Posts Tagged ‘insight into self’
Compensation Theory of Dreaming
Jung, Hadfield and several other dream researchers believe the dream process is linked with homeostasis or self-regulation – the sort of self-regulation indicated in the observations of MacKenzie, means that the process underlying dream production helps keep psychological balance, just as homeostasis keeps body functions balanced by producing perspiration when hot, shivering when cold, and the almost miraculous minutiae of internal changes. Despite self-regulation or homeostasis being an obvious and fundamental process in the body, in nature and the cosmos as a whole, it still appears difficult for many people investigating the mind to accept a similar function psychologically. See: biological dream theory;computers and dreams; self-regulation dreams and fantasy; movements during sleep; science sleep and dreams; sleep walking; LifeStream; People’s Experience of LifeStream; Opening to Life
All our lives we try to achieve a balance of the contradictory opposites within us, and whether in our egos we succeed or fail, every function claimed by the ego is balanced by its opposite in the subconscious. Only in the fusion of infancy, or of sexual orgasm, or in religious ecstasy do we escape the psychic wound of division.
Put bluntly, dreams are said to compensate for conscious attitudes and personality traits. So the coldly intellectual man would have dreams expressive of feelings and the irrational as part of a compensatory process. The ascetic might dream of sensuous pleasures, and the lonely unloved child dream of affection and comfort. But this is only the most basic aspect of compensation and is demonstrated in the example below.
Somewhere within the total personality, however, there appears to be a continuing integrative force; though an individual may be overwhelmed by their life experience, some part of one’s mind still seems to observe, evaluate, comment, and even attempt to integrate this otherwise hidden material with the knowledge of conscious life. This may disappear for brief periods, when the fears or pain occurs, but for most of the time it is clearly at work. No one knows what type of ‘thinking’ this may be. It appears to be different both from ‘reality thinking’ and ‘autistic thinking,’ from the patterns of conscious thought and the imagery of fantasy a kind of bridge between two types of mental process. Lawrence Lessing, in a Fortune article on recent sleep research, has written: ‘At the same time recent evidence shows that there may well be a second, lower level of dreaming extending down even into deep sleep, consisting largely of abstract thoughts or isolated symbols, much harder to recall than the generally vivid, active imagery of rapid-eye-movement dreaming.’
Example: In his book Psychology in Service of The Soul, Leslie Weatherhead tells the story of a little girl who while on a visit to a zoo was given a coin to get a small chocolate bar from a vending machine. She eagerly asked for more coins to obtain all the bars in the machine. The mother refused. The next morning the girl said she dreamt her mother had come into her bedroom and thrown a lot of chocolate bars under her bed.
Jung’s view of compensation was far more inclusive however. He quotes, as an example the dream of an elderly general he met while sitting opposite him on a train journey. The general told Jung that he had dreamt he was on parade with younger officers while being inspected by the commander in chief. On reaching the general the commander asked him to define beauty. This surprised the general as he expected to be asked technical questions regarding his service. He was embarrassed and could not give a clear answer. The commander in chief then asked a young major the same question and received a clearer answer. The general experienced feelings of failure and his grief woke him. Jung’s questioning led the general to realise that the young major who successfully answered the query about beauty actually looked just like himself when he was that age and a major. Further questioning led to the information that at that age the general had been interested in art, but the pressure of work and the rigidity of the military life had eroded the interest. Jung goes on to suggest that the dream in his late life was helping to compensate for the one sided development necessitated by his army career. The dream in fact reminded the general of this neglected side of himself.
This concept of wholeness, linked with the Self, which such compensatory dreams connect with is best seen in the collection of many years dreams by an individual undertaking their own personal journey to self acceptance and integration. Through an overview of dreams gained in this way, the two aspects of compensation become much more clearly drawn. The dream work, aimed at meeting the neglected or hurt parts of oneself, opens the way to more pronounced compensation. A man who was investigating a feeling of lack in regard to his marriage, gives the following account.
