By Hal Stone, Ph.D.. Reproduced with permission.
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by Hal Stone, Ph.D.
The growing up process is basically a process ofsocialization for the developing child. There area wide range of rules and regulations that needto be learned as well as subtler cues in respect tothe personal needs of family and extended familymembers and other people and groups who aregermane to the child’s world.
The process of socialization varies greatly indifferent families and different cultures, so therules may vary and the intensity with which theyare given to us may vary. The principle remainsthe same however, and at very early ages we aredeveloping primary selves out of which we liveour lives and the unconscious starts knockingat our door trying to show us the other side ofus, the one that was forced out of the picture bythis socialization process. These disowned selveslive within each of us, often for the whole of ourlives. If we are married to our primary selves,which is the fact of it, then it is very difficultto discover this, let alone start the process ofseparation from these primary selves.
If the primary self of a family system isbasically very rational and rejecting of dreamsand other aspects of the creative imagination,then the child grows up either identifying withthis viewpoint or eventually rebelling againstthe rationality and over-identifying with theunconscious and the world of the dream. Amarriage to either side isn’t good news and soit is that the idea of the Aware Ego emerges toembrace these opposites. There are a multitudeof scenarios when it comes to selves and what wedo with them. This is only one possible scenario.
There are two considerations that determinewhich dreams come knocking at our door atnight. There are, first of all, the rules/primaryselves that we live by and secondly there is theemotional intensity that attaches to the rule/primary self. The more emotional intensitythat the rule carries, then the stronger isthe disowned self inside of us. All of theseconsiderations have an effect on the kind ofdreams that appear and the strength of theiremotional content. The stronger the disownedselves that a child is carrying, the stronger willbe the emotional content of the dream.
One other basic consideration is veryimportant in understanding the dream proces inboth adults and children. Whatever is chasingus us in our dreams is a disowned self of thedreamer. Whatever frightens you in a dream isa reflection of a disowned self in the dreamerand the stronger the disowned self the strongerthe fear or panic and hence we move towardsthe nightmare kind of dream, something that isvery common in young children. A nightmaretype dream simply means that the disownedself system has reached a more extreme placeand thus manifests as nightmare, with strongemotional content.
Now let’s take a look at how this works ina real life situation. Jimmy is a very active fouryear old who has been somewhat over- protectedby his mother who fears very often that he willcome to harm. One afternoon Jimmy is playingoutside after school and he comes running intothe house crying and sobbing and yelling thathis friend Steve had hit him and that he hadrun away with his ball. Steve’s mother, Sally, isupset by this. Her worst fears center around thepossibility that something bad will happen tohim. She embraces him and quiets him downand then she suggests to him that he stay withher while she is cooking and cleaning and theycan talk together. Jimmy is only too happy tonot have to face going out into this dangerousworld that he feels increasingly he lives in. Hismother supports his fears because she shareshis fear of the world and his emerging sense ofbeing a victim to life. She doesn’t know all of thisin a conscious way but it is there to do its worknevertheless. So for the rest of the afternoonthe two of them have a lovely and intimate timetogether and the outside world of scary Mongolwarriors riding their horses on missions ofdestruction does indeed feel far far away fromthem—but not too far away once we are asleep.
A few hours after Jimmy goes to bed thatnight he wakes up screaming and sobbing. Hehas had a nightmare. He is being chased by alion and he can’t get away from it. Sally tries tocomfort him. She is very well intentioned, butsince she herself is essentially a rational woman,she has no connection to the unconscious. Thelife of the dream world has never opened forher. So she says to Jimmy—“Jimmy—This is justa dream—Nothing more. Come, I’m going tolook under the bed with you and in the closetwith you and you will see that there is nothingthere.” She doesn’t know how to honor thedream just as she didn’t know how to honor hisinstinctual energies that were badly in need ofsupport when his friend punched him. She didn’tsupport his inner lion, his natural aggression, hiscapacity to fight when necessary. She herselfhad been over socialized in growing up so anykind of fighting was dangerous to her. Withoutmeaning to and without understanding anythingthat we are talking about now, she had stifledthe budding warrior in him that needed toemerge at this time in his life. When this naturalinstinctual energy is blocked, the unconsciousbrings the next best thing that it can bring. Itbrings to him his lion but his lion is chasing him.It is angry at him. This is how our lions behavewhen we betray them in this way. They chase usand keep trying to get our attention and we keeprunning away from them.
