by Gloria | Jan 20, 2018 | Dreams
The holiest of all the spots on earth is where an ancient hatred has become a present love.
~A Course in Miracles
This dream came a year after attending the funeral of the aunt I mentioned in the last post. She was my mother’s only sister and I was very close to her when I was young. At the time of my birth, my parents lived with my mother’s family and as Aunt was still living at home she became my second mother for the first 9 months of my life. When she married and had children of her own, our two families had a lot to do with each other. I also lived with her family for periods of time off and on until I was 13, due to Mum’s frequent hospitalisations. I loved her very much and remember wishing she was my mother, not because I didn’t love Mum but because Aunt was totally devoted to her family. She was the complete opposite of my mother, who loved kids in her own way but just wasn’t cut out to be a mother and was often overwhelmed by the task.
Unfortunately, the man Aunt married led a double life – devoted husband and father on one hand and serial paedophile on the other. I loved my uncle too when I was young and that made me a prime target for his exploitation. She stayed loyal to him to the very end of his life and even after his death never made any attempt to heal the rift that his abuse had caused in the family. I had stopped feeling angry at my uncle many years ago when I realised that he was clearly insane. My aunt wasn’t but she was totally identified with her role as a mother and she protected that role to the end. By the time of her death, I felt pretty much at peace regarding all that had gone on and had no conscious awareness of any residual blame or anger in me but this dream showed otherwise. As Jung often said, the unconscious really is unconscious. When trauma has been deeply buried, it works its way out of the system in its own time. Perhaps it is never completely erased but eventually becomes a part of the whole rich tapestry of life.
The dream:
I am to meet Aunt and her family following my uncle’s death, apparently to try and come to some resolution over our long estrangement due to his abuse. When I get to the house, I drive down the left hand side, then make a 90 degree turn to go into the back yard. The entry is a rough track and is cluttered with rubbish and overhanging branches and hard to navigate. The yard is also messy. I go in through the back entrance. There is a woman present who is not part of the family and seems to be a mediator of some sort.
There is a discussion about my uncle’s paedophile activities but the family is in denial. We aren’t getting anywhere so I decide to leave and as I do Aunt suddenly throws her arms around me and hugs me very tightly, as though she doesn’t want to let me go. She kisses me all over the face in an exaggerated show of affection and seems desperate to show me how much she loves me but I am not impressed.
I ask in a frustrated tone of voice, ‘Aunt, why do you keep denying it? You know the truth.’ At first she goes into the same old routine of denial and demurring but then she says, ‘Yes. I did know.’
I feel an immense relief, as much for her as myself and go around telling the others about her admission. There is a mixed reception of belief and disbelief and my initial euphoria turns to a niggling anxiety that this isn’t the end of it.
I leave the same way I came, driving slowly and carefully because of the obstacles on the way out and the foliage scraping against the car. I do a right hand turn onto the street and a little way down I have to turn right onto the main road. As I brake to check the road, the woman who had been in the house appears near the driver’s side window indicating that she wants to speak to me but she is preventing me from turning and I am pissed! I wind the window down and say very testily ‘Excuse me, I want to turn there.’ I realise I am being rude but don’t care. She disappears and I make the turn, still feeling peeved. End.
When I woke from the dream I was in a foul mood and I couldn’t even begin to make sense of it so I just wrote it up and went out to do some gardening as a way of settling down. It was a perfect day for it but my bad mood persisted and was made worse by a pest control man spraying around the letterboxes not far away from me. He was decked out head to toe in protective gear but the spray was drifting towards me, so I abandoned the gardening, cursing to myself. My mind then started spinning stories of all the terrible things we are doing to the planet through our paranoia and ignorance. In the middle of this depressing inner rant, a light bulb went on and I realised with a start that my overreaction had absolutely nothing to do with the incident but was triggered by the dream hangover.
A few days later I told a friend about the dream and she asked me how I would have liked it to end. I said that I wanted to feel love and forgiveness for my aunt, that I didn’t want to feel so angry, I didn’t like the way it felt. In her pragmatic way she said that if that’s the way I feel I need to just accept it because fighting it is just going to make me feel worse. I knew she was right but I still didn’t feel happy about it because I couldn’t understand why I would still be angry with Aunt.