Example: As I was exploring my feeling I suddenly began to change direction and realised that from the very earliest period of my life I had certain filters in place that influenced incoming sensory information. This had come about because I noticed how critical I was of our next-door – upstairs – neighbours, and in examining it saw that I had filters to search all information for danger. This burst open in intense feelings and awareness of being a ‘weak chick’. A powerful internal struggle and something like an ‘oh God no!’ feeling accompanied it. I then experienced what it was like to be a premature baby and so weak. Being born two months prematurely had thrown my infant self into a high state of anxious survival where everything was felt as a potential danger. So my filters were examining everything for danger. Everything that moved or made a noise was a potential threat to my existence.
At first with laughter, then with pain I saw that this had made me suspicious of my own mother. I had not fitted the ‘norm’ in terms of size, strength or behaviour, so not only had I lived with a ‘danger alert’ process going all the time, but also with the realisation I was not up to scratch. Instead of the full term child who is more adjusted to the environment I had emerged still in a condition adjusted to the womb. My psychological state was also, I felt, quite different, a sort of experience of the death world, the world before birth and after death.
Society, I felt, has a sort of labelling or measuring system. It has emerged out of biological criteria of survival and fitness, and is largely unconscious. People haven’t even acknowledged they are acting under such drives. ‘My genes are best, and everybody else’s are abnormal. But only the best of mine are going to get through’. Out of this I sensed that mothers who have children who are not ‘the best’ suffer a great internal struggle about their child. Part of them cries out, ‘That is no child of mine!’
So the people who are not seen as ‘fit’ are not given social rewards, starting with such rewards as recognition and warmth from ones own parents, and escalating from there into recognition and rewards from social groups and organisations. I personally felt as if I were not seen as fit for several reasons. My premature birth led me to be slightly less robust, and also my mixed cultural background during a time of war made me less fit. I didn’t have the right label attached. Christy D.
As can be seen, Christy feels himself much less capable and accepted by his mother than someone who has had a normal birth. He feels his premature birth left him always paces behind those born full term. He sums this up by saying:
Example: Due to constantly searching for something I had lost too soon – the security of my mother’s womb – due to feeling I never bonded with my mother, I had felt agonised most of my life that I couldn’t be an ordinary husband emotionally and sexually. I pushed and pushed to see if I could grow to this ordinariness and finally felt that I had arrived, only to find that I was too late. Not only had my wife entered the menopause and lost interest in a sexual relationship, but also my children had grown up and I had lost the huge satisfaction of being with them as youngsters. So here I am in my late fifties without a sexual relationship and without the loving contact of youngsters.
The gaps in Christy’s life are obvious, and the urge or need to compensate is also plain to see. In fact Christy has an experience that he describes as follows:
Example: I realised that because I had always felt inadequate in a certain degree, I had used religion as a means of compensation. Suddenly I saw the need for hero figures to use for compensatory purposes for individuals and groups. The person may not be able to live out some aspect of their life. They may not get a sexual partner; they may not get recognition in their work; perhaps people treat them as of no account. For some people an actual physical disability stops them from living out their life fully. The hero/ine figure is then used as an image that has several functions.
For instance nuns in a convent will not live out their ability to get married or have a child. The figure of Christ is used as a compensatory symbol for this in that they marry Christ and their passion is through meditation on his being. In this way people use a hero/ine figure to compensate for what is missing in their own life. They can live their unlived soul through the passion of Christ for instance.
The figure such as Christ represents our own wholeness and complete potential. To compensate for our own unlived areas we look to this figure and have a taste of what we are not expressing outwardly through identifying with the hero/ine. Meditations on the figure might produce great feelings of love, pain, wonder, and recognition – in fact whatever is missing in everyday relationships. The Christian festivals appear to be a way of living out via the image of Christ the passions of life that we might not meet in our everyday life. The birth, the struggle, the love, the death, can all be partaken of. We can share the passionate experience of living in this way, even though in our own actual life we might not be able to live such a passionate and eventful existence. And I suppose television does this for many people today.
At first I had a strong feeling this sort of compensation was used by people who are inadequate in some way, a path for the weak, and a path that I had taken myself. This suggested by inference that I was less capable of living a full life than most. I had a sneering feeling about how people use this as a crutch, but then realised I was judging once more. ‘I need a kick in the arse. I’ve got an ability to see, but I put all these judgements on things.’
