The patient introduces herself in this essay. She gives us her infantile and early childhood experience. She tells us of her adult experience. She speaks of her problem, how it influenced her life and prompted her decisions, which never made her happy despite great success in the area in which she strove to be successful. She relates that she had a series of therapies and a trial with a popular antidepressant, all of which did not work. She stood at the threshold of a great academic career with physical symptoms which were unpleasant and a need to submerge and deny her unhappiness the way people do. Drinking is a very popular way to forget one's pain for a while. It is social acceptable and, I understand, quite rampant in academia. Naturally even that did not help. All of this is explained in the patient's exposition.

What I wanted to highlight is the result of her parent's visit. The patient looked forward to the visit. My experience with this situation is

that usually a patient will visit the parents after a year or two of analysis. There is always a great expectation, an eagerness to see Mom and Dad and a hope that all will be well, a hope that whatever was wrong in the recent - or distant - past will all be well. Actually nothing goes right. Nothing feels right to the patient for by this time the patient has learned a lot of the reasons for their illness. It is usually not a pretty picture. Fundamentally the problem is that the parents have not moved emotionally in all this time. They are who they have always been and unconsciously they feel that this child is not obeying their (Mom's predominately) unconscious demands. This precipitates the beginning of all the old arguments and disaffection, all the pain and the grim realization there will be no reconciliation, no admission of "I'm sorry".

The fact that Mom and Dad came to see their daughter is unimportant. The dynamic of the situation remains constant.

For the patient it is instructive to see how she fell "ill" almost as soon as her parents arrived to the point of being bed-ridden. What happened in this two-week visit opened everything up, revealed all the psychopathology. The patient's dreams told the story graphically if at times with horrifying fear.

It should be understood that in writing this narrative the patient gives the end result of dreams, which in reality were thoroughly discussed, and

every detail was understood. It is for the sake of brevity that the skeleton of sessions is presented.

Even so I think the reader can feel the anguish of the patient as she felt it over the weeks of purgatory. In the wake of this turmoil came the necessary question that highlighted her "lostness"; "Who am I?".

She did not know. The years of her life, her birth and perhaps before were geared to not being herself but being this obedient suffering child/woman that the mother unconsciously demanded due to the mother's experiences in life and due to the mother's imprint given her by her mother.

One last word before the series of dreams begins. Before her illness the patient had a dream in which the mother was pregnant with Mike, her brother, in her womb. Already she was captivated and obsessively occupied with this child. It was a great love story. The conclusion I drew from the dream, which I related to the patient, is that this boded ill for her and boded ill for her brother as well.

I have put forward a session which followed this essay. I believe it is clear, it is painful, it is revelatory and heartbreaking. Not only is this the apogee of child abuse but I think it borders on the criminal to deprive a human being of their true identity. Unfortunately I think people like this number in the millions all the while unbeknownst to their plight.

PATIENT’S NARRATIVE

Dr. Bail has asked me to write down the events, emotions and dreams associated with my parents’ recent 2-week visit to Portland, where my fiancé and I are shooting a documentary.

I have to provide some background information for these events to make any sense, so here is an overview of my childhood and family relationships, the stark picture that has emerged over nearly two years of analysis.

BACKGROUND

My mother, Susan, has always been deeply connected to my older brother, Mike. He was born on New Year’s Day, a miraculously quick and easy birth. This was in cold, remote Maine where my father had a teaching appointment. Mike was born there, and I believe that Susan (new to the area, a first-time mother, with few friends, in a perpetually wintry environment) looked to Mike for companionship. He was her little prince, the best and brightest boy to be found. Two years later, she became pregnant with me, and then the whole family moved to San Francisco (while I was in vitro), because my father got a position at USF. San Francisco was where my father grew up and where his whole family still lived, so it was also a homecoming for him. My mother was not readily accepted into my father’s Chinese family (she is a very fair Caucasian), and she found herself, again, with no friends and in a highly ethnic setting that was alien to her (she is from upstate New York). Even the way she spoke (East Coast-educated standard English) clashed with the way my father’s family spoke.

Only in recent years have I learned that my Chinese relatives immediately noticed how much my mother and my brother cleaved to each other. Pictures from my infancy and early childhood show my brother reluctantly holding me with a look of utter annoyance and me crying piteously, my mother hugging my brother tightly while I’m off to the side looking abandoned and forlorn, and me oftentimes alone in the frame, with a sorrowful or frightened look on my face. It’s important to note that, in my baby book, my first complete sentence is recorded as follows, “Michael hurt me.” This has become a joke in my family, but the evidence is there. My first statement reflected a very real truth that I was laboring under as a toddler – that my brother didn’t like me and didn’t want me around. As far as he was concerned, I was an uninvited guest. I would lodge this complaint for the rest of my life because my parents never quite rose to the task of protecting me from Mike’s scorn, and therefore his dismissal of me went unchecked. My analysis has revealed to me that my mother’s lack of protection reflects her unconscious desire to abandon me; in fact, Mike’s behavior is simply a manifestation of our mother’s unconscious. I was an interloper that threatened to disrupt the bond between mother and son. As for my father, he was not a strong presence in the household. In many ways, he resembled a servant, catering to my mother’s every need, even as she nagged and complained. And she always had something to complain about.

