In the early hours of Good Friday 2002, I dreamt of a gold coin dropping from a height into a bowl. The clattering of the coin as it bounced and spun around before settling, startled me awake. As I puzzled over it, an image of a rose appeared in my inner vision. It was a perfect, single, deep red rose bud with two sets of leaves. The image was crystal clear and lingered as I drifted off to sleep.
When I woke in the morning, I remembered the images and recognised the similarity of the bowl to the donation bowl at a labyrinth walk I had attended the previous night but the rose was a complete mystery. My interest was in Australian native plants and I had no particular attraction to roses. Intrigued, I found an image on the internet like the one in the vision and printed it off hoping it would trigger something. All that came to me is that I should go to the walk being held that night, which I hadn’t intended to. The friend who had been with me the previous night was happy to go again, so with that, the decision was made.
I told her of the dreams and showed her the printed image and as I sat waiting with closed eyes for the walk to start, she nudged me and said ‘There’s your rose.’ I looked up and a woman came in carrying a rose, a slightly different shade of red but identical in shape. The entrance to the walk had been set up with a selection of nails, prickly branches and candles to take into the centre but she had brought her own offering. I asked if I could have it after the walk. At first she refused, saying it was for Jesus but I explained what happened and she relented, as long as I put it with a cross.
I fashioned a cross out of a Grevillea branch and put it with the rose in a bud vase. I imagined it was trying to tell me something but I was clueless as to what it could be. On Easter Monday I decided to photograph it before it faded away. I dragged the cat tower under the skylight and positioned the vase underneath. Just as I was about to press the shutter, the cat leapt up and knocked the vase flying, shattering it into pieces on the hard floor. I grabbed the cat before she jumped down among the shards, shut her in the bedroom and with a sense of foreboding cleaned up the mess.
Although I never made sense of the chain of events at the time, it convinced me to start paying more attention to my dreams. I had been recording the copious dreams of the last five years and attending the Jung Society, hoping to learn how to make sense of them but hadn’t made much progress. Soon I found a subscription based, password protected internet forum run by Jane Teresa Anderson. Not long after that, my second marriage ended and I was left feeling shattered, just like the vase. The dreams and the forum became my lifeline and I had the sense that what had unfolded at Easter had been a kind of preparation for what lay ahead. The dreams proliferated as I paid more attention to them and the nightly dramas were interspersed with profound healing and guidance that were clearly coming from somewhere other than my personal unconscious. Slowly, Jung’s concepts of synchronicity, archetypes, the collective unconscious and individuation began to make sense and gave me hope that I could find meaning in the chaos.
Two years later another series of events, where I kept encountering twins in one way or another, brought me full circle back to the rose.
The initial incident was when a friend rang to tell me that her brother-in-law, himself a twin, had gone to see about a car for sale and the sellers turned out to be two elderly single ladies – identical twins – who had been his neighbours in another state many years before. Two days later I went to see another friend who asked if I wanted some movie tickets she’d won and couldn’t use. The movie was called ‘Twin Sisters.’ Another time I was in the supermarket when a young girl, who had been playing around with another child, crashed into me. When the little girl looked up and locked eyes with me, time seemed to slow down. I then noticed the child she had been wrestling with and saw her double.
Another time I was waiting in the stationers to use the photocopier and the woman using it apologised for taking so long. She was doing a poster made up of a compilation of photos for an 18th birthday party for the daughter who was with her and showed it to me as it came out of the machine. It was of two girls at various stages of their lives, clearly identical twins, which the mother confirmed, saying that the other daughter was at home. When I went to see the movie, there was an early scene where one of the twins, who had been separated from her sister, grabbed a bunch of roses from a vase in front of a statue of Mary in a grotto and threw them into the river in her rage at the situation.
This went on for a few weeks, I would either see twins, somebody would mention twins in conversation, or I would see media reports of twins. One day in mid June 2004, a friend rang to tell me about a TV series she had been watching and thought I might be interested in it. I turned on the television in order to set up the VCR and the first thing that came up on the screen was a show featuring identical twin girls. I then sat down to breakfast with the book I was reading at the time, which I had randomly picked up at a bargain table, called It’s a Miracle. It was a selection of stories from a US TV show of the same name, which I had never heard of. As I finished the story I was on, I turned the page in readiness for when I sat down again and the title of the next one stopped me in my tracks. It was called St Thérèse’s Twins. I had to read it then and there.
