Posts Tagged ‘growth instinct’
Biological Dream Theory
In his book Dreams and Nightmares, (Pelican 1954) J. A. Hadfield puts forward what he calls a Biological Theory of Dreams. He says the function of dreams is that by reproducing difficult or unsolved life situations or experiences, the dream aids towards a solving or resolution of the problems. He gives the example of a man climbing a cliff who slips fractionally. He then may dream of actually falling and waking terrified. Subsequently the dream recurs, but in each the dreamer tries out a different behaviour, such as clasping for a branch, until he manages to act appropriately to avert the disaster. Hadfield sums up by saying dreams stand in the place of experience. They make us relive areas of anxious or difficult experience. They thus help problem solving. But they not only look back at past behaviour, they act just like thinking in considering future plans and needs.
Adrian Morrison’s findings with animal dreams, (see movements during sleep) opens the possibility that practicing and developing skills and strategies may be the function dreams performed in early animals. They may enable us to economically learn from experience, and to play with experience in untidy or irrational ways. This ‘untidiness’ enables experience to be juxtapositioned in so many ways that it enables useful new behaviour to arise from the occasional creative juxtapositioning. See: Evans, Christopher.
Hadfield also emphasises a slightly different aspect of the compensatory process in dreams than Jung, although there is great similarity. He writes in Dreams and Nightmares, ‘If a branch of a tree is cut, new shoots spring out; if you injure your hand, all the forces of the blood are mobilised until that wound is healed and you are made whole. It is a law of nature. So it is psychologically: every individual has potentialities in his nature, all of which are not merely seeking their own individual ends, but each and all of which serve the functions of the personality as a whole. Our personality as a whole, like every organism, is working towards its own fulfilment.’
He connects this even more directly with the overall self-regulatory physical processes in saying ‘There is in the psyche an automatic movement toward readjustment, towards an equilibrium, toward a restoration of the balance of our personality. This automatic adaptation of the organism is one of the main functions of the dream as indeed it is of bodily functions and of the personality as a whole. This idea need not cause us much concern for this automatic self-regulating process is a well known phenomenon in Physics and Physiology. The function of compensation which Jung has emphasised appears to be one of the means by which this automatic adaptation takes place, for the expression of repressed tendencies has the effect of getting rid of conflict in the personality. For the time being, it is true, the release may make the conflict more acute as the repressed emotions emerge, and we have violent dreams from which we wake with a start. But by this means, the balance of our personality is restored.’
The difference between Jung and Hadfield is that Hadfield is saying the dream is not merely ‘compensating’ for something the conscious personality is doing but is being purposive in pushing toward healing or growth. As with the physical process of self-regulation, which overall supports growth and stability, this psychological process in dreams appears to have much the same function. See Life’s Little Secrets and LifeStream.
One might argue that any growth arising from the self-regulatory process might come spontaneously from the integration of experience. Caron Kent, in his book The Puzzled Body, argues that in fact the internal process of adjustment presses for growth. I believe that the unexpressed potential for growth is both physical and psychological, and if it is not fulfilled, manifests as an internal sense of dissatisfaction. The body and the mind therefore drive to find a fuller measure of satisfaction as well as they can. Because the area of dreams is so plastic and formative, this is exactly the area that these often subtle and deeply unconscious urges toward growth can manifest. See: compensation theory; self-regulation and fantasy.
Baby Dreams
What do babies dream about?
From your baby’s perspective, birth and the experience of life outside the womb is probably like waking from a long and unbroken dream into an entirely new world.
The science of modern dream and sleep research really leapt forward when Eugene Aserinsky, working as a researcher in a sleep laboratory, noticed that his eight year old son’s eyes moved while he slept. Later it was found this was due to the eyes following activities taking place in a dream, and that these rapid eye movements (REM) were a sign of dreaming.
From this it was seen that even newborn babies dream. In fact, although adults only spend about a third of their sleep period dreaming, babies spend 50 to 80 percent of sleep in dreams. Some researchers, carrying their investigation into the womb, state that at 24-30 weeks gestational age the unborn baby dreams a 100 percent.