DREAM

About three months ago, I had a dream in which my brother was the head of a compound, like a cult leader. He is leading me out of the compound. We arrive at the front gate, just as my mother is coming home. She hugs Mike, kisses him on the cheek and strokes his face. Then, she goes inside, having completely ignored my presence.

This dream clearly describes a relationship between mother and son that supercedes all other relationships. In the dream, my mother is the woman of the house and my brother is the man of the house. In waking life, there is no incestuous relationship between them, but on the level of the unconscious, we see the result of what Dr. Bail calls the “love affair” that Susan had with her fetus when Michael was in her womb. From womb to tomb, Michael would always be her great love. She ignores me completely in the dream because I simply do not matter.

In San Francisco, the weather was always hot and oppressive for my mother. She didn’t get along with my father’s family. People there were ignorant in her opinion, and on top of that, they didn’t speak properly. She began to manifest these toxic thoughts in her body, developing melanoma skin cancer about seven years after landing in San Francisco. She had been slender as a young woman, but in San Francisco she steadily gained weight and never exercised, trying crash diets that never worked. Throughout my childhood, she always seemed to be under a huge burden. I am reminded of my grandmother (her mother), who spent most of the latter part of her life in bed, always complaining of some unidentifiable illness. My mother exhibited the same extreme listlessness but, unlike her mother, hers was laced with a sharp, bitter rage, which came out in wild bursts of anger, yelling, crying, and emotional abuse. You never knew when mom would fly off the handle or, worse, guilt trip you until you had no recourse but to apologize and examine the ways in which you yourself were selfish, deficient or ungrateful.

Amid all of this, my father was in the same boat as the rest of us. He had found a woman that greatly resembled his own mother. My mother takes great pride in her interracial marriage – she believes it attests to her superior intellect – but I can see that, in reality, she and my father were like moths to the flame, cut from the same cloth. Her imprint sought a partner for her that would never challenge her to change or grow, and my father’s did the same, landing him in the same, emotionally abusive relationship that he grew up with. For his mother, my Chinese grandmother, was a sharp, selfish woman who was so dissatisfied with her marriage that she regularly abandoned my father and his siblings in favor of going out or visiting her friends and family on her own. I have only vague memories of my grandmother from childhood, on the few occasions that she would babysit. I was scared of her. She was not a warm woman, and nothing was up for discussion – it was her way or the highway. I see how my father behaves with her even now, in his late sixties. He is quiet, obedient and cowed in her presence, much as he is with my mother.

There is, of course, a plethora of childhood memories and details to add to the account, but suffice it to say that I grew up in an environment with little room for new ideas. It was a heavily imprinted setting that had its own rules and specific organization. This structure dictated that I would be the odd-man-out, always last in the hierarchy. Mom and Mike were the heads of the family, my father was the servant, and I was, at first, the afterthought, but through my hard work towards achievement, my importance in the family rose slightly to that of a prestigious ornament. What I really wanted all my life was, of course, unconditional love. What I got was an immense pressure to be someone I wasn’t (the obedient daughter who looked up to Mike and mom) and when I didn’t comply (which was often), I was sharply criticized for being too sensitive, selfish, ungrateful and just a general pain in the ass. The worst type of censure was annoyance and dismissal, and this ultimately became my family’s most effective and common response to my needs, as the following series of events will show. This was not conscious, of course, but a collective, unconscious strategy on my family’s part to keep the imprint structure intact, and to ensure that the familiar, imprinted relationship that they were married to would not be challenged.

I often wonder why I was such a threat to their imprint-establishment. Why didn’t I fall in line and wear the frilly dresses and the cheap baubles that my mother always thrust upon me (even to this day). Why didn’t I defer to Mike and let him be the little, undisputed prince? Why didn’t I accept the family landscape as just the way it was supposed to be? All I can say is that it never sat right in my gut, this pre-determined emotional/social paradigm. They say I cried endlessly from the moment I came out of the womb – perhaps I was rebelling even before I was born from the emotional pathways that were being emblazoned in my psyche. Pathways that were telling me to be small, unassuming and out-of-the-way in the life that was waiting for me just beyond the birth canal. It would take me a few years before I had the chance to flirt with my own self-expression.

At the age of five, an important event happened. A piano arrived for Mike at the house. He was to begin taking piano lessons. As the men were moving the piano into the house, I started running alongside them and stabbing at the keys. By the time the moving men had left, I had figured out “Mary Had a Little Lamb”. I went on to be a minor child prodigy on the piano, playing technical pieces very fast, and very precisely. I enjoyed playing. I loved Mozart in particular, and I think I found some solace and much-needed private space within those 88 keys. I excelled at the piano, and very soon my playing began to win me some awards and scholarships. As I gained a healthy dose of confidence (and joy from the music), I noticed that my accomplishment pleased my mother. I took this observation to heart and spent the rest of my life bent on achieving – getting good grades, awards, any kind of accolade that would win my mother’s love. Interestingly enough, my skill at the piano plateaued prematurely, until I abandoned lessons at the age of 17, having reached an intermediate level of musicianship. The recitals and competitions had become a terrifying ordeal for me, and I would only get through them by the skin of my teeth. The severe stage fright I felt had corrupted the former joy I had experienced at the keys.

