Mental Illness

If you dream about being, or being with mentally ill people, it usually signifies you dealing with parts of your own feelings and responses to relationship, work of general existence, that have inbuilt difficulties. We all have some inappropriate responses to certain situations. As there is an inbuilt process that attempts to deal with such difficulties, we may meet them in our dreams under the guise of mental illness.

And a lot of the pain and the mental misery we experience are largely because we put so much trust in what we think and feel. Yet thoughts are simple photocopies of reality and are never the real things. They are just sounds we make into words to help us move around a strange and confusing world. And feelings to are simply a response to what we meet. See Avoid Being Victims

If we look at all the human suffering in the world, not the sort brought on by floods or volcanos or earthquakes and wars, we see enormous areas where humans cannot easily survive. Of course there is enormous mental breakdown, a vast number of people needing alcohol or street drugs to get by. And there are those living in emotional hell.  This is partly because we do not or have not learnt to survive amidst the huge forces that are part of human existence. How many of us actually realise that we are only just recently in our development left the animal existence, and admit the tremendous needs it places on us? Most of us totally take no notice of those needs, and so a great amount of splitting occurs in our personality. We have lost touch with the natural world and do not honour it as part of our life as many native peoples do, and this we can learn from our inner world, our dreams. We do not tend to the hurts we feel as a natural animal that we are, so become sick in our soul – a soul that we deny we have.

Something that is obvious as you watch not only your own dreams, but other people’s, is that that we take into their sleep and dreams all the fears, terrors, sexual questions and longings, as well as all the speculations and beliefs. The huge bear, tiger or frightening person they are terrified of is actually fears either inherited or are frightening experiences from the past. Many of them are terrifying images put before them in films. But they are purely mental things that you haven’t faced, and therefore are the victims of – victims of your own fears. We have an inner life of thoughts and feelings that gives us all our reactions to what we see, experience and dream. It is so powerfully in control of us and yet most of the time we take it as US/ME, yet it is only a mass of thoughts and feelings that can be change and are usually simply habits of reaction. Whenever we meet such feelings and images, they are not like real life, because feelings, ideas and dreams are nothing like outer life where things could hurt you, but are an image like on a cinema screen that even if a gun is pointed at you and fired it can do no damage – except if you run in fear. So all the things that scare you are simply your own fears projected onto the screen of your mind.

What we are terrible disturbed by, or external person or object in a dream, is actually your own internal feelings and mental structure, and is difficult for many people to believe or even grasp. The following unusual dream helps us to develop a conception of this. I say it is unusual because very seldom can a dreamer admit to themselves while asleep, that the world which in their dream appears as exterior, is actually their own internal thoughts feelings and psychobiological functions. The dreamer, A. B. is a man in his fifties, and dreams he has found a huge thistle in his garden which is as big as a tree.

 Example: I look at the trunk of the thistle examining it. At this point it seems like a giant hardwood tree. I snap a twig and it smells very nice – a perfumed wood. Other branches are going rotten. Walking around to the back of the tree to see if the bark is rotten I notice a hole where bees or wasps have a colony. I put my left hand up to touch the bark and as I do so notice there is also a hole in the back of my hand, in and out of which wasps are flying. With great shock I look in the hole and see wasps eating my flesh away, so my hand is almost hollow. I awake with the feeling of being old and decrepit.

What is of particular importance in this dream is the point of transition where the dreamer moves from seeing the hole in the tree, to seeing the hole in himself. But this transition continues, for the dreamer then moves to the feeling of being old and decrepit. These points of transition mark the stages of realisation that what seems exterior are not. It also shows a transition that few people ever make.

The man says about his dream after exploring it: “In looking at my hand and realising there was a hole in my life and I took note of what I felt. Just prior to the dream I had experienced a lot of anxiety about whether my marriage was breaking up. The dream made me realise that niggling thoughts and emotions were eating away at my self confidence leading me to feelings of being near to the scrap heap, having outlived my usefulness. The dream depicted these emotions and thoughts as wasps. This enabled me to see that if I entertained such feelings, they would certainly eat away my grasp of life.

I could see that as a person I only ENTERTAINED thoughts and emotions. They were simply what I thought and felt about reality, not reality itself. It was up to me as to what I wanted reality to be. Did I want to entertain the reality of a tired ageing man who could no longer satisfy his wife’s need for love and companionship, having nothing worthwhile to contribute to others? That could certainly become reality if I allowed such feelings to dominate me. I had thought that my life was like a giant thistle, but on closer inspection I saw it was a giant hardwood. It did have branches which needed pruning, but the rest of the tree was good and perfumed – giving off good feelings to others. So I decided to put love and care into my life and marriage instead of self doubt and a sense of defeat.  Please see Inner World

Our mind can transform itself in a number of ways. Sometimes one new piece of information, or a new mental discipline, can change the quality of all mental life. We have the power to transform, as well as the often avoided self awareness. Our thoughts can suggest fear about ones own mental strength and health as well as being a source of wisdom and insight. But better still is the realisation that our being is a paradox, and so is things of a totally opposite nature. As such we cannot say we are sane or insane, but everything. If we realise that as a human being we can take a path toward any of the opposites and arrive at extremes, then we can also realise that we can take a middle path between the opposites where the opposites either cancel each other out or arrive at a balance. See Life’s Little Secrets

 

We block our healing process

If you agree that we did not create ourselves, that even in the womb, it wasn’t our mother who created us, it was the Life processes. Our mother gave a fertile place for an egg to start its growth, and her effort wasn’t in creating an infant body, but it being a vehicle for its growth and its nutrition. I heard a woman recently say that when she became pregnant it was like an alien creature took hold of her body.