As I looked at the situation more fully though I saw that in fact nobody lives a complete life. No one is completely whole, expressing every aspect of their potential. So in fact we all relate in some way to the Christ or other such figures who represents, or in some way ARE the total potential of human existence; a mighty example of what human life can achieve.
Now I came face to face with Christ. I felt knocked over emotionally by it. It was an experience of meeting the most amazing creature or being one could imagine. I stood in front of a god, something that totally transcended human existence. Gods are often depicted as having some great power of destruction or creativity. They might be like a human being magnified many times, with loves and hates, huge powers, throwing lightning bolts and so on. My experience didn’t show Christ as anything like this. The transcendence was in the manner of Christ’s consciousness. Here was a being with no real power in a worldly sense. This being hadn’t created the world and couldn’t influence world history through power.
The consciousness, the being of Christ, existed by a form of love so magnificent I could barely look upon it. If love is the right word, this love penetrated every living thing and absorbed their most intimate life experience. The Christ took in every aspect of existence without any judgement whatsoever. This was its life and sustenance. So one could say this wondrous creature was a sort of parasite living off the energy of life forms. But this is only a part of what I experienced. Through total acceptance it took in all. It took every tiny memory of each individual. But in return, if we can share its immense passion it offers us its own life that compared with our own is eternal.
I experienced that not only does one inherit the gift of eternal life through identification with Christ, but also we share the awareness of all life forms. Through this we participate in the life and passion of all beings present and past. As I met this I was on my knees as it were because I couldn’t help loving this wondrous being. I couldn’t help feeling my own smallness. I wanted to lose myself in this being and be washed through by its radiance and hugeness. To be in its presence was the most amazing thing. If you can imagine standing before a cosmic being that had arrived from some other galaxy, and was millions of years old, perhaps ageless, had no physical form except our own teeming lives, radiated love so much that you were engulfed in it, and simply by being in its presence shared its magnificent awareness, this might give some idea. Christy D.
Christy acknowledges his own need for compensation due to feelings of inadequacy. But he goes beyond this to see that each of us are in some measure incomplete and compensation in its largest sense is about finding awareness of the wholeness underlying our own life.
The description of compensation above is an example of something functional. To be able to survive crushing life experience is a real achievement, not an imagined one, and is therefore functional. Using an image to evoke hope and motivation doesn’t make it less of an achievement. The process of compensation also links with patterns of love and strength actually lived by others. They are then patterns remaining in the collective experience of humanity and can be accessed. When we touch these powerful racial memories we may clothe them in the image of our cultural hero or saviour.
To be clear about this, the power that is found is a release of our own potential emerging from our core self. So in this sense the compenstaory image is a graphic presentation of our own innate potential. This emerges from our unconscious clothed in whatever imagery or ideas we can accept or allow, as do dreams. It can also be evoked by using such images in a compensatory way.
See: – LifeStream; biological dream theory; self-regulation dreams and fantasy; movements during sleep; People’s Experience of LifeStream; Introduction to Dreams
Lumpkin – The Baby Who Became Tony
I existed long before my conception and birth. What was new was this particular body conceived by a young country girl, fathered by the son of an Italian immigrant to England, and born in Amersham just before the Second World War. It was a completely new configuration.
There are memories of being in the womb, feeling like the yolk of an egg. My genitals were the pulsing centre of that yolk, and they pulsed with gentle pleasure in time with my tiny heart. There was no sense yet of being a person, but there was an integrity that gave a feeling of being something different to other things in my awareness. And there was sense of love. It came to me in waves as the beating of my small heart roused pleasure in the centre of me, pleasure raised high as my mother’s heart and mine beat together while the two rhythms crossed.
Birth is seldom ever completely commonplace to its witnesses, and certainly not to the baby being born. Sometimes we have the strangely naïve attitude that this is a new being who has entered the world. But what is there new in nature? Can we say, if we plant an acorn, that the oak tree growing is new? Well, yes. The body and leaves of the tree will be unique. But millions of years in the lives of other trees are involved in the growth of this particular oak. It cannot, it hasn’t, simply emerged from itself, for each of us have a history of our beginnings started from the single cells from which all started. What an incredible journey we have all been on!!!
