The patient is 63-year-old woman who has worked as a mid level architect. She consulted me with a complaint that she was bored with her life. She was not married and not interested in men or women. She had achieved a certain status in an architectural firm and she was satisfied with the level she had achieved. She had done many things in her life and had been around the world. Now, as she was coming into the last lap, as she said, of her life she didn't know where else to turn except to analysis. She had read about it and had the impression if there was anything left she didn't know about would be this. I don't mind saying that I wondered during that first interview where was the pain that brought this woman into my office. By the time we finished the interview and I decided to take her on, I felt that her pain lay in her boredom or really behind her boredom. This series of dreams reveals a rich interior life and a profound concern for the human condition everywhere in the world. Whereas she has seen the pathetic lives in a variety of countries, which we call third world, she is now experiencing the pain personally and for the mass unconscious.

Patient: My dream on Nov 1^st captured the tone of so many of my dreams preceding it so that upon waking I was again in a state of despair.

DREAM

I am in a shop called Fitsu. I am looking at its display window in which there is a table with a cloth and small orange, yellow and green cups. This is a very high-design store. The cups are high-design, very simple, but hip. A voice (or my mind) is saying, “This is LA’s funeral.”

ASSOCIATIONS AND INTERPRETATIONS

I understood much of the dream right away, having had so many like it -- that my dream (dreams) have been heralding the collapse of our way of life, its funeral. Fitsu has the feel of “fin de siècle,” Dr Bail pointed out, adding that instead of working towards true happiness, so many people are working for things - in this case beautifully designed things, nice, but essentially useless, luxury items. These kinds of insubstantial transactions will finally deliver nothing of real human value and so will bring about their own painful demise.

In my earlier life I had worked for these things like so many others, shopped in Fitsu many times and loved its merchandise, but through my work with dreams and Dr. Bail this “love” has collapsed so that much both outside of me and within has grown to feel rotten and corrupt. And, while generally these realizations have made my life far more functional and pleasurable than it’s ever been, it has also laced it with a deep and almost continuous pain.

DREAM

The next night I dream about building a summerhouse with my now boyfriend, who also works with Dr. Bail. It is a complex construction and, again, there is much struggle and pain in the dream but it’s only vaguely remembered. Then I am driving down an urban road. A car suddenly swerves from the oncoming lane across the double line full speed, cutting in front of me, then passing by me down the parking lane to my right as if it were perfectly okay, disappearing. I am shocked and angered. This is totally illegal, reckless and very dangerous. Suddenly a second car does exactly the same thing as if it’s no big deal. I’m beside myself - the outrage of these people! Finally a strange large vehicle, like a motorized hay wagon truck about forty feet long pulls across all the lanes like the other vehicles and stops in a curbside parking area facing the wrong direction. I pull up beside the driver who sits on a chair in the middle of this strange vehicle. The vehicle has only a flat long wooden surface with an old fashion steering wheel rising up the middle. Containing my rage, I say as calmly as I can to the driver that this is an outrage. The driver looks like Grace Slick from the Jefferson Airplane, hip, flowing clothes, etc. There are others around her, also hip, urbane. They seem like some British rockers. She (and these others) listens to what I have to say relatively unperturbed. I also want to tell them that sitting on unsecured chairs on a moving vehicle like this is also crazy, but I hold my tongue.

Then I drive on, through a narrow space where some people are constructing a modern building in the style of Frank Gehry. I begin to feel that the summer house my boyfriend and are building is useless, even stupid. I then need to pee. I remember having peed earlier in the dream in many inappropriate places – corners of living rooms, beside curtains, etc. I have now stopped and I go into a room. I see a corner with a pipe. I squat down and am about to pee when I realize I am in the outer space of a women's room. There’s a door beyond and inside this second room there is a wastebasket. I think to pee in this, but then I see a toilet. It’s old; much white paint caked around it. I prepare to pee here.

ASSOCIATIONS AND INTERPRETATIONS

In the session Dr. Bail asked me to expand upon my feelings of anger at these drivers, which I did. I felt that what they had done was outrageous and selfish. I also discussed one of the British characters sitting on a chair. He was a close friend of an old boyfriend of mine from a long time ago. I was around 17 at the time (now 63) and I only met him once. My boyfriend was fifteen years older than me and he later reported that this British friend of his mocked him (and me), saying that he was robbing the cradle, that I was a baby. This angered him. It angered and hurt me.