But what she and many others never admit to themselves is that they are themselves a creature of Life. Life itself started them menstruating, and arose the sexual impulse in them, and yet they seldom every try to understand and work with the process. People often call the process God, and have very restricted rules that are often based on the past needs and are a form of keeping traditional values. But it is obvious that in mental and often even physical illness we even block the healing processes that Life offers us.

To make this plain to you I have to explain certain things, because nearly everyone has never had it explained how we actually stop our own healing processes. So I will start with an example.

The first time I ever slept in the bed with my wife Hyone, she quickly went to sleep and I noticed she had difficulty breathing through her nose while asleep. She would start breathing through her nose but couldn’t continue and the breath burst in through her mouth. I felt it must be a tension, so while she still slept I spoke to her quietly, suggesting that the muscles in her nose and face would relax. I repeated this a few times and Hyone’s breathing became easy and normal. Seeing that she responded so well, I decided to try something else. So I quietly suggested that her whole body would drop unnecessary tensions, and emotional and mental stress would melt away. I went on to say that this would open all the doors of her being, allowing cleansing and healing throughout.

There was no apparent response to this, so I lay quietly ready to sleep. But suddenly, about eight minutes later, Hyone woke, almost with a jerk, and said enthusiastically, “I just had the most amazing dream.”  In the dream Hyone had been with her mother and sisters in a garden at the back of a house. Hyone was lying in the sun relaxing. As she relaxed she felt a wave of energy flow up her body to her head. Then, wave after wave moved up her body, giving her tremendous pleasure and feelings of well-being. But the waves got stronger and stronger, and she was frightened they would overwhelm her, and at that point she woke.

This is very important, because it shows how our good healing energy can be felt as threatening. It is because our personality is so girded and insecure it feels it will be overwhelmed or they would lose their self control. There is a huge area of ones conscious skills given over to various sorts of control. This starts from a very young age when we gradually learn not to mess our pants, and later to ride a bike and drive a car. Being out of control can open us to a great deal of fear, or even terror. Yet being able to let go of control is also tremendously important. Many of the things we meet in life we are unable to control – even our own heartbeat and life processes. But many external things such as a relationship, sex, opportunity, losses, accidents and other people’s decisions confront us with areas that we cannot control.

Control and letting go of control also relate very fully to what we know about ourselves. This is because with too tight a control on what we allow ourselves to feel or experience we build a barrier against the re-experiencing and healing of old painful events, and also for the arising of new aspects of our potential to emerge. See: prison; Life’s Little Secrets

 In life and sleep we have two powerful actions working in us. The first is our waking experience based on having a body, its limitations, vulnerabilities and a particular gender. Our second is the power that gave us life and continues to express as dreams, in our breathing and heartbeat – our life. This I have given the description as the Life Will.

While we sleep our conscious self is unconscious, and while we sleep and dream our voluntary muscles are paralysed – therefore another will or motivating force moves our body. So we have a Conscious Will, and what I will call a Life Will. The first one we have experience of as we can move our arm or speak in everyday activities; but the second will takes over when we sleep. See Sleep Paralysis

This Life will can move us to speak, to move our body, and in fact do things that we cannot do with our Conscious Will. As Freud pointed out this Life Will has full access to our memories. It can do so many other things that are described else where – See Edgar Cayce and the Cosmic Mind; ESP in Dreams. This Life Will or motivator has been active for millions of years and we see it working all the time in animals. We are partly split in half because we are often opposed to what our Life Will in us wants. So the only way to express what is good for us is in dreams when our conscious will is largely passive or we are restricted by being tied down.

Life Will created your body and pre-existed you as a person you know today. It was working in you prior to your ability to speak or know in the way you do now. But of course it has fantastic wisdom and skills, as can be seen in animals. But we have to remember that having a personality with self awareness is a very new thing and has only existed for a short time. Before that we were like animals that lived only in the Life Will – what we usually call instincts. So the development of self awareness was an immense step, and left us very vulnerable, and still does. Look around at the number of people who have to take anti depressant, or who have to use alcohol every day, or smoke or take other drugs – all means of facing the difficulty of meeting self awareness. So when a powerful force takes hold of us that we have no knowledge of we fight against it, as explained above in Life’s Little Secrets.

We are tiny little plants of life that Life tries to help to grow

Because of our small area awareness which does not include the massive unconscious, when we begin to realise our wholeness, as was happening to Hyone when the waves became too much for her, we feel that we will be swallowed and we will die. It is important to say that when we meet the experience of powerlessness through becoming aware of the hugeness of our Life, which we are usually unaware if, it feels like something alien or attacking, it is a shock.

When we begin to meet the Hugeness that we are, we often react to it in our dreams or in waking with fear or panic. So we dream of being attacked by aliens or frightening creatures; or being swallowed by a whale or something huge, or even possessed by evil entities. If we realise that they are things we have created through our own fear we will pass on. But otherwise it will continue to haunt us as something that will get you; or you feel uncertain even lost in facing it! But it is only our small self image, our ego that reacts because you feel powerless, even though in reality the Hugeness is part of your totality. It is the enormous potential you have within you, it is Life you are frightened of or have been ignoring.

If you learn to let it into your life you will find healing and immense growth.