The story was of a woman pregnant with twins and at 6½ months learned that one of the twins was dying in the womb and not expected to survive. Coming from a Catholic family they prayed fervently to one St Thérèse of Lisieux who had promised to bestow a rose in an unusual manner if God allowed her to intercede. On Palm Sunday, a priest visited the mother in the hospital and offered to weave something out of the palm leaves her husband had brought from a church for her. Instead of the expected cross, the Priest wove two rosebuds which overnight loosened and gave the appearance of blooming. To the astonishment of the doctor, the malnourished baby from then on began to grow and the twins were delivered prematurely but successfully and thrived after delivery.
As I read the story, I wondered if there were a connection to my Easter rose and it piqued my curiosity. I found a trailer for a new film about this saint and as I watched, I burst into tears. To this day I don’t fully understand my reaction but it compelled me to do more research and I found that she had written an autobiography, available online. My plans for the day took a backseat and I finished the book in short order. I was captivated by Thérèse’s story, which had all the elements of a good drama but it was the authenticity of her internal struggles and her way of dealing with her emotionality through her strong faith that I found most inspiring. I did not have that kind of faith but I definitely had the emotionality and it had been a source of great distress my entire life. Not being Catholic, I had little idea of the significance of saints but my encounter with Thérèse led me to take more seriously the spiritual life I had been toying with sporadically over the previous few years. I eventually learned that her relics had been on tour in Australia at the time of the bowl and rose visions and had passed through Adelaide 6 weeks before. Was this merely coincidence?
I wasn’t used to praying but I learned of a special kind of prayer done over 9 days called a novena and getting a sign of roses sounded like an interesting experiment to try. It worked the very first time. I don’t recall who or what the prayer was for but in my journal I wrote that my sister came around with a bunch of roses the day after I finished it, saying she had got them from a neighbour because she thought it would cheer me up. She had no idea about the novena, as I felt somewhat sheepish about the idea and also didn’t want to jinx it. I have made several novenas over the years and though I have long surpassed the need for a sign, they come regardless and I am always delighted. I have also had some extraordinary ‘coincidences’ of roses at times when Thérèse has come into my awareness for some reason.
I thought with my discovery of Thérèse, the twin incidents would stop but they didn’t. I went to see the movie Twin Sisters a second time and enjoyed it as much but it still didn’t give me any further clues. One day I was out walking and from a distance I saw two young girls messing about with each other and one of them called out ‘Hello!’ I called ‘hello’ back. When I got closer, I could see they weren’t twins but I asked if they were sisters. ‘No,’ came the reply, ‘we’re best friends!’ With that, they laughingly threw their arms around each other and went on with their game. With that, the twin sightings came to an abrupt end but I couldn’t help feeling there was something I wasn’t getting. In the meantime, I kept up the dreamwork and eventually, prompted by a dream I wrote about here, returned to church and was baptised and confirmed in the Anglican faith. The period of church attendance eventually came to an end too, as my spiritual explorations took me into other areas.
Earlier this year I did an online course with Jason E Smith on Edward Edinger’s book Ego and Archetype through the Jung Archademy and I finally found the answer to the mystery of the twin saga. The core of Jung’s psychology is what he calls individuation, a lifelong process of becoming one’s authentic self. It is deep work, necessitating an engagement with not only the personal unconscious but what Jung called the collective unconscious – the transpersonal realm of archetypes that interpenetrates the personal. It is a constant process of engaging with the unconscious aspects of one’s personality and integrating them into consciousness, informed and guided by what Jung termed the Self, the archetype of wholeness.
Edinger’s book is a wonderful elucidation of this process and though I had read it several times, I had never got the whole gestalt of it. In one class Jason mentioned that in the Jungian literature when things are doubled, e.g. in dreams or in fairy tales, it signifies that something is becoming conscious. The penny (the coin?) dropped. It hadn’t occurred to me to view the external events of the twin sightings as the projection of an internal process because at the time I lacked the symbolic sensibility to recognise it. The twins reflected the split nature of my besieged psyche but as I realise now, it was also the beginning of true healing. All I wanted was a way out of the suffering and the work with dreams, the church attendance and other spiritual seeking, along with the intense study was driven by a desire for inner peace. Christianity calls this salvation, eastern systems call it liberation or moksha, Jung calls it individuation but it all comes back to the same thing – realising one’s authentic self and how it relates to the whole. Life crises are often initiatory events.
