women since Adam and Eve. But pleading innocence does not stop pain.
My mother never liked the duck in the apartment. It challenged her sense of cleanliness. One day she said, "Your duck is too big for the apartment. It's grown up. It needs a larger space. It will be happier in grandma's backyard." The hand of fate slices through all bones. Truth mixes alien desires. Grandma's backyard was big enough indeed. It looked like it would make a barnyard animal happier. You can't argue that. All I can say was, "Quackie is happy with me. Quackie will be happier with me in a small place than without me in a big place." Anywhere together was the happy place. This took no figuring at all, pure emotional arithmetic of a child not yet in kindergarten. Quackie was my best friend. He waddled up and down my body when I napped, wagged along behind me on the street.
One Shabbos I went to grandma's and Quackie was not in the yard. They told me he must have escaped. I went around the neighborhood calling, "Quackie, Quackie," but I knew. They called me in for dinner and Quackie was on the table, our Shabbos meal. At first they said it was from the butcher but my parents could not hold out. Even they knew there was truth that could not be hidden. After some attempts, they gave up trying to get me to eat it. I'd like to say I never ate duck again but I tasted it in my twenties and ate it several times after my thirties, although it has been a couple of decades since I last tasted it. A hatred was born for parents, for adults, that never left, although becoming a parent and adult somewhat modified it. My father claimed he could not eat it either, that he was horrified, that he did not know beforehand. By the time he died he achieved some sense of what good people can do to one another (it was obvious what bad people did). I know some of my faith in life – deep down in my being – comes from my grandmother. But she is also part of what shakes me to the core.
An inevitable insensitivity, indifference is part of child care. We are all seared by it. We try to personalize it, minimize it, think it doesn’t have to be there. We can, through evolution of sensitivity, tone it down, take some of the edge off. But it will never be eliminated. We always will be partly monsters afraid of monsters. The inevitability of trauma is part of emotional storm.
We look at our hardness, indifference, insensitivity, feel it quiver, give way, and reform again. We see hate attached to it, fed by wounds. But we can not be sure that the energy of hate begins with wounds, nor is all hardness hatred. There is productive hardness needed to stand up to ourselves. We can work on ourselves, soften, become more compassionate and open. But we never stop being lethal. We want to help each other and do. We lift each other’s spirits and lives. But there are moments we forget to duck as the blade's edge swings our way.
There was no meanness in the face of the pregnant old lady in my dream. There was no predator-prey element that I could see, no drive to be on top, nor sense of being a victim. She was just being what she was, ising. Perhaps she was showing me something new in evolution. Or something old getting distilled out of top dog-underdog paraphernalia, disengaged from above-below hierarchies. The pure momentum of life pressing into birth processes. Energy, endurance, persistence going on being, potentially omni-directional, steadfast in density, inherently mobile. She was startling but not menacing, not a horror. She was attention getting, arresting, but did not stop you dead in your tracks, did not turn you into stone, did not slash your heart or pulverize your being. She just made you address her, experience her, wonder about her. This in itself would be a great step – to be able to get each other’s attention without wounding, without having to hit or maim or bruise to feel we are there. She teaches by example.
Pregnancy does not stop with old age. Simply, pregnancy does not stop. The anxiety, excitement, patience, movement, endurance that never end are here attached to birth rather than murder. If we treated ourselves and each other as pregnant beings, murder might become a less addictive solution to problems. Imagine, pregnancy and birth a possibility of every encounter. The will to power might lose some of its appeal if its energy has better things to do. Emotional storms are here to stay but we may have some input as to how we undergo them. Force without dominance - my old lady flashes on possibilities far from perfect, but something to think about.
* * *
Dream: Kids on roof throw a kid off, a little girl. It’s time to flip her. “Flip-flop.” She lies on the ground a bit, then gets up. You do this to “reset” yourself.
At first I fear the danger of falling, of smashing to smithereens on the ground, then think people who jump to their deaths don’t necessarily smash to smithereens but get all broken, a mess. You’d expect if you got thrown off or jumped off a roof that the damage would be pretty bad. I think of someone I knew who jumped out a window and they didn’t show his body at the funeral service because it was too messy. He was on LSD when he jumped and maybe he thought he’d bounce back up or reset himself. Maybe he wished to jump through anxiety and pain towards the urge to start fresh, make the bad stuff go away. But renewal, like birth, and anxiety and pain all go together. My dream moves through aggression, anxiety, surprising relief. What I fear is murder turns into play.
