Personal Unconscious

This is like living in a huge building in which a small part exists above the ground but a massive amount is below the surface.

The above ground most of us are well aware of where there is a sense of separate existence, with definite boundaries where one meets a lower level.

This meeting with a larger YOU is often for many people a great shock, because they have lived their life totally wrapped in the small world of their physical senses. The human personality – the You that you call yourself, with a name, is only a tiny thing. It is moved and tossed around by all manner of drives, ambitions, emotions, fears, temptations, worries, love and desire with its pains and hopes; it is something we take so seriously and get carried away into awful situations.

When we begin to meet the Hugeness that we are, we often react to it in our dreams or in waking with fear or panic. So we dream of being attacked by aliens or frightening creatures; or being swallowed by a whale or something huge, hit by a tsunami, or even possessed by evil entities. If we realise that they are things we have created through our own fear we will pass on.

First Underground Level

If you have never met this level before and dealt with the fears or panics held here, we will judge the world with its many other levels as a hell-hole and avoid any other exploration of it. That is because this is where we store all the hurts, truamas, fears and thought or desire we dare not allow ourselves to experience.

Example: I had also uncovered a somewhat less powerful move on the part of one of his female cousins. During his most teenage years, and while still an unwilling virgin myself, she had stood before him in a dressing gown, and under the pretext of demonstrating a rather rhythmic swimming motion, had let her gown fall open revealing her naked body.

He had naturally always remembered this event very clearly. But He had not realised her powerful influence until that moment. He had not realised how much he wanted to enter her and also how much he had repressed that desire for seventeen years. Even the youngest child is now bound to feel it is not the thing to lust for relatives in that way.

That is simply one aspect of what is repressed. We often have painful traumatic events from early childhood that we have no awareness of – except the cloud over our good feelings leading to a host of difficult emotional responses.

Another example:

I was myself, and dreamt I had spent a long time following clues in my search into the unconscious. One particular line of clues had led me to go through a door in the house in which I lived.

The door led to an area somewhat like a cellar or basement. It was certainly down some steps, but I felt more as if it were an almost secret place within the house rather than underneath it. It was dark, with no windows though, and was similar to being down deep. I was the detective following clues. To follow the clues I tried an experiment. I sat in this interior place facing a tunnel. It was maybe about five or six feet high. Where I sat was dimly lit, but the tunnel led into complete blackness and the unknown. I believe I repeated some keywords and looked into the tunnel.

I had neither warning nor expectation for what happened next. I was overwhelmed by terror, as if the very darkness of the tunnel was a living force of fear that entered me and consumed me. I screamed and screamed uncontrollably in reaction. Nevertheless, a part of me was observing what had happened, and was amazed and realised I had found something of great importance. Somehow I managed to turn my screaming self away from the tunnel. But on my right – it had appeared to be behind me – was another tunnel that brought about the same terror.

I managed to get to the door, open it and get back into the everyday part of the house. I also feel as if I have had many, many dreams involved in the house, that I have never brought to consciousness before.

The dream describes the terror that we run from and so hide in unconsciousness. Later in exploring his reactions the dreamer realised it was a huge trauma he had experienced during a surgical operation when was nine years old.

See Exploring a dream – To go beyond this first level see – Wider awareness