This is a continuation of a prior patient (the essay “Unloveable”) and I present the dream with its content in which the patient recounts her prior experiences of self-help seminars, which she attended with all the eagerness of an intelligent, apt pupil ready to learn the magic secrets that the pundits, mentioned in her dream, were willing to sell for stated sums of money for admission.

Dream: January 22, 2010

I go to a little town or city like Santa Fe, New Mexico. I am there on a vacation I think. I recognize the streets. I find myself in a little hotel where a seminar is going on. I have taken this seminar before… it’s a sort of “self help” seminar. I recognize some of the group leaders. I try to ignore everyone. This is all of another time and place for me. I have no interest in it. It wasn’t helpful anyway. One of the coordinators of the seminar recognizes me and comes over and starts talking. He starts kissing me and hugging me. I gently extract myself and remind him that he is married. He seems not to care… he just wants to keep hanging on to me. I see my friends in the lobby, and I go and sit with them. They are all having milk and cookies. That’s not of interest to me either. I excuse myself to go to the restroom just to get away from all of them.

I am now in the restroom, and someone hands me a baby to care for briefly. The baby is having some sort of liquid diarrhea. What should I do? I hold her over the toilet to catch as much as I can but it’s still all over. It’s messy. Whose baby is this, and can they just take it back?

Associations and Interpretations

I tell Dr. Bail that in the dreams I felt as if I were constantly trying to get away from something that I did not want… the seminar, the man kissing me, the friends with milk and cookies and finally the baby. Somehow, I think that I am dreaming about getting away from my tendency to make poor choices for myself in my personal life.

I have told Dr. Bail several times over the last several weeks that I feel that I have come a long way toward making better choices. I feel smarter, but I also feel wiser. There’s a difference. Feeling smarter is both intellectual and emotional, but feeling wiser is totally the work of the soul. I reminded Dr. Bail that I have been worried that if a significant personal situation arises that requires me to exercise emotional maturity, perhaps I will fail the test. Frequently in the past, my intellectual intelligence has been trumped by my emotional immaturity. I hang around with wrong men. I go to “fun” events that exhaust me instead of amusing me. I select “fun” that is ultimately destructive, and then Dr. Bail and I have to pick up the pieces over multiple sessions of the analysis. Picking through the rubble of my feelings and my dreams to figure out what went wrong and why is never easy and is always painful, humiliating, disappointing and embarrassing. I have told Dr. Bail that I am afraid that my “stupid meter” will come back into my decision making process and encourage me to forget what I know and make wrong choices.

This morning as I review these dreams with Dr. Bail and talk about my “stupid meter”, I suddenly remember a thought that I had as I was waking up this morning. It was a thought I had never had before. I thought that I no longer had to worry about my stupid meter flipping back into the “on” position. Instead, I saw that it is very possible that when faced with a choice which would be emotionally harmful for me, I will simply make the right decision. I will not agonize over the fact that I want to do whatever action is being presented to me but which I know it is not good for me. I will just not want to do it at all anymore. Period. That’s a totally new concept for me. I will know what I want, and it will NOT be what I used to want. I won’t struggle to say “no”. I won’t struggle at all.

As I discuss this with Dr. Bail, I realize that the dream is a verification of exactly this new way of thinking. I have come to the point through the analysis that I will know what is best for me, and I will do it easily and with no internal resistance. The dream shows me three ways that this is true… first, I say “no” to the seminar. I have been to tons of self-help seminars in my life. I have never found them to be ultimately helpful. They get you all hyped up and raring to go out and change your life, but within a few days or a few weeks, nothing has really shifted. All the “positive thinking” seminars don’t change anything in your real world even if they do make you feel a bit better for awhile. T. Harv Ecker, The Forum, EST, Lazaris, Abraham, etc., etc. all try to motivate people to change for the better. But none of them ultimately works because they are not based in the Unconscious. Trying to change something by using only the conscious mind is a behavior modification technique that only deals with the most superficial and top layer of a problem. The analysis with Dr. Bail has forced me to delve deep… deeper than I even knew I had within me into the depths of the Unconscious. It is there that they key resides. All the self-help seminars, books and therapies were about trying to resolve my emotional pain, but the source of that pain was my imprint. Those things cannot touch an imprint. They don’t even know what an imprint is.

In the dream, I reject the self-help seminar. That’s a good sign. In the dream, I reject the man who is unilaterally kissing me. That’s a way of rejecting a wrong man who is representative of my mother. The man in the dream is married…my mother was married to her Unconscious. I reject the man’s kissing and hugging. I don’t want to be kissed by my imprint. That’s a good sign. In the dream, I reject the friends eating milk and cookies. Children eat milk and cookies. I don’t want to be in the company of children/ unanalyzed people who know nothing about their Unconscious and so live in a fantasy (as children often do) that they can control the world through their conscious minds, positive thinking, etc. I correctly reject all of these modalities, and I excuse myself to the restroom. The analysis is the restroom… with Dr. Bail I am able to evacuate material that is no longer needed. I am on the right track now.

Dr. Bail pointed out that my thought upon awakening that I would know and make the correct decisions on emotional issues going forward was directly related to the dreams I had during the night. Those dreams from the Unconscious caused me to awaken with the conscious knowing that I would be able to make correct emotionally based decisions going forward. That was helpful to see and understand.

I told Dr. Bail that the man who was kissing me and hugging me reminded me of my ex-husband. I have been thinking about the fact that he is still in love with me so many years after our divorce. I had a psychic tell me recently that I am “unavailable” to men because they read energetically/ unconsciously that I am still connected to a man….that man is my ex-husband. The psychic told me to do a meditation to break the energy. I haven’t done it. I don’t know why I haven’t done it.

