Posts Tagged ‘fear’
Night Terrors
Night terrors may occur due, not to frightening dreams such as a nightmare, but to sudden and powerful body changes such as difficulty in breathing, or a sudden drop in your pulse.
Night Terrors often Linked with Difficulty in Breathing
Night terrors occur most often in children and usually decrease as the children mature. A cause noticed as long ago as the nineteenth century was that many cases of night terrors happened to children who showed early signs of heart disease. In other children, after removal of the adenoids the terrors disappeared. Like tonsils, adenoids are a glandular tissue that lies at the back or the mouth behind the soft palate. If enlarged they can interfere with breathing.
Night terrors are characterized by abrupt awakening, sometimes with a scream; a sleeping child may sit up in bed, apparently terror-stricken, with wide-open eyes, and often with frozen posturing that may last several minutes. Afterward there typically is no recollection of dreamlike experience.
According to Professor Colin Sullivan, head of the clinic, people gripped in a night terror are in a “state of absolute panic .
“I have seen patients injure themselves by pushing their hand through a plate glass window and run out onto a balcony and fall off,” he said.
Night Terrors are Differnt to Nighmares
Sleepers sufferind night terrors who are shocked awake will likely be disoriented and confused. Try very gently to help them find their own way to a couch, the floor, or back to their beds. Sometimes a softly repeated suggestion will do the trick. When waking them is necessary, try repeating their names, very quietly, over and over again.
Scientists distinguish between nightmares and night terrors, the term for terrifying nocturnal experiences that mainly affect young children in deep sleep. The principal difference is that the sleeper seldom remembers a night terror. Sleepers in the throes of a night terror often awaken to the feeling of being suffocated or choked.
Although this doesn’t apply to children, learning a different relationship with emotions and dream images can cure night terrors. Most people take their emotions as some sort of reality. I mean by this that a dreamed of car cannot hurt you in any way. A car in the physical world can crush your body. If you begin to realise that the only thing that can raise terror is our own reaction to your emotions.
Emotions Can Kill
In 1898 Crile was on an army transporter off Cuba and examined a young officer who was delirious with fear due to facing his first battle. He was as deep in shock as if his legs had been crushed by a wagon as William Lyndman’s had. This led Crile to become interested in exophthalmic goitre, an illness which produces a similar type of anxiety condition. Despite the use of anaesthetics, no one had successfully operated on such a goitre condition. Every patient died. Crile discovered why when he attempted such an operation in 1905.
While under anaesthesia the patients heart rate rose to 218 and the body temperature rose to a dangerous level. Despite no physical injury or infection, the patient died that night with a temperature of 109.6 F. Crile realised from his previous observations that it was fear which had killed the patient. Therefore he told his next patient, a young woman who needed the goitre operation, that he was going to give her a simple inhalation treatment. When she breathed in the anaesthetic, she therefore thought she was having a ‘treatment’ not an operation. She was the first person to survive the operation for exopthalmic goitre. Crile called it “stealing the goitre”, and was so impressed by the influence of emotion on the body he constantly stressed the importance of self control, and taught that calmness is strength.
Black Magic, Evil and Dreams
Although thorough investigation of claimed injury or death attributed to black magic has shown the real cause to be malicious aggression or murder, scientific research into the deaths of people who were said to have died as the result of a curse or a voodoo ritual, has shown the victims to have died of fear.
Death through fear is fairly common, and is reported by some doctors in connection with surgical operations, especially in the past. In 1887 Dr. Crile had watched helpless as his friend, William Lyndman died of shock after amputation of both legs. My uncle also died of the shock of losing his arm. My uncle, like William had lost little blood, and no vital organs were injured. Crile went on to develop anaesthesia and blood transfusion to counteract death through shock. But some forms of shock appeared to be outside any physical cause. In 1898 Crile was on an army transporter off Cuba and examined a young officer who was delirious with fear due to facing his first battle. He was as deep in shock as if his legs had been crushed by a wagon as William Lyndman’s had. This led Crile to become interested in exopthalmic goitre, an illness which produces a similar type of anxiety condition. Despite the use of anaesthetics, no one had successfully operated on such a goitre condition. Every patient died. Crile discovered why when he attempted such an operation in 1905.
While under anaesthesia the patients heart rate rose to 218 and the body temperature rose to a dangerous level. Despite no physical injury or infection, the patient died that night with a temperature of 109.6 F. Crile realised from his previous observations that it was fear which had killed the patient. Therefore he told his next patient, a young woman who needed the goitre operation, that he was going to give her a simple inhalation treatment. When she breathed in the anaesthetic, she therefore thought she was having a ‘treatment’ not an operation. She was the first person to survive the operation for exopthalmic goitre. Crile called it “stealing the goitre”, and was so impressed by the influence of emotion on the body he constantly stressed the importance of self control, and taught that calmness is strength.
