The patient is Frank, a 53 year-old man who is a writer and a director of commercials and whom we have met before in other essays of mine; "Tear Down The House", "Roundabout", and "Reflections on the Global Financial Crisis."

PATIENT’S THOUGHTS

This dream took place as I was beginning to face the hard reality that my entire life has been about covering up and compensating for my limitations and handicaps by employing a kind of mania. I am no longer the failure I have been, but I have also started to understand that I haven’t been functioning all that well either. The pain has been intensifying as I have been addressing the consequences of this approach, particularly in regards to my work where I have been having some serious financial issues. I have been waking up in the middle of the night in a panic.

I have to be honest—after this particular night of dreams that I am about to discuss, the panic, even terror, has increased. My days (and nights) have become even more painful. But I have learned, over these years in analysis, to exist in powerful internal pain. I have learned to make the best of it during the days. I have learned to stay working and involved in my life, even in this misery, and have learned to return daily/nightly to my dreams and their interpretations and allow the temporary relief and slow clarity (therefore deeper calm) that each dream and interpretation finally brings.

DREAM

This night’s series of dreams begins with encountering my ex-wife’s stepmother and father in a room and then on some steps. They are very passive-aggressive and untruthful (as they are in real life). I then see pictures of my son and my ex-wife (his mother) together. Are they naked in these pictures? Are they that intimate? The answer is yes, sadly. I have failed to help either one of them break their unhealthy bond. I am then on the porch of a house that is a combination of nearly all the houses over my lifetime. My ex-wife and children are there at this combo-house. My father is there as well. He is in the driveway in one of the clunker cars I once owned, a Jeep Wagoner, which is just like all my father’s clunker cars that I grew up with. In the dream, my father has some Rube Goldberg plug-contraption to get this car started, but it doesn’t work. The car is stuck. There are many kids in this car. There are other cars in the driveway as well. The car that I would drive is in the back and therefore blocked. I realize that I’m going to miss my session with Dr. Bail. I’m angry and frustrated. I am also trying to put together a party here at this house with my soon-to-be second wife. I want my son and two daughters to come, but no, my son says he’s going to the party across town for my ex-wife, his mother. It’s all a big mess, as it is (to some degree) in my real life.

I feel awful and hopeless.

Then I look up at one of those massive metal girded towers that carry the huge lines of electricity from electric plants to cities. This tower is at least 150 feet high, as these towers are in real life. In my dream there is a platform at the top of this particular tower and I can see figures. Tiny. They are shooting something. Are they men? Or boys? I realize they are shooting birds with a gun, like an underwater spear gun. It shoots out a spear that kills the bird, which is then reeled in after which another bird is shot. There is a kind of excitement about doing this. I am suddenly up there with these figures (who are, in fact, boys). I seem to zero in on one boy. Running back and forth on this platform at least 150 feet off the ground. I am suddenly terrified for him as he runs wildly from one edge to the other. I see his face, like a close-up in a movie, right at the edge. This is terrifying to me—the risk.

I am then back on the ground. But it isn’t exactly the ground. It is a wooden porch. I am holding onto a fence that encloses this porch. Below I can see that there is a steep drop into water. The water is the same distance down as the height up to the top of the tower, around 150 feet. I think of what it would be like to jump into the water so far below. Would it be best to point my toes so as to lessen the impact? Would it be better to dive? Diving is too terrifying. What if I landed on my stomach by mistake? I would probably die or at least suffer terrible pain.

I then see that there is a large, sleek sailing yacht capsized in the water below me. It’s white and perhaps sixty feet long, with its large sail unfurled and sunk under the rippling water. Without thinking I have reached to my right, grabbing a kind of rigging, pulleys and cables. I then glide downward toward the water and the boat, lands easily, gently.

Now I am splashing across the capsized yacht. It is made of white fiberglass. Strangely the deck has benches, as if set for rowers, like in a Viking ship. But this boat is modern. As I slosh through the water (the boat is capsized, on its side) I see that beneath the white fiberglass benches there is white fiberglass flooring, which has a roughened surface so that no one will slip. The builder of this boat has thought of everything, I think. It also becomes clear that the white fiberglass deck is sealed tight, a single piece of fiberglass construction. No water has gotten in. This yacht can be righted, I think.

This last part of the dream is beautiful, but I wake in terrible pain. I can’t go back to sleep. My emotion is with the earlier part of the dream, the confusion of my family, my son’s rejection, my father’s failures. I struggle, upon waking, with my work situation, with my financial concerns. I then start to think about the bigger picture—that all that matters is what’s spiritual; that my job in life is to move forward spiritually, isn’t it, that nothing else really matters much? I have come to have little hope for the short-term fate of our species, so as I toss and turn I feel increasingly clear that millions, maybe even billions of us will be slaughtered as the planet warms and democracy fails, as all systems fail. But I also tell myself that all of this will slowly move us toward a realization of our spirituality, and that my job here on this planet is to help as best I can. I must move toward the truth of what it is to be human. There is some (but not a lot) of comfort in this. I drift off into fitful sleep, remembering no more dreams.