Whatever way we explain birth, the baby carries with it the influences of an immense number of men and women who lived, struggled, loved, in the past.
I have memories of my birth. Not as pictures in my mind, like old photographs. I remember through the pain in my guts, and through my feeling response to some situations. I remember because the experience of that birth sometimes wells up like a great tide overwhelming my normal, everyday, self.
My tiny body was born two months early, apparently dead. I was told the doctor threw my body to one side, saying, “Forget the baby. We need to look after the mother.” The doctor’s words were not flung out casually. I was born in the thirties, prior to intensive care units for premature babies – prior to antibiotics. Each of us is a witness to our times. We all exist within a huge web of influences and understandings, and if I try to grasp the view from which the doctor’s words arose, there is sense in what he implied. If we have children and say to one of them as he or she goes out the door, “Be careful”, we don’t need to mention all the things in today’s world that one needs to be careful of. If the child is old enough to manage the streets alone, they can already fill in most of the details about dangers they should avoid, such as drug pushers, muggers, child molesters, and other violent children. So the doctor was saying to my mother, “Within this present social and medical situation your baby has little chance of survival. If it does survive it will be weak. Let this one die and have another one.”
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It wasn’t an auspicious beginning, but my grandmother carried off the limp body and managed to provoke breathing.I have a sense — I cannot call it a clear memory — that in reviving me, my grandmother baptised me in case I died. She blessed me with her love, and marked a cross on my forehead in oil and water. That mark has remained in my being indelibly, having been given with true love. It has opened connections to me with mysteries I might otherwise not have known. |
It wasn’t just my body that was impressed with the experience of birth. There are levels of awareness in us right from conception, along with the learning of responses to what is confronted. Not only does the unborn body mature in readiness for birth, so does the awareness, the receptive sentience.
In my 40s, when I traced back troublesome reactions to everyday life events, I discovered memories of the period just after birth. I found the experience of being a tiny vulnerable creature, and as that creature I was very definitely reacting to a feeling of awful exposure, even though I didn’t know myself as Tony.
Remember that in the womb my small being did not need to breathe. Food did not have to be taken in and digested. There was a stable temperature, so no exposure to temperature shifts. My nervous system was geared to survive, and in some way respond to stimuli. There was no assault of powerful and unknown sounds in the womb – sounds such as birdsong, dogs barking, house sounds. Also, in the womb one is buffered against bacterial and viral attack.
A baby is aware of all these in its own way. It has a functioning brain and nervous system that is already learning — not in words, but certainly feeling responses.
What I recall from that early period after birth — recall and put into words by my adult self — is of being afraid I could not survive in this new environment. At the time of my birth there were no intensive care units to plug my tiny body into a drip feed or oxygen tent, or an incubator to keep me warm. Neither were there antibiotics to help fight the deadly diseases so many infants and children of the time were laid low by. At that time premature babies were very likely to die.
So I couldn’t breathe easily. I couldn’t digest easily, and I was deeply anxious about the strange sounds around me. A tremendous feeling response took place in my tiny self. As an adult we would call this a decision. But in my infant self it had nothing to do with thinking or analysing. It was a total feeling and fear response. It was a rejection of life. A turning away from scrambling, struggling, for survival. I didn’t want to be in the world. I wanted to remain in the egg!
The effect this had on my adult behaviour was that I never developed the ambition to “get somewhere in life.” Just existing felt like an enormous struggle, an exhausting struggle. I turned away from opportunities because they needed involvement and participation. I didn’t want to be involved, and often had to crash out of social activities, as I did not have the coping mechanisms to engage in ordinary social events.
There was also, in my budding awareness, a sense of death. Even though my body was ill prepared for life outside the womb, it still functioned strongly enough to stand between me and death. But death felt very close. I needed to be back in the womb, kept warm, protected and given a chance to grow undisturbed. Second-best would have been to be held skin to skin against my mother’s body and breast, a sort of constant drip-feed in a warm environment. Unfortunately that did not happen. She was a working mother dashing back from work to breast feed me.