As I tell Dr. Bail this, I remember that while taking my bath this morning, I had a sudden insight that I was holding on to my ex-husband and not the other way around. I have not broken the connection with him because I need to know that there is at least one man in the world who loves and adores me. It is my Achilles’ heel…. I need to be special. I need to be loved. I also realized in the bathtub that I have been angry at my ex-husband for a long time. I have blamed him for treating me badly and being emotionally abusive during the marriage. But the truth is that I taught him how to treat me. I lay down and let myself get walked on. I gave him the proverbial straw and told him (unconsciously and by my behavior), “Go ahead and drink my energy and my essence…use me up… I am nothing and am here to serve you.” I lost myself in the marriage because on an unconscious level, he had become my Mother. I gave myself up to my Mother as an infant. I allowed her to cannibalize me because I believed as an infant it was what I needed to do to survive. I had repeated the same behavior with my husband. I didn’t know it. He didn’t know it. So, neither of us was to blame. The imprint was to blame. It is time to forgive him and to forgive myself and let him go.

As I explained all of this to Dr. Bail, I felt a tremendous relief. I also told him that I was surprised at the experience of this profound and deep understanding just rising up through me from the bottom of my feet all the way up through my body as a sort of “knowing” while doing something as mundane as taking a bath. This was not an impulsive “gut” feeling… it was a whole body inspiration that washed over me like a wave. Dr. Bail said that this is the type of inspiration that should guide a person…“gut” instincts are typically sharp and piercing insights that are rooted in the imprint and not in the deep wisdom of the Unconscious.

Dr. Bail pointed out that everyone in the world makes decisions from the intellect and not the Unconscious. The Unconscious has all of the information, knowledge and power, and yet most people either don’t know of its existence, or they discount its impact completely. Dr. Bail also talked about how all politicians make their decisions from the intellect and from feelings that are filtering up from the Unconscious in a manner that is unchecked… they rely on their gut. This is a big mistake. This combination of the intellect and gut feelings will lead to wrong choices every time. Dr. Bail said that I had made my decisions about my ex-husband from the filtering up of feelings from my Unconscious which were really all about my mother… we were back to the imprint. “You can eat me Mom so that you survive and then I will survive.” My ex-husband was treated to the same feast with my unconscious approval.

We talked about the baby who was having green diarrhea. As I described the scene to Dr. Bail, I told him that the liquid that was flowing through the baby was literally being poured into the baby’s mouth, running through its digestive tract and the pouring out of its bottom. I am saying “diarrhea” but it was more like a constant stream of green liquid much like the way water flows in a constant stream from the kitchen faucet. There was nothing smelly, gassy or fecal-like… it was just a constant powerful stream of green… it was very odd.

Dr. Bail asked me if the baby was female. I told him that she was female and that she was about a month or two old. He asked me why I was dreaming about this steady stream of green liquid pouring through the baby. It made me think of “Bieler’s Broth” which is a drink made of zucchini, string beans, parsley and water all cooked together and then blended into a liquid for drinking. It is very alkalizing for the digestive system and was invented by Dr. Henry Bieler and is discussed in his book, “Food Is Your Best Medicine.”

Dr. Bail said that the baby was me and that the analysis was the cleansing and healing green liquid. Dr. Bail said that it was he who handed me the baby to care for… this is my new baby self which is making new and better decisions. The baby’s diarrhea makes me want to give it back to Dr. Bail. Why? Because it is hard work to be cleansed and to handle all of this new information from the analysis. But the dream says that I am handling it. The seamless flow of green liquid through the baby is going into the baby’s mouth and pouring out of its bottom in the same consistency and without change just as water runs through a pipe. Dr. Bail said it was a good sign that I am healing my infant self and learning. These past few months (the age of the baby) have been a time of rebirth and healing for me. It seems that I have now finally worked through some of the seminal issues of my imprint and will more easily be able to make better choices in the future when my emotional world is at stake.

COMMENTARY

All of these experiences were dismal and all were let downs for she soon saw through their superficialities as she could contrast the content of these seminars with what she was learning in her analysis.

There was no contest.

It was nice to hear the dream for she went through the content with a comment that held up the situation and, once seen, could easily dismiss it. There is only, in addition, the man hugging her and wanting to kiss her who was her husband but it was also the "intellect". The patient rejects him or it, being in favor of a more balanced appreciation of life and its choices, being more appreciative of the cooperation between unconscious and conscious.

The women eating cookies and drinking milk were soon dismissed as she arrived at the conclusion that these were children eating their cookies after school.

The bathroom aspect of the dream was interesting for it took a little time for the patient to realize that the green diarrhea was the green broth being fed to the baby. The green broth, as she explained, is in reality called Bieler's Broth, which is a very healthy food. It is a matter of concern that there is a diarrhea, raising the question, "Is this healthy soup going in one end and coming out the other without being absorbed by the baby?" That remains to be seen but the other essential point is that I give the baby to her as if to say, "I have had to do a lot of taking care of your baby self. It has had to be that way. You were not able to do that heretofore." Now the dream says, "I am mature enough to look after my baby self. My immaturity, from which I have suffered so many years of my life, has greatly attenuated. I can do it."

So we see that the capacity of perception or discernment is a necessity for maturity and, when this quality comes into being, one is ready to be the mother of one's baby self, to look after it properly. It is this function done well that serves as the foundation to be a true and natural mother in reality.

March 2010