I engaged in a variety of activities as a child, becoming the model, well-rounded over-achiever. I played softball at an early age, and my club team won the state championship nearly every year. I was also a member of the championship Varsity volleyball team in high school. I took up the flute at age 8, and played at Carnegie Hall with my high school orchestra. But, more than anything else, I was a star student, getting straight A’s throughout middle school and high school. I went to the top prep school in San Francisco and gained early admission to Princeton. In everything I did, I felt the need to be the best, and it grated hard when I could only make second-string in sports or if I lost a music competition. But there were two areas where few people could surpass me – my academics, and my filmmaking.

My prep school was so well-endowed that it had a television department by the early 80s, complete with a small studio and tape-to-tape VHS editing stations. Because my father is an academic and a film buff, our main family activity was watching movies and discussing them afterwards. It’s interesting to note that my father’s love of movies developed during the time when his parents were divorcing, and he had to babysit his siblings. The cinema was a surrogate parent for my dad, and it offered an escape from what must have been a terribly difficult and cold family dynamic. My brother and I were inducted to the world of film at a very early age. Along with my over-achiever approach to winning my mother’s love, I adopted a concurrent strategy to gain my father’s attention – making movies. In each of these endeavors, there was the attendant joy of learning, reading, writing, telling stories, and art-making that was akin to the joy I felt playing Mozart, but at the heart of it was my overarching desire to win my parents’ love and attention.

When I was about 7 to 10 years of age, we had guinea pigs. I had begged for a dog but, unsurprisingly, my parents were very wary of the amount of care and attention a dog would warrant. Still, I was fascinated by the guinea pigs and soon became very attached to them. I spent many hours playing with them and observing their lives. When a new litter was born, my brother would claim the special ones (the rare silver pup, for example), but I would always champion the plain brown or traditional parti-colored ones. I related very strongly to the helpless, caged guinea pigs who had no way of communicating to their human caretakers. One unusually hot summer day, my father moved one of the cages out from under the shade to mow the lawn. I remember that he also hung up some laundry to dry, like a housewife. He forgot about those two guinea pigs in the cage, and they stayed out all day in the hot sun, with no water. I found them in the evening, dead from sunstroke. I was about 9 years old. We buried them in the side yard. I secretly planted alfalfa in the soil above their final resting place, thinking they would enjoy their favorite snack in the afterlife. The alfalfa grew fast, because the soil was rich from the nutrients of their carcasses.

I bring up the guinea pig story to show both my sensitivity as a young girl and the extreme lack of focus my father so regularly displayed. He was more concerned with the chores my mother had ordered him to do then the welfare of his daughter’s pets. For me, this episode was a deep scar. Even when I was able to carve out a little corner of joy for myself within this family, it would always prove to be ephemeral and end in sorrow.

Fast-forward twenty-five or so years later to when I’m 35 years old. (I am now 38.) I had muddled along with the same strategy that I had forged in my traumatic childhood, which meant that I had made a series of decisions that kept me engaged in a losing battle for my mother’s love. In effect, the very sensitivity that had given me insight into the problems in my family had fueled a pattern of over-achievement that regularly put my personal needs last. Here is a perfect example of this pattern of self-denial: Instead of accepting a spot in a very selective film program at UCLA, I went to Princeton to please my mother (who had always dreamt of having a child go to an Ivy League school). After graduating from Princeton with honors, I decided to go to an obscure film program at the University of Illinois instead of attending UCLA’s Graduate Film School, where I had again been accepted. My father, ever frugal, wanted me to go to Illinois, where they had offered me a plum fellowship. He was also impressed with their film studies program (history/criticism, closer to my father’s expertise), which of course had very little to do with the filmmaking curriculum I would be taking. But what this obviously ensured was that I remained within the stultifying family structure – small, obscure, with clipped wings.

Along the way I had also developed some unhealthy habits. I was promiscuous in college and grad school, always searching for love in the wrong places (indulging my imprint), sometimes searching for the loving brother or protective father that I never had. I drank a lot and partied a lot to overcome my social anxiety. I had always been the odd-man-out, so I needed a lot of social lubrication to achieve my goal of feeling included. Of course, this was complicated by the superficiality of such party-relationships. I would feel included, but it was only on the surface, and many of these “friendships” were fleeting and insubstantial. So, most of my twenties and early thirties were spent flitting about with different social groups and engaging in serial monogamy – I always seemed to get involved with exactly the kind of guy that would eventually come up short, either because he was a slacker or because he wasn’t emotionally available. Of course, the truth behind this was that I was incapable of being emotionally present myself, since I had yet to know and love myself, and I was still deeply locked into the love-seeking pattern of my infancy.

During this decade, I also experienced long stretches of depression. I saw a handful of therapists and psychiatrists and got on Prozac for two-and-a-half years, finally weaning myself off of it because of the way it numbed my personality. During this period, I also experienced heavy stress and developed ulcers, a problem which has only gotten worse over time. This led to intense bouts pain that left me nearly passed out on the bathroom floor. Of course, at the time I didn’t know what was happening, and lived in fear and denial about my ulcers.

Like my father, I became a professor, teaching documentary filmmaking, but the fine point here is that I became an academic instead of a working professional. My brother, meanwhile, also went to film school (the family imprint permitted him to be an artist, but required that I be an academic), but he dropped out from the highly regarded USC film school a year shy of obtaining his graduate degree. Here is where a discernable fork in the road began, with my brother falling into his own pattern of self-denial and me struggling with mine. While I was tucked away in Illinois, he went into freelance work, and eventually settled into a job as mid-level videographer. He got married, moved to a house in the suburbs, had a wife and 2 kids and, by the age of 35, was stuck in a dead-end commuter job in LA. To make matters worse, their third child was born with autism.

