WarriorQueen – I know it is difficult for us to see our dream characters as anything other than outside of us, but think for while. All the negative feelings you are expressing about your family are real and move you, and continue to move you as powerfully as any outside influence.
From our family we learn most of the positive and negative patterns of relationship and attitudes towards living, which we carry into daily events. Father’s uncertainty in dealing with people, or his anxiety in meeting change, may be the roots of our own difficulties in those areas. If our mother is unable to develop a feeling contact with us, we will lack the experience of being able to love unless we learn it in other relationships.
Our maturing process calls us to in some way meet and integrate our childhood desire, which includes sexual desire, for our parent of the opposite sex, and rivalry mingled with dependence, with parent of the same sex. Even a missing parent, the mother or father who died or left, is a potent figure internally. An absence of a father or mother’s love or presence can be as traumatic as any powerfully injuring event. Our parents in our dreams are an image, full of power and feeling, of the formative forces and experiences that created our identity. They are the ground, the soil, the bloody carnage, out of which our sense of self emerged. But our identity cannot gain any real independence while still dominated by these internal forces of our creation. Heraclitus said we cannot swim in the same river twice. Attempting to repeat or compete with the virtues of a parent is a misapprehension of the true nature of our own personality. See: individuation.
So, your dream! Sitting in your car as the driver is a sign that you are not being led by other people’s will. But the care moving by itself is a very powerful message. In a sense non of move ourselves. I cannot quote all the research on that, but a quick look at yourself will give you an idea. Almost all of you is unconscious. I know we dismiss it with our modern medical view of our body being a sort of unconscious factory that does its thing – and the important part is what we call ourselves. But that isn’t so, and our little self is almost powerless, unless it works well with the massive powers of the unconscious – which is not at all unconscious but is a world largely hidden from our conscious selves.
So, as I have said elsewhere - In life and sleep we have two powerful actions working in us. The first is our waking experience based on having a body, its limitations, vulnerabilities and a particular gender. Our second is the power that gave us life and continues to express as dreams.
While we sleep our conscious self is largely or totally unconscious, and while we sleep our voluntary muscles are paralysed – so another will or motivating force moves our body. So we have a Conscious Will, and what I will call a Life Will. The first one we have experience of as we can move our arm or speak; but the second will takes over when we sleep.
This Life will can move us to speak, to move our body, and in fact do things that we cannot do with our Conscious Will. As Freud pointed out this inner will has full access to our memories. It can do so many other things that are described else where – See ESP in Dreams; Edgar Cayce.
So I feel your enquiry into your dreams is showing that you are being moved by your Life Will to some extent. The scene with you and your sister in law is about wanting to get the loving influence away from the family influence. And the fact they all came out was also the influence of the Life Will showing you the influence they had on you. Don’t forget that such influences become habits. This is why it says that you should honour your father and mother. It says this because they are so much a part of you, that to not sort it out you will be left crippled. So it isn’t accepting their weakness but almost like digesting it so what is healthy can be built into you, and what is not can be passed out.
I believe the threat to leave was another way for you to see what was done. I had it done to me and it influenced me for years. The after effects are not to trust anyone entirely.
I know I say such things over and over, but it is important to live ‘as if’. It is a way of gradually restructuring your life – to live as if you are loved and happy. A hard one but every little pays off.
What would you say as the invisible boy – perhaps that though you are never seen, you are a powerful influence?
Tony