Author Archive

Premature Birth and Postmature Birth

In humans, premature birth refers to any birth that occurs significantly before or after the expected date of delivery.

A premature birth is defined as one that occurs less than 37 weeks after conception. In the United States prematurity occurs in about 7 to 9 percent of pregnancies in white women and about 17 percent in black women. A presumptive reason (usually multiple pregnancy, maternal toxemia or hypertension, abnormal attachment of the placenta, or congenital malformation of the infant) can be found for 40 to 60 percent of premature births. Poor maternal health, hygiene, and nutrition increase the likelihood of prematurity; maternal accidents and acute illness are insignificant as causes. The chief specific causes of death among premature infants are respiratory disturbances, infections, and spontaneous hemorrhages, especially into the brain or lungs. With good care, about 85 percent of all live-born premature infants should survive; those of higher weight have a better chance.

Prematurity is to be distinguished from intrauterine growth retardation, in which weight and development are subnormal for fetal age. An estimated 1.5 to 2 percent of all babies are significantly below a birth weight proper to their fetal age. Deficiency of transplacental nutrition from various causes is frequently responsible. Other causes include fetal infections and some malformations. Generally, babies under 5.5 pounds but carried for more than 37 weeks are considered growth-retarded rather than premature.

A postmature birth is any birth that occurs more than three weeks after the expected date of delivery, at which time placental transfer begins to fail, and the fetus receives decreased amounts of oxygen and nutrients. If birth does not occur naturally or is not induced, the fetus will die. Postmature newborns are often thin, with dry, wrinkled skin and unusually long hair and nails. If the postmature child lives through the first few days after birth, its chances for survival are good.

Akashic Records

The word akasha refers to an Eastern concept that there is an aspect of nature which records all experience. In this universal recording of all human life and cosmic events, it is stated that one can find detailed insight of such things as past lives, the great dramas of history, and the emergence of the cosmos.

In the West, Jung’s description of the collective unconscious has similarities with the akashic records. Also the metaphysical theory of the Cosmic Mind or cosmic consciousness. Many instances of people being able to access the akashic records or cosmic mind have been recorded.

An example of a dream that could suggest akashic records is seen in the following dream.

Was exploring a very old and abandoned house with a friend Les, and I think, another shadowy figure. We looked through and came to a room with a baby grand piano in it. I lifted the lid and the whole top flapped open as one piece, revealing it to be an enormous gramophone. I saw one of the giant records for it, about a yard across. The record was titled “Cheiro”. I put it on and Cheiro talked, but I cannot remember what he said, as I was looking through the other records behind the piano. Les said he was going to clean up, or polish up and rejuvenate the record player.

The fact that the records were so large and their link with Cheiro, who was a famous seer, links them with something more that ordinary memories. See: Cayce, Edgar; collective unconscious; Akashic Records.

Age and Your Dreams

To quickly find an age group click on the below –

Being Born

Dreams of early childhood

The enormity of our education

The conflict with culture

Now I’m a teenager

How do I leave home?

How do I know I’m grown up?

And now I am 40

There’s more – much more

There’s more to life than death

From the baby’s perspective, birth and the experience of life outside the womb are probably like waking from a long and unbroken dream into an entirely new world. This is because although adults only spend about a third of their sleep period dreaming, babies spend 50 to 80 percent of sleep in dreams. Some researchers, carrying their investigation into the womb, state that at 24-30 weeks gestational age the unborn baby dreams a 100 percent of the time.

From this it is obvious that our experience of dreams and dreaming changes at different periods of our life. The evidence for this deepens when we look at collections of dreams provided by people in different age groups. As far as we can tell some of these differences are due to the fact that at different periods of our life we are confronted by different challenges and different needs. But that is only partly true, and the changes in our experience of dreams are also due to not only the physiological changes of our body but also the psychological changes, or spiritual changes, occurring at different ages.

Being Born

For instance, the unborn baby is in a completely different world physically and psychologically to the adult, or even to the six-week old baby. Although we cannot be certain of what the unborn baby dreams, we can give an educated guess. The information behind the guess arises from the experience of people who undertake very deep psychological explorations into the unconscious using modern therapeutic techniques. In a sense they are like deep-sea divers who don special equipment to explore the depths of the unconscious. What they report is that their baby self, existing as it does without language or focused self-awareness, lives in a world of complete identification with the forces of life creating it. Toward the end of its life in the womb it begins to have a more focussed sense of a relationship with another being – its mother. Before that there was no feeling of separation. Because it has not yet experienced vision, its dreams are long slow experiences of sensation, of feeling. One explorer of these deeps, attempting to put his experience into words expresses it as follows:

Unknown to myself I am the swimmer.
Music I do not hear moves me toward the sea I do no know.
For I am the music – Each movement a beat –
Each swift turn a passage in the flow of life.

I know not – Yet I am a swimmer in the river,
Close to me as my own unknown, without boundary.
I am the imperative – Survive!
Fear is my being, reaching tendril fingers
Into the great ocean toward which I swim –
Immense beyond all my experience of fear,
Older than I am I go fearfully fearless
To the sea.

This sea toward which this little swimming life form is moving is birth. Frightening because it is a huge new world that it already senses ahead. Imperative because its whole urge is to live, to survive, and it must enter the ‘sea’ to continue living. This because all things in existence change, and the little swimmer’s season of life in the womb will end. So not only is it dreaming about what it senses it is moving toward, but also it faces in dreams what its own inner changes are.

Babies born prematurely feel they are not ready to be born. Experience of premature birth

Dreams of early childhood

Of course, that is largely speculation, although part of the miracle of human awareness is its ability to look back upon itself and put words and definitions to what was, at the time, indefinable. However, from birth we know a lot more about what the child faces, and therefore dreams about. We know because the child can start telling us their dreams as soon as they can talk. But also we have the dreams of childhood remembered by adults.

Here is an example of a recurring dream from a young girl:

I would be sitting up in bed holding a very large thick book open close to my face. In the centre between the open pages there buzzed a huge bluebottle. Suddenly the book would slam shut, squashing the bluebottle and I would wake in terror.

Another from a slightly older girl:

I am staying in a boarding house in Blackpool, the room number is 13. During the night there is a lot of noise, I get out of bed and leave my room. Many people are hurrying past. I meet a woman with a child who has a fork protruding from her throat. I go to find my Gran, she is in the top bed of a pair of bunk beds. I cannot help her get down, someone has chopped off her arms. I would wake terrified.

Both those dreams are about fear, and of course children face many fears in their dreams, more so than adults, as there are so many new things to develop a relationship with. Also, these anxiety dreams might be more often reported because they are troubling, and the more positive dreams forgotten. It is helpful to know or tell children that dreams are like computer games with terrific graphics, where you meet dragons, serpents and awful enemies, and nobody ever gets hurt even though in the game they may be killed again and again. It is because it is dream is also a virtual reality like a game.

But here is a dream frequently reported by children, or remembered from childhood by adults.

I would stand at the top of the stairs and instead of walking down the stairs I used to fly. This dream lasted for a number of years and as I got older I sometimes dreamed that boys or men were chasing me. I would suddenly take off like a helicopter and fly away. Sometimes narrowly escaping from my pursuer.

Stairs for a baby and child are not only very dangerous, but also a challenge. Originally for many children a forbidden challenge. When we are physically skilled enough to run up and down stairs, this is felt as an enormous achievement, and translated in dreams to flying. The dream therefore suggests confidence to the point of dropping anxiety, and the ability to do things in life previously forbidden by parents or from lack of physical and mental skill.

So the child is not only facing and dreaming about things it fears, but also the vast range of things it is learning and developing skill in. For instance the child learns the basics of motor, verbal and social skills. Great changes take place in the psyche through the learning of language. Language itself is like installing a massive type of computer program into the developing consciousness. Like any such program, it enables functions and processes to take place that would be impossible without it. The following dream and the exploration of it illustrate this wonderfully.

The enormity of our education

I dreamt I was flying at a great height in the sky. Then I glided down and approached a field to land. It was near where council houses backed right onto the open hillside above two old elm trees – a place I knew well from my childhood. The houses had a back garden, separated from the field by a public path, then a hedge. A young girl of about three or four was playing in the field. I knew that she had walked from her house, through her garden, across the overgrown path, into the field. As I came in to land she saw me and ran away very frightened. I was gliding in the same direction she was running and I called out to her not be afraid. She stopped and I landed. In amazement she looked at me and said, “How did you get to be up there?” Steve M.

Steve explored this dream, and in the role of the young girl came across insights he describes as follows:

As the young girl I had walked from the back door of my house, along the garden path, across a footpath behind the houses, into the field. As I looked through her eyes and feelings, I realised what a long journey it was for me to get into the field. Not a long journey physically in distance, but an enormous journey within myself. In developing the ability to go from the door to the field, I had gone through the long process of learning to walk; I had learned the confidence to be alone; through language and understanding what my parents had passed to me, I had found out how to avoid stinging nettles, and how not to be overcome by my fears of them and of the huge creatures that I knew as cows. This had all taken ages, and so walking into the field was an enormous achievement, especially as I was doing it by myself. Learning to walk itself had taken tremendous practice and perseverance. Learning to be independent of my mother was also something I was learning. I had made the inner journey of acquiring an immense stock of information and conditioning regarding the external environment I was facing too. I had slowly learned survival responses to stinging nettles, walking alone, nests, birds, the sun, trees, spiders, stones, the wind, children, adults, worms, leaves on the trees, cars, etc, etc, etc, etc, and so on.

I had never realised before what an amazing education a child has, before ever it goes to school. Language itself is like a massive encyclopaedia of information. Then, the attitudes or feeling tones with which language and its concepts are passed to us, adds further volumes.

Therefore we can be sure that in childhood our dreams are an environment in which we explore the possibilities of the information and experiences we are meeting. In fact several researchers have found evidence that a process of learning takes place during dreaming. Because of this the theory that dreams are nothing more than a means of dumping mental garbage from memory has not been validated. Jerold M. Lowenstein, professor of medicine at the University of California at San Francisco, says, ‘Most researchers who study dreams reject’ the idea of dreams as means of garbage dumping, ‘because dreams seem to have a narrative coherence and logic that goes beyond being just a random collection of impressions. They are convinced that REM sleep and dreams constitute a separate reality that plays a vital part in our lives and health, though the nature of that reality is not yet understood.’

Robert van de Castle, in a study of a large number of subjects, says –

I found a striking relationship between age and the frequency of animal characters in American dreams; there were over five times as many animals in the dreams of children ages four to five as there were in those of American college students, and the percentage frequency of animal dreams decreased in a fairly linear fashion as chronological age increased. This finding suggested that the percentage of animal figures might serve as a rough index of cognitive maturity in the American dreamers. In most American dreams, the animal character usually frightened and attacked the dreamer and seemed to represent fear of the dreamer’s instinctual drives. Among native populations, the dreamer was usually engaged in some hunting or fishing pursuit of the animal who more often represented a potential dinner. (From Our Dreaming Mind. New York: Ballantine, 1994.)

The conflict with culture

Castle’s findings suggest a higher level of stress in children than in adults, and this has already been mentioned above. It also suggests that the culture we are born into places us in conflict with our instinctual drives.

Another report of research conducted by Pagel and Altomare, and published in Dreaming-Journal-of-the-Association-for-the-Study-of-Dreams; 1995, found that stress associated dreaming decreased with advancing age. Results indicated that stressful life events may affect dreaming, especially among younger individuals and women.

But these findings about stress represent a fairly surface level of dreams in children. The dream work quoted in which the child faces what has been achieved in walking a garden path, takes us to a much greater depth. In fact the child meets many levels of crisis during immense change, the learning of language being in itself a huge transformation and period of adjustment.

The child depicts these enormous periods of challenge and transformation in archetypal images. In such imagery the process of its psychological growth is displayed. One of these themes, a theme that continues throughout life in one way of another, is that of engulfment by a monster, or being pursued by a monster. To understand the meaning of this, we have to remember that the child’s personal awareness, it sense of self, has emerged slowly from the ocean of unconsciousness, of unfocussed and oceanic life. This ocean of what Jung calls the ‘collective unconscious’ – or what might be called the primal ocean of awareness, still exists in each of us. But we often relate to it with fear that we will be swallowed up in it, and our ego lost. This theme is expressed in Genesis where, describing Adam and Eve after they have eaten the apple of self-awareness, the story tells us they hear God – the huge collective awareness of primal life – walking in the garden and they hide. When they are asked why they hid, Adam says, “I heard your voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself.”

But it is important for the child to remain in contact with its origins, its roots in life. So it must face the monster, the enormity of god-consciousness, and learn to maintain its self-awareness in the ‘belly of the beast’. The need to learn this balance between self-awareness and cosmic consciousness is something we all face. But as the child is newly emerging from the womb of life, it is particularly important.

Now I’m a teenager

The dream world of the adolescent shows very big shifts from that of the child. One of the major themes here is illustrated in this dream from Natalie, a thirteen year old:

I have this recurring nightmare. I see my mother standing by my bedroom door, blocking it as if I am being trapped and stopped from getting out. I often call to her, “Let me out Mum” but she just stands there staring with no expression on her face at all. I end up getting out of bed and switching my bedroom light on and then she disappears. Sometimes I will see her standing by my wardrobe. It seems as if she is always standing by a door and trying to trap me.

The dream shows Natalie trying to find a way out of her dependence on her mother. The dependence is felt as if it is the power of the mother over the child, a sort of restrictive force. This theme of moving toward independence physically and psychologically is a huge step to take, and many dreams in this period explore how this can be achieved, and the various paths one could take to attain it.

The following dream shows a particular facet of this. It is from Eric Fromm’s book on dreams, The Forgotten Language. The dreamer was a young man, an only child, who had been cosseted by over protective parents, and was finding it difficult to face life without their support.

He dreamed that he was about five or six years old and was faced by a river he must cross. He looked for a bridge but found none. He thought of swimming but then realized he could not swim. (In the waking state he actually could swim). He then sees a tall, dark man who indicates he will carry him across the river in his arms. He is greatly relieved and allows the stranger to pick him up and begin. But then he is seized with panic. He suddenly realizes that if he does not escape from this man he will die!

They are already in the river, he in the man’s arms, when he gathers his courage and makes a desperate leap into the river. He is sure he will drown but suddenly finds that he can swim and soon reaches the other side. The frightening man disappears.

How do I leave home?

Dr. Fromm describes crossing the river as the need, and the difficulty, of moving from childhood toward adult independence. The man is all the support he gets from parents and other people such as teachers and friends – excellent while he was a child, but something he must learn to do without if he is to develop his own innate strengths. When the dreamer takes the risk of daring the river, he finds he has the ability to survive.

In many teenage dreams a darker note arises as the emerging independence starts to make a dramatic break with parental authority and with the dependence upon the succouring received. Because the break is difficult it sometimes needs anger or a form of violence. This is not because the parents are necessarily holding on to the child, but because the need of the child is so strong, that to cut those ties a form of violence is used. We then find a dream such as the following:

I dreamed I dared not move from home as I had murdered my father and hid the body in the rubbish tip at the end of the garden.

If it is not murder, then the dreamer sees the parent or parents die. In either case, the child still faces life without them, and this seems to be the point of such dreams. In waking life there may at such times also be some anger or aggressiveness toward the parents – once again a means of making the break. After all, how could you move away if you were still tied emotionally? The next dream illustrates the quieter form of getting rid of a parent.

For the past year I have had recurring dreams about fairground rides. Occasionally members of my family, including my father have died on the rides. When I’m on the ride I’ve survived, but I can sense danger all around me. This dream is beginning to bother me. I am 15 years old.