Meanwhile, I had finished my graduate degree and won a Fulbright, which allowed me to travel and do research on my first feature documentary. But when the fellowship ran out, I fell back on my academic credentials and applied for professorships in film production. I got a tenure-track position at a state school in the Midwest, where for six years I continued my hybrid life of dissolute living, failed relationships and hard work and achievement. There was no joy in this period of my life. Instead, a very deep bitterness began to well up inside of me, and I began to act out in ways that threatened to destroy what I had built up professionally in my life. I did the bare minimum at work and ratcheted up the partying. I had always excelled, so I managed to BS my way through teaching. I would intermittently rally my senses around my film projects, managing to produce short documentaries and a few PSA’s during this period, but those were the only times in which my potential was temporarily tapped. These projects were stunted by the academic environment in which they were wrought. I was not in a profession or a setting that brought me into contact with other working professionals. I was working in quicksand, never gaining purchase as a working director because my imprint had led me to an ivory tower prison. Therefore, with my teaching and my artistic output having plateaued (much like my piano-playing had so many years ago), and my professional relationships having soured due to my lack of enthusiasm for a job I never wanted, I approached my 7^th year tenure review on shaky ground.

It is important to note here, however, that though my films were made on a small scale and did not meet my own lofty expectations, I nevertheless had become a filmmaker and had screened my documentaries around the world and even won some minor awards. I had succeeded in becoming a director, whereas my brother, after having dropped out of film school, never went on to direct a film of his own. This would prove to be a major bone of contention in my relationship with my brother. As I continued to seek his approval (something he has never given me), I was blind to the fact that my brother was deeply jealous of my accomplishments. I had become a walking reminder of my brother’s failure in life. Ironically, none of these accomplishments and accolades ever won my mother’s love or the attention of my father and brother. If anything, it had the reverse effect. By this point in my life, I began to realize that my achievements had actually alienated me from the very people I desperately wanted to get closer to.

I got another grant that allowed me to take a leave of absence, thus dodging my review. I moved back to California. I was, for the first time since leaving for college at the age of 17, living close to family. I felt a surge of hope because of this, thinking (as I have so many millions of times) that I would be able to find comfort in my family. But this was not to be. I encountered the same scorn and abusive criticism from my brother, made sharper by his unhappiness with his job and the disappointment that the autism diagnosis caused. His son was now a burden to him, much as I had always been. Visits from me and my parents compounded the burden, and Mike began to exhibit serious lapses in judgment, drinking and driving, smoking pot and exploding in fits of rage that closely resembled our mother’s emotional tirades. I was faring no better with my work, having thrown myself into a new and alien environment with no support system. I quickly entered into another abusive romantic relationship, which exacerbated all the problems with my work and my family.

That Christmas season was the last time my family ever gathered together in the same place. Mike and his wife were barely cordial when we arrived. In perfectly predictable fashion, there was a mixup in the Secret Santa assignments, leaving me gift-less. Instead of an apology, however, I was treated with annoyance, as though I had yet again caused trouble. My sister-in-law now had to run out and get me a gift, though I tried to prevent her. A few days later, I had an ulcer that incapacitated me. This was again perceived by my brother as a burden even though it meant that I stayed in my hotel room most of the time. A couple months after the holidays, I got a call from my mother. She tearfully told me that Mike had cut all three of us off from him and his family. This blow was almost unbearable for me and my parents. I was particularly struck by the fact that I was told second-hand of my banishment.

My life quickly went into a downward spiral or, rather, the speed of my ongoing decline picked up dramatically. The bad relationship I was in got worse, and crashed and burned by the summer. My leave of absence ended with mixed results. By June, I was experiencing the worst bout of depression in my life. I stopped eating and increased my drinking. I over-exercised. Finally, one morning while playing volleyball, hungover and undernourished, I fell and broke my ankle. I flew home to San Francisco and convalesced in a sublet by the water, my leg in a cast. My ulcers were bothering me relentlessly and I was, for all intents and purposes, finished. It was at this time that I began my analysis with Dr. Bail.

DREAM

One of my first analyzed dreams involved a brown dog with a broken back that moved painfully across the ground in an “S” motion. In the dream, I leave my dog in a parking lot and go inside a building where I join the military. This dream, Dr. Bail informed me, was about the destruction of my soul and the debilitation of my instinct, which the dog signified. The “S” motion of the dog’s body recalls the serpent, which is the symbol of truth. My instinct had been crippled by my imprint and the subsequent decisions I had taken in deference to my imprint. My dream was telling me that my instinct (or my soul) is really the only truth in life worth preserving. And yet I had parked it in a garage and left it behind like a discarded shoe in order to join the military, which stood for academia with its strict rules, hierarchy, and soulless intellectualism. Inexplicably, after I hung up the phone on this session, a fat brown dog showed up at my doorstep. I had never seen her before. She was full of life, bristling with energy. My friend took her around the neighborhood looking for her master, but to no avail. He wound up letting her go on her merry way; we never found out where she came from or who she belonged to, and we never saw her again.