It has long been my belief that a kind of rhythm involving injury-recovery is part of a faith structure that is part of the foundation of experiencing. This may involve processes of renewal, rebirth, re-generation in many forms, always partial and tentative, although too often they are felt or conceived as totalistic and absolute. The above dream image is a semi-whimsical variant of this pattern. It begins in earnest, deadly serious (so it felt to the dreamer). A kid being thrown to her death. It was awful. All the terror, dread of dream, a sick storm increasing in force.
The compression of time in dreams is amazing. The anxiety attached to the girl being thrown to her death was palpable. It was acute and steady, on the rise, ready to accelerate, flood, paralyze the dreamer’s consciousness. At the same time, it did not reach climax. It remained more of a steady state, like sound waves rapidly oscillating, background radiation ready to flare into something totally decimating. In fact, decimation was already happening: the little girl being thrown off the roof, on her way down, hitting the ground. Each part of the sequence simultaneously in slow and rapid motion, one after another, excruciating drama, yet in some way happening all at once. One can dip into each micro-instant and find worlds of affect, infinite dread, limitless sub-currents of feeling, anticipatory and actual dread, dread of outcome, dread of happening. Parts of images could be slowed down and focused on as the dream sped along. The viewer-experiencer does not know the outcome moment within moment. Startle is part dream structure, moving from shock to shock.
The girl hits the ground, lies there. Death. The dreamer’s affect drops downward, downward. Dread fuses with depression, shock with sorrow, nascent onset of mourning. A terrible happening, soul buckles, heads towards grief. The girl pops up. Surprise. Up, up. Soul smile in the startle. Relief. She is OK. She is alive. I mean, not just alive but alive. An active kid with kid energy, alive energy. Popping up, walking off. I can feel her body and now think of the pregnant old lady’s energy. Except the little girl lacked the perpetual motion machine feeling, She is not perpetual motion, irrepressible force, She is destructible yet wasn’t destroyed. She could die, but didn’t. The old lady’s energy felt indestructible, whether it is or isn't. The little girl felt vulnerable, even if she wasn’t.
It is said that Jesus truly died and truly resurrected. If one gets into the infra-structure of my dream, it might be that the little girl truly died and came alive again. It certainly felt that way. She plunged to her death. Only death was not final. Perhaps she did not die, but was lying unconsciously or semi-unconsciously, analogous to a state of shock, awaiting recovery. That’s not what it seemed like. In the dream, she died and popped back up. Surprise was an important element in the dream feeling, part of the nucleus of the dream. The surprise of violence, finality, not-finality, renewal. A not surprising sequence in retrospect, an ancient sequence, but real and consuming while in progress.
The dream entertained me with its prowess, its amazingness: “Look what I can do.” Life triumphs. Violence and death are part of renewal. Self pops up good as new. The dream caricatures my own faith structure, faith rhythm, my commitment to a rhythm of recovery. A basic feeling in the dreaming state is "Wow! Look at that!” And what is that? Something in me that keeps popping up, wanting more? Narcissism, elan, self-affirmation, love of living? Something irrepressible? Or more - the dream's jouissance, amazement at itself, at its own existence and its appreciation of itself as exemplar of the processes that make such worlds of experience possible. Amazement at itself as part of the thus-ness of things. The images themselves have the last word, although I keep writing.
* * *
The pregnant old lady and young girl who dies and comes to life share a surprising energy. Neither one is business as usual. They evade space-time categories, not simply to shake things up, but to inject something new. They intervene in habitual routine and make one re-visualize events of the day. They stop the world for a moment, make you wonder. You have to appreciate the fact that there is more to life than you dream, as your dreams make you notice. They are part of the strange, the unanticipated. They make you stare dumbly at the scene as prelude to opening you up a little. Surprise, startle and shock is part of their method.
Whatever their differences, the old lady and the girl share a life energy that won’t be put off, boxed in, easily packaged. Even though they fit traditional themes – pregnant old lady, dying and coming to life, birth and rebirth – they slip in between the cracks of personality, tickle a raw nerve, and won’t let you get away with dosing off on your life forever. To some extent, they reverse the order of time, not simply to fulfill wishes (to evade death, live forever) but to keep you in tune with what you value most, freshness of being, the taste of experience, the shock of aliveness.
The girl and old lady aren’t involved in dramas about caring. They are forms of energy going on being, just themselves. It is not a matter of cruelty or indifference but of isness. They don’t represent the whole, personal self, but give a sense of nervous endurance, momentum (pregnant old lady) and resilience (the dying-alive again girl, down and up – neither scared or scary, just alive in herself). There is an x that keeps going, gets through things, never stops, carries one along. It is neither sentimental nor mean. While these images are surprising, they bring out something commonplace, basic – the nervous, vibrating propulsion and momentum of life moving you along.
