The messages within a dream
The recurrence with which I visit my childhood home and yard, the place where I grew up, is definitely trying to tell me something.
Some dreams may be erroring outputs of hyper stimulated minds throughout the day; but the recurrence of a certain dream or specific ideas and concepts should never be omitted from analysis.
Such a recurrent dream involves my childhood, my origins,my family. They always show up, especially during the times I get disconnected from my own body (which feels more like being disconnected from my mind).
I find myself in this similar settling where I run from something. The theme is there; always surfacing, telling me something is coming to get me and I should run (or else I die). Last night, my entire family was sitting inside the animal shelter my grandfather kept (which I associate with his property, his domain, his authority). They were all there, much like waiting their turn for something.
I look at them, they look at me and I know it’s my turn. At the same time, I think I have a mission to complete in order to escape alive: I must eat two of the same blue pieces of clothing (yes, eat!) but there is a catch: one of the shirts is wet and I can chew it better; the other one is dry and it doesn’t go inside my mouth to chew. So I run and I run, and I realize it’s my older sister coming after me, trying to kill me. I know that if I’m getting caught, I’m dead.
As I run, I chew the wet shirt: it’s cotton grazes my neck but I don’t care. I run like a wild animal, from room to room, I bend the iron bars my parents used to have on their windows and I get out of the house once more.
I come back to the animal shelter and I can see that everybody’s there except for my older sister; I am convinced now that she is the one trying to kill me. I tell them I need protection and they simply point to the water bucket. I understand that I need to wet the other shirt in order to eat it if I want her to stop harassing me but I don’t have enough time, she’s already behind me.
I run faster while trying to chew the dry piece of clothing and I jump from the fence to the house roof and back onto the fence, like a gazelle. She’s behind me all this time, like I can’t escape. Although I know that once I finish eating the shirt, she’ll stop, there’s no time for me to eat while running; almost like a catch 22. I feel trapped but I don’t stop and I know there’s no stopping if I want to keep living.
This dream is one of the many I keep having that tell me the same thing: how I’m trying to run away from all the memories, be they good or bad. My mind is mushing them together in one large stew because it’s easier that way to cope with everything that defined me.
Packaging memories by “good” and “bad” will make me see the not all of it was bad; and if not all of it was bad indeed, then…. I shouldn’t have been so fucked up in the first place.
Dreams like these pinpoint the origin of my conflictual mind that keeps waging wars on myself and that has been fine as long as I placed the origin of this under the pain of the past. But if there’s wasn’t only pain, then that means my mind as a noogenic ability to create conflict.
I can create battles with myself regardless of what happened outside of me, and they are a result of my own, unique brain chemistry and personality makeup. There is nurture and there is nature in the way I am (which is valid for all people). But knowing it and accepting it are two different things.
Dreams are telling me this; how self-acceptance goes beyond what has hurt me and shaped me in some way. Self-acceptance requires seeing and understanding my own abilities to create the faults and lesser things I am capable of doing and being that stem from within and that have no anchor in the outside world.
Self-acceptance is recognizing the inner undesirable traits we have created for ourselves, independent of the events that we witnessed so far.
The sensation of wet and dry cotton in my mouth and the nearly-chocking sensation I had in my dream every time I swallowed shows me, much like my family was pointing to the water inside the animal shelter, that I must stop running, with my heart up my neck, from myself.
Everything is me. I am everything. The place, the family, the older sister, is me. The clothing, both wet and dry, are my accumulated baggage I carry, as part of my identity, defining me through time and space, as I cling to it although it chokes me piece by piece, slowly and steadily; not enough to kill me, because I run fast.
But enough to make me suffer.
