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Dreams => Dream Interpretation => Topic started by: Omega on April 03, 2016, 01:48:51 PM

Title: Doctor
Post by: Omega on April 03, 2016, 01:48:51 PM
I discover a wound on my upper arm, I think it's jam and pull congealed red material away but it must be blood. Beneath a circular hole in the skin, raw flesh shows exposed beneath. A dark haired man appears, youngish, he says he's a doctor and needs to cut it open I don't want him to I say Why? And can't we leave it? He looks too casual to be a doctor. He's very insistent, I'm scared and don't want him to do it, I'm afraid it will hurt and that it's not even necessary at all. It's like he just wants to experiment rather than heal me. I wake up scared heart thumping, takes me three hours to return to sleep.

Being the thing:
Guy/'doctor' - I am power. I can do what I like. I don't care if it hurts you.
Wound - I am wound. No skin to protect. Open access to inner. I am a hurt and I attract more problems because of existing.
Title: Re: Doctor
Post by: Tony Crisp on April 06, 2016, 02:36:25 PM
Omega – Firstly, it is all taking place within you, and as you dream does not have anything much to do with waking life. But it does show a great deal about your inner attitudes which obviously then can create outer world events.

The Guy/Doctor is obviously a liar to say he can do as he like – unless of course you allow him, a part of you to do so. You have the power to choose in the inner world, though it is often difficult to do so outwardly -  but even so it is your choice. Maybe past events have ‘programmed’ you to react feeling you have no choice.

I am not saying this because I only know confidence in my life. I say it because I know the way. “Quite soon afterwards, still dreaming, the sound of a door creaking open made me sit up. Then from behind me two black men who looked as if they had risen out of a grave with flesh peeling off them approached me. I quickly made the sign of the cross and said some sort of holy words and the figures disappeared. I lay back again thinking it was a good thing I knew how to get rid of them. But as soon as I settled to sleep again the door creaked open and the two figures appeared once more. This time all my hand waving and words had no effect on their advance, and their hands closed around my throat and I woke screaming in terror. My wife, feeling my fear, got up and we switched on all the lights.”

That was my terror, and it took many years to face it. I didn’t know how then – remember I was born in 1937 and there were no web sites with people sharing their experiences. I had to grope and experiment.
To quote from Peer Dream Work, slightly altered, “The suggestions that follow have arisen from fifty years of dream work.

The foundations of this practice rest on an understanding, or a standpoint accepted or taken by the listener and perhaps the dreamer. It is you are an expression of life. Let’s forget anything about dream theory, because the very first step is to form an attitude to what is in fact you. Here is a being, you, a little chunk of life, and at the core of this living being, this living process, a process that has developed a sense of self, is the stuff of life. It is the stuff that makes heroes and saints, mothers, fathers, friends and foes. It is the essence from which arises the whole thrust of life. It is the living core of creative possibilities. If you look around you at what life does, you can see it can be a multitude of things. It can manifest as a lion or a flea, a giraffe or a tree. It is, at the same time, both a galaxy and an amoeba. And here it is, you, as a living example of the miracle of Life.”

Honestly Omega, you have it in you. So please try facing that idiotic part of you that says he has control of you – use http://dreamhawk.com/dream-encyclopedia/secrets-power-dreaming/

Tony
Title: Re: Doctor
Post by: Omega on April 06, 2016, 09:22:33 PM
Thankyou Tony.
As ever in these situations, there is usually a context which makes it difficult/impossible to protect myself. I am usually in a situation where I am outnumbered/ over-powered by far superior physical strength/ isolated/ paralysed or mute so I can't call on help. But in the link 'Power Dreaming'.. "Dreams are simply feelings put into images" - therefore these contexts, must be my feelings of powerlessness, manifested in the dream world.

I realise with this type of dream in particular, I am always feel very reluctant to do the extra layer of work, remembering it is bad enough. But I guess I need to push myself towards that confrontation.

Well as I can't get lucid in my dreams, the power dreaming method is my only option and waking life as well of course.

So if I want to create more beauty and bliss in life, is this the first step, confronting fears and healing wounds?
Is life stream the other part? Is there more?

Thankyou!  :)
Title: Re: Doctor
Post by: Tony Crisp on April 07, 2016, 11:40:19 AM
Omega - It is already explained so clearly in the myths and fairy stories. The sleeping beauty is an excellent example.