* * *
Ordinary disruption in dreams takes many forms, sharing qualities of surprise, startle, shock, crackling at the edge of rigidities, inviting personality to stretch and be more inclusive. Here is a nearly random sampling from recent dreams drawn out of a hat.
Dream: Not able to find my younger son. Train? Subway? Night? Raining?
I wake up from this scary dream which embodies parental fear. The dream fear shakes me and has power to shake me more. Waking puts the brakes on. Here the disruption is fear of a loved one dying or lost, the most dreadful fear a parent has. There is no growing through a fear like this, no expansion of personality through death. Just terror and living through fear of loss and the worst.
Even so, the literal portrayal of the dream fear acts as a channel for fear that runs through personality, rampant annihilation dread that is part of disaster terror attached to a trauma world. The worst trauma I can imagine now – loss of a child – bespeaks terror and trauma in general through a specific possibility. It is loaded with all the fear of my life in a somewhat attenuated way, since there is no indication that my child is dead. In the dream he is just not there. To be missing can be ominous but there are other possibilities.
The reality is likely he has gone somewhere and is not back yet. Of course, the dream does not say that or stop there. To say my son is missing sets a tone that spirals. There is, too, subway, night, rain – place and atmosphere, partly filling out the mood, partly normalizing it. There is no reason to jump to conclusions, except dreams express affect through extremes. It is hard for me to give up control, to let him go, to tolerate autonomy. He has gone on his own without me. I am left behind as he risks the world and the task and adventure of living his life. As it should be.
I had a very over-protective father and it cost me much to break free. Is the dread that pursued my father embedded in me, part of an atmosphere of dread permeating generations?
Is the dream expressing the fact that there is something missing in life, in relationships, in encounters – as Lacan says, we are always repeating a “missed encounter.” Are we trying to discover something in life that isn't there, life that is nowhere?
I want to stick with the dream's incipient affect here, the impending dread, a dire feeling potentially mounting. Whatever its meanings, the fact of it is upsetting. It taps sub-seas of catastrophic anxiety that surround, subtend personality, sensed as premonitions of the worst or of something pretty bad. Semi-omnipresent disaster anxiety inform the background of experiencing that dreams grow out of, nibble at, try to digest or express. Hints of storm never far away.
Dream: My parents called the cops as I was missing. I’d been away from morning on and didn’t call. I was at Betty’s apartment. When I got around to calling at ten PM, the cops were on the way to find me.
My parents jumped the gun. They could not tolerate my being away, out of their sight, out of their control. They could not take the anxiety of growth, aliveness, separation difference. The dream exaggerates to make the point: I must have been in my mid-thirties if I was at Betty's (my wife to be) apartment. Even my parents didn't track me down when I was in my thirties. But in spirit, the dream is right to hyperbolize.
I get anxious when my kid does not call. We live in a dangerous city and he is supposed to let us know he is alive past a certain time. I went to extremes to break away from my parents. I had little urge to call when I left home. As a young man, I did not want much contact with them. I had as little to do with them as possible until I got married. I did not want to feel how afraid they were, as I feared that would break my life drive. I pushed past their fear, my fear.
I’ve thought of calling the cops when my kid is late in calling. Parents have to sit on a lot to be parents. Holding oneself back is part of love.
On the other hand, I may be missing something as a person, missing something in life – and no amount of police work will find it.
There is ebb and flow, balance between impulse and protection, life drive and police, although lives get weighted too much one way or the other. Here police function as tether to parents. A reigning in function, lest I get out of control, too far out, or just become myself.
I was living my own life with Betty, my wife. The dream flashes on her apartment before we were married. You’d think the superego lessens with experience. But the dream makes clear it is a persistent force in personality, here a parental extension clustering around safety and loss vis a vis sexuality and freedom. It is delusional to think either pole absent. Conservative and adventurous tendencies work together, although tensions between them can mushroom. Freud cautioned that competing tendencies can be tyrannical, that one can be destroyed from the side of control or the side of impulse, while needing both.
There is no getting away from the stormy situation of being a parent or of being a child. To grow or not to grow – what kind of choice is this? Often I meet someone who thinks growing solves problems. One does not leave personality structure behind by acquiring new territory. New territory, new problems. And inside new problems, old ones, with further meaning, significance, possibilities. Old and new are not reducible to one another, but are not simply outside each other either.
The child missing dreams focus on parental anxiety, rather than the child’s growth anxiety. The two dreams cover an arc of experience, with me on either side of the fence, parent, child. However, the thrust seems to be on the difficulties of being a parent - containing parental dreads, letting go, separating, affirming the fact that we live our own lives, that attachment involves suffering. We grow through the challenges attachment presents, since there is no life outside these challenges.