Two years of analysis later, I’m 38 years old, and things have changed. I am now tenured at a prestigious university on the west coast and engaged to a courageous man who has faced his own demons and found his voice later in life. He encourages me to find myself and helps me navigate the turbulent waters of my family with grace and compassion. A successful producer, my fiancé is helping me make a new, ambitious documentary. My brother and his family now live in San Francisco, and my parents babysit his kids every weekend. (Mike quit his job and now devotes his time to writing. He does not have an income.) Despite having re-established a relationship with our parents a year ago, Mike still refuses to speak to me. For three years, I have sent him and his family birthday and Christmas gifts, and have received nothing in return, not even a card to congratulate me on my engagement. What’s worse, my parents (and even my extended family) turn a blind eye to this blatant and undisguised snub. This persistent dismissal of me on Mike’s part is a glaringly obvious symbol of my odd-man-out role in the family. Could the writing on the wall be more blatant? Running parallel to this is John, my autistic nephew, who has become the focus of Mike and his wife’s attention and the reason for everything that has gone wrong in their lives. He is their beloved scapegoat, a handy cross to bear.

At this point in my life, I had a very important cycle of dreams.

DREAM ONE

About four months ago, I dreamt that there was a cat that I packed in a box for a year, nearly forgetting about it altogether. One day, I happen to move the box, and the cat inside makes a sound. I suddenly remember its existence and freak out – how on earth is it still alive after not eating or drinking for a year? The cat breaks free of the box, meowing pathetically, then says out loud (in English), “Water…water…”.

At this time, I had just turned in all the materials for my tenure dossier. This represented nine years of work – all submitted for my tenure review. It was a perplexing time for me. All those years, doing something I didn’t want to do, and yet I had taken it as far as it could possibly go: tenure. In the last two years (thanks to my analysis), I had managed to clean up my damaged work relationships and even muster a renewed passion for teaching, based on new and slightly nonconformist values. Most dramatically, I had directed a documentary that represented the best work I had ever done. My dossier was strong – a far cry from the materials I would have presented for tenure had I stayed in the Midwest. And yet, my dream was about a starved and thirsty cat trapped in a box. It was clear that the cat was me. About a year before, my fiancé gave me a cat. I immediately bonded to her as I had with those guinea pigs as a child, and now she appears regularly in my dreams as a symbol for my instinct and my soul. I am struck by the fact that, in the dream, she still manages to survive despite not having been fed or given water for a year. I recognize the parallel with my own survival – 9 years in academia with very little nourishment for my soul. The cat is still alive, and it frees itself from the box and asks for water. The dream beautifully speaks to my desire to break free of academia altogether, even though I have survived for so long, even to the point of submitting my tenure dossier for review. In fact, the promise of tenure is beginning to feel like a death sentence, a reason to forget the world beyond the ivory tower (the box) altogether, to finally be included in a family after so many years of being the odd-man-out. The cat begs for water, and water has always symbolized the Divine, my Unconscious. For it is thanks to my analysis (my terrifying confrontation with the realities of my imprint and the sad life it bequeathed me) that I am breaking free, and it is only through dreams that the unpolluted truth can be delivered. It has taken two years of Dr. Bail’s incisive and unsentimental interpretations to penetrate the truth of my imprint and reveal glimpses of the soul it has always sought to ensnare. But the more water I give to the cat (the more truth/analysis I feed myself) the better her chances are to live free.

Since that dream, I was awarded tenure, and I now find myself in a more stable and flexible position because of it. But my family trudges on in its all-too-familiar groove, and my brother’s continued dismissal of me rubs my imprint raw. My mother, father and brother now exist in a kind of fantasy – the configuration they always wanted, with me relegated to the sidelines. My parents are intellectually aware of the impropriety of Mike’s snub, but they’re too frightened to confront him about it, since they cannot bear the thought of being rejected by him again. And so they enable his behavior by ignoring the elephant in the room and they justify their actions by doing what Mike and his wife do – they cite John’s autism as the reason for Mike’s inability to focus on anything else. This does not sit well with me, especially in light of the fact that my parents have ceased to call me altogether, and only write short emails every month or so. It is as though the sister/daughter in the family has faded into nothingness in the face of their mighty triumvirate. I confront my parents on the phone when they finally call, and their worst fears about contacting me are realized – they have to admit that Mike’s actions are wrong and they find themselves promising to say something to him. But weeks and months pass, and instead of an intervention, my parents inform me that they are coming to visit me and my fiancé in Portland, where we are making a documentary. I am annoyed by their continued silence regarding Mike, but secretly touched that they would fly out to visit me. In the past 10 years, they visited me a total of three times. (Conversely, they visited Mike at least twice a year.)