Sexual development is of course of prime importance at this time. Girls are usually ahead of boys in their appreciation and awareness of the intricacies of what this means. So their dreams explore the facets of this in a variety of ways. Below is a fairly clear look at exploring sexual possibilities.

I have had this dream for about 3 months now. It is about a bus driver I really like. I am only 15, and I see him and me making love. He is about 23. The other day he asked me when my 16th birthday was. I wonder if that meant anything. Could you let me know if anything serious could happen between us? Debbie.

Many girls dream of becoming pregnant and giving birth. Such dreams are ways of experimenting with the future. Through them the dreamer learns to deal with anxieties and become more confident in facing their own future.

I dreamed that I gave birth to a healthy, happy, and smiling baby boy (even though I looked barely pregnant in the dream and gave birth at home with no pain). I was very happy and felt a lot of warmth, care, and protection towards my baby and cuddled him a great deal.  

How do I know I’m grown up?

When we move beyond the processes of growth faced in adolescence we journey into adulthood, during which we face relationships, work, parenthood or creativity, as an independent individual. However, there is no age at which we can say we have arrived at adulthood. Sometimes elements of babyhood, childhood or adolescence have not been outgrown even in old age. Dreams sometimes illustrate this when we see ourselves in the dream with an adult head on a baby body. Or we have an adult body but the genitals of a child, and so on. But in general, in this period of our life we dream about the issues of relationship, of finding our own strength to deal with life creatively and satisfyingly. There is an attempt on the part of our dream process to release and deal with early traumas or situations that occurred and led to blocking or trapping our potential energy and creativity. The challenges and difficulties we face in outer life are explored in our dreams.

Unfortunately this means a real and honest self-assessment and meeting with areas of feeling that have not been healed in the past. As Freud so clearly pointed out, there is enormous resistance to this. It is much easier to explore the controlled world of lucid dreams, or see ones dreams in the light of inspiration rather than confrontation. Of course, dreams are all these things.

Unfortunately this means a real and honest self-assessment and meeting with areas of feeling that have not been healed in the past. As Freud so clearly pointed out, there is enormous resistance to this. It is much easier to explore the controlled world of lucid dreams, or see ones dreams in the light of inspiration rather than confrontation. Of course, dreams are all these things.

An example of how dreams portray the deepest of our difficulties is seen in the following dream of a forty year old man, Clive.

I dreamt Pete, a guy I knew, came into my father’s shop in London. Someone had shot him in the bicep and I was trying to help him. I had a small box on the counter and there was fluid or blood in it, and I put the hurt muscle in it hoping to heal it. When the gunshot flesh was in the blood the blood bubbled and effervesced, becoming hot. I felt the flesh would not be of any use now, but wasn’t sure. In the end I was considering cleaning away the injured flesh from the arm (left), and this would heal and connect with the thin sinew of flesh. I began to feel that gradually new cells might grow and develop into a new muscle – granulate.

Clive explored his dream in depth, and wrote the following report on what he met.

I had wandered around and around trying to understand my dream. Then suddenly I realised I had met Pete on a walk a few days ago. I had heard him shouting out about, “The Lord Jesus Christ,” in a mocking voice. At the time I was in a wood with my children, and had stood still waiting for Pete and his friends to pass by – Pete being outside of the wood in a field. This memory of the event immediately led me to realise my avoidance of Pete represented pride. I had not wished to be associated with Pete. Pete, who had failed in marriage, failed at his musical career, failed at working for himself – failed. It became so clear that my pride was how I defended myself against my own feelings of failure.

Pete and his friends actually walked into the wood, so I had not been able to avoid them anyway. There was a young French girl, Katerine, in the group, and Pete was trying to get off with her. Pete, who had failed at marriage and parenthood, but was chasing after young girls. In looking at Pete I was looking at parts of myself I didn’t want to see. No wonder I didn’t want to meet Pete. Being willing to face him now, I was forced to admit that I too felt I had failed in my marriage but yearned after young women.

There was more. I knew from my relationship with Pete that he was in battle with his father, and constantly fought authority tooth and nail. He had tried to make it in life alone to prove how much better he was then father/authority. What a waste, when one could work together to accomplish more! Conflict wastes so much effort due to the countless retreats.

Now it was coming thick and fast so I went down to my wife in the kitchen, as it was so helpful to talk. Yes, it was my father I was in conflict with. The shop was the important point in the dream. It was in that shop our conflict had come to a head. It had been there always. My father had never spoken words of encouragement to me, but always showed me how good his work was, and asked why I didn’t do it like him. Never a word of encouragement – always wrong.

As these feelings surfaced I felt enormous emotional pain. Not that my father had ever hit me. He hadn’t. But blows would have been less painful than this absence of love and encouragement from the man who was most important in my life. I wept and wept with the agony. What a fucking waste of my life, to live in that pain and unconsciously fight authority all those years.

So my conflict with him, led me to try to prove how good I was, never able to co-operate at school, at work, in marriage. I had to keep on at my wife over nothing, just to prove how good we were. I didn’t understand what he wanted of me. So I kept on at my kids like he kept on at me. Trying to attain the unobtainable instead of a little warmth and love. “Dad, you fucking killed me right back then”.

The damage to the muscle pointed to the whole area of my life that I was trying to save and heal. The left arm represented the strength that backed up my outer action. If I banged a nail in with my right arm, I held the nail with my left hand. It was my confidence and support that had been shot away in my relationship with my father. But I needed to let go of that awful pain and wait for the new muscle tissue to grow. How does a man of 40 start life over again? Is it with patience to let the new tissues and strength grow? The dream had suggested it could happen.

Clive’s description clearly shows his resistance to meeting the feelings involved in his dream – his wandering around for over an hour. Then, as he understands his dream, we can see exactly how dreams reveal his deepest and hidden self, and used his everyday experiences to do so. What Clive says describes so well one of the real challenges we all face as adults – how to transform and transcend our past, and thus realise our fuller potential.

And now I am 40!

If we were to live till 80 years of age, at 40 we can consider ourselves middle aged. In fact the cycles of our life, and the processes of our bodily change in ageing, do start to confront us at 40 with a great shift in what we can now expect of life. Clive’s dream is not only typical of the sort of dreams we experience in adulthood, but it also shows a theme occurring much more often in middle and old age. Clive puts it into words when he says, “How does a man of 40 start life over again.” Perhaps it would be clearer to say, “How does a person of my age look forward to creating a worthwhile life now my youth has fled?”

We usually feel that having expended our best and failed in some major or minor way, how can we now go on to do better in the waning years of our life? It is this challenge that Jung so carefully charted the territory of, and wrote about extensively. He called it ‘individuation’ – the development toward becoming a real individual, or a self created person. The term self created is used to suggest the personal effort one has to make, the new lessons learned, in order to move out of past failure and despair, or present sterility and meaninglessness.

There is some research suggesting that the elderly spend less time in REM sleep, and therefore dream less. But this is still controversial. The results of another approach to the subject says,

“The often documented decrease of dream recall with age has only been observed in one third of the sample. Generally however, apart from some minor fluctuations dream recall tends to remain quite stable over a life-span. These findings suggest that the decrease of dream recall frequency in cross-sectional studies might have been caused by cohort effects. A preponderance of negative feelings in the dreams of the elderly has not been found. The hypothesized relationship between dream feelings and life satisfaction has been confirmed by the present study, since subjects scoring low in life satisfaction recorded more negative diary dreams. This finding and the results of the content analysis support the continuity hypothesis of dream life. No evidence has been found for the regression hypothesis which states that dreams of the elderly are mainly influenced by past experiences.

There’s more – much more!

To balance this view a little, if there are still past difficulties to be faced, these will still present themselves in dreams. But a drive in many people is in some way to actualise themselves, to express themselves in a satisfying way. If we use the analogy of a plant, it is as if they have grown and reached full stature, but for some reason have not flowered and spread seeds. They have not produced fruit.

There is no one way in which people feel or seek this fruition prior to death. But it does become an imperative for many. It may involve receiving or giving love. It might be a need for expressing in one of the arts, or simply in breaking away from habits and roaming the world. The next dream illustrates this theme.

I flew over a farmyard and a large pig saw me and began to chase me as a dog might, but with the sense that he/she wanted to eat me. She chased me snapping and leaping into the air trying to ‘get’ me. I felt a bit apprehensive at times that she would get my leg. This lowered my confidence in flying and I began to worry about altitude, and flew over a barbed wire fence and the pig and her young could not follow. I flew low over small trees that were just coming into leaf. They were beautiful soft green leaves. I knew it was autumn and the leaves were only just coming out because it had been a cloudy, overcast summer. I felt the leaves would have time to mature because the sun would be out in the autumn, and the trees would not die.

The dreamer was in his fifties at the time of the dream, and had distinct feelings of something missing from his life. He felt very clearly that the late autumn expressed how he felt, that the best of his life, his fruition had not yet occurred. This was because ‘it had been a cloudy, overcast summer.’ By this he meant his life had so many difficulties, he had not had a chance to ‘flower’. But the dream promised there was still time.

Something I have met frequently in the dreams of those leaving their youthful life behind, is the images of a race and the plateau. This dream from John deals with one of these.

I recently reached my fortieth birthday and dreamt I was walking uphill. It was quite tough going. When I got to the top I saw the road on the other side was very steep. I felt frightened of going down it. I looked around and saw that the top of the hill stretched away on each side, so there was plenty of space, like a plateau. I realise that I could walk around and there is no hurry to go down the hill.

This suggests, before John actually got to middle age, he had the idea that it led directly to a fast decline into old age and death – going down hill. The dream shows a different view of this by saying that in fact he worked hard to climb to a plateau of ability and possibilities that he can now explore. Each portion of life has its rewards, and in fact John depicts this period of his life as more relaxed than the first half.

The image used in such dreams is sometimes that of a race, either running or on a bicycle. This suggests ones part in the human race. In John’s dream he simply says it was hard going to get to where he was.

Whether the person consciously allows it or not, there is a recognition that in old age we are getting nearer to death. Of course, death is a subject that arises in our dreams no matter what age we are. But as it draws nearer it becomes more imperative that we develop an easier relationship with it. The following dream clearly shows the sense of drawing ever nearer to the end. But in this dream ‘the end’ is not defined.

There’s more to life than death

I was on a wide, sandy open plain. There was a high rock coming up out of the desert on my left hand side. I was in a long queue of people, who seemed to be either very old or very young. We were all wearing long robes, and all weeping bitterly. We moved forward slowly towards an opening in the ground where steps going downwards could be seen, and gradually the people in front of us made their way downwards. There was no panic, just an orderly procession and the sound of weeping. I woke up before I reached the steps, and I was crying bitterly. Mrs. W.

If one is in some way working with, or in harmony with ones internal processes of growth, the relationship with death develops beyond fear or despair, and moves into wonder and insight. The following dream shows this.

I knew I was dying and it was incredibly real. So real I wept deeply because I knew this was the end of everything and I would lose my children. All that I had created in life would be at an end too. But there was nothing I could do about that and I died. Then I seemed to be at a slight distance watching my dead body, and I saw my father, who had died some years before, come and carry the body over a threshold into a heavenly meadow. There a resurrection took place. I was given new life. And the new life came from all that I had given to others, and all I had received from others, during my life. That was my spiritual body and life. A.C.

Here is another dream where the dreamer moves beyond the attitudes and concepts of present cultural values.

Suddenly I was in a huge underground cavern. It was hundreds of feet high and as wide. It had two great statues in it, both to do with death. The whole place overpowered me with a sense of decay and skeletal death, darkness, underground, earth, the end. I cried out in the dismal cave, ‘Death, where is your sting! Grave, where is your victory!’ I immediately had the sense of being a bodiless awareness. I knew this was what occurred at death. Fear and the sense of decay left me. Andrew.

At the very cutting edge of ageing and the doorway of death, there is perhaps something to be learned from the reports from those who have met a near death experience. In her book Coming Back to Life, P. H. Atwater gives the following true account of a person’s NDE.

For me it was a total reliving of every thought I had ever thought, every word I had ever spoken, and every deed I had ever done; plus the effect of each thought, word and deed on everyone and anyone who had ever come within my environment or sphere of influence, whether I knew them or not (including unknown passers-by on the street)

In the dream quoted above in which the dreamer dies, and then sees his dead father carry his lifeless body over a threshold, the same sort of theme is mentioned. He says that his resurrection occurred from all that he had received or given to others during life. The account immediately above also tells us of meeting all that has been done in life, and realising what impact it has on her, and even on those passing by on the street.

This recognition of the wider implications of ones life, this meeting with ones spiritual dimension of existence, is what we draw closer to in ageing. If we are lucky, we die before we die. In other words, we meet death in our dreams, learn to walk up to it without fear, and pass beyond into a wider awareness of who we are. See: Near Death Experience

Today I noticed for the first time
A small brown mark on my left hand.
True I have been out in the sun,
But I never grow freckles.
This is one of those marks
Old people have on their hands.

I thought – or perhaps it was a hope
That I would never have
Such brown discolourations.
In my imagination of ageing
I had seen my skin wrinkled,
But clear and vibrant.
The mark was something
I noticed in the morning,
Looked at for a few moments
And passed from to other interests.

The day was full of things to enjoy.
At fifty I feel happier
And more vigorous
Than ever before.
Then, in the afternoon,
Sitting among friends
And in the midst of our enjoyment
The thought struck me –
Supposing I fall over!
Supposing I dropped to the floor
Right now.

I was with friends,
Friends to have wild fancies with.
So I followed my mood,
Allowing it to grow leaves and stem,
And remembered,
Though I had never really forgotten,
That my father had – one day –
Fallen over on his garden path.
Busy as ever with things to do
He was walking the path
Fell over
And never got up again.

That’s when I knew
More clearly than ever before
That I am slowly dying.
If I were a leaf on a tree,
The small brown mark would be
The first sign of Autumn
As change touched me
Making me golden.
Then I would fall
From the tree.

But I am not ready
To drop.
Though I am turning brown
There is something I need.
I have a will to spend myself
On my friends,
That I might fall
Feeling well
With the coming of winter.
Of a sudden
I see the face of Death.
I hear its voice.
I know it –
For we have met
Often and always.

Death has the features of
A child I made cry;
The profile of
My loved woman;
Your countenance.
Have I known you?
Then I have known Death.
Have I betrayed any?
Then I have betrayed Death.
And its face is beauty
For it is all things –
Naked,
Undressed of flesh,
Leafless,
Exposed,
Unclad Life –
Without the garment
That our selfhood is.

And the waters in me rose
To tears.
Bathing me in regret
That I had
So often
Forgotten
My love
For the
Naked Beauty.

But there are rewards in actual physical life as well. Here is a letter from a man who is finding that enjoyment.

Hi Tony- You probably won’t remember me, I used to come to Combe Martin in the 1980s on Richard and Juliana’s Intensives Psychotherapy workshops… I remember fondly how we all enjoyed your and Hy’s wonderful cooking!

Just wanted to say that as I approach old age (nearly 70), welcome changes are happening. Firstly, I’m accessing information I never knew I had, mainly evident in my enthusiasm for University Challenge on TV where I will often find the correct answers to questions on disparate subjects, they just seem to pop out of my head without consciously thinking which, in addition to surprising me, are sometimes not even guessed correctly by any of the eight panellists!

Secondly, synchronous-type occurrences are becoming more frequent. Things such as suddenly thinking of a friend I’ve not thought about for maybe weeks, only to have him or her then call or text me less than a minute later!

Also, the wider, world view you write of is becoming stronger in me, where I get a (intuitive) sense of the world at large, a strong feeling for the multitude and mass of humanity, and principally its collective suffering, which is a much more expansive experience than previously I’ve had most of my life ie my own small world and its restricted boundaries.