Crile’s experience illustrates what can occur through threat of a curse or black magic. In our dreams we often portray something we deeply fear as an evil influence or person, or as an awful monster or ghost. Such fears usually relate to our own urges, such as anger or sexuality, but can be about any urge or thought that we have been led to feel is not permissible, or downright evil. A demonic figure or environment might also be connected with very early babyhood experiences. The pain of birth is often depicted as hell or demonic influence in our dream symbolism. On exploring dreams that have a very evident evil force or devil in them, what is discovered is that the ‘evil’ is actually the person’s own repressed or hurt sexuality or urges. See: evil; witchcraft; The Con About Evil.
Because the unconscious will use any belief system or cultural symbols we have absorbed to express a theme, the powerful images of witches or evil characters we see on films or in fiction are often used to depict important experiences. For example a dream in which a spell or curse is placed on one can portray the influence a painful experience has left on ones emotions. If you had been deeply hurt while in your mother’s arms, your unconscious would equate pain with being held close by a woman. This ‘cross wiring’ of associations could meaningfully be portrayed as a ‘spell’ which makes one feel frightened in the apparently loving situation. See Victims; Dream Like a Computer Game; spell.
Behavioural Modification Therapy
Modifying the behaviour of other human beings has a long history. Whatever can change the way we feel and act can be a means of altering behaviour. Methods as widely separate as religion, political torture and brain washing, can be thought of as behavioural modification techniques. A major demarcation can be seen in the use of such techniques with people – there are those who want them applied, and those who have them applied against their will.
As a form of therapy or aid to mental and social health, behavioural modification has been practised in every culture in all periods of history. Rituals in which individuals or groups felt more in harmony with each other, or which induced a feeling of cohesion against a common enemy, can be thought of behavioural modification.
In more recent times, although the age old techniques are still used, an enormous amount of research has been undertaken to define exactly how human beings, and of course animals, can be changed or manipulated. After all, such information is incredibly important to religious and political organisations, and to businesses that wish to induce people to buy their products. This has given rise to such varied approaches as physical and mental intimidation, brain surgery, brainwashing, electric shock therapy, drug use, subtle advertising and propaganda, the use of suggested fear to sell or induce and psychotherapy.
In modern psychology, the term behaviour modification means something specific. Ivan Pavlov developed the foundation for modern approaches through his work with conditioned reflexes in dogs. Apart from showing that a dog could be conditioned to salivate when a bell was rung, Pavlov experimented further and performed experiments in which a dog was trained to salivate when the image of a circle was projected on a screen, but when an ellipse was shown it was not trained to have any response. When this was established the shape of the circle was gradually changed toward and ellipse. As the circle was changed the dog showed signs of agitation and lost the response to salivate. The disturbance experienced by the dog was seen as an ‘experimentally induced neurosis’. See: Example under brain levels.
In 1920 these methods were tried on human beings. The American psychologists John Watson and Rosalie Rayner worked with an eleven-month-old baby who showed no fear while playing with a white laboratory rat. By producing a loud noise each time the baby touched the rat, the baby was conditioned to experience a fearful response when the rat was present.
Having learnt how to artificially create fears in children, Mary Cover Jones experimented with reducing fears already established in children. The two methods she found most effective were 1) Linking the feared object or situation with a new stimulus capable of arousing a positive response. 2) Putting the anxious child with children who showed no fear of the object or situation.
Later, people like Joseph Wolpe, Hans Eysenck, and M. Shapiro, used and developed these methods. This was mostly in connection with people with disabling fear reactions. The ideas of B. F. Skinner who led the behavioural movement in psychology, played a leading role in some approached to modifying human behaviour. Different approaches evolved, and some of these became well known enough to have particular names – systematic desensitisation; aversion therapy; and biofeedback.
There are usually five steps in behaviour modification.
- Defining what the individual needs to improve their problem.
- Putting together a method that changes undesirable behaviour and aids the development of desirable responses.
- Using the program according to the principles of behavioural modification.
- Careful observation and recording of results .
- Changing the approach if it aids improvement.
See: aversion therapy; desensitisation therapy.
