River 19
Mell
The Riverwall Dream 1992

~~~~~~dream~~~~~~

It is night, a lovely peaceful, moonlit night, and my husband and I are lying in bed. It seems we have moved to a new house and the bedroom is unfamiliar and mysterious to me, but I sense that I am going to like it very much.

One long wall (the outside wall) is missing, so although the structure is normal in all other respects, I have a strong feeling of oneness with the night and the outside world. Right at the edge of the room - where the bed is set parallel to the missing wall and I am lying looking out into the peaceful darkness - a river laps gently, flowing parallel to the missing wall. I could almost reach out a hand and touch the water.

For a moment I’m a little concerned about this and say to my husband ‘But what if it floods? We’ll drown in our sleep and everything will be washed away and ruined.’

He tells me very calmly that no, this won’t happen. Everything is perfectly safe and exactly as it should be. The river will always stay like this, and just to relax and enjoy it with total trust and confidence.

There is a second scene to the dream, following on immediately: another part of the same unfamiliar house, and I am standing in the dining room, facing into the lounge. The entire front wall of the house is made of unpainted grey besser-blocks, as if it has been deliberately walled up. There are no windows, no doors, and no light can get through from the outside or even any fresh air.

A feeling of panic overwhelms me. I can’t live here. I can’t survive like this. I feel trapped, a sensation like being buried alive. I say to my husband, who appears to be waiting for my verdict, ‘No!, I hate it! I can’t stay here even a moment longer’.

He reaches out towards the wall and shows me a miracle. ‘See?’ he says. It’s all in your mind. If you don’t like it this way, you can make it better any time you decide. It’s up to you.’

Suddenly the wall is a yellow and orange curtain, sliding sideways, and all at once the whole room is flooded with sunlight. Finally I understand with blinding clarity that it is all up to me. As soon as I make up my mind to do it, I can free myself - pull open the curtain, see outside, go out into freedom if I want. I’m the creator of my own prison. It’s only real because I’ve chosen to believe that it is. The miracle is - it doesn’t have to be that way at all!

~~~~~~

For a long time, maybe six or seven years, I had been steadily ‘losing it’. Looking back, I realise now that a kind of emotional damming up had been going on in me since childhood. A lot of stuff had happened back then which I had absorbed but had never let myself deal with or even acknowledge was taking place. The best way I can describe it is as a feeling, all my life, of having been a sort of cripple.

I knew something was very badly wrong with me, or missing, but for some reason I was able to hide it from other people. I was very good at pretending. It was hard, at times very nearly impossible to sustain, yet through childhood and into early adulthood I managed pretty well. I had a few weird phobias: for one thing, I couldn’t eat or drink if anyone else was around. Yet, somehow, I led a fairly normal life.

Then, in my early thirties, little things started coming unglued. Before long panic attacks were becoming a major problem. I got to the point where any sort of social occasion was torture. People terrified me. I felt vulnerable and threatened and irrationally panicked at the idea of even meeting an acquaintance in the street and having to speak to him or her. In the end I stopped going anywhere, except to those few things that were impossible to avoid.

The world seemed to be shutting down, doors slamming closed, locking me into a smaller and smaller space. There was so much I longed to do, things to learn, things to share, yet I felt I was shrinking and moving further and further away from everything.

Marie, my closest friend, realised what was happening, and my husband did too. They both tried to talk some sense into me but nothing really seemed to make any difference. I’d lost control and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get back in the driver’s seat.

The situation kept worsening as time went by. As you can imagine, this was a horrible period. I became pretty desperate, and think eventually I was almost ready to stop even thinking about turning ‘normal’ again, when the dream came. Melodramatic as it may sound, I credit this one dream with actually saving my life!

The impact of the dream was indescribable. There was no need to ponder or interpret symbols, the meaning was clear. The dream made me see the whole situation for what it was, in a way which made instantaneous and total sense. The realisation that nothing external was responsible for my situation, that the whole cause and solution rested with me, was comparable to a bolt of lightening.

Basically, I realised what I was fighting was myself. And fighting was not the way to go about the problem at all. I had to accept. It was OK to be me. It was OK to be a little weird. Who wasn’t? Did I expect perfection from other people? No. So, why punish myself to the point of annihilation because I wasn’t either?

The change began immediately. In effect, what I did was give myself permission to be. The steps were small and painfully slow, but gradually the momentum picked up. I’m so much easier with myself now. It’s strange to imagine how things could have become so horrific. I still have setbacks; I still get very shaky and sometimes have to withdraw a bit from people to take a breather, but on the whole I’d say I’m about eighty percent functional.