So Sally opens the lights and she andJimmy look under the bed and they look inthe closet and they look behind the curtainsand sure enough, there is nothing there. It wasjust a dream—just as she had said. To hear thewords—“It was just a dream”—is somethingthat has always brought great sadness to me.There is so much of the world that still livesin this kind of consciousness, unable to hearthe music of the dream world and begin tolearn about all the treasures it can bring us. Itcertainly takes time to learn about this world,but the rewards are so very great.
Sally has done two things to harm her son,the last thing in the world that she would everwillfully do. First she was unable to support thedeeper voice of her son’s jungle heritage, hisinstinctual energies. That night she is unableto support the symbolic picture of those sameenergies. The dream image of the lion is only adream—it isn’t real. Sally is not alone. The vastmajority of the world lives without any kind ofobjective understanding of, and appreciationfor, the world of the dream. We do so at ourown peril. To take dreams seriously, to realizethat they are not “just a dream” is to discover theOTHER that lives within us. The other realityis the source of a profound intelligence that isjust waiting to be awakened so that it can beginto operate in our life and bring us a new way tolook at ourselves.
Of course here we have yet another problemto be aware of and that is that our dream life ismonitored by our primary selves. When most of usdo remember our dreams it is our primary selvesthat think about them and reflect on them. Thisis why the process of separating from our primaryselves is so intimately bound to our work with thedream process. If George Bush had a dream that avery cute Easter bunny was sitting at the right handof God in heaven, his way of looking at the dreamwould probably cause him to think that terroristswere invading heaven directly and we would havea new Guantanamo Bay for Bunny Interrogation.(By the way, I am referring to Easter Bunnies andnot Playboy Bunnies, though it probably wouldn’treally matter to the primary self system.)
So Jimmy finally goes back to sleep and Sallygoes back to bed and what happens an hourlater? Jimmy is screaming again. The lion is backagain but it’s bigger. Of course it’s bigger! Thedream is like a fairy tale. Dragons grow headsand the bad guys and the scary guys of ourdreams get bigger when they aren’t dealt with,when we don’t know that the enemy we think isout there is really our friend inside of us, waitingto come to our support in life.
Sally goes through her routine again and theysearch the room and of course there is nothingthere. “It’s only a dream Jimmy! It isn’t real!” Thistime Jimmy gets a cup of hot chocolate and he goesto bed again. Soon Jimmy will stop rememberinghis dreams. They will only come back as anoccasional nightmare or he will feel an unknownanxiety that becomes so natural to him that hedoesn’t even know that it is anxiety. Years laterwhen he is a lawyer defending a client in a courtof law, he will find himself shaking with fear anddread for reasons that are unknown to him. He isworking against a killer lawyer whose lions roar inextremis, a lawyer who is Jimmy’s polar oppositeand Jimmy is victim when he is anywhere nearthis man or any man or woman like him. Jimmy’slion has long gone to sleep as he pursued his pathof intellectual excellence. There is nothing wrongwith intellectual excellence so long as the lions andtigers are available to us on the other side. The reallygood news is the level of awakening that is startingto happen to so many people in the world as theybegin to catch hold of these realities and begin towork with them.
Let us imagine a different scenario for Sally.Imagine that she was somewhat comfortable withthe world of dreams and they are alive and real forher. Jimmy starts to scream and she runs in andcomforts him and he tells her his nightmare. Shemight say to Jimmy—“What a wonderful dream.Your lion wants to meet you. Tell me what he lookslike?” They begin a talk. She asks if the lion has aname and Jimmy tells him that the name of thelion is Jilson. It doesn’t really matter what she doesor says so long as she honors the dream and staysaway from any kind of attempt to interpret thedream to him. Maybe she brings out a pad of paperand asks him to draw a picture and then she mayask him to tell a story about Jilson.
It is no longer “just a dream.” It is now themagic of the dream. She is teaching Jimmyto dance with the world of his own creativeimagination. She is teaching him how tobuild a bridge between the marvelous world ofthe rational mind and, on the other side, themagical kingdom of his creative imagination,the world of fairy tale and myth. She can even,if she wishes, make him a large cup of cocoa.Personally, I prefer coffee—but then I’m not fouryears old and Sally isn’t my mother—or is she?
© 2006
Original source and copyright: Hal Stone, Ph.D.. Read the original at Voice Dialogue International.