I’ve enjoyed, as I get older, the growth of my intuition, and celebrate its development in contrast to left-hemisphere mental (?) attributes such as intellect, objectivity, etc. I’m both fascinated and pleased to find your writings on these subjects, and more, on your website. It feels appropriate that I have come across your site at this time in my life.

Thanks for sharing all your wisdom on the site.
Best wishes. P

Useful questions are:

Do I think I am the sensory experience of my body?

If so who am I in sleep when I lose the awareness of my body and exterior world?

If I am my body, how do I account for its enormous changes in ageing, and the fact I have a sense of permanence amidst this change?

You can explore your own dreams as described above by using Talking As and Processing Dreams. You might be able to explore that wider world by using Arm Circling Meditation and Life’s Little Secrets.

Aesculapius – The Roman God of Healing

Aesculapius The Roman form of the Greek god of healing, Asclepius. Aesculapius was probably a renowned healer who lived during the 11th century BC in Greece. Like many such ancient heroic figures he was later deified to become a god of healing. Such deification is much like the canonisation of saints in the Catholic Church. In the fifth century BC Sophocles built a shrine to Aesculapius in Athens. In the following years many other shrines were built, and over 300 such centres of healing still existed throughout Greece and the Roman Empire in the second century AD. These shrines were dedicated to healing, principally using dreams and the incubation of dreams.

After consultation and a night’s rest, the next day or so would be spent in prayer, fasting, and preparations for the hoped for healing, guidance, or dream answer. This would be followed by a long purification bath with pleasantly scented oils. The pilgrim, then ready, would don a clean, white robe and enter the temple. There would be a small sacrifice, followed by music, chanting, and an impressive ceremony led by the priests imploring Aesculapius to come to the aid of the supplicant. Last, there would be an elaborate dream incubation ritual succeeded by a well deserved night’s sleep in a specially prepared room in the Temple of Dreams.

In the Aesculapius dream temples, the dreams were said to be invoked by the god, whose symbol was also a serpent. Thus a childless woman, going to the temple to secure fertility, dreamt that the god approached her followed by a snake. The snake then entered her sexually. After the dream, and within the year, she had two sons. Sometimes the person would dream that they had been made well and would awake to find the dream accomplished. The rooms in which patients slept were occupied by snakes of a harmless variety also. This, along with the necessary rites and purifications, set the patient in the right frame of mind and emotion, to receive a healing dream.

One of the most beautiful of surviving shrines to Aesculapius is at Epidaurus. It was built in the fifth century BC. Such centres were often of great size, and the one at Epidaurus took about 150 years to complete. For instance the temple had an adjoining stadium large enough to hold 14,000 spectators, a temple to the god’s daughter Hygeia, a library, a sacred well, and a hotel with 160 rooms and several areas for people to sleep in to incubate sacred dreams. See: analysis of dreams; Asclepius; Greece (ancient) dream beliefs.

AdaptiveTheory

This theory suggests that patterns of sleep in different animals arose out of their relationship with the environment. For instance grazing animals that are prey to predators sleep in fairly short burst. Adaptive theory says this is because they need to be alert, and longer or deeper periods of sleep would increase their vulnerability. Animals such as humans, gorillas and opossums sleep up to fifteen hours a day. Such animals have few predators. In the case of humans, the theory suggests that the long sleep pattern developed in the period when humans lived in caves, and were thus better protected.

Abreaction

Abreaction is a release and re-experiencing of painful or traumatic events or emotions. In many dreams it is obvious that the process underlying dreams is attempting to trigger an abreaction. This suggests the dream process, as Jung and Hadfield say, is a self-regulatory one in our psyche. In many cases where a person explores the feeling content of their dreams in a confident way, abreaction occurs. Although it has been given different names in recent years, such as Primal Therapy, Rolfing, Discharge, Catharsis, abreaction is still a basic psychological healing process.

Example: ‘For some considerable time now I have been troubled by a nightmarish dream which is so realistic sometimes I think I am going to die. In my dream I have swallowed something which is literally choking me or is going to poison me. I wake up and rush down the stairs to the kitchen spitting and choking, holding my throat and making all sorts of disturbing noises which frighten my wife. I have had this dream as many as five or six times a night. My doctor says it could be to do with the last war. I was a child then and my dad had to constantly wake me up to take us down to the shelter, sometimes as many as four times a night, and we were bombed out twice. I cannot recall having any fears about this at the time.’ Mr. K. T.

Parts of our experience become repressed because there is an automatic reaction in us to avoid pain. Therefore painful experience may never be fully felt or understood at the time. Reliving such experience allows us to review and integrate vital information about ourselves. At times of great physical or emotional pain or anguish we unconsciously make decisions that influence the way we behave thereafter. We may for instance, in feeling abandoned by a parent, reactively decide never to trust a man/woman again. Frequently all the analysis in the world cannot relieve a neurotic pattern or decision until the repressed emotion holding it in place is released and understood.

“Mere abreaction is of no lasting value, unless the associated emotion is also released, “digested” and accepted by the patient. This is the reason why in many cases the repressed traumatic family relationship or experiences has to be brought up a number of times before it is fully integrated.” Quoted from Lysergic Acid and Ritalin by Ling

The strength with which we hold out against allowing our body to spontaneously abreact is seen in the above example. Again and again Mr. T. is brought to the brink of reliving or releasing what may be his very stressful childhood experiences. Yet he manages to avoid actual memory, and in particular, the experiencing of any childhood emotions and fears.

‘For several hours I could find nothing about the dream. My mind simply wandered. But with help I persisted. Suddenly I seemed to break through, first to seeing how the shop was a place in which I had unconsciously experienced great emotional pain. My father was always criticising. Never a word of encouragement. Then I burst into powerful sobbing as I felt the pain of wanting my father to love me, instead of criticising all the time, and help me grow into somebody capable of meeting life. And then, something I just had not wanted to see, the thirty years of my life I had wasted by avoiding any contact with authority. My father was THE original authority in my life. I had cut off from him because of the lack of support, and I had done the same with school and other authority situations. The worst bit of all though, was to see that in my desire for my father’s love, I had been seeking older males in a form of latent homosexuality. I wanted love at almost any price.

As all this was felt I sobbed uncontrollably. I wept for the lost years, the wasted years of my youth. I was convulsed with the pain of not having been loved by my father. Tears fell from me for the failure of my life. I would never have believed one could feel so much pain about something missing in ones life. I had always thought to feel that much pain you would have needed to be beaten or abused in childhood. My father was kind, but he showed no warmth. And that was as bad as being beaten, perhaps worse. I had been severely beaten at school, but it hadn’t scarred me like this.

But what a relief to understand myself, and to meet that young vulnerable boy I used to be. How I loved him and understood him/myself’.

The opposite is shown in this account by Clive, who explored a dream with me about being shot in the arm in his father’s shop. In allowing his painful emotions to be released, Clive gained enormous insight into his own behaviour, his past, and personality. He also began to move on from being trapped in avoidance of authority figures and the seeking of love from older males. See: Life’s Little Secrets; LifeStream; self-regulation; assisted passage; compensation theory; movements During sleep.

Women Poets – Rosetti and Browning

The poems of Rossetti and Barrett Browning present a complex image and description of women and the times the poets lived in. One of the impressions their poems give collectively is that of looking back and maintaining the romanticism and standards of the past. Another is of looking ahead and glimpsing the modern movement toward emancipation and individuation, toward more options in relationship and work.

In Rossetti’s Goblin Market she starts with the words:

Morning and evening

Maids hear the goblins cry:

Come buy our orchard fruits

The narrator here starts as if telling a story, one in which there is no personal involvement. There is a powerful statement however that maids hear goblin voices that call for their custom. The word maid refers to an unmarried woman, and goblin to a mythical and mischievous and ugly non-human male being. Something is being offered to presumed virgins that they must pay for. Soon afterwards in the poem appear the lines:

Laura bowed her head to hear,

Lizzie veiled her blushes:

Here two opposing characters are introduced by the narrator, and a direct description of two different responses to the same situation portrayed – the goblin call. Laura is trying to hear. She is attracted and does not veil it. Lizzie is likewise responding, and her blushes suggest some personal feeling which either embarrasses her or excites her, maybe both. Is she in fact feeling excitement but also experiencing some sort of social embarrassment? Further along, after Laura has gorged on the fruit which Lizzie has assured her is forbidden; after she has “sucked and sucked and sucked” on it, and returns to the river with Lizzie, she no longer hears the goblin voices – but Lizzie does. The meaning is surely that the voices are purely subjective. Like a fantasy love, once it is tasted the glamour, the seductiveness, the allure and charisma may disappear. If so, where does the seductive voice emerge from? At least, where does the illusion emerge from?

Laura and Lizzie appear to be meeting the fantasies unmarried and sexually unsatisfied young women now admit they experience. Laura “sucked and sucked”, Lizzie was aware of or afraid of the outcome. These two women are certainly not described as innocents. Laura has already tasted the fruits. Even if fruit only symbolises temptation, to know temptation that deeply suggests a loss of innocence even if virginity is maintained – “She sucked until her lips were sore.” That they also lie together “Cheek to cheek and breast to breast” also points out they are not innocents in comforting each other. Other lines have a directly sexual symbolism, such as Laura walking home:

Trudged home, her pitcher dripping all the way;

So crept to bed and lay

Silent till Lizzie slept;

Then sat up in a passionate yearning,

And gnashed her teeth for baulked desire, and wept

As if her heart would break.

This is no description of an innocent woman who does not know the power of sexual longing. The pitcher can easily be recognised as the vagina, oozing in longing, just as the male penis does. Then, in case we are in doubt, the narrator tells us of passionate yearning and baulked desire.

In the mention of money as payment, and adding ‘Market’ to the title, the poem brings in the accompanying complexities of sex for women at that time, or perhaps in the life of Rossetti herself. The lack of efficient birth control, disease, and the economics of relationship were all a part of that complexity. However, when Lizzie has what might be a neurotic or subjective experience of sex; when she “Knew not was it night or day”, she gains a power of either self satisfaction – auoteroticism – or something that enables her to stand in a male role with Laura. Then Laura, in what is a fairly straight description of a lesbian relationship, “… kissed and kissed her with a hungry mouth.”

The poem ends by placing the heroines in the role of caring mothers. Switching to the voice of Laura, the narrator gives us the motto that her sister stood in “deadly peril to do her good.” So the difficulties of a woman facing sexual drive, of restraining it from licentious behaviour and even passing through the fiery pleasure of a lesbian relationship with her sister, are described. The story is an allegory exploring what a woman in that period might face in awakening sexually. It looks at possible ways of dealing with such an awakening.

Barrett Browning, in Lord Walter’s Wife, takes a very different stand to the question of fidelity and sexual desire. After a direct stand for infidelity, Lord Walter’s wife says to the anxious male who is avoiding her advances and calling her hateful:

“Her eyes blazed upon him – ‘And you! You bring us your vices so near

That we smell them! You think in our presence a thought t’would defame

us to hear!

This very powerful passage completely reverses the argument, which was usually that any woman who did not remain ‘virtuous’ was a harlot, a ‘fallen woman’. The lines imply that a man considers it virtuous to feel desire for a woman so strongly she can ‘smell’ it when he is near her, as long as he doesn’t give in to it. Even if he does occasionally have sex with a woman other than his wife, it is only a small misdemeanour. But if a woman simply expresses her desire for such a relationship, she is “ugly and hateful.” Meanwhile the man can think such things that if a woman were known to have taken part in hearing them, she would be labelled as complying with them.

Another aspect of trying to integrate the best of womanhood past, with what was felt to be the emergence of womanhood future, was the question of single motherhood and an illegitimate child. Barrett Browning addresses this in her long poem Aurora Leigh. In the poem this is considered alongside the quest for personal expression and success outside of a male/female relationship. The character Marian features as the woman who is abused and gives birth to an illegitimate child. About the single mother and her child Aurora argues that:

“She is no mother but a kidnapper,

And he’s a dismal orphan, not a son”

Marian answers in reply:

“… the child takes his chance;

Not much worse off in being fatherless

Than I was, fathered.”

The narrator, by having the two voices, Aurora and Marian, can explore more easily the pros and cons of illegitimacy. Obviously there is tension and conflict between these two views, and the attempt to meet this conflict about the old order and the emerging new is certainly something one can identify in the poems.

Another facet of the emergence was whether a woman should take the male role. Barrett Browning’s poem To George Sand seems to stand for the woman acclaiming her womanhood rather than trying to be a male.

“True genius, but true woman! dost deny

The woman’s nature with a manly scorn,

And break away the gauds and armlets worn

By weaker women in captivity?”

Putting the ‘but’ in the middle of the first statement brings extra attention to the words ‘true woman’. It is like saying, “You may be a genius dressed as a man, BUT you are actually a woman. Do you deny that?” There might be some question as to whether the words are suggesting the woman should use ‘manly scorn’ as a weapon. The following words, “Ah, vain denial” clarify this however. This is a difficult passage however, as if the placing of the exclamation mark is a full stop as it usually is, then the meaning is as suggested. If it is not a full stop, then Barrett Browning is encouraging women to take the role of male.

Later the poem says:

“… and while before

The world thou burnest in a poet-fire,

We see thy woman heart beat evermore

Through the large flame”

Just prior to these lines, the words “Disproving thy man’s name” appear. Is this a note of disapproval as well as a statement that acting like a man doesn’t make a woman a man? If not, what essentially is the woman in these poems? Who is she?

Considering that Barrett Browning in her poem To George Sand, describes Sand as “Thou large brained woman and large hearted man” there is some dichotomy about what is woman and what is man. So the argument for woman begins to partly seem like an argument for a psychic sexual mobility – a mobility of the psyche. One can have a male or female body, and yet psychologically one can have attributes that are often considered those of the opposite sex. A man may want to hold his baby to his breast even if he does not have the physical equipment to feed it. The woman may have the ability to defend and struggle in the world, even if her body continues to menstruate to be ready for childbearing. The Greeks embodied this idea in the statuary of the hermaphrodite. Is that what Barrett Browning is hinting at in the line, “Till God unsex thee on the heavenly shore”?

The difficulties women felt at the time, as suggested, were many sided. No wonder there were so many women who retired to their bed. With so much social and personal conflict, so much at stake, retreat may at times have been wise.

In summary the poems of Barrett Browning and Rossetti frequently present the woman as an individual, and social unit, and a force in society. She is someone who is reaching toward massive change, but is still carrying the social and personal attitudes, the burden of established laws and customs, the “gauds” acting as a burden or means of captivity. This woman is attempting sexual, marital and vocational reform. She is gradually achieving it, but with much struggle, frustration and self-searching. She is trying to define what it is to be a woman, a mother, a lover, a force in society. She is also a goad to men to attempt change themselves. Such changes however, are not without enormous doubts, and not without the need to define her emerging self. In large part, the poems can be seen often to be working at this task of definition – or at least the exploration of it.

The greatest love story in the world

Sylvie had lost a lot of blood while giving birth to her son at home. She was sped to hospital, and didn’t quite manage to understand what the rush was about. She felt strange, and when her husband Andrew sat near the bed clutching her hand, she began to feel detached. She clearly saw her own body lying on the bed looking very ill. Then her husband called nurses and a doctor was brought. Sylvie had died. It appeared to her that she was standing above the bed looking down on the scene. In this way she witnessed the frantic attempt to resuscitate her. At the same time she detected a delightful sense of something, somewhere, calling her away. It was so urgent she began to allow herself to follow the urge. Then she noticed her husband. In her new found liberty she could easily see into him and perceive his alarm. He felt alone and lost with a child and a new born baby to rear and his wife dead. She saw him as young and fragile without her, and decided she wouldn’t leave. At that point she identified with her body again and started breathing. It was a long climb back to health.