It was a full 3 months later that I finally understood what my anger was about and it wasn’t a happy discovery at the time. I had been doing a course in Applied Jungian Psychology and we were working on identifying our complexes. There had been a lot of discussion about the negative mother complex and the mother wound and I began to wonder about my own mothering history. I had long since resolved any anger I had towards my own mother for the fact that she didn’t protect me from my uncle but Aunt was the one I had felt most betrayed by. It wasn’t just because she knew what was going on at the time but also because of the way she vilified me in later years when I disclosed about the abuse and how she continued to be the enabler to her husband, thereby continuing to put other children at risk.
With these new insights, I was reflecting on my dream attitude and suddenly saw the situation as if it were a real event. Here was my aunt finally giving me what I had wanted for so long – a simple acknowledgement of the truth – and I wasn’t satisfied. What did I want then? I wanted her to suffer! The revelation that followed closely on this insight was that that meant I must also want myself to suffer. Anger, resentment and blame towards another, no matter how justified it appears to be, always hurts the so-called victim. There’s simply no escape from that fact. When I went deeper into my resentment I had to admit to myself that I was still feeling guilty over the fact that I had caused so much trouble in the family by my disclosure and the way I coped with it was to project it onto my aunt.
About a week later I was sitting with all that had transpired from the dream and got the distinct impression that it was at last the end of a long saga of trying to sort out the complex web of emotions that we had all been entangled in for so many years. With that, the floodgates opened and I found myself sobbing my heart out. I wasn’t crying just for myself, it was grief over everybody’s suffering, even that of my uncle who had been the primary cause of it, as well as for all who had been indirectly affected, especially the children of some of his victims who I knew suffered from the unhealed trauma of their mothers. My outburst of grief once again demonstrated to me that whenever anger is released, grief usually follows and it is the grief that is the hardest to be with. Anger is easier to deal with in a way, because at least it feels energising whereas grief feels so debilitating but it really doesn’t matter in the end. Holding onto any deeply charged emotion takes a lot of energy and there is always a price to pay for that.
At the time of the catharsis I had the feeling that I needed to write about this dream in order to complete the healing but I managed to keep deferring it until another dream recently prompted me to get on with it. In this dream I was talking to another family member who had also suffered at the hands of my uncle but who had never dealt with it. She was sitting in a car and I was on the outside and she was telling me about how depressed she felt. She started crying and at the same time desperately tried to control it. I told her it was good to cry and she said, ‘But it makes so much noise.’ At that moment a woman appeared walking down the middle of the road towards the car and I said, ‘When this woman is past, the road will be clear and you can make all the noise you want to.’ When I woke I immediately realised that this woman represented my aunt and the fear I still had of her disapproval of my speaking up. I realised that finishing this blog post was the way in which to lay that fear to rest and release both of us. It simply isn’t possible to love someone fully while at the same time fearing them and what I really want more than anything is to love my aunt as I did as a child and as I know she loved me.
I think this is what the mediator woman in the dream was trying to get me to see – that Aunt, by her admission, was really asking for my forgiveness and love and that by denying it to her, I was denying that same grace for myself.
I now have a much deeper appreciation for the lines in the Lord’s Prayer; ‘Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.’ As so many wise ones say, forgiveness really is for the one doing the forgiving.
by Gloria | May 27, 2017 | Dreams
I had this dream 18 months ago and it was the kind of dream experience that happens occasionally – waking up out of the dream and upon falling asleep again, going straight back into the dream. It was 6 years between this one and A Mother’s Love but they are intimately connected. In that post I told the story of how the song by Anne Murray I’ll Always Love You acted as a bridge to re-unite my mother and me after a painful estrangement. In this dream I was desperately trying to find that same song to play it in memory of her.
The dream:
A service is being arranged for Mum. It’s not clear when she died and it doesn’t appear to be a funeral but more like a memorial service. I don’t know where we are or who I am with but it feels like family. We are working out what music to have. I say we must have at least one Anne Murray song and suggest ‘I’ll always love you.’ The dream then goes into one of those marathon ‘can’t find what I’m looking for’ episodes. I know I had made tapes of all the Anne Murray albums I had but couldn’t find any of them. I decided to try and find the original LP records and re-copy them and the search was then on for the albums, again to no avail.