In the second dream, the parental police proved unnecessary. My parents could not withstand compulsion. My inner parents need to grow more. It is unlikely I 'd call the police when my son is late coming home, but I'm not above calling his companion's parents at three in the morning to see if there is any news (much as I'd hate myself for doing so). The anxiety-control nexus is gripping. But that is not the whole person. There is, also, a free and open feeling seeking development, a sense of treasuring one’s chance at living. We are neither just clearing nor clot.
Focus placed on child development obscures fuller realization of how much parents develop (or need to). Parent development is as important a fact as child development. We need university departments for the former as well as latter. So much in life depends on how parental developmental challenges are met. I've gained enormously by staying with internal upheavals, emotional storms, family differences entail. Upheavals come from anywhere, often when least expected. My kids and wife are doing something that arouses anxiety. The urge to mold or shape the situation raises its ugly head, threatens to tyrannize. Helplessness, rage, control meld. A little thing, like who is going where when suddenly mushrooms into a threat against the self, challenging a constricting, one-sided conception of the day.
The wish to help and contribute skates thinly over the will to dominate. It is very easy for some aspect of family life, with all its potential intensity, to tip over one's individual balancing act, hit a nerve, rub an image wrong. Little twists and turns incessantly challenge imaginings of how things should be. How does one learn to wait when waiting is needed and let things sort themselves out? How does one let oneself become part of dialogical processes that open pleasures of responsiveness? There is a feeling of freedom and lightness and breathing easier that comes with learning that others know how to do things and that the spontaneity, resources, inventiveness of others is a pleasure. The gruesome fact is that many are intolerant of this kind of learning and substitute destruction for dialogue.
Over the years, I've accumulated a little catalogue of events that precipitate break-ups. There are marriages that survive extra-marital affairs but fail to survive a house renovation or family trip. The latter are but two triggers for exaggerating the clash of differences, stresses that distil or aggravate chronic, personal fault lines. Family life is made up of complex developmental processes or failures thereof. That enormous emotional pressures are involved is seen by flights from relationship occasioned by pregnancy or birth, which turn out to be more than one bargained for. Of course, flight can be better than murderous fights, although both merge. For some, personality does meet challenges life together exacts and one enters the mystery of profound development that connection entails.
As mentioned above, one of life's most freeing discoveries is a deeply felt sense that others can figure things out, that one does not have to think for everyone. As wisdom literature reflects, it is an odd property of self to think one knows what is good for others when one can't figure out what is good for oneself. Even more freeing is the realization that we don't know what we're doing (as Jesus noted, a basis for forgiveness). We grope along and productive groping is what we hope for. Life finds its ways. There is such great fear in letting go control, mental or spiritual or physical, whether control involves real or illusory power. Sometimes people fear growth or try to stop growth because some favorite method of control, one with a favored sense of self (even if hatred of self) is threatened with extinction. Such threats are apocalyptic and based on an all or nothing, totalistic style of thinking. Not to worry. Since the compulsion to control that is part of the anxiety of attachment does not vanish, one need not fear being deprived of the pleasure of letting it go some more.
* * *
The pregnant old lady and girl dying and coming to life express the urge of life to go on being, keep moving, renew. As long as you are alive, life goes on, with or without your consent, sweeping you along, although you may try to channel it, use it your way (what you think or imagine is your way), slow things down, reflect on it. There is a division of labor of sorts: the dream images catch the dream gazer’s attention, so that there are actors and observer. A mixture of movement, immediacy and watching, two poles of aware being. If there were only action or only a watcher, the tension that makes the dream compelling could not exist.
The second set of dreams involve parental anxiety, with subtexts of annihilation fears, separation, control, and autonomy issues, as life pushes into life. Birth anxiety, attachment anxiety, growth anxiety fuse with parental fears. Parents need to grow. Pressures children exert can be overwhelming. The movement into full parenthood requires growth of capacities one scarcely suspects exist, as challenging a growth as a child’s. What it means to be a child or parent are boxes we are opening more fully than any time in history.
The going on being of aliveness in the first two dreams was carried by others, not the dreamer – old lady, girl. The parental anxiety dream involved the dreamer as player, as anxious one or as “cause” of anxiety. It was as if life gave the dreamer a glimpse of itself and its processes in the first two dreams, and touched on an enduring difficulty in the second two.
Some surprises in dreams are fulfilling for the dreamer or promise fulfillment. That a dream goes well for the dreamer both as actor and watcher can be more surprising than things going badly. So many dreams nibble on the edge of disaster anxiety that it is a relief and something of a dramatic foil when dream-life treats one truly well. But there are good dreams and dreams of promise, although fusion of good/bad elements and tendencies come closer to the rule.
back to top