The Archetype of the Shadow
The shadow archetype is depicted as a shadowy figure, often the same sex as dreamer but inferior; a zombie or walking dead; a dark shape; an unseen ‘Thing’; someone or something we feel uneasy about or in some measure repelled by or frightened of; drug addict; pervert; what is behind one in a dream; anything dark or threatening; sometimes a younger brother or sister; a junior colleague; a foreigner; a servant; a gypsy; a prostitute; a burglar; a sinister figure in the dark, a person or thing that we can see but not put a face or defined form to. Usually there is an air of disrepute about the person, or of danger. In literature we find the negative aspect of the shadow depicted in such stories as Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; Frankenstein’s monster or Lurch; Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray; Hesse’s Steppenwolf, and in many stories about werewolves or haunting. Ackroyd, in his Dictionary of Dream Symbols, even points to Cinderella as a shadow figure, as she is seen as inferior by her socially accepted sisters, and is kept shut in the house, thus repressed.
But as usual we all live a dual or many sided life. So there is what Carl Jung called our ‘Golden Shadow’; this is the creative, loving and powerful side of our nature that we also tend to keep hidden, repress or do not believe we are worthy of. Many, many people hold themselves back maybe because their sense of themselves arises out of your personal misery, out of depression or emotional pain. Is that how you see yourself? Is that the limit of what you know yourself to be? Is that the lie that you have taken to be the truth? If that is so it is a tragedy. It is from that painful, tiny and limited world that you are rescued by the action of the core. When you recognise that it enables you to transcend the prison bars of those limitations. See Opening to Life
In occult literature the Shadow is called The Guardian of the Threshold. It is described as a great – subjective – figure we meet at a certain stage of growth. The Guardian holds in it all the negative and positive actions and deeds that have been repressed aspects of self committed or developed in the past, even in past lives, which must be met and transformed or allowed to grow more fully. See: guardian of the threshold.
The Shadow is any part of ourselves that we reject, and so do not allow sufficient expression in our life. We may so dislike aspects of our nature we fail to recognise them altogether and instead see them in other people and criticise them. Nations as well as individuals do this. The Nazis projected all problems onto the Jews. The Americans have not wished to see their own social sickness, and looked instead at the Russians. No doubt the Irish blame the English, and the English use the class system, with its projections between employee and employer. It is easier than looking at one’s own shadow. The foreigner is one of the favourite shadow projections. This may be because through living in our culture we develop certain likes and dislikes, certain value judgements and ways of doing things. In other cultures their normal and acceptable values and ways of living may be vastly different. In dealing with the foreigner we therefore meet our own unconscious potential for living in a different way. Many individuals who worked in the British Commonwealth in vastly different cultures to their own, started out loathing the native customs, and then changed their life to live within the new culture. In the English language it was called ‘going native’.
The shadow develops in us, according to Jolande Jacobi, because as we grow and absorb our culture, we naturally repress parts of our nature as they are not acceptable to ourselves and/or society. These grow and mature in just the way our conscious personality does, through experience and further information – except the shadow has a life under the surface – in the darkness – like any socially unacceptable organisation, criminal activity or individual. But often it is the functions or instincts in us that date from prehistory, when present day social and sexual restraints did not have survival value, that make up a large part of the shadow.
If you can think of the characteristics you loathe in others, that is a fair picture of what you repress in yourself. The great ‘ladies man’ may hide a shadow which feels inadequate sexually. The loving Christian mother might meet a shadow full of resentment and anger at how she has been taken for granted. The rigid heterosexual might hide homosexual tendencies. Meeting the shadow through our dreams is a meeting with our own reality, which in turn enables us to look at the world realistically. If the shadow can be met it leads to wholeness.
Example: During his analysis of women patients, sexual advance or assault by the woman’s father was often revealed. Freud struggled with this, wondering whether the assault was memory of an actual event, or a psychic reproduction of it. He eventually came to the conclusion that hysterical and neurotic behaviour was often due to the trauma caused by an early sexual assault by the parent. Where there was not evidence of physical assault, then he saw the neurosis as due to sexual conflict or a trauma caused by some other event. This led to Freud being rejected by university colleagues, fellow doctors, and even by patients.
This an excellency example of the shadow working in individual and society. People refused and still do refuse to see the awful side of the repressed side of ourselves and others. Fraser Boa tells the story of a man who told his analyst he had dreamt of Red Rooster – a cartoon character used in American national parks. Red Rooster is bossy and tells people to keep their litter and cigarettes and not to make a mess. The analyst asked the man if he recognised Red Rooster in himself. After some thought he said no, he couldn’t see he was like that. The analyst suggested he go ask his wife if she could see Red Rooster in him. He did this and was astonished when she said she could. After a few minutes of his attempts to suggest she was mistaken, she suggested he ask each of his three children. He took each one aside and was amazed when each said that of course they could see Red Rooster in him. He was always bossing people around and being authoritative. Red Rooster was his shadow.
