Pedestrian tunnel that runs through the rock mountain in the Peñon de Ifach natural park in the city of Calpe, province of Alicante, Valencian Community, Spain.
[Because this is both a regular dream and also reflects dealing with a nightmare I’m posting it in both blogs.]
Last night I found myself lost in caves and tunnels filled with salons, beauty shops a Buddhist Temple, and a bubbling brook used for meditation. I can’t find my way out. Everywhere I turn I’m lost. I’m frustrated in that every tunnel I go down takes me deeper into my lostness. It feels as though I’m starting to give up hope.
This is clearly an overwhelming and depressing dream. Because it’s an expression of what I’m experiencing in the waking world where chaos is everywhere and there seem to be few sane people left to turn to. Is there any way out of this nightmare? This dream is urging me to take some personal action, to transcend the tendency to retreat into myself.
The cave is my inner self, my deeper being. The tunnels are resources that I can use to get to where I want and need to be. The dream suggests that meditation and caring for my own well-being (Buddhist temple, babbling brook [calm down in order to see the way, the Tao], and salons) might help if not for the lostness, then for the calm needed to get through the craziness. The dream also suggests that I keep going and keep looking for an answer despite the frustration and helplessness.
I’ve been dreaming a number of very dark and scary dreams over the past month. In one it’s a cold overcast day when a young toe-headed boy loses his head in a guillotine while in another dream several young women are in a cold-water cistern that is draining rapidly and they begin to circle the drain before going under.
The toe-headed boy may be my own innocence being decapitated as well as the morality and values of the country that are being thrown out as the people vote against their best interest for people who promise them something they’ll probably never give.
The women circling the drain may represent compassion, caring, and inclusiveness dying all around me in a world gone mad with populism.
It has become a very dark world where the light of the candle is sputtering and the fire near the hearth barely crackles, leaving the room to grow cold.
Politically and socially, it is the ‘winter of our discontent.’ In Steinbeck’s novel of the same name a man seems willing to give up his morality to his desire for success through unethical means. Our world seems ready to do the same and is taking frightening form in my dreams.
May the new year bring less frightening dreams as well as less frightening events.
In the last two postings of the Book of Dreams Blog*, I’ve examined fear and anger in dreams and in our waking lives. Today’s Dark Knight of the Soul post extends these themes.
The dream (a mild nightmare): A woman is crawling on the ground in obvious distress. In the dream, several different females are in distress.
Interpretation: is this an attack on the soul? Soul stress? On the individuated soul/anima Mundi?
There is a general dysphoria that has gripped the societies of the world. Though this nightmare-like dream may be idiopathic, i.e., not caused by a specific trauma, it may reflect a more global and profound trauma being experienced daily. We are awash in fear-generated news almost 24/7, placing us in nearly constant fight/flight/freeze mode. This affects society’s cohesion, creating an atmosphere of everyone for themselves type of action. Not realizing this fear is internal, we seek ways to mitigate the feelings by attaching ourselves to like-minded people and blaming others outside ourselves and the group we’ve attached to.
Not knowing where these feelings of fear come from, we conjure wild conspiracy scenarios to create an object of our fears that we can then attack or defend against. But it is us who are the enemy. Wherever we run, wherever we turn, there we are. We flail at ghosts and that which is not us. We try to mitigate what threatens us but always miss the actual perpetrator. Meanwhile, the soul is hung out to dry with its purpose and value-driven existence, drowning in fear and draining its energy as it thrashes about.
I had a nightmare last night where I experienced a human skull biting my foot and though I tried shaking it off violently it would not let go. As I tried to wake up I found myself barely able to breathe and paralyzed.
Sleep paralysis, though scary, isn’t abnormal in that the body motor system tends to shut down as you enter REM sleep and as you come out of it. REM or rapid eye movement sleep is the primary dream stage of sleep though one can have dreams during the other four stages of sleep as well but often not as vivid. This stage occurs roughly every 90 minutes or so after entering the first stage. The body shuts down the motor functions as a form of protection so that you won’t hurt yourself while thrashing around in your dream.
Though normal, if you awake during this stage the paralysis can be quite disconcerting and may be, if experienced too often, a sign of some sleep problem or neurological issue.