I gather from these memories, and the feelings accompanying them, that my mother, being young and inexperienced — I was her first and only child — was frightened by my fragility. All her sisters had produced heavy full-term babies. So she may even have felt lacking in some way. And I felt something of this anxiety. My own struggle, and feelings that death was sniffing around me like a waiting hyena, were not held at bay by my mother’s anxiety. As the little budding me existed beyond any sense of time there was no knowledge that things could change, only a feeling of impending doom.
Then a truly life changing event occurred. I have no awareness at all of its place in the sequence of things. But picture if you can this vulnerable and helpless creature, this spark of life and awareness not ready to deal with independent life, retreating from it, yet not wanting to die. And my spark of awareness, my forming sense of myself, is afraid, and feels alone in this fear, alone in the dark, with death as a predator sniffing around. Then suddenly I am picked up and held in arms that are strong; held by a being of love who is not afraid of death, and communicates love and courage to me. Communicates so profoundly that I feel I am in the arms of a higher being, a being who has lifted me out of darkness and fear, and has driven away skulking death itself. So I cry out to this being with the only passionate sound I can make, the panting, weeping of an infant. But if there had been the gift of words I would have been looking into the eyes of this being, crying out, “I love you! I love you! I am bonding with you! I am connecting with you forever!”
When I remembered this, when I re-experienced the moment as an adult, I too bawled like a baby, and felt the exquisite love and strength, the relief from darkness, of those moments. In fact I still weep as I write these words, for that experience was so profound.
That was my second, and most deeply felt experience of love. It was also the first, and perhaps most fundamental, experience of religious awe. It stands as some sort of nucleus in the development of myself as an adult personality. It is a touchstone against which is tested any meeting I have with love. Also, when I first re-experienced this event it was accompanied by a revelation, a certainty, that this was the resurrection.
The wonderfully loving higher being who had the power to lift me beyond the reach of death, was of course my grandmother. She was the mother of 13, some of whom had not survived. My mother was the youngest, born on the eve of the Great War. My grandmother did not have long to live herself, but I think had developed that serenity, not of the mind, for I doubt she was a thinking person, but of the heart, that comes with deep acceptance. I also have a feeling out of these experiences, that she was the heir to the wisdom gathered by a long line of women who were her ancestors. I don’t see this wisdom passed on verbally, because I doubt it was ever put into words. It was passed from eyes to eyes, from heart to heart. It was passed in the passionate responses to hard times and loss and love. And I feel my grandmother baptised me in the essence of it, and I am blessed for all time.
My Grandmother
I have wondered a great deal about what was meant by the resurrection. I know it has to do with love. I feel people apply the term to Christ because the Christ being represents, or is a symbol of, a form of love we sense in ourselves occasionally, and sometimes see in other people. It is the type of love that in its weakest form is seen in the love of parents for their children. It shows itself as the giving that enables a mother to almost totally devote herself to the needs of the helpless and completely demanding life of her baby. It is the ability some fathers have to toil year after year to feed and provide for their children.
But that is its weakest form. That love is often partly instinctive, built into us if we are healthy. Its most profound form is seen in those who reach beyond their love for their children and family, and extend it in depth, not just in duty or to be seen to do good, to people who are not their kin, and from whom no financial, sexual or social advantage is expected.
I sense the resurrection as a form of love that transcends the boundaries of kin, and is not afraid of death or risking of one’s own life for the need of another. In essence, this is the story Christianity tells. Although I am personally uncertain about the existence of an historical Jesus, I can see that as humans, we collectively sense there is a profound wonder in such self-sacrificing love. In sensing this we have created a deeply perceptive mythology around it. The mythology tells us that even if we can allow a little of such love into our life, it will give us entrance into becoming aware of an essence — the spirit — that pervades all existence, and to the survival of bodily death.
To some extent I have to acknowledge that by getting my newborn body to start breathing, my grandmother did raise me from the dead. So my unconscious mind has powerful material around which to create its own personal mythology. But the love I experienced I sense as a force beyond that, and has to be acknowledged too.
In our collective myth of Christ we have created, or witnessed, a being who extends love to all living things, and offers a life beyond death in its existence – the mystical body of Christ. Just as my grandmother lifted me from darkness and death, so Christ is said to lift humankind.