A main feature of many archetypal figures, and particularly of the shadow, is their autonomous activity in us. This is called an autonomous complex, or in some schools ‘sub personality’. We experience this as an influence to act in particular ways that have a lot of feeling and motivation in them, but may be very different to our image of ourselves. For instance we may deeply criticise a man for leaving his wife for another woman, only to find later that we have the same urge, and have been denying it. Therefore, when we detest something in another person, our dislike for them is very strong and often unreasonable in its degree. So much so that we cannot stop mentioning them or criticising them. See: autonomous complex; sub-personality.
P. W. Martin says the shadow is ‘something which comes between a person and their fulfillment: his laziness, his fecklessness, his tendency to let things slide or to over-do things, his cowardice, his rashness, his self-indulgence, his carping and envious nature, his murkiness.’ It is all the negatives which we prefer not to see about ourselves.
Example: Before I started my serious yoga practice I had dreamt my wife and I had been talking about whether there were any ghosts in the house. On going to bed I sat in bed and challenged any ghosts to show themselves, certain I could handle them. There was no response, and feeling rather smug I lay down to go to sleep. Just then the door creaked open, and in walked two black men who looked as if they had climbed out of an old grave. Their flesh was falling off them and they were blank eyed. I was terrified and made the sign of the cross and said a few holy words to ward them off. It worked and they went, but not for long. This time all my signs and prayers didn’t get rid of them and they put their dead hands around my throat strangling me. I woke screaming and frightened. Some years later I dreamt of these two black men again, this time on an underground train. They were no longer zombies and were well dressed. One of them still went for my throat though. I caught his hands and wrestled with him, pulling his hands down, overpowering him. As I did so I realised this was what yoga had done – given me the strength to meet this attack. After another long period of time another dream came in which I was sitting with this black man in a circle with other people meditating. We were all opening ourselves to the spiritual power. Suddenly the power took hold of my whole body and moved me around the room, along with the chair I was sitting in. Then I experienced it moving my mouth and vocal organs, speaking through me. The word flowed through me talking to the group about the spiritual life. Afterward the black man came to me and asked if I had really been moved, or was I acting. I said as far as I knew it had been spontaneous, not acted. He said he would like to surrender to that same influence with me. What I gathered from these dreams was that originally I had repressed parts of my own natural sexual feelings, shown as the black men. They were dead because I had killed this part of myself as a teenager. But I was deeply frightened of these sexual urges because of what had happened in adolescence. Therefore, in my meditation, in trying to enter more fully into myself, I always turned back through fear, because in meeting more of myself, I met these black men – my own sexual urges. My practice of yoga had gradually helped me find strength in meeting this part of myself, show in the second dream. There was also a change going on in my unconscious – the underground train – as the men were healthy and well dressed.
However, because the shadow is the ‘out of sight’ area of our psyche, it also holds in it great treasure through its connection with our unconscious potential. In fact a great deal of our energy is involved in our ‘negatives’. When we meet our shadow or our fears, we are enormously more energised. Meeting the shadow and unfolding the possibilities held unexpressed is our life’s work. Without it we may never become the mature and full person we are capable of. As Prospero says of Caliban, we need to say ‘this thing of darkness I acknowledge mine’. Through this we gain not only our own greatness, whatever that might be, but also the acceptance of our common connection with humanity. Jung says that if we could fully meet our shadow, we would be immune to any moral or verbal insinuations. We would already have seen this for ourselves. Finding this sort of transformation to a state beyond guilt is a task for the hero/ine who has the strength to descend into the underworld and wrestle dark creatures; to open Pandora’s Jar and deal with what is revealed. See: black person; black under colour; shadow.
Useful Questions and Hints:
What do I hate in others – and what can I gather from that about what I repress in myself?
Where is my shadow appearing in my dreams – and what happens if I explore its qualities?
For help doing this see Talking As and Processing Dreams. If I observe what I think and feel, can I catch myself editing/deleting certain thoughts or feelings?
My Needs As a Premature Baby
I was born two months early prior to the formation of intensive care units and antibiotics. The doctor – it was a home birth – pronounced me dead, threw my body to one side on the bed, and said, “Let’s look after the mother.”
At that time childbirth was surrounded by very different attitudes than exist today. The shadow of enormous mortality still fell over mothers and babies, and it influenced doctors. So the doctor was implying all of this. He was telling my mother and grandmother a straightforward and accepted truth of the times – ‘Why attempt to give life to this premature and tiny baby? It will be difficult to rear, more prone to illness, and it will be harder for it to cope with life. It isn’t breathing at the moment, so forget it and try again for a healthy baby.’
My grandmother took no notice of this, carried my jaundiced body away and started me breathing by dipping my tiny form in hot and cold water.