With this insight, I watched the movie Twin Sisters again and halfway through it, realised that it is precisely about this process. The orphaned twins were separated at 6 years of age, Anna going to a life of child labour on a farm in Germany and Lotte to a life of privilege in Holland. As adults, they were able to reconnect but their first meeting coincided with the start of the war and they were separated again. This time their physical separation was marred by ideological differences. Anna had become a Nazi sympathiser and Lotte betrothed to a Jew. Although Anna was eventually disillusioned by her own experiences of the war, Lotte could not accept her change of heart and refused to let her back in her life again. The theme of separating and coming together again, only to separate again played out in various ways throughout their lives until a chance meeting in their old age enabled Anna an opportunity to confront Lotte and they were able to reconcile their differences. At this point, Anna died peacefully in her sleep, curled up with her sister in a bed of leaves on the ground, where they ended up after becoming lost together when Lotte tried to evade her sister’s pursuit of her. The movie portrays exactly what happens in the psyche as it seeks to find its authentic self among the mass of conflicting influences from within and without.
Jung understood the vital role of what he called a religious attitude in this process and his psychology provides a way to navigate the void left when institutional religion doesn’t satisfy the inner yearning. In Psychology and Religion: West and East, he said:
I do not expect any believing Christian to pursue these thoughts of mine any further, for they will probably seem to him absurd. I am not, however, addressing myself to the happy possessors of faith, but to those many people for whom the light has gone out, the mystery has faded, and God is dead… It is certainly a difficult undertaking to discover connecting links between dogma and immediate experience of psychological archetypes, but a study of the natural symbols of the unconscious gives us the necessary raw material.
As I learned, the rose, the bowl and the gold coin are perfect examples of these ‘natural symbols of the unconscious.’ The bowl symbolises receptivity and gold symbolises immortality. The gold coin dropping into the bowl can be interpreted as the integration of spirit and matter, masculine and feminine, or union of sun and moon in alchemical symbolism. The rose has long been associated with Mary and considered the equivalent of the lotus in Eastern traditions as a symbol of the unfolding of higher consciousness. The thorns of the rose are associated with the crown of thorns Jesus bore when he was crucified.
It’s just as well I didn’t understand any of this at the time, it would have scared me to death but trust in the process has grown along with my capacity to assimilate what was presented and I have come to appreciate the essence of Thérèse’s message inStory of a Soul – what she calls ‘the way of trust and surrender.’
It is altogether amazing how little most people reflect on numinous objects and attempt to come to terms with them, and how laborious such an undertaking is once we have embarked upon it. The numinosity of the object makes it difficult to handle intellectually, since our affectivity is always involved.
~ C.G. Jung Answer to Job Paragraph 735 Ch XVl
This experience occurred 12 years ago but remains as fresh in my mind as when I had it. I call it a dream because I had it in bed at night but it had a sharpness and clarity that is lacking in both regular dreams and waking life. I didn’t wake from it – it came back to me in a flash in the morning. Its numinous quality alone was enough to etch it into my memory but it was the questions it confronted me with that has kept the memory intact. These questions are still not fully resolved; it is one thing to accept the reality of such experiences, quite another to thoroughly explore all the implications and integrate them fully.
I am approaching an energy field that I know is the source. It is not visible but I somehow sense it. My ‘body’ is a vortex of energy and is vibrating at a great rate. This is what has enabled me to get close to the source and as I near it, a form takes shape in front of me. It is as though my vibration has caused it to emerge. The form is the same as mine but has a masculine energy. We start vibrating in harmony and it is a wonderful feeling.
Without making contact, we slowly turn so that we are side by side. We are now looking out over a vast space. It is an inky darkness but illuminated as if by an invisible full moon and all is utterly still and silent. Vignettes of movie-like scenes of people going about daily life are scattered about in the space and with this being I am deciding which scene I will enter into. He is my adviser and is totally trustworthy. I know it is the Christ and we are communicating telepathically. I am like an excited child, asking “Can I really choose, really?” His response is the equivalent of “Yes, of course!”
I am radiantly happy with a feeling of complete freedom and understanding throughout the whole experience.