The young Prince (conscious mind), hears a legend (in-definite feelings from within) about a beautiful princess (the core) who lies asleep in a castle with all her attendants and family (the castle is the body, the attendants is ones potential not awakened). The young Prince seeks for the castle that he may find the Princess (he looks within himself to find the core within). He finds a way to it and sees it to be surrounded by weeds and huge briars, making immediate entry impossible (when we look within to find the core we first uncover all our fears, prejudices, ignorance and illusions etc. - our Karma). These he cuts down with his sword to make a path to the Princess. (We have to rid ourselves of all these barriers to the core-in earth time it may take many years). At last he comes to the Princess and sees how truly beautiful she is, worth all his efforts. He kisses her, and she slowly awakens. As she wakes, so also do all her family and attendants. (When we have cleared away our ignorance and illusions we begin to sense our core, and realise that it is indeed the long awaited BELOVED being returned to us. The conscious mind then begins to touch the unconsciousness of the core, this is the Prince kissing the Princess. As this contact is made, consciousness brings awareness or realisation to the unconscious potential, love and wisdom. The process is gradual, and with it the powers, wisdom and love of the soul also begin to manifest and awake.)

Your dream also is part of a Mythological Story you are writing - but you are still journeying through by experiencing it in time and space. When you have made the whole journey you will see your own version of it. At the moment you are at the briars - the guy/doctor is a figure created out of your own feelings of fear and vulnerability.

Tony
Title: Re: Doctor
Post by: - anna - on April 07, 2016, 12:33:45 PM

Dear Omega - I had a dream in June 2013 that helped/helps me understand what my fear was about.
Perhaps it helps you too?

There is a memory of what it is like to live close to what I feel inside. With every step I take I come closer to that memory.
I grab into something in which thorns are. I go through a door and look at my finger. I see what I reckon are small splinters in the index finger of my left hand.

When I sqeeuze around my finger with my right hand, two large thorns come out very easily, which I had not expected, as in neither that they were thorns, nor that they would come out so easily.


Anna  :)
Title: Re: Doctor
Post by: Omega on April 07, 2016, 04:23:37 PM
Thank-you Tony.
Title: Re: Doctor
Post by: Omega on April 07, 2016, 04:28:30 PM
Thankyou Anna. How did this dream help you? What were the emotions? Do you mean it was 'living close' because you were able to self-heal within the dream?

I had a dream some time back about Cacti, huge like you see in cartoons..cut down and floating like logs on a small stream. I was at an art event among artists and the public. One of the cacti brushed my hand and a few tiny spines became embedded in my finger. I looked at them closely wondering how Id get them out as they were hooked in. The dream zoomed in like a camera lense then, focusing on these things stuck in my finger and probably hurting.
It was not a strongly emotional dream but really drew my curiosity because of the imagery.
Title: Re: Doctor
Post by: - anna - on April 07, 2016, 05:53:57 PM

Omega - This dream was part of my process towards daring to work with LifeStream.
In order to survive as a child I had chosen to repress my feelings and allowing any painful feelings scared the shit out of me.
This dream helped me to understand - if only in a rational way at first - that allowing the painful feelings does not mean that I will be in pain for the rest of my life.
It was as if my child self still lived in this "timeless state of mind" where it saw everything as "lasting forever"
and so this part of me was very resistant towards allowing her pain.

There were no emotions yet in the dream, because I was not ready yet to "feel"; I was merely preparing and so I did not self-heal in the dream yet either.
Mind you, I started working on my dreams with Tony in the Forum in April 2013 and so I was still at the very beginning of this part of my inner journey.

I see your dream story - I like the idea of a cartoon  :) - as exploring LifeStream; "cut down and floating like logs on a small stream".
While allowing the flow, you feel hurt and/or irritated and you are not sure yet how to let go of these feelings.

I see the Forum as "an art event" too where we can learn to use our creative abilities and imagination and I trust that you will find your way to let go of "these things stuck in my finger and probably hurting".

Because you also mention your perception of "a cartoon", perhaps drawing and/or painting will be helpful for you too?
For a few years I have used watercolour painting  as a means to explore my inner world, and I have perceived it as incredibly helpful to express myself while not having to use words.
To me it is a form of release too.