We are all the sum total of what we experience and what we make of that experience. I slowly learned the truth of that as I was gradually confronted by the influences left deep in my being by my premature birth. For one thing, as an adult I felt as if it was a continuous struggle just to exist. I know life sometimes is a struggle, but the power of this feeling seemed to dominate me more than others. Also, I have a more than average tendency toward introspection. But other more pressing problems led me to undertake years of intensive and deep psychotherapy. During those years I arrived at a form of remembrance enabling me to experience life from the perspective of my newborn self. These remembrances sometimes arose accompanied by emotional pain, and sometimes by a sense of wonder. I discovered that to be a baby is an extraordinarily rich and wonderful experience, even though sometimes fraught with misery because of circumstances, and I cannot help but wish to share something of what I found. I do this hoping it will help mothers of undersized miracles like myself to understand something of their baby’s world.
Words from the baby I was
Speaking as the tiny premature babe I once was, you have to understand that I cannot think I can only feel. But there is intense feelings. There is also a sense that my existence is without any of the filters given by the concerns adults have about how others will judge or respond to their behaviour. Also, there is no focused sense of myself as an individual being. Without language I cannot say or think, “Me”, “I” or “You”. However, my feelings handle all these equations of relationship. And my feelings are not haphazard. They have been finely tuned by millions of years of survival. So I know without thinking exactly what I need. In the same way I know my response to what is happening. Being here is not a good feeling. It is difficult to breathe, difficult to take in what I need. If I had the power of self-reflection and the words to express what I feel, I would say that I do not feel ready to be here. Everything is a struggle, as if I do not have the right equipment, as if I am not suited to this environment. I should be back in the water where I do not have to breathe or take in food.
Because I feel so vulnerable, everything frightens me. Everything seems dangerous. Even the birds I can hear singing scare me. I don’t want to be here. I want to crawl back into the egg.
Looking back on those remembered baby feelings, I can see those powerful early feeling responses to life outside the womb built a foundation from which my personal inclinations in later life developed. So, without attempting to describe my baby view of life directly, let me summarise as follows.
The premature baby is unprepared for life outside the womb. It really does want to crawl back to the place where it doesn’t have to struggle to exist. So it can be given great comfort by producing as much as possible a quiet undemanding environment. Flesh to flesh would be perfect.
Every baby has a major instinctive directive. Namely, to intimately bond with its mother. This directive has arisen because for millions of years if this bond were not established the child would die. There would be no milk to feed upon, and it might be abandonment. Everything in the baby struggles against that possibility. Some of its earliest crying is an attempt to make sure this bond is secure. It needs to know it is wanted as desperately as it wants its mother. This is its safeguard against death. It has no rational mind to think otherwise.
Your baby is not an unfeeling lump of flesh, and should not be treated as such. Until recent times no anaesthetic was given during some operations because babies were seen as without feelings or sensation.
I know from personal experience, because my own mother was young and frightened at producing such a vulnerable baby, that it is not always easy to feel confident and warmly loving if you are the mother of a premature child. But this is what your baby needs. If you recognise that you cannot give it the warmth and confidence it so desperately needs, the situation can be saved by someone else giving the baby that sort of warm love. In my own case, my grandmother was the delivering angel who helped me face my own fears and sense of dying.
Because your baby is so tiny, it doesn’t mean she or he will not become a usefully contributing member of society. But it’s unusual beginnings may give it a different perspective on life and relationships than someone born full term. This difference can be the source of great creativity. So enable your child to explore its own experience, even if that experience was an early struggle in life. Such struggles are not crosses but sources of unusual strength.
Life is precious, and I feel grateful love to my grandmother for securing me in this lifetime. Pass on to your own child the sense that life is a wonder, and that its own unique experience is a treasure to be explored.
A Psychotherapeutic Experience of Premature Birth
Without hesitation I begin to feel my connection with another human being. I experience that being connected with another human being is a fundamental part of life and procreation. If something threatens that connection, then it is life threatening – the reason being, I am in the womb! To lose my connection threatens my life. But my life is threatened. I am expelled from the womb before my body and soul are mature enough to be ready to be separated, ready enough to undertake life disconnected from the placenta. I feel incredibly vulnerable. Each sound, whether a bird singing or a car going by, is a possible threat to my existence. I had been physically and psychically attached to my mother. Now the bond is broken.
I realise as I experience this that the broken bond, the feeling of life threatening isolation, enormously increased my sensitivity to threats. It set me up for what happened at three when I was placed in a convalescent home and was deeply traumatised. In itself the short absence of my mother was not as potentially traumatising as it turned out to be. But because of the birth experience, I was already traumatised to abandonment. To be hit by it again increased the volume of it enormously.