Sylvie doesn’t claim to be a heroine. She is just the woman who lives next door. But the woman next door defeated death itself for her man and children.

Kim, on hearing this story said “That is exactly what a lot of women are angry about – that a woman has such a strong urge to give herself so completely to someone else.”

The love story of womanhood began a long time ago. Perhaps it originated on a warm mud bank millions of years back when a female creature began a new way of caring. The fragile eggs, usually extruded from her body and left vulnerable and unprotected in the earth, were held onto. Out of her caring drive, that ancient female created a warm mud bank within herself, and gradually learned to nurture the growing life with the resources of her own body. That incredible event is visible today in the shape and functions of a healthy woman. Each woman pays a price in terms of her pelvic shape, her internal organs, and personal experience, for carrying the mud bank within.

Another chapter in this story concerns the change the earliest of humanoid females made from seasonal mating to becoming fertile throughout the year. Did this come about because it was a survival advantage? Was it triggered by our ancestors moving through different climates? Because bonding is such an important part of present day mating, it is reasonable to believe that particular bonding between a male and female may have played a part in the change.

Jane Goodall, in her study of chimpanzees, noticed that although the females had close relationships with males only while on heat – oestrus – occasionally they continued a special and caring relationship with a male beyond oestrus. This special bonding may have been the move toward longer openess to partnering a mate.

My body is the picture of my love

That a woman has enormous influence over her body through her feelings is obvious. Eileen, who although married for twelve years had never fallen in love, left her husband and fell in love with Martin. She says, “Within a month of beginning our relationship, despite attempts at birth control, I became pregnant. My breasts swelled and my period was missed. During the following month the symptoms gradually disappeared. My breasts became normal and I had a natural period. Out of this I realised that because I loved Martin I deeply wanted his baby, and this desire, that I certainly had not previously admitted to myself, had produced all the physical signs of pregnancy.”

Could this level of passionate involvement with her man, have led early women to extend their oestrus, and finally transcend it altogether? Whatever the details are in this magnificent love story, the change occurred. As it did so it brought with it possibilities that are the foundations of humanness. Life-long mating is shared by other animals, notably some species of birds, but the ability to transcend the environment and the seasons, which conditions mating and birth in animals, gave human beings the capacity to have a new relationship with the world and each other. The herbivores for instance, whose every drive, instinctive as it is, locks them into particular activities at given times of year, have little space to develop any sense of separateness, any feeling of personal identity or will.

The new birth

Although few of us may give these issues much thought – we probably take them for granted – for early humans living in very rigourous circumstances, they must have been felt very deeply. So much so our ancestors have left hints in some of the greatest of ancient allegories. Very ancient peoples had no written language. They tended to express their vision of life in such things as religious rituals or great symbolic stories. One of these stories, literally written upon the stars, may be directly about the drama of woman transcending the environment. It is the story of the Zodiac, showing as it does the herbivores in the signs which fall in the usual periods of birth for them – early in the year. It depicts a woman – Virgo – fertile in the middle of the year, and the later signs as human qualities emerging from animal bodies. One of our great symbols, Christmas, portrays a virgin – Virgo, the woman fertile out of season – bearing a child in the midst of winter. What a miracle that first child born out of season must have been, the first of a new sort of human being. Facing an environment or season which was different to anything their instinctive drives prepared them for, they would have to develop different ways of surviving, and thus different types of mental attitude – the different Zodiacal types.

When Sylvie defeated the call of death to be with her husband, she was expressing the power women have garnered from millions of years of experience. In that period of time they have reorganised their body more radically than males have done. They have more fully entered into the self giving relationship with another person, whether that is their child or man. Although those skills are not placed high in our society, psychologically and biologically, they are extremely important. They confer intuitive empathy with the life processes in the body, enabling the woman to work more fully with the functions of growth and the self regulating activities of her being. There is also the ability to deal with people at a more human feeling level.

Of course, any power we have brings with it the negative as well as the positive. The enormous biological energy that moves through a woman’s urge to procreate, can be directed to illness as well as health. A woman I know who became ill and whose hair fell out when her dog died, had most likely connected her parental urge to the dog – and figuratively her child had died at the dog’s death. The powerful negative turn in her feelings adversely influenced her body. Understanding thes powerful forces can help to direct them in positive and creative ways.

The dangerous power of love

This wonderful or dangerous power of a woman’s love is often not acknowledged by women themselves. And in living a life that does not see, does not sense – that fails to take hold of the source of their own potency – women lose self understanding and the valour to create wonder with the living flower of themselves.

The spirit in women that transformed their body; that gave birth to a new sort of human being, that has the power of sickness or health, that led them through millions of years of a story of love, is wonderful. When a woman forgets this greatest of love stories, she forgets her own personal wonder. She may lose the sense of her power, of her ability to live something of beauty and importance. In bathing joyfully in the great river of her drives, stretching as the river does into the most ancient past, and creating the matrix of the future as it flows, a woman can shape things. Her most fundamental power is to be a part of fashioning all living beings. But she need not shape a child with this great drive unless she chooses. However, she ignores the river’s urge to shape something at her peril. If the river of her creativity is not consciously directed it will flow into all the dark folds of her fears, bitterness and fantasies and give them life. It may move into the sites of tension in her body and enhance the negative, causing cancer.

We need the power of women

Today we need the power of women to create a new world. Not the power which builds houses or makes airplanes. That is more a male form of creating and ultimately less important if we consider life as the most wondrous, the most unlikely, the most challenging of all things existing on our world and in the universe. What is needed is the ability to empathise with the very forces of life and the living process in our world – to touch it, to direct and heal it as it writhes under the impact of human activity. We need the power that can nurture things which grow, that through love turns the very direction of living process in a new path. We need the power of woman!

William Blake – Psychologist

Blake may shock us sometimes with what he says, but at all times his sight is from what he can clearly see in human nature.

One of the interesting statements made by modern psychology, is that the past actually is a living principle in each individual. In fact, it is stated in some textbooks that the great men and women of the past live on within us. Dr. G. R. Heyer, in his book ‘Organism of the Mind’ says “We all have a psychological ancestry as well as a physical one. In us Germans, Goethe still lives on, not alone superficially, in our conscious memory, but in our more hidden thoughts, our imagery, our behaviour, and our feelings, as a mental ‘gene’. The same is true of all the great, of all the immortals, as far back as Jesus Christ and further.”

If this is true, then it must be of value to study the lives of such men to see what there is of them in us. William Blake, poet, artist, philosopher, mystic, and as I hope to show – psychologist – being so near to us in ways of birth, historical distance and background, must be of particular importance. It is hoped that this is enough excuse for us to indulge ourselves a little in this man’s inner life. The enjoyment that one can thereby obtain from a study of Blake’s thought, is heightened also by his subtlety and very great humanity.

Probably some of his most obvious psychological expressions are made in ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’. We read for instance the statements, “Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained.” and “Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.” When we realise that such verses were published in 1790, long before the advent of modern psychiatry, we cannot help but respect this man’s insight into human nature. The very title of this work, ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’, is also an expression of Blake’s philosophy. He maintained that there was no lower nature in man in the sense of being inferior or evil. For him, Heaven was a Poetic or creative genius in man, or what today would be called the superconscious. Hell was man’s body and all the energies of movement, emotions and delight that it generated. He mocked the conventional outlook of the churches of his day over this, for Hell to him was a necessary and delightful aspect of man’s nature when rightly seen. He writes “I was walking among the fires of Hell, delighted with the enjoyments of genius, which to Angels look like torment and insanity.” He felt that one must find some sort of harmonious relationship with what is called the highest and lowest in man. A’-though he would not admit that there was any true differentiation between them, rather that they were merely different aspects of the same creative process. “Man has no body distinct from his Soul; for that called Body is a portion of Soul, discerned by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age.” In fact he says that without contraries or opposites there is no progression.

Blake felt that within man was the source of all wisdom, power and love. He expressed time and time again how men should at all times attempt to release the tremendous inner potentials that are his birthright Because of his yearnings to achieve this in himself and in society, he became the enemy of the established church. This does not mean that he saw anti-Christian – a man who wrote Jerusalem could not be that. He saw in the dogmas of the church the chains that prevented men from expressing the real and natural life within them. He attempted to explain to the society of his day that “Energy is the only life, and is from the Body; and Reason is the bound, or outward circumference of Energy.” As we have found, dogma, or too much reason, literally does ‘bound’ this inner life and prevent its expression. Rather bitterly, through such feelings, he says that “Prisons are built with stones of law; brothels with bricks of Religion.” Certainly the foolish repression of natural energies may in many lives lead eventually to an unhealthy or destructive expression of these same forces.

Jung writes in his works that one should allow fantasies to arise in the mind, and that if we would seek to understand life we must enter into it. Blake has again apprehended such findings. He believed that “If the fool would persist In his folly he would become wise.” and “You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.” Being also something of a scientist or experimenter with life itself, he felt that provided one was indeed seeking the truth, “The Road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.” One should not judge this statement too quickly. Blake was not a licentious man, nor had he been. But he did allow his nature wider bounds of expression than most men of his day. His excess was one of the soul, which he refused to shackle with the limiting conventions of his time. His attitude was to experiment with life, accept nothing until you know, “Drive your cart and your plough over the bones of the dead.” The past is dead, follow the path of the present. The past is in us and expresses through us, but such forces are generative bringing about ever new forms, not the – dead laws of the Pharisees. “I must create a System, – or be enslaved by another Man’s; I will not Reason or Compare, my business is to Create” he writes.

One might even imagine Blake saying “Can man ever be perfect? Is the idea of perfection itself not relative to our desires-, our viewpoint and our function?” But he says the same thing in his usual synthesised manner when he states “Mutual Forgiveness of each vice, such are the gates of Paradise.” Later, in a Meditation on Jesus he writes, “Now hear how He (Jesus) has given his sanction to the law of the ten commandments. Did He not mock at the Sabbath, and so mock the Sabbath’s God; murder those who were murdered because of Him; turn away the law from the woman taken in adultery; steal the labour of others to support Him; bear false witness when He omitted making a defence before Pilate; covet when He prayed for His disciples, and when He bade them shake off the dust of their feet against such as refused to lodge them? I tell you, no virtue ”

Again upon this point, Blake can be greatly misunderstood. In these sentences he seems to be attempting to show that set moral codes are only a working guide. When he says Jesus acted ‘upon impulse we have Blake’s ideal of the Poetic Genius expressing again. To react to circumstances and environment according to the prompting of our higher consciousness, and not from reasoning upon the Law.

In Jesus and the Pharisees we can see a psychological drama taking place if we interpret it according to Blake’s key. In Jesus we have the higher consciousness at work, reacting and expressing according to its universal scope. The Pharisees are the reasoning mind, always questioning, but lacking contact and power over the creative life giving forces in the universe. Reason also cannot surpass itself as does intuition, for it depends upon already revealed law and cannot enter the unknown.

Reason, because of its limitations cannot understand what Jesus symbolises; and because this higher consciousness urges us at times to do what may seem to be against our reason, the reason in us may even sacrifice this divine aspect of ourselves.

One can see in this use of symbolism another aspect of Blake’s understanding of man’s inner nature. In modern psychology it is explained that people, objects and places are used in dreams as symbols of inner conditions or realisations. Blake used this principle a great deal in his poetic expression. This is especially noticeable in his ‘Jerusalem’. For him the towns and hamlets he knew were symbolical of various shades of feeling and life.

Symbolical also was the sexual act and the intercourse between men and women. Unlike his contemporaries, he could not see that the human nature was a snare keeping men from the divine. He felt that “Whatsoever lives is holy”, and as passion lived in him and nature, it must have its place in things. It is the steam that drives the engine of creation when rightly used, and Blake would not indulge himself in the practices of the ascetics. Passion became for him the fiery sap rising in the tree, which when united with the ‘breath of life’, the radiant energies of the Sun, becomes something vitally alive, responsive and creative.

What then shall we think of this man? Shall we think of him as a genius? Was he one in whom intellect was so acute as to enable him to foreshadow the outcome of our present psychiatric knowledge? Or should we think of him as he may have thought of himself-as one who had contacted the Poetic Genius in himself, and like all those before or since who, having found the fountain of living water, was able to con-found the reason of their times. In his own words “What is now proved was once imagined.” Blake then was surely the embodied imagination of England’s Eighteenth Century, expressing in print, in art and in life. If we can find something of this man alive in ourselves, then it is a happy moment for us. If besides finding it we can allow it to flourish and bloom, then we may say as he did:

Bring me my Bow of burning gold -Bring me my arrows of desire; Bring me my spear; O clouds, unfold! Bring me my Chariot of Fire!

I will not cease from mental fight, Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand, Till we have built Jerusalem, In England’s green and pleasant land.

What Keeps Me Going

Work means all sorts of things to me. I work at different things on different days of the week. I’m a builder, electrician, plumber, writer and therapist —  but I’ve learnt all this variety because what I love doing doesn’t earn money, or at least it didn’t to start with. My work has to do with two things. One might be called healing. The other is exploration and understanding of myself and other human beings.

I cannot sell a spiritual experience to people. The process is already there, inside them, and it is personal motivation that activates it

As a teenager I was very interested in spiritual healing and I had this wonderful dream of being a healer in the traditional sense and this didn’t come about. But the dream stayed with me. I explored relaxation and hypno­tism, I trained as a nurse — I did all sorts of things — but the real beginnings of my work were in relaxation. I started teaching people basic muscular relaxa­tion and I couldn’t get satisfied with it. There was something I didn’t under-stand driving me on, so I constantly tried out different things. Gradually I pieced together a personal understand-lug of a process that goes on in human beings. Some of the pieces were tradi­tional spiritual approaches from India, Indonesia and Japan. Some were nearer at hand, such as Mesmer and his work. The basis of it all was relaxation, and out of real letting-go arose spontaneous movement. From this, the process of healing occurred and it happened by itself. I saw this phenomenon all over the place, described in various ways, with different approaches all over the world in different periods of history. But I couldn’t find out how to get this experience myself. I knew that what I was looking for wasn’t a cult thing. Other groups had this process, but they said they owned it and I wondered how it could be unique when Pentacostalism had it and Mesmer was doing it. Then there was another approach that was owned by the medical profession which I didn’t want either. I was trying to find something that was for the lay person.

At the age of thirty-four I had a spiritual breakthrough and directly experienced this action of the uncon­scious through spontaneous movement. I remember getting up in the middle of the night and I was just about to get back into bed when this voice spoke from everywhere and said: ‘You’ve asked how God touches the human soul. Now watch closely.’ From then on I was in love with this experience and wanted to tell everyone about it. And so that’s my work. How to find and help other people find and perhaps simplify their understanding of the process of self-realization.

I have worked with individuals and groups. It’s a way of earning a living but I have a lot of conflict with it. There’s no way I can sell the spiritual experience to people. They might have what it takes to find it, just as some people have what it takes to climb a mountain. But it’s their personal motivation that does it and that’s something I can’t give to people for money. I write as well. Human dreaming seems to link with this process, so I write about that. The royalties from my best-selling book this year probably amount to about £15 a week, so it doesn’t earn a living. What has kept me going is my sense of personal need. When I was in my early thirties I felt so awful that I didn’t think I could go on, year after year, feeling the way I did. I needed healing. After finding healing what then drove me on was curiosity. What was this healing process and what were its possibilities? Internally we are shape-shifters. We consider ourselves to be merely our outer personalities but we’re so much more than that! I was motivated by a desire to learn how our unconscious can change our lives. That still keeps me going today.

At the moment I am exploring several things. One has to do with perception. The unconscious has faculties of perception which some people use in traditional ways. I love to to put the workings of the unconscious in terms anyone can understand. I’m also exploring what’s going on inside us and whether people can make radical life changes using their inner resources.