My grandmother took over my care soon after I was born. My mother told me that I slept in the same bed as she did, but one morning she woke and couldn’t find me. She panicked, and then discovered I had slipped out the side of the bed, and was as cold as stone. From that point on my grandmother took charge, which probably did nothing for my mother’s confidence.
I have not recovered memories of this period, but from looking at photographs, I grew from a tiny shrunken little creature into a happy and sometimes radiant looking child with blond hair. Things soon changed though. My grandmother died of a stroke before I was two. So suddenly the great love in my life was gone.
This was such a major event in my life that it left massive residues in strata of my psyche. The petrified remains of that event were only uncovered slowly, plunging again and again into the depths to find the heartbreaking remains of that lost love.
From my teens, through to the time of uncovering these buried feelings connected with my grandmother, I had an almost compulsive religious drive. This was never something leading me to attend church or listen to sermons, or study the Bible. It was a direct need to find God as a personal experience. I wanted to communicate, to meet, and to have a direct confrontation.
Understanding of this drive dawned slowly as I developed the skills of mental archaeology, and learned to carefully brush away the debris of years. My first discovery in this old burial mound was anger. I was angry with God – violently angry. Only slowly were the roots of that anger uncovered.
My grandmother died after a second stroke. As a young child I had no foreknowledge of this, so it was a terrible shock suddenly to no longer be able to find her. Literally she was no longer there. I didn’t even see her dead body, and I feel that was a great mistake on the part of my family. Seeing her corpse would have given me a tangible experience of her death. Lacking that experience she had simply disappeared mysteriously. I was left to seek an answer to this, and when I asked where she had gone was told that my grandmother had gone back to God.
When that one sentence was lifted out of the darkness of years, along with the emotions buried with it, the anger and the compulsive religious search were understood. I was angry with God for taking away the person I loved. I was searching for God because, according to what I had been told, in finding God I would find my grandmother.
It’s crazy how the mind and emotions work, but logical too. As a child I didn’t have the equipment to question the information I had been given. So it was buried intact, still channelling the energy of my drives and emotions until I managed to uncover it and re-evaluate it against a much wider database of experience and information.
Isn’t love a strange and terrible thing to keep a child held to its determined search through the long years into adulthood? Some ghost, some spirit of that small boy that I was, remained waiting in a corner of myself. Waiting and hoping for the return of his beloved grandmother. Waiting and bearing the weight of that waiting each day, gradually becoming walled up in a dungeon of debris dropped by the passing years.
The vulnerable and beautiful spirit of that child, buried in the shadows of myself, was the hidden artist behind much of the beauty and tragedy in the love story of my life. It became known to me in a dream as Lumpkin.
That’s how I waited out the years with my mother. Because I had been so close to my grandmother, in some ways my mother was a stranger. Living with her left the love child in me constantly waiting to go home. There was a feeling in me that if I could wait through this day, maybe today, or the next day, I could go home. If not today, maybe tomorrow I could be with my grandmother!
That feeling of desperate waiting, of feeling I was never “at home”, of constantly wondering where home was, lasted most of my life. A dream I experienced in Italy in 2000 shows the depth and dilemma of this. In the dream I was driving home along a country road. Ahead of me the road forked and I took the right-hand fork. I drove a little further and arrived home. It was a lovely house in its own grounds. My wife and children were happy to see me and came to greet me warmly. But something was wrong. I had no sense that these people were my family. This was not my home, and I hurried away, back to the fork in the road. There I took the left fork. Again I arrived home – another lovely house, another wife and children who warmly greeted me as husband and father. But there was still no feeling in me that I was home. Again I must go to look for where I belonged.
That dream sums up the feelings that haunted me most of my life, and the split shown by the forked road. As with the religious drive, the feeling arose because of my desire to be once more with my grandmother. After all, it was a desire etched into me over many years. Strangely enough, at the time this memory really surfaced, I was living with a friend, being homeless at the time. On the very day it came to light my friend told me I would have to find somewhere else to live. It was so strange it was almost comical.