There were probably 12-15 scenes in the vision but I could only recall two clearly on waking. They appeared to be way off in the distance yet I saw them as clearly as if they were only a few metres away. One was of an American Indian campsite with a teepee and a campfire and a native woman in traditional clothing pottering about doing what appeared to be domestic chores. The other was the inside of a house with a stocky, grandmotherly looking woman in a long dress and apron tied around her waist attending to pots at a wood stove. My impression from the clothing was that it was around the early twentieth century but there were no specific details to indicate the location. I felt no connection with the first scene whatsoever but the second one was similar to the kind of house I grew up in. I only saw the back of the woman and didn’t recognize anything about her.
The intensity of an experience like this defies regular dream analysis but I attempted to make sense of it by doing a dialogue with the energetic being in which I asked if I had made a decision. The response was that I had but that no decision is final or irrevocable and that all life paths are fully negotiable and determined on a choice by choice basis. There was no indication as to what the decision was. The dialogue ended with this:
“It is impossible to make a wrong choice for I am with you always.”
And who are you?
“I am your fully evolved and whole Self.”
This threw me somewhat – Christ is my fully evolved and whole Self? What did that even mean? At that stage Christ was synonymous in my mind with Jesus and yet this figure was nothing like the initial vision I had in which the figure that appeared to me resembled my inner image of Jesus. Nonetheless it felt like there was a connection with that earlier vision along with a man who appeared often in various forms in my dreams. I had come to think of this man as my Jesus figure because he reminded me of the wise guide and friend that I had regarded Jesus to be before my rational mind rejected religion wholesale in my teens.
That this figure was really myself was rather difficult to swallow, along with the implication that I had actually chosen my life. For as long as I could remember I had said that if I’d had any choice in the matter I would not have been born and as I’ve shared elsewhere in this blog, suicide as an escape from the sufferings of life had never been far from my mind. I had often felt a sense of shame and guilt about this ambivalence towards life and did my best to overcome it but never quite managed to. I suspect now that this experience was a response to a yearning to find real meaning for my life and though it didn’t change anything instantly, it marked a turning point in that quest.
An experience a few weeks later brought both more clarity and more confusion.
I was doing an online course through a meditation teacher, which was a kind of spiritually based self-development course and was listening to an audio based on a Neuro-linguistic Programming exercise. The first part entailed determining my most important values and identifying and dissolving any fears that conflicted with them. I don’t recall a lot of the details of the exercise but the emotional impact of what ensued was deeply affecting and together with the previous experience had a significant impact on my attitude towards life.
My most important value boiled down to one thing at that time – knowing who I am and what I’m here for. The exercise involved identifying any impediments in the way and what I came up with is that ‘the search’ was giving me a reason to live, so therefore the fear was that if I was to realise who I am and what I’m here for, I would no longer have a reason to live. Kind of a no-win position to be in and completely irrational but as I was fast learning (still learning), the ego’s fear of its own demise is legendary and the rational mind really is pretty clueless.
The exercise involved assuming a ‘root cause event’ for the obstruction and intuitively deciding on whether the event occurred before (i.e. in utero), during, or after birth. The idea was to then picture my entire life as a timeline and view it from above, gradually increasing the distance until I was way above it and then send down a ‘double’ of myself into the situation to resolve it, while staying high up and far removed from it. I didn’t get to do this because the exercise took on a life of its own.
I found myself as a kind of disembodied pinpoint of consciousness, floating peacefully in empty space when suddenly my attention was drawn to a scene below and I saw a woman who I felt a strong connection with in the kitchen of a house that looked very familiar. She was pregnant and I knew that no soul had yet entered her womb. I understood everything about her and her life circumstances and knew that she felt bad about herself and had hopes that the baby she was carrying would help her mental state. I felt an almost desperate yearning to be that child and had no sense of anyone else lining up for the job. It was as though I was all alone in the universe except for this very compelling connection with a woman who I knew as intimately as myself. Along with the strong desire was a feeling that I wasn’t quite ready but that was completely overridden by the sense of urgency I had.
When the vision ended I remained in a state of reverie and various scenes from my life played through my mind, including a story Mum had been fond of telling: according to her, when I was around 9 months old I was hospitalized for malnutrition because I refused to feed. When she visited me in hospital, I was covered from head to toe in food from attempts to force feed me and she was so angry she grabbed me out of the cot and went straight around to the doctor to show him. Mum was rather melodramatic and I obviously have no memory of the event but I had suspected all my life that had she left me there I would have quietly exited planet earth. I had food issues, hospital phobia and separation anxiety my whole life until fairly recently.