Because most researchers investigate dreaming from a physiological or neurological standpoint, they are not very good at telling us why babies, or we adults, spend so much time dreaming. This is because dreams are more connected with the passionate drive to survive, to relate, to learn and grow. When we see a child go into a frenzy when they are lost, we can understand just how passionate the emotional level of dreams are. It is this level of feeling that dreams deal with. But an interesting study done by Nathaniel Kleitman showed that he observed a regular breathing cycle in infants which lasted 50 minutes. He felt that this was probably to wake the baby at these intervals to see if it was in need of feeding. It would signal this by waking up and crying. The child would therefore get adequate nutrition.
Likening a dream to one of the monitors we see at the side of a patient in a hospital is perhaps the easiest way to understand what a dream is. Just as the monitor presents a visual image of the patients heartbeat, their blood pressure and temperature, a dream puts into drama and images the processes, feelings and fears that lie behind our personal awareness. In a baby, an unimaginable amount of learning, adjustment, development of responses and body skills is taking place. We usually take this for granted. But like a television show or film, it is only when we see the credits at the end of such a film that we realise just how much behind the scenes work has taken place to produce the film. And this is precisely what dreams show – the behind the scenes activities and dramas.
Understanding this, and realising that a baby and young child lives in a completely different world than we do as an adult, helps us support them toward a healthy and happy adulthood. For instance a baby and child who have not learned to speak cannot think. We think with words. So during pre-speech there are only feeling responses or instinctive urges and fears to guide the child. The development of thinking only phases in gradually, and prior to that we learn from events and relationships, not ideas. See Animal Children to understand the part speech plays in a child’s life.
For instance, a woman I met, Tina, as a child was told she was being taken to a party, but in fact she was being taken to an orphanage. She was given a bar of chocolate. She never ate it. Since then she has never been able to eat sweets, and she still has an eating problem while with other people. When she got to the orphanage she immediately went to the toilets and hid there, feeling she couldn’t speak. She still has difficulty speaking to groups of people. Tina had experienced massive feeling responses to what had been done to her. Those feelings are still active ‘behind the scenes’ of her life.
Dreams depict all the aspects of what is taking place within the child. Sometimes, just for the child to tell or draw a dream helps them integrate the underlying feelings and processes. Another thing they can do is to model their dream. In this way the awful dream event or creature can be put outside them and they can manipulate the frightening things – for instance they can put the creature in a cage where it cannot hurt them.
If you yourself can understand that whenever we dream its images are not like real life, because a dream is nothing like outer life where things could hurt you, but is an image like on a cinema screen, so that even if a gun is pointed at you and fired it can do no damage – except if you run in fear; so, all the things that scare you are simply your own fears projected onto the screen of your sleeping mind. And if you can therefore understand that dream fears are all about fears, hurts and threats that threaten the person or child’s confidence in their on coping strategies and aid them towards confidence and coping, you will do wonders.
Remember that a child’s greatest fears are to be abandoned or threatened by what they see or hear – television and films for a child are almost the same as the real world.
While small, my youngest son told me he dreamt his pet baby mice had opened their eyes. When I asked him what it means for a baby mouse to open its eyes, he told me that it showed they were ready to become independent. I then asked him what it might be like to be a pet, and he said a pet couldn’t do anything for itself, not even get its own water or food. He went on to say that because he was small, he sometimes felt like a pet. So we talked this over and he decided he could start getting his own glass of water by putting a chair near the sink. He was moving toward independence.
Although you cannot have a conversation with your baby in the same way I did with my young son, if you see your baby is having disturbing dreams you can still talk to her or him, even while they are asleep. Your baby is incredibly sensitive to the sound of your voice, and your own state of calm or agitation lying behind the way your voice sounds. Therefore you can sit with your baby and imagine a situation in which you feel calm and loving. When you feel calm and strong, gently talk to your baby telling it you are holding it close in your love, and you are with it while it meets whatever is disturbing it. Tell it your love is the strength it can use, and imagine wrapping your baby in your calm and love.