Doctor Bail also asked me about Grace Slick whom I felt was an individual who had lived and sung “outside the box,” always pushing the envelope. She had looked very good in the dream in her flowing clothes, quite young. I had felt that she had dealt with me rather maturely for a rocker.

After some further discussion he said that the dream was saying that he (Dr. Bail) was the two cars that came in the opposite direction and that he was Grace Slick as well. It shocked me for a moment because I had felt such rage in the dream at these drivers and had never felt any rage toward Dr. Bail, only gratitude for how much my life has grown clearer and better with his help. But almost immediately it made sense. The Grace Slick aspect helped. And, of course, Dr. Bail is going in the opposite direction from everyone else. His practice runs almost directly counter to all modes of current analysis and psychiatry, not to mention most contemporary thinking. Also Dr. Bail has made it very clear to me, countless times, that I have been a little girl, even an infant, just like my boyfriend’s British friend pointed out so many years ago.

And then, of course, there is my rage and despair at being forced to face a world that my dreams (with Bail’s interpretations) have helped me see is more often misery making than anything else. It is a world that is confused, filled with wars and polluted (physically, mentally, spiritually). Most people just expect it to go on like this then end, so they don’t really see the point of looking at it too closely. My dreams (and Bail) have forced me to look at it closely and this hasn’t been fun.

He then pointed out that, as I went through “a narrow place,” I no longer believed in the work on my “summer home” that I was working on with my boyfriend who, as I said, also sees Dr. Bail. In other words, upon seeing Bail as a crazy driver I would, of course, feel that my project (with him, i.e.: analysis) was useless and dumb.

And so I go to “eliminate” once again in inappropriate places - public places, which would obviously affect other people adversely with its smell, etc. Very immature. But I have been working for quite a few years now with Dr. Bail, so even as I attempt to eliminate the toxins in me (urine) inappropriately, I in fact find the “old toilet” (Dr. Bail is old) into which I purge myself appropriately.

At the end of the session the anxieties that had been humming just beneath the surface evaporated. I felt relieved.

DREAM

The next night I have a dream in which I am in bed with my grown son. We are in the lower bunk of a bed that I slept in as a child. There is nothing sexual about this. I am trying to get him to go to sleep just as I used to do with him as a child. Finally he seems to drift off. I get up carefully, wanting him to sleep. I go to turn off the light switch but there are many switches. I turn on some other lights by mistake. This upsets me. I want my son to sleep, to dream undisturbed. More switches. More lights. Troubling. Finally I am able to figure it out and turn all the lights off. My son has not woken up, but I’m a bit of a wreck from this.

ASSOCIATIONS AND INTERPRETATIONS

At the session with Dr. Bail the next day I reported that upon waking I was incredibly upset again. I had this overwhelming feeling of dread. I felt that everything was hopeless; that it seemed like almost no one on the planet really cared and would be more or less relieved if the world around them just went to pieces. The hell with it, I had thought, let everything be destroyed.

Dr. Bail seemed to understand this sentiment, but then explained that he felt in the dream I was trying to quell this same anxiety, dread and rage in my son (as well as in others that I loved, for instance, my son’s adopted boy who I nowadays often try to put to sleep. He’s still quite young). That’s why I was trying to turn out the lights with care.

I suddenly remembered in the session that when I had been a child in that bunk bed I had suffered overwhelming anxieties, at times so bad that it felt like a belt was being winched tighter and tighter around my stomach so that I couldn’t breathe. This is what you are trying to quell, explained Dr Bail (in yourself, in those you love) as you try to turn out these lights. Dr. Bail also pointed out that although it was difficult for me I did, indeed, get the lights in my childhood room turned out in the end so that my son (and, by extension, his boy, my grandson) could stay calm and dream.

But later (in reality) that same day, while driving, a thought flitted up and then away. I have gotten better at remembering these vague kinds of daydreams, as I have gotten vastly better at remembering my night dreams. This thought that flitted through me was so horrific that it’s a wonder I didn’t bury it right away. I almost did. It just flickered at the edges of my consciousness then disappeared.