I hope we make advances in our understanding of the human mind. I still see people locked in old patterns of behaviour that go with believing themselves to be of a certain religion, or a certain nationality, and out of that comes bloody conflict. We all have the possibility of transformation inside us. It’s very important for people to be able to say ‘I don’t depend on a therapist. I have this process inside me.’

One of the major diseases in the world today is the old social pattern of traditional religion and politics. They helped people gain identity in the past, but now they set them at odds against one another. We need to clear up our own personal unconscious.

The Power of Us

This may sound silly, but we have seen it happen frequently that while helping a female friend, if a male friend refers to her as his wife and speaks for her, a difficult situation can often be turned around to her advantage. The same happens if we are in some way aligned with an organisation or group. The person we are trying to deal with relates to us quite differently than if we are a single person without affiliations.

Of course, some affiliations will put you at odds with the person or group you are dealing with, so this ‘power of us’ has to be used wisely. Maybe things would be better if they were not like that, but at the moment that is how things are. However, things are changing.

Collective power has always existed, but modern technology and greater personal awareness brings different forces into play. An article in Business Week explains this. Employees at Meiosys Incorporated, a software firm operating in California, started using the internet calling system Skype instead of the usual landline phone. The firm’s regular monthly $2000 long distance telephone bill instantly disappeared.

Fine, but not for big and often greedy corporations who have been overcharging for services for generations. In 2006 British Telecom hit 6 billion pounds profit. ($11 billion). And what Skype are dong to the world of communications, other innovations are doing to many of the things that are part of our daily life.

Business Week says of this, “Open-source software, blogs, song-sharing networks, free Internet telephony – they’re each disrupting multibillion-dollar industries and reshaping the landscape of business, politics, and culture. What’s the common thread behind them all? Us. All these new technologies — spawned by nearly ubiquitous cheap computers and Net connections — not only give individuals more power to get their own way but also allow people to join ad-hoc, mass global groups for the first time in human history.”

An interesting example of this was born in July 2004. Adverts for Halo 2 computer game appeared on cinema screens across the US. As the ad was running an internet address was briefly shown – ilovebees.com. When people logged on to the site it appeared to belong to a female beekeeper who had mysteriously disappeared. Instead of the usual honey recipes there were what seemed to be a random set of numbers. What developed was that 600,000 people got together, linked by online communication and websites, to solve the mystery. The numbers turned out to be 210 global positioning coordinates of telephone kiosks around the US. It was a game to test the resources of the players.

The Observer newspaper [i], commenting on this said that if a games design team could unite thousands of people to find the code hidden in a set of numbers, couldn’t similar online collective action work at dealing with global warming, help communities stay safe, muster support for the elderly, disaster victims, as well as the many other creative activities we can do better with the power of us?

Political activists are already using the Internet and mobile/cell phones to organise ‘flash mobs’. [ii] A new world order is emerging where power is not simply in the hands of the government and large corporations. China is moving toward becoming the largest Internet user in the world. Already they have 54,000 cyber police watching where the power of the people will flow.

The world is changing under this influence. Some of the most obvious examples are in the way Wikipedia works. Created by world wide individual action in 250 languages, it is now the largest and most up to date encyclopedia in the world. It is not perfect, but it is open to anyone without cost. Open source software such as Linux and many other free software programs, are changing the way business is done and genius flows into public use. Linux, if it had been done commercially rather than by voluntary action by uncounted people, would have cost $8 billion. The Japanese site Elephant Design allows consumers to advise companies how to make better products. It now claims that six out of 10 of a leading Japanese retailer’s top-selling products have been developed through the site.

In the UK the online School of Everything now gives teachers a chance to teach any subject to students for free. Also in the UK skool.com gives online education to children who for one reason or another do not fit into the usual school system of teaching. And MIT the Massachusetts Institute of Technology offer free courses anywhere in the world. The Open University offers free education in its very wide range of courses – again anywhere in the world.[iii] Free-ed.net allows the same thing, and you work at your own pace in your own way. Free education! An earthquake of change is happening, and you are part of it, either passively or actively.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the fence, a bill has been presented in the UK Government’s draft legislation programme for 2008 that will give the Government total power to snoop on all electronic communications. Richard Thomas warned the database would be “a step too far for the British way of life”. He said: “Do we really want the police, security services and other organs of the state to have access to more and more aspects of our private lives?”

The US already have this ability, not only in America, but as an outreach elsewhere.

There are problems each of us face in being a power in the world. Whatever it is we aim for, whatever we want to create in the way of a better society and personal life, there are people who want the direct opposite. This creates a stalemate. But if you have a way of life that has brought you health and peace, then just living it is a force in the world.

We often hear people bemoaning that they haven’t achieved anything; that they have done nothing to alleviate the troubles of the world. This arises from a mistaken view of who we are and how we interact with each other.

Phyllis Atwater, describing a near death experience in which she relived her whole life says, “For me it was a total reliving of every thought I had ever thought, every word I had ever spoken, and every deed I had ever done; plus the effect of each thought, word and deed on everyone and anyone who had ever come within my environment or sphere of influence, whether I knew them or not – including unknown passers-by on the street.”

When this was first read it seemed inspirational but implausible that we interact with passers by. Gradually though it was easy to observe. Whether we are conscious of it or not, every house we pass by leaves an impression on us. The house is an expression of the person who lives in it. How many houses have you passed that have a yard full of rubbish and motor parts or other junk? How many houses have a colourful window box or garden. What are each of those people sharing with you?

Make the experiment. Walk along a road hunched over and not meeting anyone’s eyes. Then walk upright and with a smile, noticing the difference. Notice also how many people actually acknowledge you, even with a glance, and what is etched on their faces. What is it they are radiating into your world? What are you radiating into theirs?

If you can imagine a whole town radiant with colourful gardens, clean and orderly yards, and with people meeting your eye and acknowledging you exist, wouldn’t that be a different experience than what you usually meet?

We each make up the world, and the world is not made up of leaders. We are not all actors on the stage. Some of us are stage designers, movers of props, cleaners and supporters. Without ‘us’ the actors couldn’t perform. More goes on backstage than occurs on stage. Things only happen through cooperation and the intricate web of support.

Your body is an excellent example of this. Supposing all the blood cells suddenly felt suicidal because they were not in the forefront of what goes on in your life; because they were not famous or in the limelight. That would be a mess. But when we each live our best the whole world is transformed. And that is just single person power. When we add our energy to others, wonderful things can happen.

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[i] The Observer, Sunday March 9 2008.

[ii] A flash mob is a large group of people who assemble suddenly in a public place, perform an unusual action for a brief time, then quickly disperse.

[iii] http://www.open.ac.uk/openlearn/home.php

Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud was born in 1856 and died in 1939. His father was a Jewish wool merchant, Jakob, who in his second marriage wed Freud’s mother, Amalie Nathansohn. They were living at the time in Freiberg in the Czech Republic. The family later moved to Leipzig, and then to Vienna, where Freud lived and worked for much of his adult life.

Freud’s early ambition was to study law, but it is said that on hearing a talk on Goethe’s scientific investigations he decided to study medicine. This he did at the university of Vienna, and in his third year he became fascinated by a study of the central nervous system. He became so engrossed in this neurological research that it took him three years longer than was normally needed to qualify as a physician.

After spending three years at the General Hospital of Vienna, working in the fields of psychiatry, dermatology, and nervous diseases, he left when given the role of lecturer in neuropathology at the University of Vienna in 1885.

In that same year he was given a government grant, and Freud used this to spend 19 weeks in Paris as a student of the French neurologist Jean Charcot at the Salpêtrière mental hospital. Charcot was well known throughout Europe for his methods using hypnosis as a way to deal with hysteria and other nervous disorders. This deeply impressed Freud, and a year later he started his own clinical practice in Vienna, using some of the techniques learned while with Charcot. One of the influences of this association was probably that it left Freud feeling that not all mental illness had its source in the body. The physical brain does cause some illnesses, but Charcot helped Freud see that some problems stem from the mind, the psyche of the person.

Marriage

Shortly after his return from Paris, Freud married Martha Bernays. Her family were prominent in the Jewish community, and her ancestors included a chief rabbi of Hamburg and Heinrich Heine. Martha was deeply supportive throughout Freud’s life.

In this same period of time, and shortly after his marriage to Martha, Freud became firm friends with Wilhelm Fliess. The dialogue this friendship afforded is thought to have deeply influenced the direction and detail of Freud’s developing concept of the human psyche. Ideas about erogenous areas of the body, human bisexuality, and early sexuality in childhood, may have originated in this dialogue.

It was in this same year, 1886, that Freud started a clinical practice in neuropsychology at Berggasse 19. He used this consulting room for almost fifty years. About the same time Freud began another association with a Viennese physician named Josef Breuer. In 1893 Breuer had presented a paper titled Studies in Hysteria. In essence Breuer stated that forgotten traumas, painful incidents that had left a psychological scar, were responsible for what was at that time called hysteria. It was, Breuer wrote, the undischarged emotional energy associated with these forgotten traumas that were the root cause of hysteria. Using hypnotic techniques, Breuer helped some patients to re-enact, and thus recall, the original traumatic incident. In doing so the emotional charge was released. The release and remembering or integrating, was called catharsis or abreaction.

Discovery of the talking cure

Although this was almost the same as work done by Franz Anton Mesmer a hundred years previously, Breuer’s paper on hysteria was the foundation for modern psychotherapy due to its basis in clinical observation.

There was a major difference between what Charcot was doing, and the approach Breuer took, and it was nearly ten years before Freud accepted this difference. Whereas Charcot used hypnotic suggestion to direct the course of treatment, Breuer, instead of being in command, allowed the person to follow a spontaneous course by talking about the initial events linked with the trauma. This ‘talking cure’ as Breuer and his patient Anna O called it, this ‘chimney sweeping,’ acted cathartically to release the bottled-up emotional obstruction at the root of the problem. This was the approach already used by Mesmer, and in essence, later by many modern practitioners. Unfortunately, none of the practitioners prior to Carl Jung noted the self-regulatory factors in it. See: Life’s Little Secrets;  LifeStream; Franz Anton Mesmer

It was not until Freud noticed how allowing his patients to freely associate ideas with whatever came to mind, that he really explored spontaneous abreaction. Freud himself suffered bouts of deep anxiety, and it was partly this that led him to explore the connection between association of ideas and dreams. In 1897 he wrote to his friend Wilhelm Fliess:

‘No matter what I start with, I always find myself back again with the neuroses and the psychical apparatus. Inside me there is a seething ferment, and I am only waiting for the next surge forward. I have felt impelled to start writing about dreams, with which I feel on firm ground.’

The doorway of dreams

This move toward dreams may have come about because in allowing his patients freedom to talk and explore the associations that arose – free association – Freud noticed that patients would often find a connection between the direction of their associations and a dream they had experienced. The more he allowed his patients to go in their own direction, the more frequently they mentioned their dreams. Also, talking about the dream often enabled the patient to discover a new and productive chain of associations and memories.

Freud began to take note of his own dreams and explore the associations they aroused. In doing so he was the first person to consciously and consistently explore a dream into its depths through uncovering and following obvious and hidden associations and emotions connected with the dream imagery and drama. Obviously previous dream researchers had noticed how the dream image associated with personal concerns, but Freud broke through into seeing the connection with sexual feelings, with early childhood trauma, and with the subtleties of the human psyche. He did this to deal with his own neurosis, and he says of this period, ‘I have been through some kind of neurotic experience, with odd states of mind not intelligible to consciousness, cloudy thoughts and veiled doubts, with barely here and there a ray of light.’

Using dreams for his self analysis, Freud discovered that previously unremembered details from his childhood were recaptured, along with feelings and states of mind which he had never met before. He wrote of this period, ‘Some sad secrets of life are being traced back to their first roots, the humble origins of much pride and precedence are being laid bare. …… I am now experiencing myself all the things that, as a third party, I have witnessed going on in my patients, days when I slink about depressed because I have understood nothing of the day’s dreams, fantasies, or moods.’

Norman MacKenzie believes that without this powerful and personal experience of working with his dreams, meeting emotions and fantasies welling up from the unconscious, Freud would not have so passionately believed in his theories regarding dreams and the unconscious.

The interpretation of dreams

From his work with dreams, Freud wrote and published his masterful book, Die Traumdeutung – The Interpretation of Dreams – in 1899. But the book was dated 1900 to represent it ground-breaking nature. What was new about his representation of dreams was their role in the health of ones psyche. Fundamental to this was his view of psychic/sexual energy that he named libido. He saw this as what one might call the electrical current of the psyche. It was the energy within all the mental, emotional and sexual life of the person. Like electricity in nature, or like the flow of a river, the energy could build up and would seek release. If it was not released in a satisfying way, or if its current was somehow linked with or directed into indirect expression, mental, emotional and even physical pain or disturbance would occur. Sexuality or emotions could become linked in strange ways with objects, such as one might find with shoe fetishism. (Freud was, however, not the first person to link dreams to psychic health. See American Indian Dream Beliefs.)

Through dreams, Freud felt the patient could gradually uncover the ways their libido was repressed, cross wired, or traumatised. This development of insight could release them.

Freud defined several aspects of dreams.

Wish fulfilment – Dreams were seen to be an expression of wishes that were perhaps unconscious. One might desire something that was socially or personally prohibited. Therefore one might dream of fulfilling that desire, even symbolically.

Dreamwork – Because of the struggle between what one was urged toward, and what was prohibited, dreams often symbolised the real nature of their content. Therefore to understand the dream, interpretative work needed to be done. This work was outlined in his book,

Manifest and latent content – The manifest content of a dream is that which we can remember and report as the images and plot or theme of the dream. Freud pointed out that this obvious and reported dream intermingled the residues of immediate daily experience with the deepest, often most infantile wishes. It did this by condensing a massive amount of associations and feelings in any given dream image. Almost any social symbol does this in fact. If you take the symbol of the Red Cross, for instance, at first you might say it represents an international organization that cares for the wounded, sick, and homeless in wartime. Beyond that however are millions of other things you could associate with it, such as its history, events or incidents it took part in, even personal memories and feelings of wartime experience.

Condensation – This is the action of representing two or more ideas or feelings in one object, word, or situation. For instance a man dreamt he was working in his father’s shop and a male acquaintance came in with his left bicep shot away. The shop connected with the difficulties of relationship the dreamer had with his father. It was also a place the dreamer had experienced feelings of extreme shyness in their youth due to acne. So it had the connection with difficulties in meeting people and feelings of self worth. There was the further connection with work. It had been the dreamer’s first work place. The shop therefore depicts all those parts of the dreamer’s feelings and memories. We can therefore say the dream shop condenses all those parts of the dreamer’s inner life. Freud said that no direct correspondence between the manifest content and its multidimensional latent counterpart can be assumed.

Displacement – This means that the dreamer substitutes one thing or person for another. This is done to take away stress. For instance the dreamer might use a king in place of the father. This allows them to fantasise/dream events that might otherwise be blocked.

Representation – Means the changing of thoughts into images. Therefore to understand a dream the images have to be translated back in to thought sequences.

Secondary Revision – One might think of this as a sort of writer’s skill, in which events and scenes are linked and made orderly.

Transference – This means that feelings a person had originally felt toward a parent, were now unconsciously felt for an important figure in their life such as the psychiatrist working with them, or a marriage partner.

Defining the nature of dreams

Freud also defined dreams as being:

• ‘Thoughts in pictures’ – a process of thinking while asleep.
• ‘Ego alien’. They have a life and will which often appears to be other than our conscious will. This led older cultures to believe they were sent by spirits or God.
• ‘Hallucinatory’. We believe the reality of the dream while in it.
• ‘Drama’. Dreams are not random images. They are ‘stage managed’ into very definite, sometimes recurring, themes and plots.
• ‘Moral standards’. Dreams have very different moral standards than our waking personality.
• ‘Association of ideas’. In dreaming we have access to infant or other memories or experience we would find very difficult to recall while awake.