INTERPRETATION

The next day I came to Dr. Bail anxious and very much aware that my life in the real world was not going well. He pointed out that the first part of these dreams portrayed this exactly—a troubling snapshot of my relationships with my ex-wife, her relatives, my kids, my father’s ineptness and failures during his lifetime. Dr. Bail then went on to say that he (Dr. Bail) was the boy on the tower, riding the electric, divine power that these huge towers delivered, that he was shooting down the “birds.” English slang, he noted, for “girl” in England. The dream was trying to portray how he is killing the effects of the mother’s imprint.

A few days later he amended this original interpretation (something he doesn’t do often), but it made all the difference. He said that while there was truth in this first interpretation, he felt that the dream was more importantly exploring that it was me on that tower, that at a young age I had started to shoot down the divine messages coming to me, the spiritual messages that could have given me a full life. This second interpretation had a powerful effect, like a puzzle coming clear for me, because in the dream I had felt so much terror for this boy, so much terror that he might fall. I then also remembered a childhood incident. Two of my siblings and I had been grabbing spider crabs out of the ocean, smashing them gleefully against rocks—crab after innocent crab. For hours. We were about the same age as those dream children up on the tower shooting the birds.

Dr. Bail then said that the yacht was me, dead in the water, capsized. It was the result of my killing off all those divine messages as a child. He said that this was one of those nodal dreams.

He has been absolutely correct.

This dream has sent me deep into myself. It is one of the most powerful experiences I’ve had in analysis, outlining clearly what has been wrong with me: I am capsized, but I am also beautiful and not sinking. I can be righted. Experiencing the emotion of this has been critical. Experiencing all the emotions around this series of dreams has been critical: the terror for this little boy about to plunge to his death; the strange exhilaration of killing the birds, which brought me back to that long forgotten real-life pleasure of killing the living crabs; and then the experience of that terror of jumping into the water from such a height; the calmness when I reached out for the pulleys and rigging; the sense of discovery as I moved across this sleek yacht with its unfurled sails and Viking benches (interestingly, my father’s heritage is Scandinavian).

The intellectual awareness that comes from an interpretation like this is always helpful, but it is the actual emotional experience that is transforming, the way the feelings and memories now sit in my body. This has made all the difference.

Dr. Bail also pointed out that the rigging and pulleys I reached for that guided me down to the yacht were the analysis—no crashing and burning, no horrible belly flop as I came upon my capsized self, just a slow, careful entrance into the water.

I am clear that there is a long way to go before this beautiful racing yacht can be righted. I have been doing this work in analysis for too long to expect overnight results, just as I know that the massive problems of this world are not going to be righted overnight either. The warming globe, endless wars, overpopulation, hatred, et cetera, won’t be cleaned up in my lifetime or even in the next few hundred years. But I understand, even as I understood in the dream, that my boat is not forever dead in the water and sinking. This self of mine is in fact a kind of a miracle even on its side. And I knew (I know) what my job is now. I can’t say that this job is in any way easy. I can’t say that my waking days are any less painful, but when that sense of hopelessness descends, I seem able to move through it with a little more toughness, conviction, even hope, which are qualities I desperately need to continue this brutal, but beautiful, journey of informing my waking life with the truth of my dreams.

ADDENDUM

A few nights later I had a dream about a pickup truck being pulled up by its rear axel and then towed away by two white cloth straps. It made no sense. But during the session I realized that the straps were made of that extremely strong fiberglass material, capable of picking up something as heavy as a truck. The fact that the material used to “pick up” the “pick-up” truck was white fiberglass took me back to the yacht and its white fiberglass deck. I then began wondering how I was ever (in the context of that earlier dream) going to “pick up” this capsized yacht (this me). I suppose I was in a slight daydream during this session. How could I possibly do anything with this massive keel? How could I ever get enough leverage between the mast and the keel’s heavy ballast? Perhaps I should start by rolling up the sails. That would be something at least. But then what? Suddenly it hit me: the rigging and pulleys that I had reached for while clinging to the porch’s fence, 150 feet up. Couldn’t I attach these to the mast? Couldn’t I then pull the boat back up to its righted position?

This discovery delighted me, like a child playing a wonderful game that he’d just won.

This is when Dr. Bail pointed out that what the dream was trying to say was analysis (which had lowered me safely down to this yacht, to this capsized me) would now help me to re-right this yacht/this me.

Dr. Bail then also pointed out that the boat represented the human race as well, capsized as I was. Analysis, he said, would ultimately right the world.