The scene then switches to the kitchen in my current house and Mum is with me. I don’t recall the details of the conversation but the gist of it is that I am very worried about something. Initially Mum shows concern but as the conversation proceeds she starts teasing me about my seriousness. I get upset and ask her why she is treating me like that. Her response is “It’s because I love you.” In an exasperated tone of voice I say, “If you really love me you wouldn’t make fun of me.”
I wake at this point, still quite upset. I know I should write it down but before I can rouse myself, I fall back to sleep and the dream starts at the beginning again except this time it feels like I am in my old house. I redouble my efforts to find the song but to no avail. There is someone with me supposedly helping but she is prattling on about I don’t know what and I become increasingly annoyed at the distraction. I finally give her a mouthful and tell her to piss off and leave me alone and with that I wake up.
This time I got up and wrote it down. It was obviously important because of the escalation of the intense emotions in the dream and the residue that carried on into waking but I was quite baffled by it. Mum had been dead for 31 years at this stage and most of the dreams I had of her were what I termed spirit visits and they almost always had to do with healing or solving some emotional difficulty. This one too felt like she was trying to help me but without knowing what we discussed, I couldn’t work it out.
Later in the day, I was on my way into town when I got a call on the mobile. It was a friend calling to see if I wanted to meet for coffee. This friend happened to be one of the few people I could discuss dreams with and they were always our favourite topic of discussion. She had been my hypnotherapist many years ago and was intimately acquainted with all my family issues. The timing of her call seemed more than a coincidence so I was happy to change my plans and meet up.
We tossed around some ideas but nothing felt right. The most obvious interpretation was that not being able to find a song called I’ll Always Love You as a tribute to Mum and the amount of frustration and anger I felt in the dream suggested some unresolved grief or even anger but I felt pretty much at peace with my relationship with Mum at this stage of my life. We also looked at the other woman in the dream who was hindering my efforts to find the song as a kind of inner saboteur figure getting in the way of me finding this ‘always’ (eternal) love. This did make sense as I often felt at odds with myself but as dreams don’t usually tell you things you already know, it still didn’t feel like a good fit. We parted not having come to any satisfactory conclusion and all I could do was let it percolate.
Next afternoon I got a call from my sister to tell me she had just learned that our aunt – Mum’s sister – had died and that the service was going to be next day. The news affected me deeply. Her death wasn’t unexpected, she was 90 and in a nursing home but it posed a dilemma about whether or not to attend. Aunt had been my second mother growing up and I had lived with her family at different periods of my life. Although disclosing about the abuse I had experienced at the hands of her husband had driven a wedge between us, I still cared deeply for her and wanted to pay my respects. I hadn’t had much contact with the family in the intervening years and I didn’t know if I would be welcome. My sister decided against going so it meant I would be on my own.
I texted my friend with the news saying that I thought there might be a connection with the dream as it was Aunt having a go at Mum that caused Mum to stop talking to me and then eventually reconnecting via the song in the dream. There was a flurry of text messages and in the end I got one telling me to think about whose feelings I’m protecting and if I want to go, to take a risk and just go. I was taken aback as it sounded quite exasperated and most unlike her but then it hit me – this sounded very similar to the conversation with Mum in my dream! Here I was making a big drama out of the issue instead of just following my heart. As I reflected I became more convinced that the conversation I had with Mum in the dream was about this very dilemma and that she was encouraging me to go. With that, all feelings of trepidation left me and my mind was made up.
As it turned out, it was indeed a memorial service and not a funeral. It was held in football clubrooms and there was no casket, which made it feel very much like the sense I had of the event in the dream. Aunt’s only daughter, who I hadn’t seen in 10 years, broke the ice when she saw me by holding her arms wide for a hug and telling me how happy she was to see me. To my great relief my other cousins were equally friendly and that helped ease my feelings of awkwardness in this large gathering of relatives I had never met, having had little contact with the family in over 30 years.
The tributes to my Aunt told of a woman who was absolutely devoted to her family and adored by them and who didn’t have an enemy in the world. Two of her children and several of her grandchildren paid tributes to her and they all told the same story – how she made each and every one of them feel special and absolutely loved. I knew this side of her and it was unquestionably true but I also knew what lay in the shadows. Her determination to keep the family together and defend her image and her role as matriarch meant protecting her paedophile husband and turning a blind eye to his activities at any cost. I wondered how many people in the room had been affected either directly or indirectly by their shared complicity. Was it possible that the love she gave so freely balanced out the negative effects? At this stage of my life I could no longer judge her choices and behaviour, or condemn her for her attitude towards me and nor did I want to.
