Posts Tagged ‘vulnerable’

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.

The Baby In Your Dream

Your dream baby is very special to you. It doesn’t matter that perhaps the baby in your dream is the child of another woman, it is still the baby of your dream. Like any baby, it is something new and vulnerable that has come to life – come to your life. The important question is, what is it that is new and growing in your love, in your work, or in yourself? Or perhaps it is about vulnerability. Therefore the answers you give to the following questions are important in helping you discover the truth about your dream baby.

Example: I have had 2 dreams now where I am pregnant and there are 3 possibilities for the dad! 3. And usually its a pair of brothers (different each time) and another person (cant remember exactly who, once it was my ex bf I think). Weird right? Why would I have this dream? I am married and had a baby over a year ago.

Your dream baby is very special to you. Like any baby, it is something new and vulnerable that has come to life – come to your life. The important question is, what is it that is new and growing in your love, in your work, or in yourself? Such a baby is a new part of yourself that you have formed out of your life experiences and so is enlarging you. Take care of it and see what it adds to your life.

However, if you are pregnant or hoping for a baby at the time of the dream, your dream baby may be reflecting your hopes, fears or intuitions about pregnancy. Many pregnant women have very anxious or strange dreams about their baby. So do not feel that such dreams are predictions. They are often ways of releasing anxiety or of expressing hopes regarding your unborn child.

If you have given birth to a baby in a dream, it can represent a new phase of life; a new idea; new activity – as when we say someone has a new baby, meaning a new project or business. This ‘baby’ might be part of you that did not have a chance to be ‘born’ or express before. Or it may be things learned in a rich life that you could not put into practice because of circumstances. The baby in this aspect is the ‘you’ that could have been if you had been free from problems and past hurts.

How would you describe the condition or situation of the baby?

The baby in your dream might be hungry or ill. It might be wonderfully advanced and already able to speak. Whatever the condition, this is a description of what is happening with the newly emerging or vulnerable part of you. Therefore try to put into words what you see or feel the condition of the baby is.

As an example of this, here is a fragment from a man’s dream: ‘I am responsible for bringing up a baby boy. I feel very happy about it and feel committed to it.’ So in this case the condition of the baby is that of being loved and cared for.

What does it mean when I give birth to a dream baby without a father?

If you have given birth without any man involved, it suggests it is a virgin birth – i.e. no male partner was involved at the time.

So the dream baby born to you in this way a wonderful creative act between you and Life. It is a new part of you that if you let it gradually grow into your waking life as a new force, a new way of feeling about life and acting. Being pregnant like that is very important. Obviously you are not going to give birth to a physical baby, but dream babies are important too.

Many women dream of giving birth without any man involved. Virgin birth is normal part of dreaming. It means that the woman or young girl has conceived as a process of Life. Being a virgin represents the human soul or psyche and its possibility of dropping pre-conceptions, thus attaining an inner virginity and through that being receptive to the unseen or unconscious side of self. Joseph Campbell in his book “Myths To Live By” says – “There are myths and legends of the Virgin Birth, of Incarnations, Deaths and Resurrections; Second Comings, Judgements and the rest, in all the great traditions. And since such images stem from the psyche (from you and your dreams), they refer to the psyche. They tell us of its structure, its order, and its forces, in symbolic terms.”

For instance, the story and events surrounding the virgin birth, when looked as if a dream are not about a biological miracle, but about how as ordinary people, we can drop our preconceptions, our fixed ideas and beliefs and allow an entirely new and creative impulse into our life. This truth has been so venerated that we find virgin figures all over the world such as Maya the mother of Buddha born 500 BC; the virgin mother of Osiris, and of course the story told of Mary.

Being a virgin in this case is about having a mind free from previous ‘conceptions’ and so being open to Life itself fertilising you for a new and precious thing being born. If you are not a virgin because you have had children, that is not what virgin birth is about. It is about conceiving without any mental preconceptions, having an open and receptive mind or soul. it is about a wonderful human possibility.

Only a ‘virgin birth’ can bring forth the birth of an intuition, a new response to oneself and ones environment, that transforms ones life. This is a living relationship with the mystery which underlies our life. If we generate a child in this way, we are not held prisoner by habits of thought, stereotypes of behaviour, then we can begin to allow into our waking life what was previously impossible to know. This open state of mind and feelings, acts as a link between the identity or personality, and the deep unconscious life processes. This link allows a birth of realisations and inner change that brings healing and a possibility of experiencing the aspect of oneself that is our core self. Here is an example of a man giving birth to the wonderful child.

“Was in a basement where my wife and a woman I loved was giving birth to a baby, but I was somehow the one who gave birth to it without a doctor being there. It was a lovely boy. Its lower face was covered by a tight caul, but I pulled this off and it began to breathe. It opened its eyes and looked about, fully conscious; then said something about Jesus, and, “It is gone!” I asked what had gone, and it replied, “The other ego; where has it gone?” I explained that the spirit self it knew before birth was now gone so it could live in the body. The baby was then taken upstairs, and I felt it was a holy and wonderful baby. I was going to rest from the rigours of the birth, but on looking around saw how dusty and dirty the basement was. I began to clean it, and felt I would go upstairs and rest afterwards.”

This was a dream marking a real change in the man’s life. The man did work at cleaning his basement/unconscious and then began to go upstairs to his wider awareness.

Example:  “I had a baby girl, but I had no idea who the father was. I’m dating someone now, so I figured it was his, but she didn’t look like him at all. I remember I started going through this list of men I’d been with recently”.

