(Pascal, man - age 40)
"I am standing in front of the house where I lived with my parents as a child. It was an old tenement house in the town centre where I grew up. I am standing in the back yard where I used to hang around with my friends. In the summer we used to play on that field every day even after dark. In the dream, I face the building and notice that all of the windows are open. Nothing actually happens, I just stand there, but it's hard to describe the feeling I get and the whole dream is about that feeling.
“There were corporeal, psychic, and spiritual people. Somatics, psychics, and pneumatics, they called them, from the Greek. Equality goes against nature, however rightly one might strive toward it. Some are made of more earthly elements, and those people are thick, sensual, and non-creative. They are only good for listening. Others live with their hearts, their emotions, in bursts of the soul, and others still have contact with the highest spirit, distant from the body, free from affects, spacious inside. It is to this final group that God has access.” - Olga Tokarczuk
There was something extraordinary about this dream, something timeless. As if I went back in time and space, to some specific moment from years ago. Like at the post card. So I am standing there, I feel kind of fulfilled, the happiness penetrates through my body. It's hard to explain, but I felt connected to everything around me, as if everything including me and the building, and the smell of the late summer evening were a whole. There was not a living soul around, and time seemed to stand still. I look through the windows and among others I recognise the window of my parents apartment. Generally, I don't have good memories related to my childhood and this place, where I grew up. My mother was an alcoholic and I was often afraid to come home and see her drunk. But in the dream I felt good and completely safe, as if I had gone back in time and discovered that there was so much beauty around me that eventually became a part of me. I felt grateful for life itself as I stood there, and I felt tears roll down my cheeks. Then I looked at the other windows, I felt that I was part of each apartment, all the windows were wide open and I felt part of all the interiors. When I woke up I felt as if something exploded in my head, it was a pleasant tingling feeling like some tension had been released.
Dream interpretation:
Dreams may reveal what we fear or what we desire, but they can also guide us. By closely looking into the dreams we may sometimes discover not necessarily what we were looking for but something we have lost in the past. And find (out) maybe just what we need at the present but we don't quite realise ourselves. This dream reveals how something deeply hidden in the dreamer's mind is trying to come to voice. The emotions associated with the repressed content transform into somatic sensations which are felt after the dreamer becomes awake. The dreamer recalls the feeling of explosion in his head and the pleasant tinglings passing through his body. These sensations are caused by the discharge of the energy suffocated underneath the images seen and experienced in the dream. When Pascal is asleep, his defence mechanisms lose their vigilance. In consequence, suppressed memories and emotions come back to the surface of the dreamer consciousness as the memory of his dream. His adult mind in the dream, connects with his younger Self i.e. the source of the energy from which his Ego developed. The dreamer in a metaphor, yet how literally in the world of the dream (when he faces the building when he grew up) comes face to face, with his primary mechanisms of his personality. In fact the whole dream features himself looking at the place where he grew up which allows him to get in touch with what has been closed off because of the alcoholic mother. As Pascal recalls, all the windows in the building were open and he also emphasises the importance of the pure experience more than anything else: “there was something extraordinary about this dream, something timeless”. The dreamer is taken back to the place and time when he had to learn how to block his emotions. He created the defence mechanisms that helped him back at the time. As a result, the emotions which he wasn't able to express/experience become repressed and distorted. The dream allows him to experience wholeness within himself and get in touch with the full essence of his potential.
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