When the invitation came for anyone present to say a few words, I hesitated long enough to settle my pounding heart and then went forward to tell a little anecdote about her perming my dead straight hair when I was around 4. Her daughter had very tight curls just like her father and so when she took me home, Mum at first mistook me for my cousin. It was a sweet memory and typical of the little things she would do to make a child feel special. She gave me more affection than my own mother was capable of and to dwell on what I saw as her betrayal would be to negate the very positive influence she had on my formative years and all the love she showered on her own family throughout her long life.
There was a funny little incident towards the end of the service that again reminded me of my dream. A rather outmoded portable CD player was being used throughout for the music, with one of the granddaughters operating it. When the celebrant announced that The Sunny Side of the Street would be played to accompany the slide show, she duly pressed the button only to have something quite different start playing. There ensued a comical scene of trying to find the right track. The player was on the floor, which made it even more awkward and as she became increasingly flustered her father came to the rescue and amidst apologies for the ‘technical difficulties’ it was eventually located. I had a little chuckle to myself. It wasn’t Anne Murray but as my mother had also been a big Willie Nelson fan I know she would have thoroughly approved of the choice.
Another interesting bit of information that emerged at the service was that it was my Aunt and Uncle’s 65th wedding anniversary on the day I had the dream. Aunt survived him by 5 years and one day so they had 60 years together. As they were married the year I was born, it was also my age. This coincidence further convinced me that the dream was about Aunt’s death, rather than my birth mother’s. Over the years I have had countless dreams that have occurred on significant dates pertinent to the people in my dreams, regardless of whether they had been on my mind consciously or not prior to the dream. Without this one I doubt whether I would have had the courage to go and I was so glad I did, as much healing came from it.
With my cousin’s permission I made a recording of the service and listening to it again later enabled me to reconnect with the side of my aunt that had become a dim memory for me. Her 7 year-old great granddaughter gave out sunflower seeds to plant in her memory, which I sowed the following day. Appropriately it happened to be All Souls’ Eve (Hallowe’en). It felt very satisfying to do so and as I nurtured them over the following months and watched them bloom and then die, I felt that I had at last found the peace with the past that had been my quest for a long time – consciously for the past 20 years but unconsciously probably my whole life.
It wasn’t quite the end of the story though as I had another dream a year later that got me in touch with some residual anger that was most likely connected with the anger I expressed at the end of this dream. That will be the subject of the next post.
by Gloria | Apr 6, 2017 | Dreams, Jungian Psychology
Here is a brief description of Jung’s approach to dreams from Daryl Sharpe’s Jung Lexicon available online at http://www.psychceu.com/jung/sharplexicon.html
Dreams
Independent, spontaneous manifestations of the unconscious; fragments of involuntary psychic activity just conscious enough to be reproducible in the waking state.
Dreams are neither deliberate nor arbitrary fabrications; they are natural phenomena which are nothing other than what they pretend to be. They do not deceive, they do not lie, they do not distort or disguise. . . . They are invariably seeking to express something that the ego does not know and does not understand.
“Analytical Psychology and Education,” CW 17, par. 189.
In symbolic form, dreams picture the current situation in the psyche from the point of view of the unconscious.
Since the meaning of most dreams is not in accord with the tendencies of the conscious mind but shows peculiar deviations, we must assume that the unconscious, the matrix of dreams, has an independent function. This is what I call the autonomy of the unconscious. The dream not only fails to obey our will but very often stands in flagrant opposition to our conscious intentions.
“On the Nature of Dreams” CW 8, par. 545.
Jung acknowledged that in some cases dreams have a wish-fulfilling and sleep-preserving function (Freud) or reveal an infantile striving for power (Adler), but he focused on their symbolic content and their compensatory role in the self-regulation of the psyche: they reveal aspects of oneself that are not normally conscious, they disclose unconscious motivations operating in relationships and present new points of view in conflict situations.
In this regard there are three possibilities. If the conscious attitude to the life situation is in large degree one-sided, then the dream takes the opposite side. If the conscious has a position fairly near the “middle,” the dream is satisfied with variations. If the conscious attitude is “correct” (adequate), then the dream coincides with and emphasizes this tendency, though without forfeiting its peculiar autonomy.
Ibid., par. 546.
In Jung’s view, a dream is an interior drama.