Jane, coming to see you lecture that night was a big achievement for me. Sitting there, feeling all those people so close, and not letting panic take hold was really something. At the interval it would have been nice to walk up and say hello to you, but being out in public and actually speaking was more than I could have managed in one night at that time.

Post Script:

Panic attacks have a way of wearing a person down, mentally and physically. Energies and the ability to cope from day to day get drained to the limit. I realise now that I was unusually accident-prone before the dream, when things were really bad. I can think of several incidents, in particular, and all of them were injuries to my legs, ankles, feet etc.

Having since read a bit of what Louise Hay has to say about problems related to various parts of the body - well, it makes you wonder!

Jane's Interpretation

Dream houses (houses which do not exist in our waking world) usually symbolise the dreamer’s state of mind. Each room in the house reflects compartments of thought, the kitchen, for example, perhaps symbolising nourishment and nurturing, and the bathroom representing a place of (emotional) cleansing. Since our physical health and wellbeing generally relates to mental attitude (mental stress, for example, being a major contributor to physical disease), the dream house can also be seen as symbolic of the dreamer’s physical health.

Mell experiments with knocking down one of the solid walls she has built in her mind. With the wall gone, she can almost touch the flow of life (the river) outside. For a moment she fears that contact with the outer world will prove too emotional an experience for her (the flooding river which could drown her.) She then relaxes and feels safe in the dark, secure in the mystery, comfortable with trusting herself to be able to be more open and allowing herself to flow, like the river, with life. Her husband supports her through this gentle experiment of making contact with the outside world. Although he presents as her husband in the dream, he is probably symbolic of her ‘inner male’ (Yang qualities of assertiveness, logic, intellectual self and general relationship with the outer world). In her waking life, at that time, Mell drew little strength from her inner male, but this dream contact enabled her to feel the security ‘he’ could offer her. If she wished to do so, she could tap into her own inner strength for support in facing the outer world at any time.

In the second scene she clearly sees the walls she has built in her mind: they are grey, the colour of depression and lack of life. There are no windows (no view or open perspective on the world), no doors (no opportunities opening up, no prospects entering into her life) and no light (no conscious development, no joy). She realises she has created this, that she has mentally buried herself alive. How beautifully the sun suddenly explodes into the room as she reports ‘Finally I understand with blinding clarity’. The full light of consciousness has burst open upon her as she realises she, and no-one or nothing else, has always been the author of her own life.

Ocean Dip
Wendy
Babies 1980 - 1990

~~~~~~dream~~~~~~

A long series of dreams always required me to mind someone else’s baby which had to be breast fed. I would put it aside with every good intention of doing the best for it. With horror I would remember it hours or days later. I’d run to it, thinking it was most likely dead. I’d always arrive just in time. Each dream presented different situations but with the same results.

In the last one of the series, I put twins in their carry baskets in a ground floor wardrobe, on the floor, whilst I was upstairs busily doing other things. It was about a week later that I remembered them. Totally devastated, I raced downstairs just in time to save them. I had been sure they would be dead.

~~~~~~

I was always doing more for others, and particularly being a lone parent, for my children. The dreams always had an upsetting effect: it was terrible being responsible for almost killing a baby through neglect, but twins were the utter limit! It took this last dream to really work it out.

Finally I realised the babies were me. I was all the time giving to others and totally neglecting myself. After all those recurring dreams, the twins caused me to take action within a matter of only days. It was time to give more to myself, and I set out to do this.

Sometimes, when feeling overly imposed upon or not considered, I pause, reflect on my position, then set about regaining a balance. I feel so relieved and much freer and happier now.

Jane’s Interpretation

Babies often symbolise the part of ourselves we should be nurturing and caring for, but which we so often overlook in focusing on the needs of others, or in putting too much emphasis on some of our personal needs while neglecting other important areas. Babies can also represent our ‘baby projects’, the ideas we are developing, the creativity or careers we are nurturing and so on. Wendy’s final dream beautifully illustrates the way in which a dream goes for added impact by magnifying or duplicating the vital dream symbol: the single baby became twins!

Babies are excellent dream symbols, since most people respond to the vulnerability of a tiny baby. What we have difficulty with is transferring the same amount of care to ourselves. One way of achieving this is to find a photo of yourself as a tiny baby, frame it and keep it in prominent view for a while. Examine it closely and build up a mental picture of how you looked, how you might have moved, laughed and cried. Do this until you can close your eyes and picture your baby self clearly, feel the warmth of your body and sense the baby smell of your skin. Then, for a week or so, imagine you are carrying this baby everywhere with you: even on a trip to the bathroom. For those few weeks, each time you have to make a decision, consider what you would decide for the baby. It is much easier to do something kind and nurturing for your baby self than it is to do the same thing for yourself. In time you learn to care for yourself while eradicating the feeling that such self-attention is selfish.