Most nightmares are an expression of a healing process. They are attempts to meet and discharge the feelings in difficult events we have faced. Because your child is so dependent upon you and is vulnerable, it is more prone to nightmares than adults are. A common nightmare for children is that a lion or some other scary creature is chasing it. There is good evidence to show that the lion might represent the child’s anger, which it has been told is wrong or bad, so the child is scared of it and tries to run away from its own feelings
Whether this theory is right or not, an easy way to help your child deal with its nightmare is to encourage him or her to draw or model the dream. In this way the child gets the frightening thing out in front of it where the scary thing can be seen and controlled. Once it has done this, ask it what it wants to do with the scary creature or thing. For instance it might wish to put it in a cage, or to make friends with it. In either case the child begins to feel more in control. Allowing your child to talk about such disturbing dreams also is very healing. It allows the child to voice its fears, and to know you will listen without criticism or judgement. But nightmares are exceptions. Most dreams are about your child’s personal growth, what it is learning, what it is feeling about the world around it, and the ways it is expressing or denying its own creative centre. So drawing, modelling and talking about these everyday dreams is tremendously creative and growth promoting for your child.
Here is an example of what a child faces and learns. True it is from an adults dream, but we carry the child in us.
I worked on the dream with my wife. The whole centre of the dream seemed to be the little girl. As I came in to land, because I had been gliding high above, she saw me and ran away very frightened. I was gliding in the same direction she was running and called out to her not be frightened. She stopped and I landed. In amazement she looked at me and said, “How did you get to be up there?”
As the young girl I had walked from the back door of my house, along the garden path, across a footpath behind the houses, into the field. As I looked through her eyes and feelings, I realised what a long journey it was for me to get into the field. Not a long journey physically in distance, but an enormous journey within myself. To be able to go from the door to the field, I had gone through the long process of learning to walk; I had learned the confidence to be alone; through language and understanding what my parents had passed to me, I had found out how to avoid stinging nettles, and how not to be overcome by my fears of them and of the huge creatures that I knew as cows. This had all taken ages, and so walking into the field was an enormous achievement, especially as I was doing it by myself. Learning to walk itself had taken an tremendous practice and perseverance. Learning to be independent of my mother was also something I had had to learn. I had made the inner journey of acquiring an immense stock of information and conditioning regarding the external environment I was facing too. I had slowly learned survival responses to nettles, walking alone, nests, birds, the sun, trees, spiders, stones, the wind, children, adults, worms, leaves on the trees, cars, etc, etc, etc, etc, and so on. See: Pregnancy; individuation.
Although it is difficult to theorise about the subject of babies dreams without their ability to report their experiences, evidence gained from the study of animal dreams probably applies to infants too. Michel Jouvet, while observing dreaming in cats, devised a way to avoid the usual paralysis of voluntary muscles during dreaming. This allowed the cat to actually make full movements while dreaming instead of the usual jerks or subdued movements. The cat would then live out its dream through the movements it made. Jouvet then noted the cats dreams were largely centred around crouching and stalking prey or play fighting. Adrian Morrison of the University of Pennsylvania noted the same behaviour in cats while investigating narcolepsy in animals. Because the area of the brain which usually stopped the dream movements from being expressed fully was injured, the cats Morrison was observing lived out their dreams in the same way Jouvet observed.
Jouvet, and later Nicholas Humphries, reasoned from this evidence that at the beginning of a mammal’s life, an enormous amount of time is spent in practising necessary survival skills in dreams. With cats the survival skill is defence and hunting. With a human infant it has more to do with socialisation, easily expressing its feeling and anger. Estimates have been made of what period of time the baby dreams in the womb, and the figures are that it dreams at 24-30 gestational age weeks a100%.
Taking this further, Christopher Evans, in his book Landscapes of The Night, says that this need to dream about social interactions and adapting to the social rules of their culture and thereby practice them, explains why children who have just started school need a lot of sleep.
The work of Stanislav Grof, which dealt a great deal with the remembrance of the birth experience in adults, and the recovery of memories and fantasies connected with it, also suggests that the dreaming baby is not only practising social skills and preparing for action in the external world, but also trying to balance and perhaps heal the internal memories it already carries from its uterine life, trauma of birth, and post-natal relationships. This type of dreaming may account for the nightmares suffered by some babies and young children. The function of such dreams or the process behind them appears to be that of attempted integration of experience, or means of finding an adaptation to its containment. See: children’s dreams; individuation.
The Archetype of Rebirth or Resurrection
The symbols of rebirth are: The cave; an egg; spring; the tree; the cross; dawn; emerging out of the sea; the snake; the bird; a seed; arising from the earth or faeces; green shoot from a dead branch or trunk; phoenix; drinking alcohol or blood red wine; flame; a pearl; the womb.