The whole dream-work is essentially subjective, and a dream is a theatre in which the dreamer is himself the scene, the player, the prompter, the producer, the author, the public, and the critic.
“General Aspects of Dream Psychology” ibid., par. 509.
This conception gives rise to the interpretation of dreams on the subjective level, where the images in them are seen as symbolic representations of elements in the dreamer’s own personality. Interpretation on the objective level refers the images to people and situations in the outside world.
Many dreams have a classic dramatic structure. There is an exposition (place, time and characters), which shows the initial situation of the dreamer. In the second phase there is a development in the plot (action takes place). The third phase brings the culmination or climax (a decisive event occurs). The final phase is the lysis, the result or solution (if any) of the action in the dream.
by Gloria | Mar 27, 2017 | A Course in Miracles, Dreams, Jungian Psychology
Gloria and Bessie 1983
…the mother stands for the collective unconscious, the source of the water of life…
~CG Jung Individual Dream Symbolism… CW 12: §92
I worked through this dream with Jane Teresa Anderson in the early days of her dream show podcast (link), way back in August 2009. It has taken all this time to unfold fully and though I am in a much better emotional space than I was when I had the dream, meeting the challenge I set myself in it is still a work in progress.
The dream:
I am in the study of my house with Mary. As we come out of the study, I notice water on the floor. I point it out to her so she won’t step in it. When we reach the dining room I see there is a large puddle of water also pooled on the carpet by the table. I notice an empty glass in the place where I usually sit for meals. I get a mental image of someone picking up the glass, and without realising it is full, spilling it and leaving the trail. I know that ‘someone’ is me but don’t recall doing it. The trail of water leads back to the study through the kitchen and family room to where I first noticed it.
I fetch a towel from the laundry basket and while I’m on my knees mopping up the water on the carpet, I tell Mary about Frank Sinatra’s rejection by his mother. She bursts into tears and I stand and put my arms around her and she cries on my shoulder. She says it reminds her of the way her mother rejected her. I say I am not surprised and then say very gently but clearly: ‘You can’t find love outside yourself, not even from your mother, you’ve got to find the source of love within yourself and connect with that.’
Using the concept of all dream characters representing aspects of the dreamer, Jane and I explored the idea that Mary’s emotional outburst represented some unresolved grief in me concerning my mother’s rejection. This did fit for Mary’s relationship with her mother but I couldn’t relate to it, as I didn’t perceive my mother as being rejecting. As we explored the issue further, I concluded that perhaps my child’s mind had perceived her frequent absences through physical illness and nervous breakdowns as a form of rejection and we let it go at that and went on to explore other aspects of the dream imagery. Days later, the memory of a very traumatic estrangement from my mother that had occurred almost 30 years before, surfaced from the depths and the scene with Mary made total sense.
The estrangement occurred as part of the fallout from my disclosure about the sexual abuse that had occurred throughout my childhood at the hands of an uncle – the husband of Mum’s sister. Although my mother and my aunt were the only ones I had spoken to, somehow word got around and all hell broke loose in the family. It emerged that this uncle’s activities were not only very widespread but also well known. In spite of that, I was branded a troublemaker and a liar and treated like a pariah by all except my sisters. I became the family scapegoat. It’s an all too common scenario for anyone who rocks the boat by speaking up and a powerful deterrent that perpetrators and their enablers exploit. Mum didn’t speak to me for 9 months and when she did reconnect, the subject was never discussed.
When she finally rang me, she broke the ice with the sad news that her precious dog had to be put down. She had been very attached to him and perhaps losing him made her reflect on our estrangement. When that topic was exhausted, she asked if I’d heard Anne Murray’s latest album. We were both big fans. I hadn’t and she told me it was called ‘I’ll Always Love You.’ I knew it was her way of saying what she was never able to say directly and this, together with the news of Sooty’s death and the fact that she was talking to me again had me blubbering like a baby. When I got hold of the album and heard the title song, I played it over and over. It was almost worth all the pain I had been through to hear the opening lines:
Standing by my window, listening for your call
Seems I really miss you after all
Time won’t let me keep these sad thoughts to myself
I’d just like to let you know, I wish I’d never let you go and…
I’ll always love you, deep inside this heart of mine
I do love you…
When I went to see her, we both carefully avoided the dreaded topic but as I was leaving she said to me “I know I’ve been a bad mother, Gloria.” I didn’t know what to say and her words haunted me for years. I wanted to put my arms around her and comfort her and tell her how much I loved her but sadly she was not comfortable with such behaviour and I knew where to draw the line. I also felt that she somehow needed to make that confession for her own benefit and I didn’t want to take that away from her. She wasn’t a bad mother – bad mothers are the kind that hate their kids and want them dead, like so many stepmothers in myths and fairy tales. She was, though, a Puella Aeternus – an eternal child – who in one sense make good mothers because they can relate to the child on their own terms but on the other hand lack the emotional maturity necessary to handle the responsibility entailed in raising children. She was basically unsuited to a role that was her lot as a woman of her time and place and had the added misfortune of marrying a man whose alcoholism led to him abandoning her to the sole responsibility of raising their five children. The odds were stacked against her in so many ways.