My parents arrive, we all have dinner and by the time I go to bed I feel the onset of some kind of sickness. Sure enough I have a fever for the next 2 days, which turns into a cold for the following 4 days, which then turns into 2 days of stomach pains and diarrhea, and several more days of coughing up mucus. For their entire two-week stay, they never mention Mike, and for two weeks straight, I am as sick as a dog. Their reticence and total lack of sensitivity to my ordeal is directly linked to my illness. I have three important cat dreams during this time:

DREAM TWO

When my parents come to our apartment, they meet our cat, Ella, for the first time. Being in my mid-thirties and gearing up to having a family of my own, I have made it clear to them that Ella is my “starter baby”. In other words, I dote on her and make quite a fuss over her. So, when my mother’s first comment is, “She’s real chunky,” it feels as though I’m getting punched in the stomach. Over the course of the evening, my mother, who is close to being clinically obese, makes about four other comments about how chubby Ella is (she’s a medium-sized, 10-lb cat). That night, I have this dream: I am running in the rain, naked, through the streets of Portland at night. I am desperately looking for my lost pussycat. I come across my father, who has an inflatable raft. He helps me across a canal, but he steers poorly, and it takes quite a long time to make it to the other side. I keep running, going into some seedy stores and clubs, asking everybody I meet, “Where’s my pussy?” Finally, I come to a house where a group of people has gathered, my mother and father among them. I go straight to my mom and ask her if she’s seen my pussy. She says, “No, it’s not here.” My father says, “You’re wrong. She’s right over there,” and points to a person a few feet away who is holding Ella. I grab Ella, hold her tightly, and yell at my mom for lying to me.

I relay to Dr. Bail both the dream and the comments my mother made about Ella’s weight the previous night. I also add that my mother used to say to me when I was a teenager that I “could lose 5 pounds.” (I have a petite build, and I’ve never weighed more than 125 lbs in my life.) Why does she insist on putting me down? Recalling that Ella has stood for my soul in other dreams, we can say that my mother attacking me when criticizing Ella. In my dream, she has successfully taken away my pussycat. But why do I refer to Ella as “my pussy”? I make an association. When I was about 3 or 4 years old, I remember going to the doctor because there was a problem with my vagina; the labia had sealed shut due to lack of hygiene. In other words, my vagina had been neglected to the point where the labia had become crusty and stuck together. The doctor had to use a surgical instrument to separate the labia. I remember it hurting, and I remember being very frightened and ashamed by the whole experience. Dr. Bail had discussed this with me before and acknowledged my mother’s failed responsibility as my caretaker. In light of this dream, the neglect takes on great significance; by taking away my pussy (both my actual vagina and Ella, my “starter baby”) my mother is clearly barring the way from me having both a healthy sexual life and a family of my own. This is a liberty that I’m not supposed to have. My father tries to help, but navigates poorly. He is, however, the one who points Ella out to me. But he risks angering my mother by doing so. The fear, shame and sorrow of my predicament is captured in the naked run through the cold, wet streets. I feel utterly bereft because I am being denied my natural right to womanhood – something my mother has always withheld from me, because it would disrupt the balance of the imprint-family. How can I be a fully realized individual when I’m supposed to be the orphan of the family? How can I be a woman and a mother when that is my mother’s role?

DREAM THREE

A few nights later, I dreamt that I was on a boat with my mom and dad. All of a sudden, I see Ella tear out across the deck, at breakneck speed. She jumps off the side of the boat and swims like an olympian in the churning ocean waters. I’m awed by her strength and resolve. I catch up to her and scoop her out of the water, thrilled by her courage.

Dr. Bail and I agreed that this was an optimistic dream. Cats generally don’t like water; they won’t go near it. But Ella’s dive into the water symbolizes my plunge into the unconscious (the analysis, and coming to know myself). This action frees me (Ella) from the world of my mother and father (the boat). Unlike the starving cat in the box of five months ago, this cat is healthy, strong and independent.

As my sickness dragged on, my parents toured Portland and enjoyed their vacation. It became clear to me that they were not going to confront the issue of my brother’s silence. In fact, I began to realize that they never had any intention of doing so. In their minds, coming to Portland was a benevolent gesture. In other words, by visiting me they were trying to prove that I was loved, and that everything was okay. But to me, nothing was okay about our family’s dysfunction. I then had a dream that woke me up in the middle night in a cold sweat, the details of the vision still dancing in my mind’s eye even though I was awake.

DREAM FOUR

In the dream, my mother is leading me through an old folks’ home. Ella follows me and nips lightly at my heels. I ignore her. We pass some old, white-haired grandmothers who are embroidering a huge quilt together. Ella keeps nipping my right heel and calf, and I try to shake her off. But she persists. Now, I’m following my mother across a walkway that stretches above a lofty, high-ceilinged room. There’s a 20-foot drop to the floor below. At this point, Ella bites left ankle very hard. It hurts, and I shake her off rather violently, causing her to fall off the walkway. In horror, I watch her fall 20 feet, but she lands safely and, in one amazing bound, jumps all the way back up to the walkway. She doesn’t miss a beat and continues chomping at my ankle. My mother turns around, exasperated by my cries and picks up Ella. Her face contorts into an ugly sneer and she declares, “I’m going to wring her neck!” And, sure enough, she pulls and twists Ella’s little neck. I scream and grab her hands, trying to pull them apart. She’s very strong, determined to kill Ella. I pull at her hands with all my might. Ella lets out a bloodcurdling wail. I’m terrified at the prospect of her dying, and use every ounce of strength I have to pry her loose. At last, I overcome my mother. Ella is safe in my arms, hurt but alive. The dream ends with me knowing that her neck will heal with time.