Rebirth is the Death of the Old Life
Rebirth is as difficult to face as death. It holds within it not just the memories of the struggles and difficulties of our own physical birth and growth, but also the challenge of becoming the unknown future, the dark possibility, the new. The dream of Andrew in the underground cavern below, is an example of positive rebirth. After realising himself as bodiless awareness he emerges from the cave, and finds himself near a tree.
Example: ‘A tremendous jolt of power poured into me from the tree. I saw that we had arrived at a place where a line of trees, about a 100 yards in length, stood very close together in a slight semicircle on the top of a bank. The trees had great spiritual power and the place was a holy temple. Two spiritual beings were there – an ancient Earth Being, and Christ.’ Andrew.
The next example is of a dream typical of meeting memories of physical birth. As can be seen, the experience is powerful enough to cause physical shaking.
Example: ‘All I can see of what I enter is a very narrow space with a light showing through. But immediately I enter I realise I have made a mistake for I am being forced swiftly through a dark, very narrow tunnel. I feel pain as I am dragged along and I hear loud banging noises which frighten me, but although they are loud they seem to come from inside my head. I feel terrified and breathless and very relieved when I wake before reaching the end of the tunnel. In fact as I write this account I am shivering.’ Female. Anon.
We usually face a deeply felt experience of death before encountering the archetype of rebirth. Neither the death nor the rebirth or resurrection are things that happen quickly. There may be dreams, waking subjective experiences or a short period in ones life when death or rebirth are felt very strongly – but the process as a whole is a psychological one which may take years to unfold and stabilise. With many experiences of archetypal nature, such as entering puberty and meeting the process that unfolds manhood or womanhood, we are working out psychic growth which involves our entire nature. Puberty is an excellent example of how an archetypal human process works in us individually, yet is very unique for each of us. At the same time however, while puberty is a well worn path which virtually everyone travels, some aspects of human possibilities, like death and rebirth, are not universal. Only comparatively few people really manage these points of growth.
Here is a very clear example of death and rebirth. It occurred when the man explored a dream of entering an old house that was lived in previously by his ancestors. Puma was a great cat that had leapt on him as he started his journey. Lurch was a figure representing the guardian of the threshold:
I started by imagining myself standing in the shadows of the house with Puma and Lurch. Then we walked together into the darkness. The subjective images took on a life of their own and I saw we were walking in a large underground space like great catacombs. The light was dim but we could see our surroundings, and not very far into the cave like space was a tomb on our right. It had the form of a low wall about a foot high in an oblong, and the wall surrounded a long stone in the centre, which was roughly body shaped.
As we drew level with the tomb an enormous change occurred in me. Suddenly I became a woman. It was no longer imagination. I was now completely experiencing myself as a woman whose tomb we had approached. As such I was torn by an immense pain of loss. As my complete identification deepened my body curled up with the pain as I was torn by wretched crying. Suzanne told me my voice changed as I cried out again and again for release from the pain of losing all my children, my husband, even my parents. My hands were clawing my legs in an effort to express the misery, and I was screaming that I could not bear to live any longer with such pain. I cried out to God to take me, for there was nothing left for me to live for. “Why? Why did this happen to me? Why has everything I loved been taken from me?”
There was no response to these awful cries and tearing sobs. But slowly a shift began. It seemed to me as an observer witnessing this awful pain, that by entering this place the spirit of that woman had woken in me. But as she had died in such unresolved agony of loss, that is what was met when she awoke. But gradually she realised she was alive again in a new way. She began to recognise that I was holding her within me. Because I was not frightened of pain and emotions, the misery could play itself out in me. And because my understanding of what was happening flowed into her awareness, she slowly saw and felt her loss in a different way. In fact we were both realising she was experiencing resurrection, and that in turn meant there was no final death as believed by many. Therefore there was no loss as she had originally felt it.
At this point something truly incredible occurred. She and I both realised she was one of my past dwelling places – past lives. But for her the viewpoint was slightly different; for she saw me as a continuation of a life that she had failed to be a part of because of the awful pain of loss. It had kept her from flowing into what was her future as my life.