I wasnt properly formed, so it was very traumatic to be separated as a baby. I am trying to heal this at the moment. I feel the struggle of resisting what has happened to me. I cry out that I dont want to be born. I am not ready. I feel deeply alone. There is in me a sense that tells me I shouldnt be alone. It is like something that pushes me to seek not to be alone. I feel lost. Im not ready for this world. Im feeling awful.
In fact I do feel awful, like I am ill and can barely move, or move only with effort and concentration. I go on to say that I have felt awful most of my fucking life. I can see from the feelings I am meeting how they have contributed to my lifelong feelings of being lost and cut off – alone. I have always called it independence, and perhaps seen the positive side of it more than the negative. But it has been a source of restlessness and a spur to seeking a bonding with someone. Of course I want to find the security of the womb. I want to know someone is deeply committed and bonded to me.
I am so alone. Even when someone loves me I cant feel it. I want to change. I dont want to keep hurting Hy by living like she isnt there at an emotional level. But that is the feeling world I have lived in – who is there for me? I was part of something and I lost it. I was part of something that was good, and I lost it. I was a part of a woman and I lost her. I was rejected. I was rejected. Now I face this struggle just to exist, just to breath, just to be. This feeling of life being a terrible struggle just to keep going has pervaded me all my life. I’ve got to struggle to exist just to keep alive. Got to struggle just to keep alive! GOT TO STRUGGLE TO EXIST – JUST TO KEEP ALIVE! GOT TO STRUGGLE BECAUSE THERE’S NOTHING THERE. I WANT SOMETHING TO HOLD ONTO. I’VE GOT TO STRUGGLE JUST TO KEEP ALIVE.
I cry like a baby. The question burns in me – Why is life like this? I cry again. Then I realise that at first when I was born I was too small and undeveloped even to be able to cry properly, so I couldnt let out my misery. It is such a relief to cry now and be understood, to have known what I felt at that terrible time.
I am aware of my connection with my stream of life having been broken – the umbilical cord. What I realise as the adult watching this, is that because of its proximity to the genitals, there is an unconscious connection made between the genitals and the connection I seek to sustain my life. So even as a baby I am reaching for that connection with my genitals. I want to be fed. I attempt to reconnect through my genitals, but the pain of the separation is so acute even when I do try in adulthood, the pain of the separation turns me back. This is the story of the Garden Of Eden. I was in the garden and was cast out. Now when I attempt to return, an angel with a burning sword turns me back. Not only was it painful every time I attempted reconnection, but I had the unconscious expectation to be fed, to be nourished. Instead of that every time I had sex I felt cheated, deceived and betrayed. I was not fed, but deeply sucked dry of what small nourishment I had managed to build up. I wasnt fed, I was fed upon by a predator. Each sexual act was a betrayal, a predation, and a torturous pain. Yet I had to find my way to the garden again, because there lay the secret of my genesis and myself. So I would return, to be wounded once more. It is even painful to look back on those years of misery now. Why is life so painful?
Seen from this level of experience, that of the uterine baby, God is a projection. You were in connection with a great creator, the mother. You were at one with them, but now you have been cast out of the Garden of Eden, so you have lost your contact with God, the creator in whose bosom you had existed. Perhaps that is why I searched so long for God.
Archetype of the Fugitive
To forever feel you must avoid intimate human contact; to forever be running from something that is hard to define; to never be able to feel that where one is in life is home, is a place to relax in, is a place where you can feel peace and look around and take in the world, instead of looking around to see where danger is – these are signs of the fundamental feeling of alienation or aloneness.
All of these have anxiety or the fear reaction as their root. As fear is one of the major reactions to life, archetypical patterns of behaviour have developed around the fear response. The description of the little boy at the beginning of the section on archetypes who was lost and running frantically is an example of behaviour which is not developed out of personal experience, but is instinctive or archetypical.
In modern Western culture, where religious, social, family and work connections are no longer as stable or meaningful as they were just a few generations ago, many of us face this sense of alienation or of not belonging. Richard Tarnas, in his book Cosmos and Psyche says that this situation of finding ourselves alienated from the world, from nature, from each other and the cosmos, is a crisis Western society and individuals are facing at the moment. This makes it an archetypal influence in our lives, affecting almost all of us.
Being the fugitive in our dream, or relating to one, may also suggest an avoidance of something. The fear may be that of being overwhelmed by ones urges, such as anger or sexual desire; it may be a response to past hurts that we find difficult to meet. It may, as often happens, be a habit which developed in earliest infancy as a survival fear reaction to not feeling safe – such as might happen to a premature baby who was not held and made to feel wanted, and is therefore exposed to the overwhelming sense of abandonment.
