Pill

An experience you need, or are making yourself meet because you think it is good for you; something we ‘swallow’ because we think it is right – we may ‘swallow’ lies or excuses; an attempt to deal with internal feelings by external means.

If we dream of a particular pill, one we have just been taking, it naturally associates with the events or reason for taking the pill, or its influence in your body.

It may not be put into words, but the intimation made by many doctors is that if one is depressed, it is a biochemical situation or a brain malfunction. If one is withdrawn or autistic, it is not that there is a vital centre of personality which has for some reason chosen to avoid contact, but that a biochemical or physiological situation is the cause. It’s nothing personal – take this pill to change the biochemistry, because you are not really a person, you are a biochemical mess.

Countless numbers of people need a sleeping pill in order to sleep. Or else they face the tortures of fear, nightmares and formless anxiety. These arise because sleeping is a doorway to meeting the unconscious with all its hidden and unmet traumas and their pain and fear. It is a meeting with Life and is not in itself a fearful thing, but because we have been raised to forget that we are the products of the universe, of Life, Life which we avoid meeting, kill out any animals within us and outside of us, we grow into diminished people. We forget that it was not us, our ego, which created us, even as mothers we did not create our children, it was the process of Life that formed and nurtured us.

All of what Lisa feels about her life – no child – no external achievement – no partner – no house of her own – not measuring up to her family – are all true, but only in a certain way. What is devastating is that Lisa believes she is what she feels. It is this point that is the fulcrum, the lever that can shift defeat into release. And that lever has nothing to do with repeating positive affirmations to fight the gloom. It has nothing to do with meditating light flooding her being to dispel the darkness. It has nothing to do with taking a pill or injecting a chemical to deaden the pain. It has everything to do with recognising who we really are, and emerging from the locked cell we have been a prisoner in.

 Example: ‘I was in my mother’s bedroom with my teenage boyfriend. We lay in my parent’s double bed and he was kissing my breasts. I realised we were near to making love and told him I was not on the pill. Seeing him taken aback I told him my father has contraceptives in a nearby drawer. The dream fades as he is trying to put one on.’ Julia.

Example: We live in a “pill age.” Millions of people, with no forethought at all, take tranquilizers, penicillin, birth control pills, cold remedies and energizers—and the attitude is that the “pill” is the solution to everything. Ancient Sanskrit records spoke of pills of gaiety, prepared from hemp and sugar. More recently the Assyrians of the seventh and eighth centuries used hemp as an incense. Still later Marco Polo told the tale of the Old Man of the Mountain and the Assassins (Hashishims) he gathered around him—a tale so exotic that it has captured the imagination of his readers ever since. The Old Man of the Mountain, after promising neophytes a foretaste of paradise, intoxicated them with a drug and introduced them to a secret garden where they were fed exquisite foods, drank delicate wines, and were indulged by beautiful women in every whim. The warriors actually believed themselves in paradise, and after their return to the mundane world would defend the Sheik with their lives. They no longer feared a death which promised such bliss.

A pill we are actually taking: May link with feelings or physical reactions to the drug being taken.

Idioms: Sugar the pill; bitter pill; the pill.

Useful Questions and Hints:

Do I regularly take pills?

What type are they, medical, leisure, vitamins, or pain killers?

What would I use pills for?

Are they taken habitually or because of need?

See Being the Person or Thing – Dreams are Like a Computer Game – Secrets of Power Dreaming