Our relationship pretty much picked up where we had left off and Mum died a few years afterwards. Until this dream, I hadn’t realised how much guilt I had been carrying over telling her about the abuse. As kids we were trained to be good girls and not to worry Mum, with the unspoken threat that to do so would result in her going away yet again. From my uncle I was warned not to tell ‘our little secret’ or else I would go to jail and so would he. Together with upsetting Mum, the thought that I would be responsible for his family being without a father and thereby suffering the same fate as mine was enough to keep me silent until I was 30. After the avalanche of hostility that was unleashed on me then, I closed down for another 20 years, until the death of my husband and the many life changes it entailed brought it to the surface with a vengeance. This dream – and many, many others – was a part of the healing process both of the childhood abuse and the trauma that occurred through my disclosure as an adult.
As I worked through the dream with Jane, we looked at the significance of the reference to Frank Sinatra. A few days before the dream, I had read an article about him in which he had stated that he hated the song My Way and that the only reason he did it was because his fans requested it and that it didn’t reflect his attitude at all. Following the thread of the mother theme we explored the idea that children have to go their own way and that made sense in the context of the dream but again it was only later that I recalled a vital piece of information that was a further key to understanding the dream within the context of the mother complex.
One of the most efficient entries into a dream is to consider what might have occurred in the day or two prior to the dream. We had discussed the article about Frank Sinatra but as interesting as that was, it didn’t have any real emotional charge to it. What did have a charge though and totally relevant to this dream was that the night before I had it, I had decided spontaneously to stop going to a Zen style meditation group I had been attending for about 15 months and had emailed the teacher to let her know. This was a very difficult decision to make because I had a deep affection for her. I had no doubt of her sincerity but was feeling increasingly uncomfortable with what I perceived as a lack of psychological awareness and the attitude that meditation practice alone is ‘the way.’ Several weeks after I stopped going, I woke up in the early hours one morning and had an almost desperate yearning to see her again. As I explored the intensity of the feeling, I recognised that it was the same kind of feeling I used to have at being separated from Mum when I was young. I knew then that separating from the teacher was another necessary step in loosening the attachment bonds of the mother complex.
One aspect of the dream analysis I did with Jane that I was never fully satisfied with was to do with the spilled glass of water. I said to her that it had brought to mind the song My Cup Runneth Over With Love and she suggested it might symbolise having an over caring attitude towards others and ‘spilling’ my love indiscriminately. That certainly had validity but I felt there was more to it than that and it was only when I connected the dream with the meditation teacher – my ‘spiritual mother’ – that I was able to join the dots. The two rooms in the dream – the study with the computer and Internet connection and the dining room where I did all my reading – represented ‘my way.’ The connection with the meditation teacher also added another dimension to the water symbolism; because life as we know it cannot exist without water, at the archetypal (spiritual) level it symbolises the life force itself – another name for which is love. The way I understand the symbolism now is that I was unconsciously spilling my life force energy (love) by following a path that wasn’t suited to me. My way home to myself was very eclectic. I studied widely and was involved in various groups but the main practice aspect of it was through a combination of meditation, dreamwork, Jungian psychology and A Course in Miracles. All of these methods have as their common denominator the development of trusting one’s own inner guidance and this dream was clearly demonstrating that very principle.