The following example is typical of a basic anxiety reaction to something that may have no external reality – based perhaps on past pains or fears, or present worried speculation about what MIGHT happen in ones life. The thing one is running from remains unclear because we don’t know what it is. The old bogey man fear is shaking chains out of sight, and our hair stands on end. It is helpful to stop and face such fears and recognise them as chimera we create out of our own memories or worries. See: anxiety; nightmare; Am I meeting the things I fear in my dream under processing dreams.
I am in a light, green forest, no gaps in trees. I am running away from something and am very frightened. I can hear loud breathing, like someone is running. I keep running and bang into a tree while looking behind me. I think I see a very unshaped, black very tall thing. I fall down to the ground. Time passes, maybe a few seconds. I looked behind me again and start running. Looking behind me I see the black thing. All around me is like bad home movies, all jumping up and down. I can see myself from the air, then wake. Poppy S.
That is a very powerful description of being a fugitive from fear.
N. D. Browne, in a paper published in the International Journal of Psycho Analysis, (December 1987) states that one of the causes of fugitive dreams is ‘early sexual overstimulation – leading as it does to precocious erotization and rage.’ To protect against being overwhelmed by sensations and emotion, and thus the fear of losing oneself, or self control, the person remains apart from others to disguise rage and inner deadness.
However, that is only one possible reason for our meeting with the fugitive archetype. Other reasons are that at some time in your life you may have made a life decision that you are different from others, do not fit into the group you live in, are an immigrant from another culture living in what might feel like an alien environment or social atmosphere, or that you have faced harsh accusations or judgement at some time.
The positive side of this archetype is that you are no longer captured or immersed in the view of life or social responses that are taken for granted around you. For instance your peers may believe that it is a great pleasure to get drunk each weekend, but your alienation from them enables you to escape from that worldview. It might have the same influence in regard to religion, politics and the general worldview around you. It might also enable you to take new directions, explore unusual ways of doing things or thinking about things. It can therefore be a useful influence to creativity. See Archetype of the Outcast.
The negative side to the influence is that we might really feel antagonistic to the group around us, and thus be unable to interact with them. It can also lead to feeling isolated and abandoned. Sometimes enormous anger and destructiveness arises out of this, and is probably involved in a great deal of social destructiveness or terrorism.
Useful Questions and Hints:
Am I aware of feelings of isolation or of avoiding others – if so can I recognise their source in the past or present?
Am I running away from or avoiding some of my own feelings through fear, guilt or shame?
Do I feel I don’t fit into modern society, or sense a lack of connection and isolation?
The Archetype of Fear
The images of fear can be darkness; an unknown something approaching you; losing control in some way; a dark and monstrous figure or animal; an obscure but powerful ‘thing’ that is threatening to engulf or destroy you; or death in its various forms such as disease, ageing, or meeting an opponent, etc.
As a human being you are not simply a creature that responds automatically to your environment. Even intelligent animals such as chimpanzees and foxes do not simply responded to their environment instinctively. They learn certain types of behaviour from their parents, from experience, and from their fellow animals. They, like us, are capable of learning. Our own relationship with parents, other human beings and animals during infancy, passes on to us an enormous amount of information through our ability to copy behaviour, through word of mouth, through our own experience, and through reading or viewing. So many of us have awful images or sense of fear haunting us from being passed on.
The instincts that inform us, and the cultural or personal information we acquire, are both the result of enormous amounts of past experience. Instinctive behaviour has developed over millions of years of dealing with survival. In a similar way cultural responses that we absorb are the result of experiences faced by millions of people. Both of these sources can be described by the word archetypal. By this is meant that no one particular person, experience or piece of information lies behind an instinct or a cultural response. Such responses are usually the synthesis arrived at over thousands of years, perhaps millions.
In this sense archetypal behaviour is the synthesis of thousands of people’s response to situations. These archetypes are often more easily seen, not so much in our own personal experience, but certainly in how some things are portrayed in art, in literature, and in popular or group responses to things that we might confront.
However, it is difficult to categorise such responses as clearly instinctive, cultural or personal. If we take the example of pain for instance, some individuals in tribal cultures seem to have a very high tolerance for pain, whereas many people in European based cultures have a much lower tolerance. So we cannot say that a response to pain is instinctive. Even if it is instinctive to remove your hand from something that burns, there still seems to be a cultural element to the response.
In looking at general responses to human situations, there are however particular things that often stimulate fear. Of course, physical or emotional pain is one. There are many other things that are much more subtle though. Fear of death for instance, can be seen as a sort of archetypal response to something that is essentially unreal until we actually meet the experience of death. Watching someone else diving into water is not the same as doing it oneself. In the watching you are only having a subjective response. In doing it oneself all ones body senses and feeling responses are involved. Observing the death we see around us is similar. It is not an experience of death. Only those who have a near death experience can say they have met death.