As with any aspect of a dream, paralysis can suggest a feeling of being out of control, signify coping issues, a resistance to change, or a feeling of being trapped in some situation in your waking life.
Being bitten may have something to do with feeling vulnerable to someone or some situation that you haven’t dealt with adequately. For me the whole dream sequence may represent what I’ve been feeling regarding all the hate, lies and cheating going on in my country today as well as the out of control feeling associated with all the gun violence in my country and the wars being fought in various parts of the globe. I no longer have a sense of safety and belonging in my own country due to the hate and disruption coming from the extreme right wing of the social-political-religious spectrum. This stress and anxiety show up in my dreams as a nightmare from time to time.
Though the biting of my foot can be about an attack on my ability to stand firm on my own two feet and even refer to my own penchant toward self-criticism it may also have been an artifact of some neuropathy I’ve been experiencing lately and need to see a doctor about.
The truth is that a dream can reflect several different layers of meaning simultaneously. Our job is to analyze and parse the meanings out.
We find the fact that there is cannibalism in the world ugly even though rare and recoil when ever it raises its ugly head. Cannibalism is the same species eating of the body for its own sustenance but what about the eating of the soul when we beat someone down, kick the dog, torture an animal, oppress a people, commit war upon them, or suck the energy from a room or a relationship is that not a form of cannibalism?
Some people thrive on the eating of another’s energy for they have little to none of their own having had it eaten earlier in life or the continuous presence of the loss of energy due to how they are treating themselves or are being treated by others.
Some people eat another’s energy such as what many politicians and their followers are currently doing to others. That same energy is also consumed through psychological or physical means and then this type of metaphorical vampire uses it to further its own goals.
How does one spot an energy vampire or cannibal? One way is to note who has just walked into the room when the energy level changes or decreases. In a discussion with someone do you feel lifted or deflated, valued, or devalued. Another way is to notice after someone has talked or made a speech how you are feeling e.g., inflated, empowered, encouraged, or deflated, disempowered, and discouraged. Energy cannibals bring hate, anger, and fear into a room. They thrive on the negativity because they’re trying to shed it from themselves by placing it on or sucking it from others. They are destroyers of cooperation and unity. They also will never take accountability for their actions either by placing it on others or by just lying about it, and will always one-up others who challenge or disagree with them. You can always tell what an emotional vampire is up to by what he or she accuses others of. They will also use your good nature against you and create all kinds of drama around themselves.
Some politicians thrive on sucking on the energy of their challengers and creating havoc for their own aggrandizement.
Energy vampires/cannibals will always seek to place blame for their failures on something or someone else. After being around them do you feel better or worse about yourself, better or worse about life?
Watch your dreams are they depicting bleeding or vampires or dark figures menacing? If so, perhaps you are experiencing an emotional energy drainer in your life. But remember the quote from the comic character Pogo, “we have met the enemy and he is us” for we may be playing the role of our own vampire/cannibal by how we judge and treat ourselves or in how we are judging and treating others. Dreams of shooting or being shot, threatened, and chased might also be indicators of some kind of conflict both inner and outer in your life. Feelings of being trapped, restrained, or trying to escape in your dreams might also be indicators of a vampire/cannibal in your life.
Being attacked by self, events, and/or others can leave us feeling helpless, angry or depressed.
A sea urchin with no spines is attacked by an ugly toad intent on the urchin’s destruction. But the seemingly defenseless urchin sends out tentacles from beneath and wraps them around the toad’s neck. I am appalled and grossed out as I watch this aggressive dream.
“What is going on?” I wonder as I awake from this nightmarish scene.
As I review this dream trying to gain some insight to its meaning aggression and conflict seem to be the main theme. I am both the urchin and toad, the attacker and the attacked, the aggressor and the victim. The usual suspect comes to the fore i.e., my penchant for self-punishment. But it’s more than this same old, same old story.
As I watch helplessly the political realities of certain egos plotting to dominate the government with little or no regard for people’s lives, countries making invasion plans for no other reason than to dominate and make themselves important, random mass shootings for the same reason, and in my own tiny corner of the world a violent incident that has pitted well-meaning people against each other I am feeling overwhelmed with things that I can do nothing about but watch.