Freud said of his dream findings, that his book, The Interpretation of Dreams “contains even according to my present day judgement the most valuable of all the discoveries it has been my good fortune to make. Insights such as this fall to one’s lot but once in a lifetime.”

One of his basic views of dreams, that the purpose of dreams is to allow us to satisfy in fantasies the instinctual urges that society judges unacceptable, was partly responsible for enormous opposition and criticism that he met. During the period of his early life, only men were believed to have powerful sexual urges. When Freud showed that repressed but obvious sexual desires were equally at work in women this created a social uproar. Perhaps his second finding in regard to sexuality surprised even him. During his analysis of women patients, sexual advance or assault by the woman’s father was often revealed. Freud struggled with this, wondering whether the assault was memory of an actual event, or a psychic reproduction of it. He eventually came to the conclusion that hysterical and neurotic behaviour was often due to the trauma caused by an early sexual assault by the parent. Where there was not evidence of physical assault, then he saw the neurosis as due to sexual conflict or a trauma caused by some other event. This led to Freud being rejected by university colleagues, fellow doctors, and even by patients.

But the influence of his findings was even more widespread. He was, after all, questioning the role of women in society of that time. He was also implying that children were capable of sexual response and feelings. This was seen to be degrading and a slur on the purity of childhood.

What Freud proposed was that such urges and traumas were largely unknown or unrecognised by the conscious personality. This led him to say that such urges existed in the unconscious, and that dreams were the royal road to exploring what lay in this previously uncharted area of the mind. What shocked and dismayed so many people, whose view of life was largely formed by religious beliefs, was that each of us had an area of our mind that was largely unknown unless one took pains to explore it, and that had a will of its own that could be in conflict with conscious wishes or will, and could thus produce neurosis or even illness.

Geography of the mind

Through such findings Freud developed a geography of the human mind, showed the influence the unconscious has upon waking personality, and brought dreams to the attention of the scientific community. His book The Interpretation of Dreams, was a turning point in bringing concepts on dreaming from a primitive level to alignment with modern thought. With enormous courage, and against much opposition, he showed the place sexuality has in the development of conscious self-awareness.

In connection with dreams, although throughout history dream interpretation was a widely used practice, no one prior to Freud had defined a technique of using dreams to lay bare the hidden inner life of the dreamer. No one had revealed through dreams the now unconscious childhood traumas and sexual tangles. Freud’s method of dream interpretation, although it has now been modified and developed from his original techniques, his method was the breakthrough, the creative spark, that allowed so much work and exploration to be done in the dark continent of the mind. Countless people have found transformation through the therapeutic work he started.

But Freud didn’t actually explore very far into this amazing underworld. If we think of his journey as something like an archaeologist digging into a great tomb, then what Freud ran into was a mass of rubble blocking the way to further exploration. It was rubble that in general has to be cleared before the vastness of that interior can be appreciated. The rubble, in fact is made up of the massive amount of experiences, feelings, angers, urges, that we manage to keep below the surface of awareness; that we hold beyond the threshold of waking, imprisoning them in the darkness of the unconscious. The work done later in the explorations made possible through LSD psychotherapy was an amazing expansion of the world of the unconscious. See LSD Psychotherapy by W.V. Caldwell.

It is true that psychiatry owes a debt to Sigmund Freud for showing the revealing nature of dreams, but it he made the mistake of trying to reduce all dreaming to one formula. Havelock Ellis, himself an authority on aberrant sex phenomena, observes that “the great body of material accumulated by him [Freud] and his school is derived from the dreams of the neurotic. This is not normal dreaming.” Hence, he says, Freud promulgated “a premature and narrow generalisation.”  Quoted from The Mystery of Dreams by William Oliver Stevens.

 

See: Analysis of dreams; Association of ideas with dreams; Autonomous complex; the next step- criticisms; abreaction; Adler, Alfred; birds; displacement; door; Fromm, Eric; hallucinations and hallucinogens; LSD hypnosis Meditation and dreams; Jung Carl,; lucidity; plot of dreams; wordplay and puns; secret of universe dreams; healing and therapeutic action of dreams; unconscious, the.

Shipwrecked in life

I have recently been experiencing the breakdown of my marriage. It was a marriage I was deeply proud of, a marriage I had carefully built and nurtured over many years. I am left feeling completely shipwrecked, run aground and my bearings lost. The awful thing is there is no one to blame, just the gradual encroachment of circumstances and events, with directions chosen which have led to here.

I used to feel I was a very resilient person, having met many major difficulties in life, and having been through a divorce in the past, and the separation from my children. But at present, in this shipwrecked condition, I have to admit that I am deeply vulnerable, anxious and wondering if there can be some eventual peace and stability in my life. I don’t know how to re-build myself. Every direction seems impossible.

At present I am living in someone else’s house, and feeling somewhat homeless – having had my own home for nearly forty years. I am out of work and finding it impossible to be employed, despite having been employed almost without a break for 45 years. Perhaps being sixty has something to do with it. But it may also be that I have walked into the side-streets in which I exist at the moment, and am not sure how to find my way back.

I look about me and see there are many other people like myself – shipwrecks through one thing or another – a wrong turning, a choice ill made, a parting that wounded. I wonder how, with all our cleverness, we as human beings create such difficult lives and environments.

Even offered love doesn’t come easy. There is too much fear, too much pain about past love, too much conflict about what has been and what might be. I am broken in so many ways my bones ache.

If you are shipwrecked also, I do look at you with soft eyes. I am not reaching out, that may be difficult for you to take. I raise a hand though, as a companion on the beach.

Crusoe.

The Nature versus Nurture Debate

The publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species, gave a realistic basis for questioning the divine shaping of human beings. That, on top of Isaac Newton’s view of the world, enabled people to see themselves as arising out of natural physical processes, shaped by their environment over huge periods of time.

Newton’s view of the cosmos has been summed up by saying that the universe is a giant mechanical clock that is gradually unwinding. This led to a rather mechanistic view of life, of human experience, and even of the mind. Newton’s findings were so clear, so verifiable by continuing research and experiment, that they enabled a level of certainty based on observation, perhaps never experienced by human society before. This produced a fertile environment for a materialistic view of life that hurriedly cast out older, more intuitive, perhaps grander schemes.

Part of the problem was that the atom was found – at that time – to be the smallest component of the material world. This suggested that nothing other thn matter could exist, and therefore it was only the body and its functions that gave life and produced consciousness and self awareness.

Although cultural views differ enormously, this Newtonian mechanistic view of the universe has grown stronger over the years since Newton proposed it. Whether or not we agree, we are immersed in this worldview to a large extent. It pervades the very way we experience the world and ourselves. It shapes the world around us, as most of the mechanical and electronic artefacts around us have arisen from it. It definitely moulds our attitudes to our own sense of who and what we are.

But since 1900, when Max Planck published his quantum theory, another great shift began. Quantum mechanics points out that the underlying stuff of the universe, subatomic particles, do not behave in a mechanistic or material way. Repeated experiments show that we cannot predict the behaviour of these particles, therefore they are not mechanical like the great clock attributed to Newton. Not only that, our observation of them produces changes in them. Gary Zukav writes, “Philosophically the implications of quantum mechanics are psychedelic. Not only do we influence our reality, but, in some degree, we actually create it!”

These fundamental particles do not have a physical body in the same way as, for instance a ball bearing. They shift and change and do not even have a local presence in the same way as material objecrts.

Just as it took a long time for Newton’s mechanistic view to dominate the worldview of western culture, so it will take a long time for the information arising from quantum mechanics to shift the view we have of the world and ourselves. Nevertheless, like Newton’s findings, the fundamental findings of quantum mechanics are also verifiable by continuing research and experiment.

Therefore, this shifting balance between Darwin and Newton on one side, and emerging quantum mechanics on the other, produces some interesting possibilities in connection with the nurture/nature debate, a debate that questions whether our sense of self as a human personality is largely produced by the forces of nature such as evolution, genes and instinct, or the forces of society.

To sum up these possibilities in a slightly exaggerated way, the Darwinian/Newton view might state that we emerge as a person out of the shaping forces of nature, such as we see in our genes. The opposing view to this is that we collectively create our reality, and out of that created reality and its interaction, we grow.

Of course, these are extremes, and so it is helpful to look at how we experience them in our everyday life. We all live in surroundings such as a town or village, a house, a boat, a hospital, or even a prison. Wherever we dwell, our dwelling is in a certain environment, and that environment is almost certainly shaped by human beings. As individuals, or as a group, we have built houses, villages, towns, and all that goes with them. We have, as quantum mechanics suggests, collectively created our environment. And this environment impinges upon us. We feel buoyed up by it, or perhaps we feel threatened by it. It may create great stress in us, or it may open enormous opportunities. We may love it or hate it. And in our responses to it, we are shaped or moved. So not only do we create our reality, but we in turn are shaped by it.

Taken at an even more personal level, it is worth remembering the saying, “As a twig is bent, so the tree grows.” For instance, an oak tree may have as its genetic material the possibility of growing an enormous and tall trunk. But if, when it is a sapling, we take an axe and hack its young trunk, and bend it, the tree will never make real its potential.

If a young girl, who has the genetic material giving her the potential for a healthy body and an outgoing lively personality, is raped by her father while she is young, that potential may never express. Instead she may become an introverted, anxious, and unmarried woman.

In a recent documentary examining the lives of identical twins, twin boys who were separated at birth were shown to have developed very different personalities. This was attributed to the fact that one of them went to live with a family, and in an environment, that was difficult and unloving. The other boy grew up in a loving family in which there were many open opportunities. The first boy, as a man, was very quiet, not successful in undertakings, and lacking self-confidence. The second boy, as a man, was confident, successful in undertakings, with a very different social and physical appearance.

Another viewpoint on this was detailed in a recent issue of New Scientist (21 April 2001, www.newscientist.com ) in a feature entitled Opinion Essay. The essay starts by saying:

Today we view TV documentaries about identical twins who, despite being separated at birth, have amazingly similar life experiences and grow up to have similar IQs. But when we think about what those twins imply, idle entertainment turns into concern. Must we believe that genes virtually determine IQ and that IQ differences between racial groups are caused by genetic differences? For psychologists, there is a special cross to bear. The race and IQ debate has created a paradox about nature versus nurture that appears insoluble.

Ever since the American military tested conscripts during the First World War, it has been known that whites in the US outscore blacks by 15 points on IQ tests. In 1969, Arthur Jensen, an educational psychologist at the University of California at Berkeley, shocked liberal American public opinion by arguing that the racial IQ gap had a strong genetic component.

Jensen’s model of IQ, had as a fundamental principle, that IQ is based on the person’s genetic make-up. In his model, environment had virtually no effect upon the IQ of the people being studied. In fact it ruled out the possibility of an environmentally caused IQ gap between the races. However, in 1987, James Flynn did a worldwide study of IQ trends. He found that the current generation outstrips past generations by between 9 and 20 IQ points. The speed of this development is too fast to be attributable to evolutionary changes in genes. Genes do not change that quickly! Therefore, the change must have been produced environmentally, and Jensen’s model had completely misled the public.

The report suggests that the environmental cause for such enormous change could be as follows:

Take those born to be a bit taller and a bit quicker than average. When they start school, they are likely to be a bit better at, say, basketball. The advantage may be modest, but then reciprocal causation between the talent advantage and environment kicks in. Because you are better at basketball, you are likely to enjoy it more and play it more than someone who is a bit slow or short or overweight. Your genetic advantage is upgrading your environment, the amount of time you spend playing and practising. In turn, your enhanced environment upgrades your skill, so you are much more likely to be picked for your school team. There you get professional coaching, which makes you even more proficient.

Genes, the “natural” in one’s life, still provide the background influence in the IQ testing. But it is environment, social relationship, and other people, who provided the other half of the equation.

This influence of social environment is nowhere more apparent than in the cases of children raised by animals. The environmental surroundings here are so different, they are an excellent way to see the input that most of us receive unconsciously. These children, adopted by animals prior to their learning to speak, never become human in the sense of developing an identity, self-awareness, language, a sense of time, and all the subtle equipment that we accept as being human. Genetic material does not make us human. Genetic material does not lead us toward self-awareness. Genetic material does not spontaneously give us language skills. These are all gifts of our environment. They arise in us out of our relationship with other people.

Considering this enormous influence that environment has on the shaping of our identity, and the skill with which we express our innate, genetic, potential, we must at least assume that when human beings live on another planet, or in a vastly different environment, their humanness will also, presumably, be different too. Playing with this idea in fiction, Robert Heinlein, in his book Stranger In a Strange Land, has his central character reared in a Martian culture. The emerging “human” is as different to an earth raised person, as the child raised by animals.

From what has been said, the influence of “nature”, and the influence of “nurture”, both play enormous parts in our personal development or the inhibition of it. But if we are to really understand the forces out of which we emerge, we must perhaps see ourselves as being intricately interwoven with every aspect of life around us and in us.

See: Programmed  to really understand the problem we all face.

 

Medard Boss

(October 4, 1903 – December 21, 1990)

Boss was born, grew up and lived in Zurich while it was still a centre for psychological training and activity. In 1928 he received his medical degree from the University of Zurich. But he had also studied in Paris and Vienna, and underwent analysis with Sigmund Freud.

He was much influenced by Eugene Bleuler who he worked with as an assistant at the Burgholzli hospital. He then went on to study in Berlin and London, his teachers including individuals who were part of Freud’s inner circle. However he began to widen his views by also being involved with Karen Horney and Kurt Goldstein.

In 1938, he began an association with Carl Jung, who helped Boss to see that psychoanalysis need not be bound up in Freudian interpretations.

Later Boss discovered the works of Ludwig Binswanger and Martin Heidegger. It was his eventual friendship with Heidegger, starting in 1946, that helped define his direction into existential psychology. His work and thought in this area was so profound he is seen as the co-founder of existential therapy along with Ludwig Binswanger.

As he deepened his work Boss saw dreams as arising from the person’s life as a whole, and not from a separate ‘dream state’ or from things such as an archetype that acts as an “autonomous entity possessing its own creative and mo­tive powers.” Neither did he see the ‘unconscious’ as a realm of denied impulses and neurosis as Freud sometimes presented it. He described the dreamer as holding in their total self all that they met in their dream life.

He aimed to avoid all theories and concepts of dreams and look at the dream and the dreamer to arrive at understanding. In this way he helped the dreamer to connect the events and experiences of the dream directly with their waking life.

For instance, one of his male clients, during the first six months of his therapy dreamt only of machines and mechanical things. Boss saw this as an expression of the man’s complete sexual impotence and depression. They reflected the man’s inner sterility; his lack of anything living within his feelings and inner life. As the man gradually recognised and dealt with this condition his dream imagery changed to include living plants, then animals, and eventually human beings. When this stage was reached the man fully recovered his sexual and emotional potency.

As can be seen, Boss was seeing the dreams of his client as a direct expression of the functioning of the dreamer’s internal and external processes of mind, emotions and body. See the third example under lucidity as an illustration of this.

Boss approached the dream, and especially a series of dreams, as a clear statement of the person’s dominant overall life stance or condition. The graphic depiction a dream gives defines the person’s present condition as a whole, and not so much about how they are involved in external activity. But of course, the man mentioned above, described by his dreams as almost wholly mechanical and intellectual, lacking any feeling and empathetic relationship with others and his life opportunities, was obviously incapacitated in his external activities by his personal condition.