Another such fear is the loss of what we usually call identity or personality. The illustration of such fear is often portrayed in films as an alien creature, a disease, or an encroaching influence gradually taking over ones body and mind. But this fear is not always expressed in an obvious way. Sometimes it is connected with the losing of what one identifies with. For instance you may be blessed with an attractive and healthy body, and as this ages and loses its attractiveness, you may feel great stress, and struggle with enormous vigour to maintain the features that are slipping away. Such struggles arise out of the fear of losing oneself, or at least losing the sense of oneself connected with appearance, work, success, or financial standing – the loss of identity.
Something that is not as obvious but nevertheless can be seen to cause enormous depression and even illness in human beings is our connection with meaning. As human beings we struggle to give meaning to the world and to our own lives. People often despair if they are not involved in a meaningful task, work or relationship. The meanings we give to our life and the world may be expressed in religious, scientific, or aesthetic beliefs. If these beliefs are threatened or questioned we may experience anger or stress. Enormous effort and expense are often involved in creating an expression of these beliefs in our outer life, and an attempt to support them or their reality. Any threat to them may cause great fear or anger. This can be seen in religious sects and their fight against anything that threatens their beliefs.
Examples of fear in dreams are as follows.
I go upstairs to a bedroom to get a weapon. When I enter the darkened room, I sense that someone is there. I fall onto my stomach on the bed and there I am paralyzed, unable to move, extremely fearful that I will be attacked while I am in this vulnerable position, feebly kicking my feet, sure that the ‘enemy’ is somewhere in this darkened room with me. I keep expecting to kick someone, but I can’t really tell if I ever do. I am in a state of complete panic. PG.
I dreamt I was sitting on a pier when I suddenly I had a feeling of danger. I safely pulled my feet out of the water when a shark rose out of the water really angry with me for pulling my feet out. I woke up frightened and couldn’t fall asleep again for the rest of the night. ARE dream.
Dreams also show how we can deal with our fears, sometimes paradoxically.
I dreamt that I was being approached by a tiger. I was in fear believing that the tiger would attack me. I decided not to fight or run but instead do nothing. When the tiger reached me, it was friendly. I could hear it communicating to me that if I did not fear it, it would not attack. ARE dream.
The paradox is of not being frightened of what is, in the dream, frightening. Yet that is the way through fear, to face, in the dream or in ones exploration of your dreams, what is frightening. This can be done using the methods given under peer dream work.
Fear is fundamental to life, but for humans, because of our ability to think and hold images of things we are not actually meeting at the moment, fear can become a constant threat. Therefore the facing of fear, the meeting and dealing with the many images of fear we meet, is extraordinarily transformative. See: fear – dealing with. Also see the Dreams are Like Computer Games.
Death through fear is fairly common, and is reported by some doctors in connection with surgical operations, especially in the past. In 1887 Dr. Crile had watched helpless as his friend, William Lyndman died of shock after amputation of both legs. My uncle also died of the shock of losing his arm. My uncle, like William had lost little blood, and no vital organs were injured. Crile went on to develop anaesthesia and blood transfusion to counteract death through shock. But some forms of shock appeared to be outside any physical cause. In 1898 Crile was on an army transporter off Cuba and examined a young officer who was delirious with fear due to facing his first battle. He was as deep in shock as if his legs had been crushed by a wagon as William Lyndman’s had. This led Crile to become interested in exopthalmic goitre, an illness which produces a similar type of anxiety condition. Despite the use of anaesthetics, no one had successfully operated on such a goitre condition. Every patient died. Crile discovered why when he attempted such an operation in 1905.
While under anaesthesia the patient’s heart rate rose to 218 and the body temperature rose to a dangerous level. Despite no physical injury or infection, the patient died that night with a temperature of 109.6 F. Crile realised from his previous observations that it was fear that had killed the patient. Therefore he told his next patient, a young woman who needed the goitre operation, that he was going to give her a simple inhalation treatment. When she breathed in the anaesthetic, she therefore thought she was having a ‘treatment’ not an operation. She was the first person to survive the operation for exopthalmic goitre. Crile called it “stealing the goitre”, and was so impressed by the influence of emotion on the body he constantly stressed the importance of self control, and taught that calmness is strength.
Useful Questions and Hints:
Have any of my dreams been examples of facing and dealing with fear? If so what can I learn from them?
What does my dream and its drama suggest I am frightened of?
Am I paralysed by my fear, or can I confront it?