I am in a room with my sister (like in my childhood). It is night and we are both in our beds and talking. I tell her a lot of intimate things about my life.
The next day I find out that all the public now know about this and are talking about it and I try to find out why. I cannot believe that my sister told them and thought that people had heard something outside.
But my mother told me that my sister feels guilty because she told everyone because she was asked and felt under pressure. At the moment my mother told me this I felt a very, very deep pain and I felt desperate and cried a lot without being able to stop. I was crying because my sister had broken my confidence and I could not get rid of this pain.
I have this dream two or more times a night. I am in a new relationship that is very good and very deep and maybe this brings some feeling to the surface.
At the start of your dream you are reminded of your childhood. When a dream is set in a place similar to the past or reminds you of the past, it often means that the issue you are dreaming about has its origins in the past.
How we respond to life today frequently depends on our past experiences as our beliefs and attitudes are often formed from these. The problem is that beliefs that have grown from our past experiences are not always appropriate for dealing with today. They can be obstacles to moving forward. When a dream reveals the origin of a belief and shows how it is affecting life today, you have the power to make informed changes.
Here are the opposites in your dream:
Intimate versus public knowledge.
Opposites in a dream are often a clue to the issue you need to put into balance. In your life today, do you tend towards either of these extremes? Do you tend to prefer intimacy and privacy or even tend towards being very guarded? Or do you tend towards being very open, broadcasting and sharing matters others would tend to keep more private, perhaps verging on being too confronting for people?
My feeling from your dream is the first: that you may tend to guard your privacy to the point of hiding your softness from people. You say you are in a new relationship. Are you feeling unsure about revealing your vulnerabilities? You say the relationship is very deep which suggests that you may be sharing those vulnerabilities and this may be releasing any feelings of fear that put the original guards in place.
In the dream your sister shared your secrets because she was under pressure. Where in your life (past) have you felt under pressure to share intimacy or share your secrets? Who or what pressurised you?
Now consider the opposite, as it is important to look at everyone in a dream as representing a belief, feeling or experience within you:
Where in your life (past or present) might you have put other people under pressure to reveal their secrets or to be intimate? And finally, where in your life (past or present) might you have put YOURSELF under pressure, to open up (to go public) when you really didn’t feel like it?
In the dream your sister felt guilty for betraying your intimacy. The moment your mother, in the dream, mentioned guilt you felt a very deep pain and you felt desperate and cried (grief). When deep grief or pain is felt in a dream it is often grief or pain that you have buried deep within yourself in the past. Something in waking life or in the dream triggers its release and this is always good. Repressed emotion festers. Once you acknowledge what you have hidden, you can understand it, feel it and finally let it go.
In the dream you saw your sister as the one suffering guilt, but as all characters in a dream represent the dreamer this guilt is yours. (Remember we can feel guilty even when we are innocent.)
Remembering that your dream drew your attention to childhood, where, in your childhood, might you have felt guilt and pain and tried to bury it? One of the feelings you released in your dream was desperation. Where, in your childhood, did you feel desperation?
The theme is betrayal of intimacy followed by burying deep feelings of pain and guilt. Now that you are in a promising new relationship this is a safe time to heal and release the past, to express grief and to end your relationship with guilt.
Giving back the belief:
By now you have probably worked out a belief relating guilt, intimacy and exposure from your childhood that is affecting your current situation.
First write down that belief in one sentence, “I believe that …” Then write down the name of the person who you learned that belief from. Then write down a new belief to replace the old one. Now you’re ready to give back the original belief. Use the example below as a guide on how to do this.
How to do this:
Here’s an example. You can adapt it to suit the belief you are ready to give back:
(From DREAM ALCHEMY, page 67.)
“A little boy was taught that ‘boys don’t cry’ and ‘fathers don’t hug their sons’. Of course this little one desperately needed to cry or be hugged along the way, but he grew up to hold back his tears and keep an emotional distance from those he loved. On the surface all was cool, but deep inside that little boy lived on, still crying rejected, unloved tears. He took on the beliefs of his father and suffered as a result.
To perform this Giving Back the Belief dream alchemy practice this man imagines going back to meet himself as a little child and hugs this child. He tells him that he can now give his father back this belief that boys don’t cry and fathers don’t hug because it belongs to the father, not to the child. The grown man helps the child to do this, in the visualisation, and sees the father agree to take back the belief. In its place the grown man must give the child a new belief to replace the old. He chooses to give the belief, ‘It’s good for boys and men to cry when they need to and to hug and express their feelings’.”
Make sure that when you give back a belief you replace it with a better belief, otherwise it is likely to be filled by another unsuitable belief.
How does this work?
The beliefs you carry are not set in concrete. You borrowed them from other people so you can give them back. Since dreams usually show the person you borrowed the belief from, that person is the perfect symbol to use to communicate with your unconscious mind. Like any symbol, the person lives on in your mind not as the actual person, but as part of your unconscious language. By communicating with the person-symbol through dream alchemy you give back your belief – you reprogram your unconscious mind.
More details on Giving Back the Belief as a Dream Alchemy Practice in: “Dream Alchemy” by Jane Teresa Anderson, pages 336-7.
Jane Teresa Anderson