A way to understand this dream is that you have given birth to a new part of yourself and your inner male is the father. This is said because of your uncertainty about who the father was, and that your baby girl did not look like the present partner. /so this makes it more certain that your baby was a creation with you and the processes of life in you, your inner male – or animus – which is a synthesis of all your male contacts.
See http://dreamhawk.com/dream-encyclopedia/archetype-of-the-animus-jungs-view-of-the-male-in-the-female/

What are your feelings or thoughts about the baby as it appears in the dream?

What you feel and think about the baby gives an indication of how you are relating to the new or vulnerable part of yourself, or what worries you are discharging. Clarify them to recognise what may be helping or hindering this new experience in your life.

An example of this: I had a dream that I had a child and had to cancel a test because I had to take care of the baby. I was breast feeding the baby, because it is healthier to breast feed than to give formula from a bottle. The person that I had been seeing wanted to know what I thought I was doing. The question was in an accusatory manner, like I had no business breast feeding my own baby. Then I left the baby with my friends and left. When I came back, they were feeding the baby Tabasco sauce because they ran out of milk. This shocked me because I thought my friends were more responsible than that.

So there are two issues here. The first is the struggle and strength to oppose what is felt to be right in the face of other people’s opinions. The second is that other people can injure your vulnerable and growing self if you let them take over your decisions. In either case it is clear that you have the intuitive knowledge to see what is the best way to nurture your baby.

Is the dream baby my own child?

If we are parents we often dream about our own children. Occasionally such dreams express concerns we have about our own child. We have noticed something ‘out of the corner of our eye’, and the dream puts this into focus. But often such dreams use the child to illustrate a developing part of you. This is because your actual child has characteristics unique to itself. They may be adventurous, playful, thoughtful or highly verbal. To understand your dream you need to define how you see and feel about your child.

For instance a woman dreamt she was sitting on a window sill and was frightened of falling. So much so she couldn’t move. Then she reached out and took her small son’s hand and climbed into the building away from danger. In describing how she felt about her son, she said he was courageous and confident. So her dream was showing how, by reaching out for her own confidence and courage, however immature, she could overcome her anxiety about falling/failing. Her child calls out her inner strength to meet the situation and overcome the danger.

Can I help the baby in any way?

This is an important question to answer because your dreams often present you with opportunities to change or to grow. If the dream is dealing with an emerging part of your nature, or a new love or project, protecting and helping this new dimension of your life is important. So, for instance, if your baby needs feeding or affection, sit quietly and imagine yourself feeding the baby, or giving it affection. Do whatever you feel is needed to help it. See Secrets of Power Dreaming

Is this an intuition about a baby’s or my baby’s situation?

Quite often we dream about awful events in connection with our baby or child. Because these can be incredibly disturbing it is important to understand their meaning. As a first step there are at least two types of dreams that deal with disturbing events. The first type of dream is called ‘representative’. And the following is an example of it.

I am on a country walk with my wife and small son. I look back to see my son fall down a deep hole. I rush back to see him drowning, and wonder whether I should jump down to help him. Then suddenly he is okay and with me again.

The father was incredibly worried that it showed a bad situation for his son. But as we explored it we realised that the son represented his marriage. He had a terrible row with his wife the day before, and he was frightened that it was the end of their life together. The son in this dream was the result of their marriage, what they had created together. So if the son had died it would have shown the father feeling their marriage had no hope of a future. But the dream showed the son fully recovered, showing that even when he was feeling bad, his dream showed him a different outcome. So it represented the father’s intense feelings and the possible outcome.

The other type of dream can be called direct insight or prophetic. Such dreams are usually not in any way symbolic and are highly uncommon. They do not include such things as are in the above dream which quickly switches from danger to ease. The following dream is an example.

One morning my wife woke and told me she had dreamt about the baby of two of our friends. The friends, a man and wife, were living about 200 miles from us. We knew the wife was pregnant, and about a week or so before the dream we had received a short letter saying their baby, a boy, had been born. We were not on the telephone at the time, so the letter was our only means of communication.

In the dream my wife saw the baby and a voice from behind her told her the child was ill. Its illness, she was given to understand, was serious, and would need to be treated with a drug taken every day of the child’s life. The reason for this illness and the drug use, she was told, was because in a past life the person now born as the baby had committed suicide using a drug.

In this dream very definite information was given that could be checked. I didn’t take the dream seriously, thinking it was some sort of personally symbolic dream. The dream was sent to the couple, and about a week later a letter from them said that the letter and dream had crystallised their already existing anxiety about the baby. It had not been feeding well and was fretful. On taking it to the doctor nothing definite could be found but special tests were made in hospital. From these it was discovered the baby was dying. It lacked an enzyme which was needed to digest calcium. To compensate it was given a drug, which it has had to take every day of its life to make up for the lacking enzyme.

The dream did not represent a situation, it described it clearly. Also it could easily be checked. So if you are uncertain, always go for the representative dream, as prophetic dreams are extremely rare.

So the questions to ask are: Is this dream making a direct statement? If so can I check it for accuracy? If it is a representative dream, ask yourself what it represents symbolically, and go through the questions above.

Summing Up

From the answers you have given to the questions see if you can recognise what new thing has come into, or is emerging, in your life. What do you feel vulnerable about? Is it to do with someone you love? Is it a new attitude you have to the way you express yourself? Or perhaps it is a new project you have undertaken.

When you can connect the dream with your everyday experience, consider what the dream is depicting in its drama. Is it saying the baby is healthy and strong? Does your baby need support? Is it nourished? Whatever you have discovered from looking at your dream baby, try to use the insights in your everyday life. Build them into the way you feel and think, and watch your baby grow.

See Being the Person or Thing;  Inner Baby and Child; also baby babies.