Anna  :)

Title: Re: Doctor
Post by: Omega on April 07, 2016, 09:19:02 PM
Great thankyou for your reply Anna.

I will just pick up on one point that may be useful to other readers.
Since I began my healing journey all I have heard is that I need to 'let go' - let go, let go, let go
however letting go is the end of the process and not the beginning.
Letting go happens of its own accord as the result of proper processing.

What I have discovered is, like you mention, I actually couldn't face the pain. So on many levels I was delighted to 'let go' because that meant not seeking the truth, no conflict, no accountability.. no need for anger, no need to stand up for myself, no need for scary emotions.

What was really missing for me was a whole range of other emotions -
I'd been 'letting it go' my whole life - but I needed to do the opposite, to take my pain seriously.

So that's where I am right now - finally saying my pain is important it matters and I'll do no more letting go or letting people away with behaviour and not holding them accountable. Some of us are not trapped in the past - because we're the opposite we have completely blotted it out. So what I'm letting go of is my Amnesia. Some people need to let go of the past - others need to go and find it.

I like the idea of dreams as preparing us for emotions, directing us slowly..

Thanks for your post. It's helpful to me.
Title: Re: Doctor
Post by: Tony Crisp on April 08, 2016, 10:17:37 AM
Wonderful.

And thank you writing it out so clearly.

Tony
Title: Re: Doctor
Post by: - anna - on April 08, 2016, 12:10:23 PM
Quote
You wrote; "Since I began my healing journey all I have heard is that I need to 'let go' - let go, let go, let go."

Omega - I wonder if you can see that these people are merely reflecting your own repressor.

What I see is that these people helped you to become aware of your inner conflict between the part inside you that is the  repressor - "What I have discovered is, like you mention, I actually couldn't face the pain" - and the part that is the repressed - "What was really missing for me was a whole range of other emotions -
I'd been 'letting it go' my whole life."

With awareness growing I have often understood that what I had perceived as "people not having a clue about how to approach my inner world" were actually those who tried to help me see - although often unconsciously - what I was doing already to myself.

If we can agree that "blotting it out" has to do with not being aware, then we can  be trapped in the present too by approaching our inner and outer life without looking at what we are doing to ourselves Now.

For more than 2 years I have practiced becoming aware of how I relate to myself, my inner world and others in the "Now" and it has provided me with very valuable means to do what you perceive as helpful too;
Quote
proper processing.

To me "proper" also means that I can take back what I have projected because I can see it as part of my own approach as well; http://dreamhawk.com/dream-dictionary/projection/

Anna  :)
Title: Re: Doctor
Post by: - anna - on April 08, 2016, 02:55:56 PM

Omega - What is very helpful to me as well is to look at "missing a whole range of emotions" from the perspective of Dan Siegel;

http://www.drdansiegel.com/books/mindsight/

It is an eye opener!!

Anna  :)


Title: Re: Doctor
Post by: Omega on April 08, 2016, 04:56:44 PM
I take the point about people reflecting what I am doing internally, up to a point.

However they are also independent individuals making choices and this dynamic is happening on a huge level culturally, not just in my world.

The 'bully' is painted as an 'insecure' individual who deserves compassion. They are not self aware, they make other people carry their pain and more. Very rarely are they made to face themselves.

Meanwhile all the victims, reflect, study, try to heal, take responsibility, withdraw their 'projections'
There are a lot if people making Alot of money, by telling people to take responsibility for their 'projections'


I feel people who have been victimised in their lives are further victimised, by being told they are responsible because it is their projection that's the big problem. That's the point it stops being empowering and becomes disempowering - because other people are not being made accountable and are let off the hook entirely.

Even if the waking world is seen entirely as a projection, that doesn't mean I should accept any of it. I should fight, argue, refuse etc.. However everytime projection has been used by any healer/writer I have come across - it's used to dismiss and invalidate. Oh that 'just' a projection etc so I lose any righteous anger I may have had and slink back into self-analysis.

I feel this type of focus on withdrawing projections goes too far. There is a central point of balance and more clarity is sorely needed on this area. For instance someone who is already giving too much, can pick up a book about unconditional love and further damage themselves by pushing themselves further out of balance. So there much be such a thing a too much projection withdrawal or knowing when you are not projecting, because you have done the work, now you are witnessing.