It had to do with my grandson who is, frankly, the most precious treasure in my life. He has brought me nothing but joy, complete joy, and I believe I have done much the same for him. I have always been one of the few people who can put him to sleep (as an adopted child he has had his share of anxieties.) We can also play together for hours. But there are some complicated issues around the birth parents, so we have made it a policy at this point not to bring him out into the open. I have a Facebook page up on the Internet and have never put up a picture of him for fear of any repercussions, but I have a number of friends who have many photos of their grandchildren on their Facebook pages. It has never seemed to bother me consciously, but in this daydream my thoughts were the following:

If my grandson were dead, then it wouldn’t matter anymore; I could put up as many of his pictures as I wanted on my Facebook page.

As I have already said, I barely caught this thought (I sometimes consider it similar to catching fish.) But I caught this thought and then forced myself to look at it, to think about it. Here I was actually discovering a thought in myself that for just a little bit of recognition on my Facebook page I was okay with killing the treasure that I love more than anything in the world. In the past, I would have probably never remembered this thought or I would have dismissed it as so much nonsense. Not this time. That night I had the following dream.

DREAM

Again, so much of what frames this dream is unremembered anxiety and complications. I am struggling without clarity. There are colors, half images, incomprehensible words. Then the dream becomes clear. There is a boat a bit larger than a large house. It is sitting on land. It has a strange mechanical aspect to it, which allows its wooden hull to open outward like steps so that we can climb aboard. We do this.

We climb up to the top deck (about forty feet off the ground.) I encounter two telephone pole-like objects, which rest from stem to stern on the railings. I straddle these, surveying the world stretched out before me. In the distance I see a second boat, vastly larger than the one we stand on. This second boat is huge. Every window blasts with light. It is overwhelmingly luxurious. We stare at it in amazement. It dwarfs our dark little boat. Someone asks how can people build something so huge and garish. Someone else responds: “Selfishness, greed and stupidity.”

Then I see a film about horse racing. The filmmakers are changing the music at the end. They are adding a Frank Sinatra song, which enhances the movie greatly. The song, as best as I can remember, is “Witchcraft.”

Then I see Amelia Earhart and Richard Gere walking down a street. They are looking for her goggles and hat, which she has lost. The wind has blown them off her head.

Finally, I am with my ex-husband. He is sitting at a table with my son and my two daughters. I realize in the dream that they will never be able to accept my new boyfriend, who (as I said) has also been doing work with Dr. Bail. They will never be interested in understanding the journey he and I have been on by doing this work.

ASSOCIATIONS AND INTERPRETATIONS

First, Doctor Bail said that it was true that my family and pretty much all my friends will never even begin to understand the journey with him. He reminded me of my earlier dream of the cars coming at me in the opposite direction – even I am outraged by what he (and the dreams) are revealing. Most everyone around me will continue to dismiss me as crazy or even be angry with me as I was angry with Dr. Bail in the “car dream”. All of this, of course, brings me great pain and sadness, but it is the reality.

He said that I was Amelia Earhart. (In my dream she was the actress Hilary Swank who played Amelia in the recent movie with Richard Gere.) He said that Richard Gere was my boyfriend and that the hat and goggles had been blown off because I have gained the humility (despite my resistance) to take in what Doctor Bail (and my dreams) have been saying about myself and the true state of the world. So much of what I have learned is painful, yes, but the consequences of not coming to terms with the powerful toxins that pollute my unconscious (the “urine,” the death thoughts at the edge of my memory, etc.), is to open myself up to the kind of tragedy that befell Earhart . But I am doing the work (the hat and goggles – a symbol of what killed her) are blown off so that I (with my boyfriend) have a chance to appropriately eliminate these toxins, giving us an opportunity to blossom and enjoy all these gifts of being alive.

Also true of Frank Sinatra; all of his gifts were so obvious (like Amelia), and yet his personal life (the life he experienced as a human, not as a celebrity) was cruel, sad and ultimately lost. Sinatra was also powerful, Dr. Bail pointed out, adding that horses stand for great power. He felt that much of this dream fragment was good, talking about the potential for great power, but the “witchcraft” of the toxins, the damage from one’s early life, the “mother’s imprint” can sabotage all that.