Boss used the word ‘Dasein’ in his work a great deal. It can be thought of as meaning ‘to be’, or being. It expressed his idea that we each have a fundamental existence that is not brought into being by our analysis or attempts to understand who or what we are. Perhaps it can be seen as that which exists without a prior cause. But unlike the mystical definitions of such a first cause, Heidegger saw Dasein as always having the meaning of ‘being in the world’. In another view it could be thought of as ones core self. The Core Self is, in a real sense a union with the Life within you, not simply the processes of Life.

Using light as an analogy of his approach to therapy, Boss said that work on oneself was to enable you “to shine forth,” “to come out of the darkness.” And so Boss viewed Dasein as an existing luminance that brings things “to light” or allows insight. The importance of this to Boss was that it influenced his style of working with a client. From this he likened personal defences and depression as choosing to live in the darkness.

Darkness arises from an absence or blocking of light. Darkness is not a force in itself, simply an absence. Therefore we can say that Boss’s work was to help the client remove or deal with the lumps of experience, fear, attitudes and beliefs that are like objects blocking the natural light arising from Dasein – the Core. So therapy he saw as a reversing the constriction of our basic openness, and it was described as “enlightenment!”

Perhaps out of this view of letting the natural core light shine, Boss stressed to his clients the importance of “letting things go” (Gelassenheit). Mostly people feel they have to keep a tight control over themselves and their environment. This probably arises from our view many of us have of the world having no central meaning; or that we ourselves have no core that sustains us. We lack the sense of what Boss has used the term Dasein to describe – a fundamental core that can illumine us and therefore bring healing and wellbeing. Lacking this concept or awareness of our own core – or lacking any trust in what is, after all, our own life process, we do not trust Life to deal well with us if we let go and allow things to happen from within and in the world. See letting things happen; Life’s Little Secrets.

Boss developed a philosophy or view of life out of what he observed in people and their dreams. “We are not individuals locked up inside our bodies,” he said. “We live in a shared world, and we illuminate each other. Human existence is shared existence.” What we experience and block, or what we shine out from our Dasein – Core, flows out into other people’s life experience. We are always illuminating or shining out into other people’s life and the world in one way or another. He was certain that this also determines what flows back into our own experience, and what we confront in events and people. If our condition is one of inner deadness, anger or maliciousness, then we will meet those things at every turn. If you are shining out good will, creativity and wellbeing, then those are the things you will find. In either case, those are the ways you will see the world, convinced of the truth of the world’s awful or wonderful condition.

Through his years of observation of his clients dreams, Boss also recognised that some dreams can be predictive or telepathic. In his book Analysis of Dreams, Boss devoted a chapter to these types of dreams. He gives the example of a trainee who fell ill one night with pneumonia and dreamt that he was asking his mother, who was beside him, to put her cool hands on his head. His mother, who lived over 500 miles away, phoned him the next day, something it was difficult for her to do as it was costly. She had dreamt her son was ill in bed and was entreating her to cool him. The dream worried her so much she had made the call to find out if his illness was serious.

Three years later he had an accident and broke one of his legs. Despite sending no news to his mother she phoned the next day because she had seen him in a hospital bed in a dream. Those were the only two calls she made to him because she could not afford the cost except in emergencies.

From these and other experiences Boss arrived at the conclusion that not everything must enter the dreamer from outside. Many things arise within that have never in any way been met externally. See: Answer to Criticisms.

See: Introduction to Dream Watching; Individuation.

A lighthearted look at my teens

I’d like to tell you about myself.   My life didn’t actually begin at 13, but I started some things then which have been with me ever since. You know, on one or two days in your life it’s almost as if you suddenly wake up and without blinking an eyelid or having regrets, change your whole existence.

It was like that one morning, as I said, when I was thirteen.   I’m an only child and I had a bedroom to myself.  It had a door and a bed on one side and two large wall cupboards, a gas fire and a very large mirror on the other.  I used to sleep without any clothes on, and when I got up that morning I couldn’t help noticing myself in that large wall mirror over the gas fire.  True, I always did notice myself in it every day and looked to see how my acne was coming on – I’d been spotty since 9 and went to hospital to treat it – but on that morning I really did notice myself.  I had a good look at not just my spots, but at my round shoulders, my narrow chest and my long thin legs.  To see the latter I had to get near to the mirror and look down into it, so to speak, because it was quite high up.  For the first time in all those years it really struck me that I didn’t like what I saw. I’d been hovering about that realisation for a long time.  It’s easy enough to realise you don’t like Dicky Adams who sits next to you in school, but to admit the same about yourself takes longer.

Actually, I’m still undecided whether I didn’t like what I saw, or felt I was destined for greater things.  Come to think of it though, my view could have been helped by a pen-friend I had.  For some time I had been writing to a blonde, beautiful, Swedish girl. I believe her father was conductor of an orchestra; at least that’s what she told me, and she looked the part.   After some months of writing weekly and eagerly awaiting each others letters, I sent her a photograph.  Her next letter contained bad news.  She told me that for family reasons she had to stop writing, and so ended what I had hoped was to be a long and growing romance.

The light of my dreams about travelling to Sweden and sharing sustaining love for each other had to be extinguished.  Perhaps that was the darkness that had caused me to see myself in such a bad light.  Or maybe it was my mother’s influence.  Looking back, I can understand the situation, but at the time I could only take it where it hit me.  You see, my parents owned a greengrocery shop in a small, attractive paved walk near St Pancras Church in London.  It had belonged to my grandfather Nick, who was an Italian from near Amalfi.  Just after the war Nick wanted to see his home again and so went to Italy for a holiday and died there.  So my father, the youngest of five boys and three girls, took over the shop.  Dad was a full-blooded Italian and mum just as full-blooded English with other English influences like ancient Viking, Irish and French blood.  Not the quiet English rose, but with a lot of emotion and a temper she could express easily and some-times devastatingly, as many traders found out who tried to give her a raw deal.  If she had something on her mind she would stew over it for hours or even days, going ominously quiet.  Then suddenly she would start talking and with volcanic force the heat of her worried emotions would spill out. Not that there were many things which caused her that amount of emotion and anxiety.  I can’t ever remember her flooding out strong over politics, hardship, the war, or clothes – I was born in 1937.  The few things that roused her because they were her whole world were, concern over the safety and well being of me her only child; my father and his very few glances at other women; internal family feuds, and being sold bad goods in shops or in life. It was the force of the love my mother gave by ever working to cook my meals, wash my clothes and providing all the things necessary to exist – that was her love.

My mother was, and still is, one of those people who live almost entirely on the emotional level.  In her mind she used to get things done with, not to clarify or explore mentally. Feelings were good enough for that. So the force of her life expended itself mainly through years of non-ceasing hard work, and the pleasures, worries, excitements of caring for her man and child.  It was therefore both very satisfying and sometimes very difficult to be loved by mum.

When there is not much else in life for you except your feelings for your family they can be very intense.  The amount of her caring as it poured into her cooking, washing clothes and sheets, working, painting the house, being with us, was enormous.  But it was so intense she could as soon flatten you with it as nurse you when you were sick.

For instance, when I was six we lived in Amersham, Bucks.  I went to school at St. Mary’s along School Lane, which ran past fields and a recreation ground.  I hated school dinners so I walked home each day and Mum had an arrangement with our next-door neighbour who cooked a meal for me because the war was on and mum went to work.  Brian Spencer, a boy from my own class, also walked home.  On one beautiful Summer’s day we walked back to school together after having our dinner.  School Lane starts from the High Street and passes through some rather fine houses and what was Goya’s Perfume Laboratories, where my mother worked at that time.  Then the lane turns left and stretching uphill is Rectory meadow.  It was covered white with horse daisies, and in the heat of the day was a beautiful place to be.  So we went into the field to gather horse daisies for our teacher. It didn’t seem to us we were there long, but when we arrived at school with our daisies, an ominous quiet existed instead of the usual shrieks, laughs and shouts of children at play.  We felt very unnerved and walked slowly to our classroom door.  Putting our ear against it we could hear a lesson was in progress.  We stood outside for some time trying to find courage to open that huge wooden door and walk into the gaze of thirty children and teacher. I had never ever been late, and it seemed complicated to explain what had happened.  We decided the best thing to do was not to disturb the lesson but play in the recreation ground until the afternoon break.  We could then join the other children and go into our class when they did.  Right, the problem was solved.  Meanwhile, to pass the time we played on the swings, roundabout and rocking horse.  Tiring of that, we moved down to the river Misbourne at the far end of the recreation ground, beyond the cricket pitch.

We climbed the willow trees there and imagined them to be tanks, airplanes, or just willow trees.  Then we saw the sticklebacks in the river.  So, with bottles found, in we went to trap the unwary minnows.  This was so absorbing that when the children came out for playtime, and some even came and talked to us, it never entered our heads to leave the magic of the river and go back into school.  We were under a spell that put flight to all the world outside of childhood’s delight and time itself.  We knew no hunger, time did not exist, home was in another space and experience.  There was only the river and delight.

When the children went home from school I was still lost in that world made up of water, jam jars, sticklebacks and joy.  Our daisies had been left and forgotten along our journey to the river; so had mothers, home and teatime. But suddenly, what I still remember as a dark thundery type of cloud loomed over us and blocked out the late sunshine.  It was a tense, silent, oppressive sort of cloud.  It was my mother.

I was pleased to see her and began to share the river with her and show her our catch of minnows.  She didn’t appear to be interested.  “Do you know what the time is?”  she asked me.  No, I didn’t have any idea of the time. It had taken me a long struggle to grasp what a minute was.  Our neighbour had once told me when a minute began and ended while I looked out of her window trying to experience it.  Hours were beyond me.  I tried again to share our pleasure of the afternoon.  “It’s six o’clock” my mother went on, coldly, with tremendous restraint.  “I’ve been worried sick about you.  Some of the children said you hadn’t been to school.  Why weren’t you there?”  I tried to explain. My mother took my wrist and with a tight grip walked me home without further exchange.  Despite being half Italian, I was a very fair-haired child with large hazel eyes in a wistful face with a pointed chin.  Perhaps that evening my eyes were a little larger than usual and my face more wistful in trying to understand. On the way home she stopped outside of what was at the time Goya’s perfume factory. What happened was so intense it is seared into my memmory, for my mothe turned me and stared at me and said, “You hurt me, now I am going to hurt you!”

When we arrived back at our cottage, with its two up and two down­stairs rooms.  I was taken into the kitchen.  At first my mother had said nothing except, “You hurt me now I am going to hurt you.”  She boiled water, put a large tub on the wooden kitchen table and filled it with the hot water.  Slowly and silently she undressed me, washed me, and dried me.  Then she brought clean clothes, Sunday best trousers and shoes, and began to dress me in them.  I blurted out from my fear of this strangeness, asking what she was doing.  It was quite simple.  “I am going to take you away and put you in a home,” she said.

The threat was not an empty one.  I had been in hospital twice by the time I was six and it had crippled me emotionally.  I knew what it was like. I reached out to her to hold on, but my arms felt small and weak.  Beyond that I cannot remember.  As I said, it was sometimes difficult to live with mother, but only sometimes. But on that day I made a huge decision for unconsciously I turned against my mother and started on the road to become independent from her. In fact I also remember being on a bus with her on  the upstairs level and was sitting as far away from her as possible. She called to me to sit next to her, my reply was, “No you are an old cow.” It was the worse insult I had at that age.

Looking in the mirror on that day was a turning point.  There is something in us that constantly gathers fresh information and adds it to our already large collection.  Usually, whether it is information or experience; or information gathered from experience, it adds to our stockpile without radically altering us.  But occasionally something in the nature of a catalyst comes along, and its very presence amongst all our past gatherings swirls them energetically into a new order.  Something clicks, and our life is altered in one way or another.  Perhaps the almost unwanted fact that my penfriend had stopped writing the moment I sent my photograph, had been the last straw.  But the catalyst cannot act unless there is the right material for it to act on.

But what makes us swing one way and not another?  Which way would I swing as I looked at myself?  My childhood fear of being sent away, added to my pen friend turning away, were the influences causing me to see the poor shape I was in.  But there were other factors, with other influences.

For instance, when I was about twelve my friend Eddy had told me about masturbation.  It sounded a bit improbable but I went straight home and shut myself in the sitting room to experiment.  It was a reasonably safe place because my parents were busy in the shop that was directly underneath the sitting-room.  If anyone came up the stairs I could have heard them and terminated my scientific curiosity.  But that first exploration led not to delight but to fear.  Things seemed to be progressing well when suddenly the vital part of me blew up in the middle with a bulge like a weakened bicycle inner tube.  The bulge was the size of – believe me – a golf ball, right there in the middle.  To my distressed imagination, if that bulge were a part of the event, the end result could very well be explosion.  I’d seen exploding cigars – not a pretty sight.

But fortunately the explorative spirit in mankind cannot be extinguished by minor setbacks.  I don’t know how, but that threatened disaster never arose again, and I went on to a happy and frequent involvement with myself.  Maybe, looking back it was a little too often.  I did look a bit pale, and it certainly was harder to run and jump aboard buses than it had been before masturbation.  So much so that after coming back from a camping holiday with Eddy, and just at the point where I was moving out of the most intense part of my love affair with myself, my mother sent me for a chest X ray, fearing I had TB.

The result proved my chest was okay, but I don’t think it got through to my mother.  I say this because one day soon after, she was waiting for me in the kitchen when I came home from school.  I had a key of my own to get in what we called the side door.  It was actually our front door, but we called it ‘side door’ because it was at the side of the greengrocery shop my father ran.  From the door a long passageway led the length of the shop to the stairs and the kitchen door.  The passage was usually piled high with sacks of potatoes or crates of oranges.  I made my way past these and found my mother doing ironing.  She hardly spoke, so I knew it was one of her silent times.

Gradually she began to get around to it by telling me she had changed the beds and put clean sheets on.  Then she said, “I’ve got a bone to pick with you. ”  My heart began to pound slightly, sort of first gear.  She had said that to me only once before in my life.  I had been about five or six at the time and still living in Amersham.  It was wartime and two of my cousins, Sylvia and Boysie, older than me, had been living with us in our tiny cottage next to the British Legion.  Directly behind the cottage was a field, and in part of the field was a fair sized orchard.  We had got into the orchard and picked pocketful’s of apples and ate them.  They were deliciously ripe, crisp and bursting with juice and flavour like only freshly picked apples can be.  I was absorbed in my third apple when distant shouts began.  The orchard belonged to some rich people who lived two doors up from us, and their gardener was fast approaching through the various fences.  Sid, another cousin, Sylvia and Boysie fled screaming, and I quickly got the feeling of the situation and fled too.  The only thing was my legs were shorter than theirs and those of the gardener.  He was shouting us to stop, and roaring about knowing who we were.  It was like one of those bad dreams where your legs feel as if they are moving in slow motion, while the rest of you desires to move at lightning speed.  The dream got worse when he caught me and I stood paralysed, still clasping some apples.  My cousins watched from the safe distance of a couple of hundred yards while he took my apples and threatened eruptions.  It was when I got home I heard those words “I’ve got a bone to pick with you.”  I had never heard the saying before, and my young mind raced through all its associations and imaginations to understand.  Understanding didn’t come until it was explained the gardener had paid a visit.  My mother was an great threat when towering in a rage, but she could tower for as well as against. And in this case I believe the gardener got the worst of it in the end for victimising a six year old.

But this time, as my mother ironed sheets, I did have an association with bone picking.  It meant I had done something wrong.  Thus the fight or flight reaction shoved my heart into first gear.  “You’ve been playing with yourself haven’t you,” she said.  It was not a question it was a statement. It didn’t mean anything to me anyway.  I knew what bone picking was now, but I didn’t know this one.  I told her so.  “You know what I mean” she said, “I’ve seen the marks on the sheets.”