Therefore, before ever I had any real sense of time or identity, those early experiences set patterns in me that have influenced the rest of my life. My prematurity, with its consequences of unreadiness for an outgoing life that would grasp the world and its opportunities, left a yearning, and I think an open door, to enter into the mysterious in the worlds of the mind and spirit. I wasn’t looking outward to the world. All my energy was flowing backwards into the life of the womb and its dark mystery. And there were negative aspects to that, such as lack of worldly ambition and a failure to understand the needs and functions of placing oneself well in the world to gain financial and social benefits.
What I have gained though, is an extraordinarily rich inner life. I suppose it was also a major factor in my becoming well-known in connection with dreams. Also, for never having any sense that I ought to absorb the subjects offered through schooling, as given by the establishment. But I believe there are other factors not mentioned, that played a big part in that.
The other main pattern put in place by my infant years, was the foundations upon which would be built a terror of losing the one I loved and the compulsion to be loved as desperately and urgently as I myself loved. In this way the scene was set for the drama of my destiny to unfold.
Last Thoughts About Lumpkin
I end by thinking about Lumpkin and realise what a wonderful part of me he is. I have an image of him as the Lion headed dwarf. The tiny malformed being who is yet enormous, with strength, wisdom, and power. He has that in his weakness. And in his love and compassion, he has more strength than soldiers. I have a sense that my female has taken Lumpkin deeply into herself. I have a feeling she is going to carry Lumpkin deep in her being, perhaps into another lifetime. And if that is so, I want her to recognise that Lumpkin has the seeds of enormous strength, great wisdom and love. I know that is why my lover has taken Lumpkin into herself.
Lumpkin is now also flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood.
Here is the Lumpkin dream.
“I believe it was a man, rather shadowy, who gave me a leather pull string purse or pouch. In the pouch was powder that I poured onto my rather stained trousers. Strangely, they looked like the one’s I wear now. Immediately the powder started working like yeast, or at least, I thought of it as yeast. It was cleansing and purifying my trousers in a spreading action. I knew that this yeast, or pollen, had also penetrated my body, and was gradually working through my being, purifying and healing.
I looked at the opening of the pouch, and it was in the shape of a mouth and a vagina. The powder that came out was like millions of living motes, or particles, life giving and alive. I thought at first that using the powder would empty the pouch, but I saw that in fact the living counts replenished itself. They were like sperm or pollen, they regenerated.
Then suddenly the scene shifted and it was later in the day. I was the only person at an eating-place. I heard sounds of people coming, and wasn’t sure if they were friendly or not. So, I acted as if I were working at the place by clearing one of the tables. There didn’t seem to be any proprietors or staff. Then, into the room, or space, because I believe it was outdoors, walked my friend Sheila, with a man who was shadowy, ill-defined, like the man who gave me the pouch. Sheila was now like a warrior figure, a man/woman, the genders blended. I understood, or could see, that Sheila had gone through an incredible journey or adventure. This was like one of the mythological odysseys that had transformed her in meeting its dangers and trials. She was now a very powerful figure. In her hands Sheila carried a tiny being. She held it out to me and said, “Lumpkin has been asking for you.” (Some days before the dream of the pouch and Lumpkin I experience a powerful uprising of feeling and joy. In listening to the feeling I received the distinct message that in four days I would receive a gift. I wondered what this gift might be, and understood that it was something that had always existed, but I had now grown, or opened, to the point where the gift could be received.)
Strangely, since that time, my dreams have given me four gifts – the two books, the pouch, and Lumpkin. None of them are easy gifts, and I am still riding the waves that lift me and thrown me down in my relationship with love and loneliness.
I understood that Lumpkin, this little being, had missed me and wanted to be with me. I held out my arms and took this creature, who was about 10 inches high, with spindly legs and arms. From his appearance he was incapable of individual locomotion. Lumpkin wasn’t a baby, nor an animal, but he was intelligent and could speak. He came to me and I held him, with the feeling we have known each other in the past.
Art by Carlos Caban
In fact what he brings me it is the possibility of the compassion for the helpless and injured. He has, because of his own weakness, a sense of humility that allows a link with other people’s vulnerable and perhaps a hidden, nature.”