Add to all that my own self-criticism for not living up to my own standard for being and I create the inner turmoil that this dream represents. The dream brings to the fore what I try to ignore, the feeling of helplessness and depression that keeps me angry at the world and at myself.
For some reason facing this anger helps me to settle, for the truth is I have a right to be fearful and angry but need and want to also face the fact that am not totally helpless in that I can change what I do with that fear and anger. I can resist the tendency for my emotions to take me over and still do what is right to do with what is in front of me. In short, I need to be gentle with myself in all things and not give evil for evil.
As I finish up this blog, I am reminded of the poem by Max Ehrmann, the Desiderata.
Desiderata
GO PLACIDLY amid the noise and the haste and remember what peace there may be in silence. As far as possible, without surrender, be on good terms with all persons.
Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even to the dull and the ignorant; they too have their story.
Avoid loud and aggressive persons; they are vexatious to the spirit. If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain or bitter, for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.
Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans. Keep interested in your own career, however humble; it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.
Exercise caution in your business affairs, for the world is full of trickery. But let this not blind you to what virtue there is; many persons strive for high ideals, and everywhere life is full of heroism.
Be yourself. Especially do not feign affection. Neither be cynical about love; for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment, it is as perennial as the grass.
Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth.
Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune. But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings. Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness.
Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here.
And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should. Therefore, be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be. And whatever your labors and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life, keep peace in your soul. With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be cheerful. Strive to be happy.
A dream was given to me after reading about how the military chiefs of the US planned to stop a coup planned by our ex-president. A dream that grew out of the black muck of a new Nazi party that had taken hold of half the nation, half its senators, and most of its governors and legislators. It is a Reichstag moment where anti-democracy forces burned the seat of the German government and took over the country. I used to believe that it couldn’t happen here, and yet here we are.
I want to believe that every dream comes to us in the service of our health and well-being. Still, this one seems to be both a clarion call to fight the evil growing in the heartland, to fix that which is broken but also as a harbinger of death to a nation and a way of life, a pandemic of false fears promulgated by the righteous right hand as it deals a death blow to the left leaving the country handicapped and less than the whole.
The dream visited as I chewed on this most disturbing news.
The dream:
“I’m in a pool, and the tiles on the bottom are all broken up and scattered. The very foundation of the pool has been destroyed.” This is a dream of shadow and soul work as is I believe the waking world projection in the political world.
Our world, our country, our democratic principles, and a great experiment in democracy are stressed and in some places breaking up, and its foundational tiles of the free press, separation of powers, freedom of speech, and right to vote are all being shattered and cast aside. Soon the great pool of wonder that is, or was, the United States that was once as Abraham Lincoln once said, the world’s “last best hope” will begin to leak and will soon be empty of the waters of hope, the waters of life, the baptismal font of freedom, and that symbol which represents the Holy Spirit to Christians everywhere will be no more.
We are doing this to ourselves out of fear, lies, political greed, and our self-righteous need to kill figuratively and practically what we see as different from ourselves, a caveman skill that we have yet to grow out of.
I’m not sure we can stop it, and like environmental warming, the degradation may be too vast and all-encompassing that there’s no turning it back at least not in the short term. However, we must put up the good fight for our self-respect, but I’m no longer sure we can win. Different from the last great war for freedom, there will be no United States to come to our rescue, for as Pogo once said, “we have met the enemy, and he is us.” All we have is ourselves, those of compassion, love, truth, goodwill, and reason regardless of political or religious point of view to call upon to save us. Let us hope and pray that it’s enough.
Though I never claimed to be a patriot, especially in its current disgusting and violent iteration, I have always respected the individuals who did join the military* and wanted to aid in the protection of the people and way of life of this country.
I find it intolerable how many of the very same people in the military are protecting hold so little regard for that service, especially for those who are black or brown. I am white, so I cannot even imagine what the nonwhite experience is like, but I find myself moved to anger at those who, without thinking, will denigrate a nonwhite at the drop of a hat and justify it with ignorant and irrational excuses biblical quotes out of context and some twisted understanding of individual constitutional rights. Over time my anger at my white male brethren has made me cautious and suspicious of people in general, mainly white people. I find that I have slowly become demeaning of my whiteness as though I belong to a sick group of humans that seem incapable of redeeming themselves, though, at a deeper level, I know this not to be true.