Several things happened.  I put two and two together and they made four. My heart went into second gear, and I tried to swallow something that didn’t want to be swallowed, and made it difficult to talk.  It wasn’t what my mother had said, it was that she was now going into full erupt, and the power behind the words hit me.  “Please don’t do it – Please!  Daddy and I love you. Don’t you understand what you are doing to yourself?  Don’t you understand we don’t want to lose you?  We don’t want you to die? And if you keep on, you’ll die.  Do you understand that?  You’ll die!”

My heart had jumped straight into fourth, but my body still had the brake on.  It was a strange feeling to walk slowly out of that room almost paralysed, with a solid lump in my throat.  We never spoke about that again, ever.  It wasn’t necessary.  I had got the message.  It was only many years later that the pieces of the puzzle fell together because of something I heard on the wireless, making my mother’s intensity understandable.  She was obviously frightened I had TB. What I hadn’t understood was that in those days some people with TB had an overactive sexual activity that helped, in their condition, to deteriorate their health.  They died.  My mother was frightened I would kill myself on the old banjo, and from that day on, so was I.  So a battle of wills started, my will against myself. Previously I had never felt sex to be a problem, but it was now.  The fear of premature death had etched itself into my emotions.  Oh well, it was easily avoided.  All I needed to do was give up loving myself.  So I did.

But then in my sleep I began to make myself happy again, and would wake to find the act accomplished.  Up until then I had only been frightened, now I was scared stiff.  I had the awful feeling some horrible life-negating power possessed me, the Devil, so that even in my sleep I was not master of myself.  For a thirteen year old to face the realisation that we are largely only conduits for natural and biological drives to express through, and not individuals in our own right, was heavy going.  I believe this was one of the first steps that led me in later years to an exploration of yoga.  It also eventually led me to realise that when we set ourselves against our own nature as I did, we create a devil, perhaps even the Devil, because of the fear, temptation, struggle and division we create in ourselves.

None of those fine points really bothered me at the time.  I was in on the fight, and my reaction to the insidious sleep invasions on my decision to stop was to wear tight pants in bed.  The difficulty of dealing with the tight pants woke me up and I reinforced my waking decision, even though the part of me that lived while I slept complained like hell.  Anyway, tight pants and abdominal tension won the day.  But can you ever win against yourself?  It was a paradoxical victory that for eight years I never masturbated or had a wet dream.

Nevertheless, victories are victories.  Having discovered my newly fledged willpower, even if it was born of fear, I realised I had a power for change in my life.  So where do we go from here?

Remember, I was looking in the mirror.  So what if I did look a bit round shouldered, spotty and narrow chested.  Hadn’t I conquered Old Nick himself with all his temptations?  If I could master Himself with a pair of tight pants and a little muscular tension, I could surely do something with a pair of undecided shoulders and an unforthcoming chest.  I might even be able to do something with my hairy legs.  They didn’t matter as much because I had to get near to the mirror and look down into it to see them. But perhaps I could get them a suntan or something.

By the way, I have to explain that in one of the left hand cupboards as I faced that mirror, central above the gas fire, I kept my collection of Tarzan books and comics.  Just after the war few, if any, were in print, but I had scoured the bookshops in Charing Cross Road to swell my stock, which I read with great intent and seriousness.

My true self, I knew, was hidden to casual observers by my appearance of thinness, and deceptively pale face.  This hidden self was only revealed to close friends like Eddy who could take the revelation without nervous laughter. During daylight my disguise was in full force.  I purposely avoided looking people fully in the eye at that time, lest the proud fire and certainty alight in my own eyes shocked them. But at night I could slip silent and unseen through the London back streets, using all the jungle craft and amazingly finely trained senses I had acquired from the deep intimacy of days spent with Tarzan, Lord of the jungle.

There were two big problems in being a silent deadly predator roaming London’s streets at night, looking in at lighted windows with a sneer at the poor civilised folk inside who didn’t know what it was like to run wild and free with the wolf pack. (Oh, I forgot to tell you I had read Mowgli and been one of the wolf pack before I was a colleague of Tarzan’s.)  Firstly, I had to be home before nine-thirty so as to rise fresh for school.  The second problem was that I didn’t want to remain hidden.  I wanted everyone to know what a tiger I really was – especially girls and my father.

There was a boy at school, Martin Stevens, who was shorter than I was, wore glasses, which I didn’t, but could lope like a wolf for mile after mile, which I couldn’t.  Our school was Marylebone Secondary, a small building in Marylebone High Street, with a graveyard next to its playground.  From there we sometimes went for cross-country runs in Regents Park.  Although I was slim and agile, with longer legs than Martin, the run always ended with Martin in front running along with as much ease as if he were out for a Sunday afternoon stroll, and me creasing myself to keep up with Fatty Atkinson and half blind Skinny Arkle at the end.  It honestly didn’t sit down easily with the tiger in me.

Martin also had broad shoulders and muscles bulging all over his bronzed body.  I asked him once how he got to be like that.  He said he was born like it.  Can you imagine it though, mother’s baby peering out owlishly from behind its glasses while it ripples its Herculean muscle?  As an afterthought though, he showed me a monstrous rock which for some obscure reason just happened to be in his tatty Hampstead Road garden.  He told me that from early childhood he kept attempting to lift that rock.  Eventually he managed it.  He actually demonstrated while I was there.  Veins bulged on his neck and temples like he was going to blow a fuse, but he did it.  I believe I had a go afterwards, but I mercifully forget the details.

I think it was in the Hotspur comic published then, there was a character called Wilson who did this rock-lifting stunt in his childhood. I suppose old Martin had read it too.  I remember Wilson could put himself in a trance and be frozen in a block of ice, as well as out-wrestle, out-box, outrun or outwit all the other people he met.  Strangely, Wilson was a very slim intellectual looking guy with keen blue eyes. I was forgetting I had fought and thought my way through all Wilson’s adventures too.  I liked him.  He could tap the powers of the mind as well as the body.  While he was in that block of ice he went into meditation and caused his body heat to rise so much it melted the ice. He didn’t need to breathe because he had mastered breath control more than any yogi.  Maybe that’s where I got the idea from as to what I could do with myself as I stood in front of the mirror.

Somehow that inner tiger had to be let out.  From my mother I had got self-restraint and a passionate involvement in whatever I was interested in.  From Tarzan I had learned to love my body and feel the pleasure of its capabilities.  Mowgli had given me the gift of finding the balance between the wild animal in me and civilised manhood.  Wilson? Well he had acquired all his abilities by training himself hour after long month.  Heaving rocks was a gift from Martin.

As I stood in front of the mirror all those influences surged and arranged themselves in me.  Suddenly I knew what I would do. It was difficult, but if I could meet the devil and win, I could do this.  I would stop riding the bus- back to school at dinner – time and walk instead.  And while I walked I would practise deep breathing exercises. This would be my first step.  Wasn’t it Wilson who had been a sickly child who had regenerated himself through years of training?  Eventually he achieved amazing self-mastership.  That was good enough for me.  I would get there too.  Fatty Atkinson and Skinny Arkle would have to put up with running at the back by themselves.

I started my regime the very next day.  The old habit, started in my childhood, died hard.  I still did not like school dinners so rode the 18 or 30 buses from Harley Street to Euston Station to eat at midday.  But now I began to walk back the two miles instead of busing. My system was to breathe in as I walked three steps, hold my breath for one step, then breathe out for three steps.  To keep this up for two miles took concentration.  Quite a few people stared at me as I paced up the Euston Road.  I don’t think it was just the regular paces and breathing that drew the stares.  There were finer points to the practise.  To really exercise the chest one had to breathe in and out fully.  Breathing right out, as far as I was concerned, meant collapsing the chest down as far as it would go.  This gave me a rather crumpled up bent over appearance.  On the other hand, breathing right in meant expanding the chest as high as it would go, starting the breath in the abdomen, and ending by raising the shoulders so the top lobes of the lungs were filled.  As I was pacing along I would go through the cycle every seven paces of being bent over, gradually straightening up and throwing out my 32’’ chest, then lifting my shoulders up to my ears.  I suppose it must have looked strange to passers by, but nobody actually stopped me and asked me what I was doing.

Anyway, who cared, the results were terrific.  In the first week I gained an amazing one inch on my chest.  During the next fortnight I gained another inch, and at longer intervals other inches crowded on. True I got some pretty good chest pains as my rib cage was dragged willy-nilly into expanded existence.  But it was a wonderful feeling to know that I could alter my condition, that I could, through my own efforts, become something other than I was.  I was so impressed I took the next step.

You already have the basic idea of the shape of our house. Looking at it from the street, first was the shop, with our side door on the right. Behind the shop was our kitchen, about a third the size of the shop.       The passage ran from the side door, past the kitchen, down a few steps to the toilet and a back door leading to a small smoke-blackened garden.  The first and second floors also had a big front room and a smaller back room, and right on top was a large attic which my cousin Sylvia slept in, as her parents lived on the second floor.

Right down underneath was an enormous basement.  Its big front room was the size of the shop plus all the area taken up by the passage.  This led, in the front, to big coal cellars underneath the street.

They had manholes to drop the coal through.  I found a rusted shotgun, air rifle and other delights in these.  But at the back of the basement was a bathroom with a huge boiler in one corner.  The latter was just an enormous earthenware bowl with a fireplace underneath.  In this way clothes could be boiled and laundered.  It was the washing machine of the times.  We often used it.

From the bathroom large folding doors opened into an area, a walled in square pit, at the back of the house.  And from this, underneath the toilet on the ground floor, was another cellar.  This was full of many things, mostly vacuum cleaner hoses.  My Uncle Tony, second eldest of my father’s brothers, had a good thing going during the war selling renovated vacuums.  I believe he started by selling new Hoovers.  He travelled all over the country in a little Morris Seven trying to sell cleaners.  But he discovered that if the customer wasn’t interested in a new Hoover, they were often very interested in a cheaper renovated cleaner.  In the end he sold so many second-hand cleaners he left Hoovers and set up his own business, and the hoses were the results of some black market deal.  He had sold a lot but there were still a lot left.  And underneath those I discovered a set of James Grose weights. My Uncle Lou had been a bodybuilding enthusiast in his youth and had left his weights in the cellar.  I can still remember the magic of that find, and all the million remembered events it led me to.

So that was my next step.  I didn’t have a handy rock in my garden, but I certainly had weights in the cellar.  I took them out, wire-brushed the rust off, gave them a coat of blue paint, and started exercising in the bathroom.  The results weren’t quite as explosive as my chest growth, but things did start happening.  I began to develop obvious and well-formed muscles.  The whole thing got to me so much I carried a tape measure around with me and measured my biceps and chest once or twice a day.

I really believe this was only blatantly a check on how big my muscles were growing.  Deep down was the fear that if I didn’t keep an eye on them, these delightful additions to my appearance might surreptitiously melt away.  After being a nobody so long, boys in my class were beginning to put me in the same category as Martin and Do-Do Gray. I still couldn’t run like Martin, but I could keep pace with Fatty Atkinson and Skinny Arkle and look beautiful.  I couldn’t fight like Do Do, but I certainly looked rough and tough and tigerish.  It was a good feeling to have boys come up and ask to see and put their hands around my biceps, or bring a friend along to admire the show, and go away looking at their own arms.  I was even chosen for team games now. I didn’t play any better, but I joined the team class and maybe even frightened the smaller members of the other team.

 Before and After

There was only one small cloud in my otherwise blue sky.  One day as I stood in the bathroom stripped to the waist doing a vigorous exercise, I noticed strange wheezing noises coming out of my chest.  It was actually caused by the air being pumped in and out of the lungs by powerful movement instead of breathing.  I didn’t know that at the time, and there were other factors that tipped my imagination into the negative.

My mother’s pre-occupation with TB for instance.  Also, in that very bathroom I had witnessed something that didn’t help me.  Nick, my Italian grandfather, had been a widower for years when we moved to London after the war.  Living with him as his friend he had a very big built Italian woman, Maria.  She was a handsome and impressive woman in the way an opera singer of the old type was.  I remember she always dressed very smartly.  Well, one day there was a crowd of us in the bathroom, Maria, my mother, my Aunt Millie – Sylvia’s mother from upstairs – and myself.  It was washday and everybody was sorting out what to put in the copper to boil.  I was having a great time looking after the fire to boil up the water.  Then suddenly Maria began to scream and clutch her ample chest and look as if she was choking.  Panic and confusion reigned, but somebody got a chair and Maria was sat on it.  I don’t know what I was doing, probably standing open-mouthed and wide-eyed. All I can remember is what I saw and heard, as if I were everybody else and not myself.  I was so involved.  Then Maria managed to ask for some tablets she had.  When these were taken things began to calm again and I learned that this was a heart attack.  Afterwards I heard that Maria had already experienced some of these attacks, and if she had many more they would kill her.  So as far as I was concerned that’s what it looked like when death clutched at you.  It went for the chest. That time she evaded it.  It didn’t always get you when it came.

Also I had a mongrel dog about that time.  He wasn’t far off being as old as I was, so was a big part of my life.  I had taught him a number of things, like shutting the door.  He rushed at it and leapt, slamming the door.  His name was Bucky, but some people called him Fucky, because he was very keen in that direction.  It was difficult when women in fur coats sat in our house, because Buck took them for bitches and made love to their legs.  Once, as Millie was scrubbing the side doorstep a bitch walked by and Bucky leapt straight over Millie onto that bitch.

I had taught him to leap over the wall at the end of the garden. It was very high but he ran up it and managed to clamber over into the waste land beyond.  We spent hours together there.  But one day as we went over the wall I saw his back legs were less agile than usual. Shortly after that he couldn’t make that wall at all.  He had hardpad, and Buck was put down.  That evening when the shop was closed and we sat in the kitchen together, Mum, Dad and myself, we looked at each other and all burst into tears.  We talked about Buck and cried like that for a long time, remembering his peculiarities.  How he loved to look out of Millie’s window, and if he saw us coming along the street he would run barking to the stairs and launch himself down them to the side door. Ah well, he was dead.

Death comes to all of us – but if that was it making noises in my chest, I was going to squirm as hard as I could to break loose.  But it wasn’t easy.  Soon afterwards I discovered I’d got a pain in my chest just about where my heart was.  Things began to look bad, I thought. At thirteen I was too young to die.  Well, I would go to the doctor.

Our doctor was a woman of very large proportions.  Not only was she tall, but she had enormous breasts and everything else to go with it. Also she looked as if she washed so frequently you could almost see through her skin.  I had never been to the doctor by myself before. When my turn came I went in, explained about my chest pain – a sort of stabbing, aching pain, and was asked to strip to the waist.  I was pleased about that.  Even if I was deathly ill, she could see I had fought it all the way with my firm muscular body.  I think her name was Kathleen.  Her hands were as clean as the rest of her.  She listened, probed and tapped, then sat back quietly looking at me.  I sat expectantly, almost happily, waiting for the diagnosis.  She asked me how old I was and why I had come.  Then suddenly she got really angry and said I was a bloody hypochondriac.  I hurriedly put on my tee shirt again, and pursued by further invective about needing to be ashamed of myself being a hypochondriac at my age, I fled.

I didn’t know what a hypochondriac was, but she hadn’t acted as if it were any immediate threat.  Maybe it was a slower death than heart attacks or hardpad.  In that case I might last for ages.  I might even reach my twenties.  My chest pain eased.  It was good to be alive, being a hypochondriac in the bloom of youth wasn’t such a bad thing.

When I got home the dictionary told me the problem was not in the body but in the soul. So? Well, if I could develop a bigger chest through deep breathing maybe there were things people did to their soul to liven it up. If there were, I would do it.