Back to my dream at the start, obviously Im still working with energies internally. But I have had my intuition shot to pieces, by books telling me I'm projecting, when I simply was picking up on energies. Reminds me of the Catholic 'Don't Judge lest Ye be Judged' you end up too afraid to even think!
Title: Re: Doctor
Post by: - anna - on April 08, 2016, 05:22:54 PM
Omega - The way you have chosen to perceive my comment has nothing to do with what I tried to communicate to you and I am aware and will accept that you cannot hear me.

Anna  :)
Title: Re: Doctor
Post by: Omega on April 08, 2016, 05:50:36 PM
Ok. No worries Anna.

Tony, I would love your input on what I have written above about projection. Though it's come away from my original dream now and perhaps should be in 'Questions about Dreams'

..for my own purposes I do want to clarify the whole projection issue. I have yet to find a good clarification of it in any detail, hence my attempt at such clarification above. It's very pertinent to dreamwork. It's a sort of follow on to my previous post.

..after 'letting go' I'd say 'projection' is the second most common term I hear used. Therefore it's something I want to pick up on and clarify. Thanks.
Title: Re: Doctor
Post by: Tony Crisp on April 09, 2016, 07:40:21 AM
Omega - I believe that we create our own future in some degree, mostly by the way we respond. But I believe we are also an integral part of a huge collective - society/the world - so whatever comes along we are part of it but our reactions and actions are the weave we make of our life which also weaves into the collective, and the collective into us.

Tony
Title: Re: Doctor
Post by: Omega on April 09, 2016, 10:18:52 AM
Hi Tony, thankyou for your reply.

Yes I agree that's a good description in broad terms but I guess I just wanted to trash out this whole 'projection' term in more specific ways, as it tends to be used.

If you recommend any reading I'd appreciate it - because people use this term so very very frequently and I've yet to find a fully-developed explanation that I feel has rigour.

But otherwise I'll leave that enquiry for another space.


Title: Re: Doctor
Post by: Tony Crisp on April 10, 2016, 08:01:34 AM
QUOTES FROM SERIOUS RESEARCH -

Subconscious material that appears one week as a green-eyed dragon with thirteen tails may show up as a lion next week, as father the next week, and eventually prove to be one’s self before ther¬apy is over. In this way the psyche falls back from one protective dis¬guise to another before finally revealing itself. Comfortable abstrac¬tions and allegories slowly assume the shapes of monsters and gods. Monsters and gods are revealed as mother and father. And at the deep psychogenic levels of the mind, even the parents are exposed as pro¬jections of self, agents the psyche used to perform its wishes, upon whom to project its guilts and shames. Finally these last disguises of fusion are sloughed off and the deus ex machina that worked its pur¬poses through a million deceptive images is revealed as the simple sep¬arate self—self-loving, self-hating, self-lying, self-denying—self turned into a thousand postures and relations toward self.
With most patients it does not take long for the grandiose abstractions, complex allegories, gods and monsters to assume the more concrete and familiar forms of father and mother, in the thou¬sand and one guises and attitudes in which they appeared in his child¬hood. These images, however, are not the matter-of-fact figures of the conscious mind, but the legendary figures of the child’s world, dis¬torted with the excessive dimensions, colors, and emotions of primitive imagination. These figures loom in the psyche, vast in size, powerful in significance, intense and pervasive in emotional valence.

The psychic function of guilt is as automatic as, but even less sensible than, the sadistic projection of pain. Why indeed should the psyche throw at itself this burden of pain from its hidden reservoirs of memory? There are several answers, but none of them explain all cases; the problem deserves more investigation. Suffice it to say that in the guilt mechanism the pain which one imagines the other to have is inflicted imaginatively on the self. One never really knows the pain another must bear, he can only deduce this from his own reser¬voir of experienced pain. At times he may outsuffer his victim if he imagines the pain to be more than it is.
This guilt reaction delights the moral sense. There is a certain poetic justice in suffering what one metes out to another. I know of one man who had committed the perfect murder, perfect in the sense that he was never incriminated as the murderer. Through guilt, how¬ever, he developed a compensatory passion for suicide. After a long course of psychedelic therapy had failed to remove his guilt, he resolved it himself—with a gun.