As it happened, I’d had hypnotherapy a few years before this vision in an attempt (not successful, unfortunately) to resolve the severe migraines I was prone to. In one session, I found myself as a baby, in a scene where my mother was feeding me. I was vomiting and she was upset about it and I decided to stop eating to save her from being distressed. In light of the vision, it made sense that if my mission was to make Mum happy and I was causing her distress by regurgitating my food, then not eating was the solution to the problem. While I am not convinced that a 9mth old baby has the capacity to make such decisions, I am convinced that matters concerning the soul are decided in a plane of reality that is beyond the physical.
Though there is no way of verifying the authenticity of either the pre-birth vision or the hypnotic regression scene, subjectively they felt as real as any physical experience I knew to be true. They also made absolute sense in terms of the deep attachment I had to my mother. I had long felt that my love for her went way beyond anything that could be explained psychologically. Her death when I was thirty four left a hole that felt like it could never be filled. When I began having visions and dreams of her 12 years later it helped fill the void but even now it is the thought of being reunited with her that is my true solace. I am open to the idea of this being a symbolic event within my lifetime, i.e. a reunion with my inner ‘divine mother.’
These events confronted me in a graphic way with questions that had been posed to me 8 years earlier in a dream which I wrote about here – “The real questions are: where have you come from, what are you doing here and where are you going?” This was not long after my husband’s death and I was just beginning to grapple with the idea of an afterlife. The idea that life might also be pre-existent was completely foreign, so the only question that really interested me was “What are you doing here?” My response was to try and recreate my old life with a new partner. It hadn’t worked and these two experiences eventually became a joint catalyst for taking all three questions seriously. That meant making a real commitment to the spiritual path that I had been halfheartedly pursuing. It wasn’t a conscious decision at the time but in responding to the inner prompts in my own haphazard way I was led ever more deeply until one day I realized that the spiritual life, in spite of my years of rejecting it, had always been of central importance in my life. It is the answer to ‘What are you doing here?’
At the time I had these experiences it was hard for me to imagine that I would have actually chosen the circumstances I was born into. Did I really choose an alcoholic abandoning father and the shame, poverty and hardship that went with it? Did I know that my mother would be in and out of mental hospitals, resulting in the family being split up and billeted out to mostly unwilling hosts? Most vexing of all, did I know that I would fall prey to a paedophile uncle resulting in emotional problems that would take most of my life to sort out? I don’t have a satisfactory answer to these questions because it is obvious to me that individual choice is limited by the complexities with which lives intersect both psychically and physically. What I do know is that as I have worked through the tsunami of unconscious contents that was unleashed 23 years ago, life is making sense in a way that I never imagined possible when I was in denial of my soul life.
One of the real gifts of taking dreamwork seriously is that every life event, whether it happens in some form on the inner planes or in outer life, can be interpreted symbolically. A universally effective way of interpreting dreams is to regard the dream characters as being aspects of one’s self and that is the way I regarded both the energetic figure and my mother initially in order to make sense of them. In Jungian terms, in general, a figure of the same sex is regarded as a shadow figure and the opposite sex is regarded as the animus (or anima in the case of a male dreamer). In that view, the vision of my mother could have been a metaphor for me loving myself and giving birth to myself and the encounter with Christ could have been a meeting with my animus in its positive aspect. I have looked at these events every which way over the years and the way I understand them has changed as I have grown and changed and may continue to do so but regardless of any symbolic interpretation, I can’t help but regard them as having an objective reality. I do believe that I chose to be with my mother and I did have a real encounter with the being I know as Christ and these experiences helped to anchor me at a time when I was really struggling with ‘the point of it all.’ At the time, as numinous as it was and as inspiring as it was, I had a lot of resistance that prevented me from being able to fully accept and therefore integrate the meeting with the energetic being I perceived as Christ. The biggest blocks were ambivalence about the reality of this figure and distrust of the religion he represented. It has taken all this time to work through these issues but all the while the dreams have been guiding me and I do feel that the figure I met is working with me through them and has been with me all along.
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.
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.
…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.
