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Author Topic: Meeting fear of Death and Pain and becoming Alive  (Read 8490 times)

Tony Crisp

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Meeting fear of Death and Pain and becoming Alive
« on: April 16, 2015, 01:56:07 AM »
I dreamt of being near to a place that was haunted, and that a man was in trouble in the haunted place. 
 
I decided to go and see if I could sort out the problem. I walked down a slope to where the centre of the haunting existed. It was an open space with an old double-decker bus in it. The only person on the bus was a middle-aged man who was sitting on the top deck leaning out of a window on the right hand side of the bus. I stood beneath him and looked up. He was staring in a glazed way and didn’t see me. I could see and feel that he was being hit by fantasies or hallucinations by whatever was the source of the haunting. This invasion of his mind was grabbing his attention so fully that he wasn’t aware of his surrounding or of me. I was sure that if he went any deeper into this mind stuff he wouldn’t be able to pull out. I waved my hand in his line of vision and banged my hand on the bus to make a noise and get his attention. At first it didn’t seem as if I would bring him out of it, but after a while he looked at me. 
 
I shouted at him to pull out. I said that he had a wife and some more years of his life to live, so why lose himself into this entrancement. This didn’t seem to grab him so I shouted again and said that he would eventually slip into this empty mind world anyway - at death - so why not live with his wife the remaining years of his life. I was sure that if he lost awareness he would let himself starve. 
 
I was aware that what he desired was to slip away into the Buddhist void, into the awareness of the one life in which he lost any awareness of self. But I banged and shouted and he became more ‘present’. I then felt I had to confront whatever was the source of the powerful ‘haunting’ that was pulling him into the inner mind. I turned away from the man and saw just to my right a short distance from the bus an animal that was the ‘haunter’. It was a mammal of no particular type - a bit like a mixture of dog, rat and guinea pig. It seemed very ordinary and tame, and stood looking at me. I walked toward it and stretched out my hand. It was a tan colour with short fur and gave a feeling of being okay to approach, so I touched it to stroke. This was okay and I was thinking there was no problem when the creature leapt at my throat in a flash of movement and ripped my throat out. 
 
This sounds disturbing but I simply observed this and thought to myself that stroking and trying to be friendly was no way of dealing with this thing. It was as if I was in command of the imagery in that I simply formed another body. The creature ripped out my throat again and dived into my body to eat it. The only way that felt as if I might deal with the creature was to have the meditative state of not having any goals, as in Buddhism, and not feeling panic at it’s attacks. In fact apart from the gory imagery, there was nothing to be frightened of, as the creature was only attacking my dream image of myself. As I wasn’t identified with this, it couldn’t hurt me. That was the end of the dream. 

Tony Crisp

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Re: Meeting fear of Death and Pain and becoming Alive
« Reply #1 on: April 16, 2015, 02:00:54 AM »
I woke in the middle of the night with a completely different understanding of my dream, as if in sleep I had realised what it was about. I saw that I had previously satisfies my self and had a sense of pride about being able to feel no fear and to realise it is only a dream image.

I had previously seen something when exploring the dream. It started with primitive sounds along with a feeling that something organic and alive yet buried was moving and trying to be recognised. It was a strange feeling because I sensed that this thing had deep connections, and as it began to move in me I felt it was linked with strands in my body and mind. 
 
Then sounds of struggle came from me – an animal struggling to be released. Then slowly the sounds of struggle became a torrent of curses and swearing. To sum it all up it was saying and feeling and recognising how my mother had raised me in such a way that I reacted to it by becoming alone, a loner who struggled to be independent. That wasn’t news to me, but the connections with the wanting to be lost in a form of Buddhistic trance were. There was hatred pouring out of me particularly towards women partners. But it was deeply buried, and a form of long term anger and hatred. I said that I had never really given myself to any woman, but always remained separate inside. Then I would leave them as a vengeance instead of staying to sort out the difficulty. Of course there was always a valid excuse for doing it. 
 
Gradually the outburst ended and I sought to see if I could ask that part of me to learn to love women more fully. I felt that the first step would be honesty in any relationship. I would need to say that my background of experience makes me very independent – I can come and go easily. But I feel as if the thing that I released was a part of me, not a dominating part of me, but something that has been causing mischief in me. 

The new realisation about the dream was that the Buddhist attitude I had taken was an obvious attempt to escape from pain using the view that all life experience is painful and a form of illusion. In that way I was trying to escape from the fear of death and the pain of being a living emotional human man. It was an escape route started in a culture that was so full of injustice with the caste system that the way out was to kill out ones sense of identity.

I found that facing my pain led me through to an actual living peace as a human being. I realised that our life is not an illusion but a way of learning who we are, by it we face and deal with generations of avoided pain and fear of death. It is achieved not by stopping ones thoughts and feelings, but by courage to live LIFE fully.
« Last Edit: April 16, 2015, 10:22:44 AM by Tony Crisp »

- anna -

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Re: Meeting fear of Death and Pain and becoming Alive
« Reply #2 on: April 16, 2015, 06:36:21 AM »

Well dear Tony - Your unconscious mind did take "I am on the nightshift again" quite literally  ;)
More than once I have experienced that when I write things down, they develop in that direction too.
It always makes me wonder if my unconscious mind is just a few steps ahead of - what I call - "me" and
so if that is meant with "Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path".

I do believe that there is no human being - myself included - who does not use "the Void" first for the reason you believe you have used it too in your life; to escape from LIFE rather than learning to live IT more fully.
I suppose that if you refine your nightshift experience, that you will also come to the understanding that it is merely a matter of "courage to live LIFE MORE fully"; at least that is how I perceive your inner journey.

And I do see that I have thousands of ways to take revenge on LIFE, for I have often felt that IT treated me unfairly and rather than getting to the bottom of my issues with LIFE, I project it on a LIFE FORM so that I can battle with IT, for there is a part in me which loves that battle. Perhaps I am slowly changing my mind about that?

I will follow your footsteps in daring to meet fear of Death and Pain and becoming Alive more fully  :)

Thank you for sharing.

Anna :-)

Tony Crisp

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Re: Meeting fear of Death and Pain and becoming Alive
« Reply #3 on: April 17, 2015, 09:37:39 AM »
Thank you Irina.

I am a bit behind in responding to dreams because I have got lost in doing things to the site and collecting information.

Tony

Irina

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Re: Meeting fear of Death and Pain and becoming Alive
« Reply #4 on: April 17, 2015, 05:10:43 PM »
I also want to add that life can be a pain or life can be a joy , it all depends how person will program himself /herself

Tony Crisp

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Re: Meeting fear of Death and Pain and becoming Alive
« Reply #5 on: April 19, 2015, 11:23:09 AM »
Remember that one can store pain in the unconscious and disguise it as I did in many dreams. We can transform our approach, but we often need to recover the hurt parts of us to release their energy. For much of my life I lived a life of positive thinking. We do not have to become negative or depressed to explore our depths.

The dream I quoted was from was from the 1990's - the interpretation was from 2014, when I looked at it again.

Tony