COMMENTARY

When I heard this dream I knew generally what it meant because the previous sessions were leading up to this conclusion. It is a beautiful dream with its brevity and its capacity to engulf a segment of life that led early on to a tragic death; not a physical death but an emotional and cyclical death.

I stood before it and I listened as I would before a classical masterpiece. I could see Michelangelo's David or Rembrandt or a Cezanne. One stands before this work of art exploring the depth of feelings that are stirred within.

The dream depicts a tragedy, and an epic one, because in one way or another most human beings on earth have experienced this moment, but they never recall it.

The patient is courageous in his intent to follow his development, or rather his misdevelopment, from a long time ago when he realized he was dead in the water, to this moment in time.

His bravery, his assiduous searching, has led him to the possibility of resurrection. There can be no real resurrection without having to look at one's death. The patient, so young and already so dead, needs now to fabricate a structure that will withstand the realities of the world. Obviously this fabrication is always liable to fracture, always precarious, always fearful of a blow to its weakest point. This is really why psychoanalysis is so deeply feared and ridiculed and so avoided. Therapies of all kinds are welcome as long as they never touch the sensitized area, a touch that might cause the house to come down.

In the dream the patient described his father in terms of a car connected to a Rube Goldberg construction. Still, his father functioned in some way, adapting to a wife (the patient's mother) who was ill-suited to being a mother. She was a woman who had to drink her insecurities, her dreams, away into fantasy. What can a man do who loves this woman in all her imperfections except construct his Rube Goldberg device? A little mania can possibly get you through to the end.

At another point during a session, the patient, ever an observer of the social order, commented about what he saw in the world when reading the news. He felt shaken and frightened that the world might collapse, that we were heading not for the Middle Ages but for the Dark Ages.

Maybe.

When I thought about this and the brief history of our country I realized,

if truth be told, that our country does not have a pretty past but a dirty one with a gold patina on it. The late historian, Howard Zinn, has given us a more accurate picture of how we began in this country. Few people know about it.

I did think that for a brief instant in the late eighteenth century, conjoined with the Age of Reason in Europe, a few men came together in union to form by intellectual means a new society. It had no age-old history to hobble its inception. Yet each of these men, learned as they were, reading all that was available even in Greek or Latin, were not impervious to the culture of their time. Nor were they impervious to the transmission of the unconscious of their mothers, fathers and their ancestors. And at this point, indeed, they did not even know about this phenomenon.

This was a time when slavery was accepted. This was a time when one man could own another human being. None of them knew that they themselves were enslaved. Nonetheless, we all applaud them even if what they did was for selfish mercantile reasons. A glorious idea can clothe a base for-profit motive.

To cast aside a king is no easy matter. In France the people had to be beyond rage and royalty beyond caring for the people they ruled for a revolution to occur where no life was deemed safe; where motives were obscure and coups and counter-coups took place, where executions and terror were the culture of the time and the populous roared with pleasure, much as the Roman people did in the amphitheater where slaves were killed and Christians were torn apart. There is a deep vein in the human psyche longing for these kinds of spectacles.

For a very long time the human psyche has forgotten its spiritual connection.

My observation of today is that there is a broad wave of discontent in this country, in Europe and elsewhere as the seams of economic union are separating and falling apart with no means of determining the truth of the actual state of affairs. The Middle East is still in turmoil and in the Far East stands China holding the mortgage on our country. It seems to me that a great clamor of a group of people to unite church and state signifies a trend that obviously has not been forgotten. After all, our roots were once in Europe. What are three hundred years in the pattern of a thousand or seven thousand? It is a spit in the wind.

Times must be frightening (the evidence is there) for a group of people, the evangelicals, the fundamentalists, who insist there is no evolution and who say they want state and church to be one.

At one point in history that was true. Not in American history but elsewhere. It was found to be NOT a good idea, but frightened people, and all of these people are frightened people in their deep psyches and in their unconscious, they want security at any price. For them security can only be had with fixity.

Evolution means change. Change is dangerous. In short, the temper of the times is retrogressive. How interesting that after a short three hundred years there are those who yearn backward for a system that existed in the world for thousands of years and ultimately was found wanting and ill-suited to the innate dignity of man.

Here I interject something from the patient himself: "Though dead in the water, this beautiful boat was a racing boat, white and sleek of shape, beauty itself." He is describing the nature of a human being, beyond beauty. It is what all of us are as conceived by God. As such no man has a right to enslave or hurt another. Conceived by Source, no person has the right to impose by force his opinions on another despite what one sees as inequity in this life.

Life is a mirage. As the ancients have maintained, life is an illusion. This curtain has to come down to betray the truth of existence. Everything is an evolution even though some human beings say that there is no such thing.

"Man can propose. Even the wise man does not dispose."