Unfortunately, this is not the end of the problem. If it were, Freud would never have found it necessary to postulate such entities and psychiatrists would not be busy dredging them up. For traumas have a lingering, insidious effect on personality and behavior. Denied the light of consciousness, they torment the psyche with physical symptoms, obsessive emotions, and unrealistic behavior. They reveal the fact that the most arduous efforts of repression are never completely successful. Nothing, once plantedness, all the repressions and projections, are self-deluding failures.
Whether a situation is traumatic depends on the mental set of the person who experiences it. An automobile accident might not be emotionally traumatic for an adult; he has a conceptual preparation, a knowledge of life’s probabilities and consequences, which permits him to face it with a certain equanimity. A child, without the mental framework in which to limit and stabilize this crackup of his immediate surroundings and outidings, might be completely overwhelmed.

For this reason major traumas occur most often in childhood. Growing involves a long process of accommodation to reality. It takes time. Part of this process is physiological: a baby is tiny and helpless; he can neither defend himself from danger nor answer his own needs. To be placed in physical peril or left alone for any time is inevitably traumatic.

Most patients pass from the mature sexual level back into the earlier attachment to mother fairly late in therapy. The connection between the two layers reveals itself in an exotic fantasy progression, and the memories and emotions involved are so primitive, pervasive, and generalized that mother hardly seems to be a person at all but rather a monumental fact of nature. One patient was investigating a particular sexual feeling, a gutty animal urge; not the fire of love, but the sexual release one seeks in orgasm. He was busy tracing that feeling through a series of images to center on the one image with the peak emotional valence, a common investigatory method in therapy. First he lingered on female anatomy, finding excitement in the female vagina. Later the center of attraction shifted to the anus. As he explored these associations it seemed that the attraction to the female body was but a projection of his own sensual excitement; and his attention turned to his own penis. The heightened excitement of the fantasy proved he was getting closer and he hesitated to see where it might lead next. Then he found himself staring head on at a penis in a most unusual fantasy. All he could see of it was the tip, with the small opening in the center where the ureter emerges.
The sexual feeling was approaching a new peak when suddenly his whole psychic field of consciousness erupted. While the very walls of awareness cracked and dissolved about him, he observed the orb of the penis expand and soften, while the aperture in the center closed and protruded into a soft red button: the penis had become his mother’s breast, and a breast alive with an awesome sensuality, before which the former excitement was as nothing.

In this progression he had discovered that orgasm is not limited to the sexual organs, but a pervasive feeling which can find its expression in many organs of the body. Indeed he could trace it through the classic progression that Freud outlined—from the mouth to the anus to the genitals. But above all else, deep in the psyche it is a delicious ache of joy. Man’s first contact with this feeling is at mother’s breast. There it is a madness of identity-dissolving delight. Hence the orgiastic feeling, if felt deeply and strongly enough in sex, always includes an element of self-transcendence, of blinding release into the primitive selfless psyche of the infant.
Title: Re: Doctor
Post by: Omega on April 13, 2016, 09:23:50 PM
Thankyou!
I love this reminder of how the same energy takes on different costumes.
The 'legendary figures of the child's world'..fantastic..  Yet though intense, the emotions the child feels are appropriate to its vulnerable position. The description of the patients exploration is great.

On reflection I realise what frustrates me about the use of the term 'projection' is that it's used a lot in new age circles in a way I think is disempowering. People are told they are projecting and creating their experience but not given tools by these same people to learn how to change this. It's all very vague. They are told they are 'allowing' something to happen to them - but you can only 'allow' if you have in fact also the power to 'not allow'.  Until then that's just an inaccurate statement - you are in no way an active element in any of it. Now to tell people they can learn to withdraw projections and how to do that, that's fine.

I have made notes from your own excellent explanations in Dream Yoga, specifically about reclaiming power. So this frustration is directed at what I have found elsewhere.

Thanks for engaging, I'm finding my own clarity and who knows it may be of use to others.
Title: Re: Doctor
Post by: Tony Crisp on April 14, 2016, 11:50:53 AM
Omega - Thanks.

Projection if approached as a way of learning give us enormous information we usually cannot see.

You are certainly persistent - a quality that is needed for this path.

Tony