Hostility

Direct expression of that feeling. It is worthwhile considering who or what the dream suggests you feel hostile toward. In general the most powerful hostile feelings are those generated in our infancy toward parents. As an adult these feelings of hostility project onto any person we make a close emotional bond with, so need to be met if one is to become an adequate person in relationship with an adult of the opposite sex. Unconscious hostility may cause one to remain at a mystic or idealistic level of relationship with the opposite sex, causing difficulty in meeting the real individual. Or occasionally the hostility becomes actual physical aggressive acts. Unconscious hostility also influences our relationships with social authority making it difficult to relate to any authority figure in an easy confident way. Often in dreams however there is an expression of anger we have withheld in our daily life.

However, it must be remembered that aggression or fear – fight or flight – is a fundamental response to threat. Animals constantly practice aggressive acts, or acts of flight, to be ready for actual threat. The more threatening our environment becomes or appears to us, the more fantasies or dreams of aggression we will experience. If not that, then we may become passive and withdrawn or hopeless, which is another form of response to external aggression or fear of it. Therefore some dreams of aggression, whether practised against someone else, or upon oneself, may have their origins in external threat or fear of it. Such dreams or fantasies may be a form of preparation, a practising, as with animals, to ready us to defend ourselves or find an escape from the threat or an appropriate response to it.

Hostility toward society or authority may be directed inwards and become self destructive. Social hostility leads to inability to express adequately in the world. Introverted hostility can cause illness and lack of self value. Meeting anger, aggression and hostility does not mean suppressing it or expressing it socially.

Many of us have become, in the words of W. V. Caldwell, the author of LSD Psychotherapy, ‘hostility cripples’. As human animals, anger and aggression are natural, but growing in a society which, although it practices the most terrible aggression at a national level, suppresses individual aggression, makes it difficult for us to lead these urges toward maturity. Maturity in love is often talked about, but not maturity in hate. It helps if we can recognise whether we are repressing aggressions or hostility in our dreams. If anger is felt but not expressed in a dream, then use the technique explained in processing dreams, in which you carry the dream forward, and express in imagination the emotions held back. This should begin the process of more expressive anger in ones dreams, allowing the maturing of the aggression to begin. Raw aggression transforms into assertiveness when it is helped to mature by meeting it in a therapeutic way.

If you meet a lot of anger in a dream and do not know how to safely release it, a helpful technique is to take a tennis racquet or rolled up newspaper and while holding it, beat a mattress or cushions with it. The aim is to allow the feelings to flow into the movement. It often helps to shout out what you feel as if you were telling the person who originally angered you. If you don’t know who the originator of the anger was, use the image of the person or situation in the dream that provoked the anger. See: anger.

“Our society is full of hostility cripples who are incapable of defending themselves or anyone else. Somewhere in their maturation they became so overwhelmed with the burden of guilt and suppression that they lacked the psychic energy to go on. And no wonder, considering the obstacle course which society erects in their path. It extends from mother’s admonitions that one must love baby sister, through the chorus of teachers chirping that good little boys and girls don’t fight, through Sunday school with Jesus turning the other cheek, right down to the personnel manager’s insistence on cooperation and good fellowship. The victim of all these ministrations finally can’t say no to a glass of water without a pang of guilt.

Yet for all its official moral claims, society has utterly failed in excluding from its ranks competition and combat, and the need of every individual to fight for his daily existence. Men and women who have not developed some patterns of hostility are hopelessly outclassed in the competition for life’s rewards. But there are different ways of fighting.”

Example: As I talked about my mother, she was standing before me in full anger and blaming me for bringing out the witch in her. She said look at my eyes, they were horrid to see, all red and angry and she was dark. Hy.

Example: My father was giving me and another woman some medicine. Something was being forced on us. I started to hit and punch him in the genitals and when he was facing the other way, in the backside. I seemed to be just the right height to do this and I had a very angry feeling that I wanted to hurt him as he had hurt me. Barbara G.

Useful Questions and Hints:

Do you know what your anger is about?

If not get to the bottom of it by asking yourself what was the very first time you felt it?

Can I let myself express anger without feeling it has to be on someone?

Do you realise you were programmed?

See Programmed – Life’s Little Secrets – Opening to Life – Dream Yoga – Summing Up