At the end of the discussion with Jane I confessed that though I agreed with the sentiment expressed, i.e. the need to find the source of love within, I was at a loss as to how to do it. She suggested a dream alchemy visualisation exercise but I never followed through on it. I had by that stage developed my own way of working with dreams and this kind of prescriptive approach, as well intentioned as it was, felt too controlling and manipulative. As the dream unfolded organically over time, I realised that I was on the right path already with what I was doing and just needed to have patience, perseverance and faith. I often felt lost and lonely and still do at times but I realise now that is the price to pay for following one’s own destiny.
The choice by the dream author of Mary as my alter ego was very auspicious. We met through a study group of A Course in Miracles and became very good friends. As our friendship developed, we found many correspondences in our lives, including being born in the same year, growing up in the same town and moving to the same city at the same age and living in similar places as our lives progressed. We are also alike personality wise, with many common interests. The main difference in our lives is that she has children and I don’t. I can’t think of anyone I know who would be a better fit as a reflection of myself. I don’t think it’s coincidence that she shares the same name as the most well known Western icon of the Great Mother. She also shares another connection with Mother Mary – her birthday is the same as the Feast Day of the Immaculate Conception, the recognition of the purity of the mother of the Christ Child at her own conception. I don’t know what to make of that but this dream seems to keep unfolding.
by Gloria | Jun 21, 2016 | Dreams, Jungian Psychology, Mystories
I had this dream 12½ years ago. It impacted me strongly at the time and left a permanent memory trace because of its transformational nature. I was prompted to write about it by a blog post I saw with a similar theme of awakening consciousness and healing. The post, Dreamspeak: Ancestral Healing, is the story of Toko-pa Turner’s dream visit by her Holocaust survivor grandfather, in which he apologised to her for passing on the effects of the trauma that he was only able to cope with by keeping it to himself. My dream visitor was my maternal grandmother and though the circumstances differ, the theme of unprocessed grief resonating down through the generations and the longing for completion – which appears to be as desirous from the other side as this one – is similar.
The dream:
I am in my dining room and Grandma Sweet is sitting at the table. She is young, attractive and very happy, so unlike how I remember her. I tell her I realised some time back that my hands are just like hers and put my left hand against her right to demonstrate. I say I have a photo of her that shows it very clearly and go off to look for it.
I rummage around in the pile of family photos but can’t find it and wonder if I’ve thrown it away. When I find it I realise it is her wedding photo – a fact I had forgotten. Her husband is sitting on a chair and she is standing with her left hand resting on his shoulder. It clearly shows the distinctive line of the thumb and the long fingers.
I think to myself that Grandma might like to see what has been happening in the family since she died, so I put her photo aside and start sorting through the rest to make a selection. In the process, I misplace her photo and have trouble finding it again. When I do, I look at it and realise ‘Oh, Grandma doesn’t need to see these, she knows everything that’s gone on.’ It was quite a revelation.
As I emerged from the dream, I was overcome by a sense of deep compassion and love for her that took me completely by surprise. Our family had lived with Grandma until I was 11 and I remembered her as a bitter and miserable old woman, frequently bedridden, always complaining and smelling of citronella. According to her she had a bad heart but according to Mum the doctor couldn’t find anything wrong with her. I never liked her as a child and was further influenced by her antagonism towards my mother and the stories Mum told of her oppressive childhood. When I awoke, my perception of her was instantly and, as it transpired, permanently transformed.
I had the dream just a few days before my divorce was to be finalised, so that made some sense of losing the wedding photo but I had no clue as to why it would be Grandma as she had never remarried after her husband died, as I had. At this point she had been dead 42 years and was part of my distant past. Why was she showing up now? I also wondered about the significance of the hands – why had they been made such a big deal of?
I posted the dream to the forum I was on at the time hoping for some clarity from other viewpoints. One of the suggestions was that I might be ‘handling’ life like Grandma and that had a certain resonance because at that stage in my life I was feeling very fragile and barely holding myself together. The unexpected ending of my second marriage had derailed me just as life was beginning to settle down after all the upheaval of my first husband’s death. The fact that Grandma was so happy and youthful in the dream gave me hope that the future would be brighter and I concluded that the message of the dream was just that – you will be happy again.
Because the framework within which the forum operated considered that everyone and everything in a dream represents something about the dreamer, I missed entirely the fact that this was a spirit visit from Grandma. As such it had a healing power that went way beyond the scope of psychological insight because it came from the deeper part of the psyche that Jung called the collective unconscious – a sphere of reality beyond that of the personal unconscious. In addition to reflecting my personal attitudes and beliefs, Grandma’s appearance in my dream was showing me a greater perspective – a viewpoint from beyond the physical time-space world. Although I lacked the knowledge and understanding of the Jungian approach to dreamwork at the time, the numinous quality of the dream ensured that it would continue to gestate in the depths until its wisdom and meaning came to fruition.