Upon entering his office that morning and remembering the first part of the dream about the boat it hit me that, yes, of course, this part of the dream could be a reference to Noah’s Ark. Not a good sign, given the darkness of so many of my other dreams. Is another (at least metaphorical) flood coming? Can I possibly imagine that my dreams are functioning as they did with the prophets of the Old Testament? This is difficult for me, even repugnant. I am far more comfortable with the idea of “hard core” religion, etc., being something of the past, leaving any “prophetic” possibilities on the sidelines, really more metaphor than anything else, likewise any thoughts of past lives and other New Age tendencies.

Nonetheless, it was hard for me to escape this reference to the Ark. The boat did look and sit on the ground exactly like the Ark. In the dream we climbed aboard in more or less the same manner as the animals in the Bible. Dr. Bail agreed, adding that perhaps the poles on the top deck were actually masts for the ship. He suggested that perhaps this dream was pointing out that I was ready for a flood if it came, that I was facing (and removing) the toxins that would have otherwise sabotaged my wanting to survive in the brutal times that my dreams have been saying are coming.

What then is this huge, rich, “selfish” monster of a ship, I asked. He said it was the “ark” of the rich people, who are accumulating as much wealth as possible, also preparing for hard times. They will survive, as the rich always survive (selfishly, greedily, brutally), while so many of those that are poor and uninformed will be swept away.

Awful revelations, to be sure - nothing to be pleased about even as it appears that I (and hopefully those that I love and can inform) will survive as well on a ship not bloated and blazing with the overuse of electricity (every window blazing with light) but rather in a more ecological, humbler vessel, using the wind (two masts on the top deck – two being the number of the unconscious) for power.

Dr. Bail then went back to the death-daydream about my grandson. He said that I had finally brought to the surface some of my earliest feelings – my infant rage at never having been seen for who I really was, for having been essentially ignored. This rage was (and is) so great (having never been faced) that it flickers at the edges of my life still unattended to. It is the rage that nearly all of us share from infancy, something so brutal and selfish that we can’t even begin to deal with it so we project it out of ourselves onto, say, a Satan figure or onto some distant (or even near) enemy. It drives us to murder either in reality or in more subtle ways. It drives the rich (and those who wish to be rich) to manipulate, lie, cheat, tell themselves it’s all right as they gain a kind of recognition (the garish boat) while the planet that sustains us all is ruined for these desperate, murderous needs. It is what will bring on “the flood.”

I then suddenly in the middle of this session with Dr. Bail remembered something even more horrific than the death-thoughts toward my grandson. Something I had never spoken about to anyone before.

I love to cook and I am good at it, but frankly there have been times while cooking a wonderful meal for friends or even for my son and his wife, my grandson running at his feet, that a thought has cut through me to take the gourmet knife in my hand and turn it on my loved ones. The bloody results of this flickers through my mind in detail even as I push these thoughts away, vaguely haunting me afterwards, but again, just beneath the surface. I admitted all of this to Dr. Bail.

He nodded slowly, then said, “Then afterwards you would have been seen, correct?”

I would have been seen, he continued, like all those others who have murdered senselessly and gotten on the front page – or who have murdered for acceptable reasons (all those wars for the mother country, etc.). I would have finally expressed my infant rage and finally been seen for who I really was – someone so deeply hurt and never seen until the moment of my murderous rage being acted out.

The moment Dr. Bail responded with this, it was as if some great weight were lifted. I understood immediately that I would never again be haunted when I picked up a knife to cook a meal for my loved ones. (This has turned out to be true.) I would instead be able to embrace the joy of nourishing them, understanding that I had been so deeply hurt. This allowed me to see that this murderous rage that had surfaced at such warm (blindsiding) moments in my life wasn’t some fatal flaw or fault in me. Nor was it the fault of my mother, father or her mother before her and so on, because this lack of recognition is a problem for all of us, isn’t it? Who doesn’t feel unseen? And beneath that who (as an infant) was seen in all his/her nearly infinite responses? Doesn’t the wound remain embedded deep within all our mental “tissue”?

I said to Dr. Bail that it felt like a kind of kryptonite, these thoughts and feelings, a kind of radioactive material. Yes, he answered, which saps us, destroys us and takes a tremendous amount of energy to keep out of sight.