For obvious reasons, this dream greatly affected me. I woke feeling as though I really had been physically grappling with my mother. I was short of breath and sweaty. Ella was not in her usual place on the bed, but a few moments later she jumped onto the bed and nestled beside me. I knew that this dream was probably the most meaningful dream of my life, in that it represented a major shift in my psyche. There had been glorious and devastating dreams in the past, but this one was speaking to a change within myself, whereas the others had all been about the past or the status quo. For two years I had faced awful truths about my life, the indisputable knowledge that the traumas of my infancy still had control over me. But there was Ella (my instinct) doggedly nipping at my left ankle (the one I had broken) reminding me that following my mother blindly will lead me to a crippled state. As in the boat dream, Ella is strong, willful and determined. Her 20-foot leap is nothing short of a miracle, which indicates that her tenacity is fueled by the Divine, the power of the truth. My mother tries to wring Ella’s neck in order to silence the truth and ensure that I fall in line with her mother and her mother’s mother, into an endless web (embroidery) of mothers and grandmothers (the old folks’ home). I follow like a dutiful daughter, until my instinct/soul (Ella), which has been growing stronger with every session, reminds me of the danger that awaits me if I follow my mother down that path. By saving Ella, I save myself. The dream felt so real to me because I was fighting for the right to live on my own terms; it was a battle for the safekeeping of my soul, from which I emerged victorious.

My parents’ visit finally came to an end. With the exception of one slip, I had restrained myself from re-opening the painful subject of my brother and the ugly writing on the wall revealing the truth of my orphaned status. Over the course of the two weeks, and thanks to my daily analysis, I was able to see that parents were incapable of confronting the issue, with all of its attendant truth. So we whiled away our last period of time together with superficial pleasantries. I was beginning to feel like I was on the mend. I woke the next morning feeling slightly healthy for the first time in two weeks. I also woke with this dream:

DREAM FIVE

I am lying on my bed, looking out the window at the ocean. It’s a very modern room, with a large window made out of a single pane of glass that stretches from floor to ceiling. Apparently, my abode is built partially in the water, because the water sloshes up against the window. Furthermore, the floor of my room is actually a few feet below sea-level, so I can also see underwater. I’m entranced by something coming down from the sky – I see a huge ball and chain come crashing to the ocean and, like an anchor, the ball plunges towards the bottom of the ocean. Attached to the ball and chain are four slender, metal rods spaced out like four corners of a giant skyscraper. These long, silvery rods are miles long, and they descend from the clouds, penetrate the ocean’s surface, and plant themselves into the ocean floor. The four rods settle into place, creating the outline of a silver skyscraper that stretches from the ocean to the heavens. Then, a massive, pointed object crashes into the water, tips over, and almost smashes my window. It sends a huge wave towards me, but my window holds and I am unharmed. I get a good look at the object. It’s the pointed roof of an old-fashioned stone edifice, like a Gothic church steeple. It sinks below the surface of the water. At this moment, I turn and see a small, white, mechanical mouse and a small mechanical puppy at the threshold of my room. I frown, because these are robots that my fiancé has rented to clean the house. I am annoyed because I told him to hire a human being to clean things up. But he has ignored me and rented the silly robots. I know from experience that these robots do not do a good job. The white mouse is making its way across the floor, missing a spot here and there, and the little puppy robot isn’t moving at all. I check the puppy, and see that it’s missing batteries. I go into the next room to talk to my fiancé about getting a human cleaner.

This dream perplexed me. The only thing I could grab onto was the contrast between the exquisite and lofty silver structure in the ocean and the drab, malfunctioning little animal robots. Dr. Bail asked me who the robots were, but I had no idea. Are they your parents?, he asked, and the truth of it hit me. Yes, the mouse who chugs along missing spots here and there was my mother, and the robot with no batteries was my ineffectual father. These robots also represented the only tools I inherited from my mother and father, and they’re clearly useless when it comes to cleaning things up (psychologically). Only introspection coupled with careful analysis can clean up the psyche and distill the unconscious. Because I am cleaning up my unconscious, I am able to see the vision outside the window, what Dr. Bail called the creation of the Kingdom of Heaven, God’s Heaven on Earth. (Though I am not religious, I accept these terms as ways of describing the liberated soul, the unpolluted unconscious, the Divine.) The stone edifice that falls to the ocean represents the destruction of the old paradigm. This coincides with the construction of the new, enlightened consciousness – a state of being that is propelled by the unconscious rather than the intellect. I am annoyed by the ineffective tools of the old paradigm (the malfunctioning robots), especially because my fiancé rented them. This part of the dream refers to my fiancé’s own personal problems which had begun to affect our relationship during the making of the Portland film. He had fallen back into a pattern of insecurity which was putting a strain on us. In relation to this slate of “cat dreams” that I have discussed, this “Kingdom of Heaven” dream squarely situates me near the water, even in the water (below sea-level), and therefore in connection with my unconscious and my soul. My animal instinct is intact. My parents, however, are totally disassociated from their inner animals; having suppressed their natural instincts for so long, they appear in the dream as the mechanical mouse and puppy.

AFTERMATH

To date, I have never had a dreaming-period that was so precisely attuned to the external relationships and conflicts going on my life. Well, to be more accurate, I was more attuned to my dreams during this period than in any other (for the dreams are always dead-on precise, it’s our muddled state of mind that gets in the way). I came out of this dream cycle feeling utterly exhausted, and cognizant that I had successfully waged some kind of battle for the right to live independently of my imprint.