Over the years, I have personally known maybe a handful of black people, men, and women all of whom exhibited a remarkable commitment to their lives and the lives of others. One, a close friend when I was in the Marines, was killed when we were in Vietnam. Others whom I worked closely with in various capacities also gave of themselves in very profound ways. I hate that their contributions were denigrated every time the whites decide that they are better than the black population in general. I’m embarrassed by general white behavior and constantly wonder what can be done to turn around this negative ground between white people and black people.
I know the only one who I can change is myself. To that end, I have looked at my prejudices, i.e., prejudgments toward black people specifically and all people in general, and worked on changing my internal narrative. It’s a slow process because most of these prejudices are unconscious and only float to consciousness on a piecemeal basis. Not all lend themselves to a quick resolution because of long-held conditioning, but I’m dedicated to doing what I can in the name of becoming more whole and more supportive to myself and others. This doesn’t make me better than others; goodness knows I am as flawed as anybody, but I also know that these flaws will be dealt with within the open light of day instead of keeping them hidden in the caves of my unconscious. It’s an ongoing process that I’m pretty sure will not become anywhere near complete during my lifetime.
This process of becoming conscious of my unconscious motivators and shadow aspects is a prolonged process fraught with pitfalls and social-emotional landmines. It can often undermine my sense of self-esteem. I’m a trained psychologist who prides himself in his willingness to become vulnerable as a way of opening to reality and ferreting out where I need to change. I am also quite clear that this is not for everyone, especially those who have sought out like minds to justify their points of view and feel like they belong and are accepted by their peers. How do I know this? Because I do it too. Belonging and acceptance and the love of those around us are potent motivators in forming our beliefs and behaviors that are empowering and those that denigrate.
Carrot and stick diplomacy meted out fairly and consistently seems to me to be the best way of beginning the process of collective attitude change, i.e., rewarding the desired behavior while punishing the undesired. The Chauvin case is an example of a fairly applied “stick” consequence to someone who didn’t seem to believe in the sanctity of all life, and if this were consistently used across the board might help to shift the collective point of view but will only do so if there is an equal shift in how we reward the desired behavior of treating all people as equal under the law that I believe is the real meaning behind the phrase and declaration that all men are created equal.
Of course, no effort, no matter how well-intentioned, will ever be embraced by everyone, but those who just can’t see their way to treating others with respect need to be treated consistently and held accountable for their actions regarding their treatment of others.
Hate and mistreatment should not be a matter of opinion or a sanctioned right by any ruling, legislative, or law supporting body. Hate and mistreatment are wrong and should never be tolerated or endorsed in any form, nor should philosophies or points of view support hate, mistreatment, disenfranchisement, the demeaning of others, and sanctioned division and polarization. That’s how humankind throughout history has dealt with those who were different. But that is caveman mentality, and I would hope that along with our technology and political systems, we would have matured beyond the neanderthal mentality of domination, disenfranchisement, banishment, humiliation, and death as a means of controlling a point of view. I think we have. There’s so much of the opposite being played out across the world so that the positive changes get lost in all the sound and fury of the fearful minds that want to close off the march toward equality and justice for all because it threatens its sense of dominance and power which they have for generations construed wrongly as leading to safety and security. It doesn’t and never has over the long run.
Free speech, independence, and so-called “state’s rights” that lead to the disenfranchisement of people should never be accepted at any level. We will never become the country of our Declaration of Independence if we accept hate and disenfranchisement of any of its people.
We ultimately must learn how to confront our shadow side and deal with it honestly and openly.
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*In the interest of full disclosure I was a Marine and served 13 months in Vietnam between Nov 1967 and Dec 1968.
Within each of us resides a dichotomy that of the masculine and that of the feminine. Fundamentally at our essence we are androgenous. It is our gender and response to culture that tends to pull the persona towards being of one way or the other.
The psychiatrist Carl Jung suggested that in the dreams of a woman the image of a man represented her animus, her masculine aspect while in a man’s dream the image of a female is his anima or feminine aspect.