From my perspective she was one of the past dwelling places the spirit that was at the core of my present personality had lived in and as. She was not one of my lives, because the personality that I am was unique and had not lived that woman’s life, but my spirit had. Because she was now part of me and me of her I asked her what she had brought into my life. Her reply was, “A woman’s love”.
Example: I’m imagining Christ emerging from the grave. Who is he now? Not the man he was even if he looks the same and more or less has the same qualities which you do and you don’t. So I think death needs to be factored in whenever there’s a break in the reality that you knew, and it’s not just you have to know it, but everyone around needs to know it. I’m reminded of after my father died, that when I met people, I felt I couldn’t be with them until I said that my father had died because that had changed everything and they couldn’t possibly know I was without that. So in the same way, anyone who’s died and come back is not the same.
I suppose I can say that whatever happens to you, even if the worse happens, you have something that can re-grow you, if you’ve lost everything, that means you haven’t lost everything, that basic clear quality, maybe it’s a new form, maybe it has gone on a few steps, but it’s still there if you listen to it. Don’t struggle with it unless it is a struggle, let it happen, don’t make it a big fight because you may be fighting against what is emerging.
The Great Cycles of Life
The cycle of death and rebirth happen mostly to people passing from adult maturity to old age. It connects with physical and psychological changes to do with altered relationship with life and society, and with ones own body and self image. The cycle may appear in young people however, if they face death, physically or in a deeply psychological way. In ageing ones relationship with children or procreation alters. Whereas they were at one time consuming and motivating drives, they are no longer sustaining or motivating. Work and ones relationship with society may also undergo a similar change. The identity one gained from having a place in society, and connections with other people through being a mother or in ones work, falls away. The personality, the attitudes, the hopes and ambitions built from the many years of life as a procreative, creative person meshed into society, dies through the lack of a relationship with the world that sustains it. This ‘death’ may be very painful, creating a great and sometimes crushing sense of pointlessness, of having no value in the world, of having nothing to live for. In some cases these feelings are triggered by the onset of menopause in women, or impotence in men – but also for men the absence of a sexual life or family life, or simply the process of ageing.
One man described it as, “The feeling of being paralysed, or being unable to move. It is not so much a physical impediment, but a sense of having no motivation, no ability to want anything, no drive to reach out.”
Fears may arise as to what is happening. Such fears are based on concepts we hold regarding ageing or death. The loss of identification with oneself as a procreative and higly motivated person may seem to be a sign of emerging incapability or even senility. The fear then sets up a conflict with the process of psychic growth.
A woman who had worked as a nurse, describes her experience of this as, “‘The feelings I have about dying, about losing my drive to live, link with ideas of being incapable as one is in hospital. Those are feelings or ideas I connect with it. Those images have made it – or are making it – hard to meet.”
However, such a felt death is only a precursor to the experience of resurrection, and this leads toward a new relationship with oneself and the world. The attitudes and way of life that was necessary as a procreative, work oriented individual whose self image was largely based on family background, physical looks, sexual potency, ability to get the goods of the world or gain power, steadily shifts. It moves toward a sense of self that is centred more on what there is on ones existence that is more timeless and less ravaged by change than the body, the emotions, ones intellectual concepts and the social scene.
Have I Lost Everything?
The change that takes place in this experience of an inwardly felt death, may at times feel like losing everything, shedding the past, becoming completely insecure. It usually leads to the realisation in ones life of parts of oneself that were never lived before, or never allowed expression before. There is not in the end a loss of anything, only a gaining that requires one to let go of the dominance of what was previously important. From this arises a feeling of wholeness and connection with the world and self in a new way. In her book about the individuation process, Jolande Jacobi says, ‘…. transformation is an integral component of the individuation process, which in turn follows a line of development whose goal is psychic-totality.’
Example: Last night, I very vividly had a lucid dream, where I saw a pregnant (very pregnant) women hanging from a rough rope in a bathroom. The bathroom was unfamiliar to me.
A dream expressive death and rebirth. The rope was death, the pregnancy was rebirth.
There is however, no final death or rebirth. The cycle is a fundamental process in nature, and therefore active too in the physical and psychological nature of humans. It is not only old age or approaching death causing the experience to arise. It can also happen during profound personal growth, when old fears, traumas and habits fall away and allow a completely new relationship with sexuality, with work, with being alive.
See: Life and Death.