Matt – Thanks for that account, do you have any recollection of the race of you and the man with the hatchet – I presume it was a man?
In LifeStream I lived through a mass of death scenes. One of them I was a prisoner in the First World War. I had been captured by the Germans and my feet were tortured and then I was strapped face down on a bed and buggered by a number of people. After that I felt s if I as a person was also buggered. But then I hit another level of it and realised that it was like lucid dream, and it was all symbols of something I didn’t want to face up to. The First WW came about because my uncle had given me volumes or photographs of the war; I was about twelve at the time. It became a symbol of the first inner conflict I faced, in which I had a terrible battle with my sexuality, and had killed it stone dead. That was the torture, and being buggered was that having not outlet for my youthful sexual feelings they had all turned back on me – as it were I had f*****d myself up. The awful thing to face was that it was what I had done to myself, to kill the youthful self I could have been.
Later I dreamt of finding a dead body in a hole behind a house I was living in. I want to explain this in depth as it is an example of what emerges as you learn to identify with the dream characters. So forgive me for saying so much.
I started by being identified with the house. As such I described myself as one of those typically English suburban houses that are so like all the other houses near them; the great semidetached suburbia. And that was the type of house my parents moved into when they left London. That was my background, my social background. In being the house I realised that it represented the way people remain lost in the way everybody else lives. Going into such houses you see the same thing over and over. They have the same furniture, the same TV and armchair. This is England, and this was the environment and mental world I grew up in.
On exploring my feelings about my parents, I described and felt them as subtle background influences to my present life. They did not actually appear in my dream, and I described them as still existing influences, particularly in the sense of their lives which did not diverge much from the norm. By that I mean they in no way lived alternative lifestyles, not in diet, not in work, not in any way that I could see sexually. Again, here was the background I grew from. The area of their daring was in their marriage; this because the country girl who was my mother had fallen in love with a foreigner and dared to marry him – and he with her.
So in considering my parents they seemed to particularly emphasise that in some way my own life had diverged. This started when I was quite young, about 13 when I began to be interested in yoga. It then became greater toward the end of my twenties when I met G. L. and entered into the experiences of a very different life style.
The environment in which the house stood also had the feel, and deepened my sense of this suburbia as a background to what the rest of the dream was saying.
But it wasn’t until I got into the role of the dead body that any depth of feelings emerged. Almost as soon as I was in the role of the dead body I began to think about and feel things connected with the way I had killed my sexuality as a teenager. Gradually these feelings deepened and I was describing my feeling hatred in regard to sexuality and how the masses were pulled along by their genitals into some sort of conformity and performance. I felt anger and loathing for what I felt at the time were the cattle human beings were. I saw the people lining up to visit prostitutes and how people were helpless and controlled by their genitals - men and women.
I despised and hated them. I also felt repugnance at the way people talked about sex or appeared to enjoy it. It has to be understood that in that period in history in the UK, most of sex was depicted in terms of smut, dirt, animal desire, hidden pornography, or loveless f*****g.
I wept deeply, at times hardly able to breathe, and crying, with the pain of seeing what I had done to myself. I said sorry over and over. I saw that I need not have killed my love and sexuality, but could have expressed it in a tender and loving way.
I explored it and met the pain of killing my sexuality utterly, as well as all the attendant feelings about the common herd who are dragged by their genitals into loveless relationships - exactly what I was dragged into by the fact I had utterly killed all genital sensation for all those years.
I was able to follow the tracks back - once again - to my own actions, killing any contact with my mother. But then being treated like an alien in my own home town, and seeing my peers treat incoming refuges from the war in Europe like shit. As an 'Iti' I identified with them and felt 'different'. And was whipped across my face with a horse whip by a neighbour – me being about 7. Apart from which I seemed to be carrying this desire never to be like the 'herd' from the long past.
The body in the hole was that of the me I would have grown into if I had not murdered that beautiful part of me. In the UK at the time, and in my youth, sex was nearly always about dirt, smut, a quick f***, and hidden but rampant pornography and homosexuality. I wanted nothing to do with it. I wanted nothing to do with the manipulation via sexual desire that was going on around me. But of course, it need not have been like that, but I had no other role model at the time, so I did a terrible thing to myself. Also I lost all respect for my elders as in none of them could I see that gentleness of love. My schoolteachers were thrashing children with rods. The world was killing each other in tens of thousands. My mother had psychologically castrated me out of her fears for me, and my father hardly ever even spoke to me. So I divorced the world, and of course lost that wonderful quality of compassion for the human struggle. In the process I threw myself into the volcano of fighting the forces of life itself. I fought God and won, but was mortally wounded in the combat.
Here I stand, a wiser and hopefully gentler man.
Killing myself hadn't been a painless and easy death. I went and tried to explain some of it to my son, as he was born in the middle of that battleground, to two people who were essentially emotionally dead; though at that time I was fighting like mad to come alive again. Then later I came to check, only to find I was too late. Story of my life; too late to be a decent father; too late too change to rescue my marriage with my wife; too late to deal with my sexual misery to maintain my marriage with my second wife.
No need to counteract any of this. The fires are still burning in me and best to let the heat and smoke out. God, it is humbling to see how we create our life, step by step, and brick by brick. And then often we bemoan our fate instead of admitting our liability. But I have lifted and held that buried body, and taken it into my own that it can know life.
Tony