Basically these aspects are there to bring balance to the imbalance that culture and the persona have created. It is presumed that when out of balance humans are much less of what they could be if they were to embrace both aspects of themselves.
This idea is nothing new for one doesn’t have to look too far to see that the deities Shiva and Shakti within the Hindu religion one of the world’s oldest represented the masculine and feminine aspects that when joined brought wholeness and oneness. In Ancient Greek and Roman philosophies both goddess and god needed to work in harmony or it meant trouble for humans.
Actually there are many stories where the feminine and masculine come together to create wholeness. Most fairy tales and fantasy stories include the coming together of males and females to bring about success in some endeavor. It’s the extraordinary power of relatedness and the bringing together of our personal and collective unconsciousness’s that often drive our actions e.g., the hard working narrow focus of the seven dwarves having their lives expanded by the compassionate beauty of Snow White or the wisdom shared by Dorothy of OZ with her three male companions which leads them to embracing their true selves. There’s also the necessary male and female joining in JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series that made it possible to overcome the evil of Voldemort and save the magical world from his terror, that was to bring balance to their world.
On a more current level and what could be called the waking dream one might say that a new leadership of male and female relationship in the United States will bring back balance and harmony in the way the U.S. does its business. The former leadership was so psychically skewed that it created a destructive imbalance that drastically weakened the power of the whole.
The masculine and feminine non gender influenced aspects of our archetypal selves transcend our individual psyches and if we are open to them can provide us with a way of becoming whole and complete and much more effective in our lives.
These aspects are reflections of our soul and it has been said by many that the soul of a man is feminine while the soul of a woman is masculine. So when they show up in your dreams, that road to the soul, pay close attention to what they are saying or doing for they may be there to show you the way to who you really are.
What we see of reality is often just a conditioned response and not reality.
Today I posted an article on the Book of Dreams Blog on Becoming Real and wanted to expand on that idea. The thought then struck me that in the Dark Knight blog I often speak to the hidden parts of ourselves and the how and why that material gets hidden in the first place. This blog posting is then an answer to those thoughts.
Most of my writings have been about reality and my relationship to it. When younger I thought that reality was pretty much created by something outside my self and that I was pretty much at the effect of it versus being at cause with it and God forbid I should be responsible for any of it.
The truth was my reality was conditioned by those around me i.e. I pretty much went for acknowledgment of any kind, negative or positive. Why? Because in a state of being separate from others, an individual entity, my only chance of feeling connected i.e. related was to seek and get acknowledgment, or approval. I would therefor do those things that achieved the goal. What I learned to do was to behave in those ways that insured approval i.e. I became something other than myself. This is called behavioral conditioning.
This is where we all begin to develop a mask because often being who we are beneath the mask is often not enough to secure the needed approval. So we fashion a mask that seems to be what people want us to be in order to give us the acknowledgment that we so crave. Note that the people we are seeking acknowledgment from are doing the same thing. So neither of us is being real, we’re all being what we think the other mask wants us to be with each desperately wanting to feel connected. But connection can only happen between real people, not their masks, so there’s no real satisfaction in the relationship.
The problem with this kind of relationship is that we never really get the approval we seek because what we get is for the fake us, not the real us. Most of us then decide that there must be something wrong with us because being ourselves isn’t enough. And the bottom line to this farce is that one cannot truly experience a joyful, happy relationship with anything or anyone because even if we’re loved it is only the mask, the “not me” that is loved. And out of that reality is created, the threat of being found out.
So here we are trying to avoid the pain of being separated by creating an avatar of ourselves so as to feel connected but by definition this isn’t the real us so we still aren’t in relationship, we still don’t feel connected and still don’t feel acknowledged. Can you see how this can become neurotic? We cannot win in this state, nor can anyone else. The masks we wear actually sustain the disconnect we’re hoping to overcome.
But what would happen if we were to support each other in being ourselves, with all the blemishes, habits, doubts and fears that make up a human being? What would happen if we could be like our much younger selves before we learned how not to be ourselves?
What would happen if we stopped enabling each other’s masks? What if we stopped using each other to support our soap operas?
The Dark Knight of the Soul 