But dreams and this work with Dr. Bail have accessed all this damage for me. Dr. Bail described this destructive dynamic as the “inner saboteur”. A still active infant raging force, which wishes to destroy that which it loves the most and, as Dr. Bail has posited many times, was first forced to destroy the very richness of its own complex self in infancy (or even in the womb) when this “complexity” emerged as a problem for its source of nourishment and life: the mother.

Seeing all this in myself made it possible for me to see the same thing in (for instance) those rich people on that garish ship, who will do anything to survive whatever flood is coming. They will exploit, lie, murder or have others murder for them. And yet if I am willing to face the fact that deep within me my own “inner saboteur” is okay with seeing my treasure of a grandson die or my knifing everyone else I love so that I can get a little recognition on Facebook or on TV, then how can I not forgive those who have been driven to carry out these same kind of acts openly? How can I not understand that before taking dreams seriously I was at least as lost as any one else out there, causing great damage to those I loved (and hated).

Most important, how can I not have a profound hope that others will find this key as well now that it has been detailed and refined by Dr. Bail (and will continue to be refined by others in the future), others who will wake up with the help of dreams (and their correct interpretations) and perhaps help stop (or at least afterwards clean up) this oncoming flood of contemporary rage that my dreams seem to say we have brought upon ourselves, not out of an innate evil or genetically embedded destructiveness of the human species, but out of an enormous ignorance and pain, which can be overcome (as so much else has) with the patient, knowledgeable, brave and clear, unflinching eye of real science.

COMMENTARY

Little needs to be said of this collection of dreams and their interpretations. However, I do want to clarify and emphasize the psychological mechanisms of the cars going against the traffic. In this dream the patient has identified herself with a crowd who are usually terrified of anything new coming across their lives. The masses live in unconscious dread and fear and hew to the center of their lives as superficially as they can. A new idea is quickly wiped away because the people sense that the new idea has the possibility of changing everything they have thought and lived by. That idea is simply terrifying.

In this dream the patient understands that many of my interpretations are new ideas for her, and she fears them. After a while, feeling better by their understanding, she feels stronger and happier. So here she gets a taste of what it is to be one of the masses and luckily is able to contain her outrage and her fear; well enough to speak to Grace, the Rocker (myself as analyst) who is doing this crazy thing bucking traffic, courting death. I am properly warned by her to pay attention, meaning go along with the crowd and do not frighten me with your interpretations.

As the dreams go on they predict calamity for the people that will be blamed on an uncaring God. It is easy to do this (and there are groups of people that like this idea). The truth is calamity of this immensity comes about not by the act of a careless God but by actions of people in power with designs for greater power and control of more and more. These planned realities will ultimately fail as they have in the greatest of past empires. It is never ending but erroneous and fatal for that society and in the end for mankind that must finally understand what is being fobbed off on them. One dream after another explores the feeling of a person but they echo the feelings of the mass unconscious, one standing for the whole.

Inevitably what emerges is that the one essential factor missing from birth onward is truly the love of the mother for the infant. Also part of this endless cycle is the mother's imprint which metaphorically deflects the person's innate and pure self, the self "that comes from God", as the saying goes. The endless traumas continue from the unconscious of the mother, father, siblings and family and afterward from the external world; an accumulation of hate and muffled rage begins to be stored in the unconscious. This is another reason why people shun its appearance and its presence. It is true they have a point. Unleashed rage combined with little control or knowledge puts all of us at risk. In the end it must be the understanding of what works in the netherworld, everyone's unconscious, and how to defuse those terrible feelings, to neutralize them and to use the energy expended in keeping them at bay for greater, kinder enterprises that benefit the holder and all about her/him.

In the end love cures; in the end truth and love cures. Truth is that which is transparent and open, so openness must be the order of life - everywhere - for everyone - for every office - for every government - for every country and let us leave God alone to do whatever it is He does.

We know it will only be for the good of us all. Why would it not be if as every wise man, every spiritual man says, man has been made in God's image and our connection with Source is Mind. Our minds are part of that Mind.

The patient is no longer bored.

December, 2009

[1] This is the patient's title.