As a result of the dream I decided to research the family history and was shocked to learn that Grandma’s husband had died of cerebral syphilis. The story we had grown up with was that he had sustained a head injury in a fall from a cart and never recovered. Grandma was only 37 and was left with 5 children, the oldest being 13 and the youngest only 18mths old. I also learned that she had lost 4 children in infancy, including one who had been born more than a year after her husband’s death, with no father’s name cited. Poor Grandma! I could only imagine what shame and grief she had to bear, on top of trying to survive with no means of support. By the time I came on the scene in 1950 she was 60 years old and no doubt had been well and truly worn down by life.
I framed the photo that had been in my dream and kept it on my bedroom dresser where it served to remind me of the strength and resilience I had inherited through the motherline. Grandma Sweet may have lost her sweetness through the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune but her survivor spirit was an inspiration to me. When I moved house several years later I packed the photo away. It was a fitting gesture to moving on, as it had been her death that had resulted in my mother moving with her daughters away from the mining town that had been our home with its stifling atmosphere, oppressive conditions and lack of opportunities for women.
It was only recently that I got a new perspective on the significance of the hands in the dream. The Toko-Pa Turner blog post referenced at the beginning of this story appeared on the Depth Psychology Alliance Facebook page I follow and I posted a comment: I had a dream of my grandmother once. She said nothing but I was shown a photograph of her in which I recognised my hands were the same as hers. A lifetime of antagonism towards her melted away. I love what Amy Beth Katz said about our ancestors returning in our dreams. That is definitely my experience.
Amy responded with: You have healing hands, Gloria, don’t you?
My immediate reaction was ‘No way!!!’ but the intensity of my denial surprised me and so I began to wonder ‘why so adamant?’ I had worked as a massage therapist many years ago and had also done Reiki but neither were really my thing, so that didn’t fit. Then I thought about the fact that through all the dark times, starting with my late husband’s cancer diagnosis 20 years ago, writing was what kept me sane and helped me work everything through. I did dialogues with dream characters and other figures from the imaginal realm, cathartic rants that I ritually burnt, worked and re-worked a book (still a work in progress), wrote about my experiences with hypnotherapy, wrote up my dreams and explored them through writing, participated on the dream forum and journalled religiously. Writing has, without question been the most healing thing I’ve done with my hands but it was mostly self-healing.
Then I thought about this blog – from the very start my intention in writing about my dreams has had healing as the focus, as that has been a constant thread in the dreams. I initially decided to blog my stories because I’ve always loved reading other people’s stories and been helped a great deal by them but I have been stalemated for over a year because of that insidious voice of self-doubt: It’s too hard. It’s too personal. You’re not a writer. What’s the point? Who cares? Who wants to read it anyway? People will think you’re nuts (I thought so myself at one point!). Why don’t you just go and enjoy yourself? And the most crippling of all, ‘Just who do you think you are?’
As I pondered this, I remembered a story my sisters and I had grown up with. Mum had won a writing competition at school and received a prize. When she proudly showed it to her mother – Grandma Sweet – Grandma became very angry and told her not to waste her time on nonsense like that. And so she didn’t, instead following in the path of domesticity that was laid out for her as a woman of that time and place and social status. She ended up like her mother, a ‘deserted wife’ with 5 young kids to raise. My impression of Grandma was that she was a mother and homemaker by nature and that her great misfortune was in the tragedy of her husband’s early death. Not so my mother; having to conform to the domestic life was a disaster for someone with her free spirit and resulted in a lifetime of nervous breakdowns with the inevitable trauma to her daughters as we were split up and bounced around among relatives and neighbours.
When I think about this dream now I picture the gesture of putting my hand against Grandma’s as a ‘high five.’ It wasn’t really like that in the dream and yet the image is very compelling. I do feel her dream visit was a blessing. I am sure she would approve of what I’m doing and I know my mother absolutely would. My mother and grandmother couldn’t tell their stories and suffered accordingly but I can and am grateful for the opportunity to be able to do so and intend to make the most of it.