In the current fever of discontent with our president, even our pundits do not understand the nature of the mind, nor do they understand the nature of the mass unconscious. There is so much disappointment in Mr. Obama because it would seem he was elected under false pretenses. Much of what he proposed to do for the people he has not accomplished. What the people do not understand is that their unconscious is sick and frightened, and it is their unconscious that chose Mr. Obama to be the president. As such, his mandate is to execute their fear and their lack of self-respect and their need to suffer and to have nothing. He is doing this admirably.

Each person will have to come to their own understanding of their unconscious dread and eventually gain their own self-respect and dignity as a person. When we have this new kind of mass unconscious, we will have a president who can do what the people ask, which is to better their plight and to better the plight of all. A well-known authority in group dynamics once observed that a group will elect the sickest member to lead it. Because a person is of high intelligence does make that person a paragon of mental health. In the case of Mr. Obama there is much in his background that augured for this happening. There is a deep resonance within Mr. Obama's unconscious for the material in the mass unconscious. This was the same for Mr. George W. Bush, who also gave the mass unconscious what it asked of him.

It is interesting that what people are angry about in America is not the rich but the educated (as Frank Rich accurately observed). This observation is extremely sound, for it reveals profound understanding in the mass unconscious that it has been the intellect that has led us to the brink of our current abyss. It is a case of the "best and the brightest" at the helm, and isn't Washington full of them and aren't the think tanks full of them.

In any undertaking by human beings the intellect alone has nowhere to go except to curl in upon itself into fantastic elaborate Rube Goldberg inventions, inventions that are engineered to fail.

Until we are a group, a country, a world that comes to our feminine unconscious, more and more will we tumble into the abyss. Our civilization is dead in the water. It seems to be alive because of dissonant sounds and the clamor of war. It seems to be alive because of financial meltdowns and thefts of enormous sums of public money. It seems to be alive by the rustle of thieving and chicanery everywhere in the world. Soon the world will really look and it will gasp with amazement that it is sinking below the surface of the waters.

If we contemplate the wondrous achievements and accomplishments attained even in the manic falsity of our society, can we imagine what we can fashion when we do it with the truth of ourselves in charge and with a masculine and feminine unconscious in balance, telling us which way to go?

The next day the patient brought the following dream.

DREAM

I was looking for this house in not the best part of town and it was difficult to find. It was a small house, maybe four rooms and a garden in back, divided in three parts. The lines dividing the garden were curvy. I thought that work would have to be done on the house but I knew how to do that. Inside the rooms were not big and each room was on a different level: kitchen, dining room, living room. I suppose the bedrooms and bathrooms were attached. I did not see them. Someone was helping me rearrange the furniture.

He spoke of downsizing.

Dr. B: Yes, for you in contrast to the mansions you lived in as a child, as you have said, old and stately but they had seen better days.

Patient: Yeah, yeah. Much better. We rattled around.

Dr. B: I also know from what you have said that you also lived in big houses in Los Angeles.

Patient: Yes, we did and some I fixed up. The last was beautiful. I left it when I left the family. It was empty and wrong.

Dr. B: Downsizing. In the dream it is more realistic, painfully so. The house has shrunk. That is the personality that has shrunk to what it really is without the mania, without a blown-up reality that did not exist.

There were more associations and finally I said the numbers here in the dream are important. Important is the three and the four. Four is indicative of stability and right now a small house or a smaller personality is healthier. You can manage that. The three sections of the garden are also important because three in the tarot stands for the creative imagination. It is also the Empress in the tarot, the giver, the royal being who gives her abundance to us. It is the holy trinity, identified with Source. Combining the four and three gives you seven which adds up to victory. There is victory in humbleness, in cultivating your garden without mania. Now is the time to start doing that.

I thought the dream, with the latest information garnered the next day together with the patient making efforts to right the ship, the sleek white boat, and his feeling that he could resurrect it and work on it so it would be able to sail again, was more plausible. This is more fully amplified and explained in the remarks below.

COMMENTARY

Further associations emerged the next day. When the patient was five years old his mother and father went to the city to look for a place to live. He and his siblings were left with his father's youngest sister. She was not attractive like his mother who was beautiful but she was deeper and more substantial. She spent a lot of time in the garden (recall the garden in the dream?). She was sometimes rough but deeply caring of him and his siblings.

As the dream indicated, there was a lot of furniture that had to be shifted. Metaphorically this had to do with the shift in his internal feelings and attitudes from his beautiful, narcissistic mother to this aunt who was down-to-earth and life sustaining with a sense of humor.

I wondered why this dream emerged in sequence after the others. Now it was clear. His aunt saved his life, gave him hope, gave him optimism, but it required a deep internal adjustment, which he accomplished. This is what has saved him and will save him even more. When one is little, little do we know the import of events. We live them and pay them little mind, even the ones that save our life and provide a bedrock of strength to live our future lives.

And some people ask, "Is there a Divine?"

December 2010