A few days after the Kingdom of Heaven dream, I was surprised to find myself feeling listless and lonely. Wasn’t I supposed to feel invigorated and more alive than ever before after going through this? Dr. Bail and I talked about this, and I soon understood that, after my recent breakthrough, I found myself cast on an unknown shore full of terrifying questions: What do I want to do with my life? What makes me happy? Who am I? For many years, I had soldiered through my studies and my career, doggedly keeping my eye on the prize, until I had forgotten why the prize was so important in the first place. I was becoming a mechanical animal like my parents. At times, I would briefly entertain the idea that this was all bull----, but the prospect of admitting that was so horrifying, that I would tamp down the idea almost as soon as it presented itself. But now, in the wake of these dreams and their interpretations, and two years of sober introspection, I was ready to face the naked shore of my existence. What brings me joy in life? The question requires me to accept the fact that nothing I’ve done in my life was for me; rather, the choices I made, the goals I kept, were for the benefit of others. Hence, the joylessness that characterized so many periods in my life. Dr. Bail and I began to talk about what I would have done in my life had I been free of the all-consuming desire to please my parents. It was difficult at first to admit that my choice to become a filmmaker (from the age of 12) was tangled up with winning my father’s affection, but once I accepted that fact, a host of joyful remembrances flooded in – my love of music, painting, singing, acting, animals, even a strong memory of wanting to be a zoologist. There were many things I had wanted to be, many things that delighted me as a child. Yet each endeavor had been blocked by the fear and insecurity I felt in my family environment; academics and film had won out in the end. With this epiphany, I had the following dream.

DREAM

I am sitting on a gray shore. Next to me is the severed head of a man in his thirties. I back away from it, turn, and see the same head, only now it is alive and connected to a man who buried up to his neck in the sand.

Dr. Bail asked me who the man was, and I ventured a guess: Me. I explained that at the age of 36, I was pretty much finished, dead. I had exhausted all my energy trying to win my parents’ love through accomplishments and endeavors that ultimately didn’t mean anything to me. The head belongs to a man, which Dr. Bail tells me represents the masculine drive in my life that worked itself to death to achieve my external goals. After two years of analysis, I find myself on the gray, indeterminate shore of my life, asking myself the devastating question, “Who am I?” I then see the same man, this time alive, buried in the sand up to his neck. This is where I now find myself, alive, but immobile. This reflects the listless feeling I’ve been experiencing. My masculine drive is stuck with nowhere to go, because my old goals have disintegrated and there is no direction at the moment.

DREAM

The same night, I had another dream in which I come across a black, windowless van that has been parked for thirty-some-odd years in a residential neighborhood. Inside are black cushions and an elaborate computer system with multiple black monitors. I see that the computer is in the process of deleting almost all of its files. Upon closer examination, I see that each file is a video game. I open one of the games that is about to be deleted. It’s based on a movie I just saw with my parents while they were visiting Portland. Just a run-of-the-mill summer blockbuster movie. Nothing new, nothing worth saving. I agree that the file should be deleted.

This dream perplexed me, until Dr. Bail unlocked it with the interpretation that the black van was my unconscious. It was parked for the length of my life (35 years) in a residential neighborhood (my domestic family life). The files are my dreams, all the memories, feelings and experiences that were corrupted by my imprint. Almost all of these files are being deleted because they do not truly reflect who I really am. A few are saved, which indicates that there is an essence to who I am that has always existed. The dream shows that I am leaving behind the (per)version of myself that has been in place all my life, and getting a glimpse of the real me.

DREAM July 26, 2010

I’m in my childhood home. It’s Christmas day. I hastily put up two wreaths on one of the walls somewhere deep in the house, side by side, then decide to move one to the front door. The front door already has a garland framing it, but there’s a nail on the door, so I hang the wreath on it. It’s a bit off-center, but it will do. I’m rushing, because soon it will be time for presents; it’s already midday, and no one has finished the decorations. I go to the living room closet, where there are wrapping materials and a supply of gift bags. I notice there are trick-or-treat snack bags, and a string of wedding favors, small, carefully wrapped gift boxes containing a sample of some product (body lotion, chocolate, etc.).

Later, in the living room (I think it’s still Christmas), the family is sitting around, some aunts and uncles and cousins, and they’re discussing Gram’s will. Apparently, I’ve been cut out of Gram’s will. I ask if that means the other cousins will share the will, and someone says yes.

ASSOCIATIONS

I tell Dr. Bail that this dream, especially in light of all of my dreams this past month, is pretty transparent to me. The two wreaths are me and my brother, Mike. Mike was actually born on the Christmas day, and he’s the love of my mother’s life. So, I move one of the wreaths (Mike) to the front door, which already has a garland framing it – this is the proper place of honor for Mike, who is the center of my family. I (the other wreath) remain alone on the forgotten wall. Christmas, with all its celebration and gift-giving, is reserved for Mike, not for me. In the closet, I find what is intended for me. My birthday is the day before Halloween, so the empty trick-or-treat bags signify the empty gifts that my family gives me on my birthday. The other wrapping material further signifies that I get only the external trappings of gifts, not the gifts themselves. The tiny wedding favors with free commercial samples of various products are all that I can expect to get from my family on the occasion of my wedding. (This correctly captures their near total lack of interest in my recent engagement.) Fittingly, when the dream shifts to later in the day, when the family has gathered in the living room, I hear that I have been cut from my grandmother’s will. I have essentially been cut off from the bosom of my family. Actually his has been the case all my life.

August 2010