Why Not Ask For A Dream
Here is a new essay by blog member Dr. George Mecouch author of While Psychiatry Slept: Reawakening the Imagination in Therapy. [This book is available at Amazon using this link: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=while+psychiatry+slept&ref=nb_sb_noss ]
In this essay, the question is posed: Why not ask for a dream? Dr. Mecouch provides rich examples of this approach in relation to two patients.
Why Not Ask for a Dream?
The world is in crisis: systemic racism confronts us with our long-simmering national
shadow, a viral pandemic reveals our naivete in thinking we had the forces of nature in our scientific back pocket, the long-term effects of climate change denial loom in our near future, and out of control political tribalism prevents us from reasonable solutions. Where can people turn for answers? In this day and age, it is often to therapists, who find themselves inundated with patients coming to their office with increased panic, anxiety, depression, and a sense of emotional overload. Most of these well trained and compassionate healers will then use their skills in empathy, active listening, CBT, mindfulness, and breathing methods to name just a few of the techniques in the modern-day therapy arsenal. Some practitioners may even respond to all the new course offering on the internet, hoping to gain further certification in anxiety and trauma work in this time of overwhelming angst.
All the above methods are quite useful and can help many a patient with their personal
struggles and symptoms. But what if there is one bit of training that most of these well-meaning therapists are missing. When patients came to Jung and would ask what to do, he would often state that he knew no more than they did about what the problem needed. Instead, he would say, “what if we turn to the 2,000,000-year-old man or Old Woman of Days and see what they have to say.” Here he meant the ancient wisdom of the collective unconscious that can be revealed through dreams. I would like to tell you about two women patients that I have been seeing in my analytic practice, who when feeling overwhelmed in this current time, listened to my suggestion of, “Why not ask for a dream?”
Ellen is a woman in midlife, who came back to see me after many years, hoping to
resolve issues with depression and anxiety. She had been doing some wonderful depth work but one night found herself emotionally overwrought after days on end with the kids at home from school, sheltering in place and watching the news of black deaths at the hands of police and the countrywide protests in response. Going into her room crying, she sat on the edge of her bed and used the old Asklepion healing technique of incubating a dream. She imagined what she was feeling and asked if a dream might help her to understand these emotions. This was her dream:
I'm in a row house that is centuries old. Outside the house paces what looks like a man but is actually an ancient evil force. I realize that I'm a time traveler that can also change forms, just like the entity outside. I travel forward and backwards through time, changing my forms between man and woman. The entity follows, doing the same. We battle together after each jump. Sometimes it wins and sometimes I do, but it's a viscous and violent cycle that never ends, regardless of time and form. Sally suddenly appears and takes my hand. We are standing in the row house. She says "Stop" and pulls me down into the basement. There are tables set up facing a giant whiteboard. A mixture of unfamiliar children and adults sit at the tables. Their clothing indicates that they are from different time periods. Sally and I sit and look at the white board. A man stands in front of the white board. At times he looks young and vibrant, but then flickers
and looks old and stooped with long white hair and a matching beard.
On the whiteboard are rows of black and white dots, and it reminds me of the game Othello. The man is talking about strategy and math. I look over at Sally and she is drawing her own version of the whiteboard. She hands me a pen
and paper so I can do the same.
The patient asks for a dream to help her with her overwhelming emotions and the Old
Woman of Days says to her, “this is bigger than you. This has been going on for thousands of years, this fight between light and darkness, good and evil, meaning and meaninglessness.” Jung says in Memories, Dreams, Reflections: “the world into which we are born is brutal and cruel, and at the same time of divine beauty. Which element we think outweighs the other, whether meaninglessness or meaning, is a matter of temperament. If meaninglessness were absolutely preponderant, the meaningfulness of life would vanish to an increasing degree with each step in our development. But that is—or seems to me—not the case. Probably, as in all metaphysical questions, both are true: Life is—or has—meaning and meaninglessness. I cherish the anxious hope that meaning will preponderate and win the battle.” (Jung, 1963, pp: 358 )
So, part of her cure was to realize this was not personal but transpersonal and that she needed to see it from a larger, universal or archetypal view. Next, the dream brings in Sally. A little girl she knows in life with autism and says that she is rarely politically correct when speaking and says just what she feels and thinks. She is very instinctual in her responses. Sally says go inside, down to the basement, and get your own white board and begin to work on your black and white conflicts. This hints that in spite the importance of the protests and civil unrest, the work in the end is an individual work. As Jung says, “does the individual know that he is the makeweight that tips the scales.” (Jung, 1970, para 586) Do we know that by doing our own individual work with our shadow and opposites, that we are performing a world work that can rebalance the scales of the universe? Ellen got immense relief out of this and hints about directions to take in her life.
.
Claire, a woman in her late 30’s, came to see me for debilitating panic anxiety. Her work
had been going very well when she too was presented with a dream from the deep unconscious.
I am in a school with a bunch of rooms. Outside the school is a row of portables. I am supposed to be in a class, but I have my pit bull with me. The teacher says that I can bring my dog in and tie him to a desk. When the dog's leash is getting tied to the table, he pulls away. He lunges at the teacher. My dog is being uncharacteristically aggressive towards the male teacher. The dog runs out of the room and outside of the school. I run out after him. He keeps going after men in suits, leaving everyone else alone. All of the men in suits are walking wolves. I am worried that he will get attacked and either he will be hurt or killed. Every time I get close to catching up to him, he runs away. The sun is beating down on the school grounds and there are no trees for shade. The entire area is just dirt, with no vegetation. It is getting too hot for me to be out in this weather. A female in a dress pulls me into one of the cool portables. She has an old-style apron on over her dress. She says, "Let him go, he's following his instincts. Trust him." She makes me a peppermint tea to help me relax but I am so worried about my dog that I find the minty smell makes me nauseated.
Again, even though the dreams can have individual subjective meanings for both patients,
let’s concentrate on its comments about the current state of the world. The dream ego is going to school, learning what the world wants to teach, often the status quo or orthodoxy fitting the spirit of the times. Her dog instincts are tied to a desk, but this arrangement no longer can hold back the animal. He also attacks the teacher, indicating that what is being taught makes no room for him. The dog (a symbol often for the essence of Eros, relationship, love, and loyalty) feels tied down this way….he wants out….what becomes fascinating is that he now only attacks men with suits that are walking wolves. This reminded the patient of the movie the Wolves of Wall Street and her association about these men were high powered businessmen. Symbolically wolves often represent power, greed, avarice.
Does this indicate that what we are being taught, tied down to, indoctrinated into,
represses our instincts telling us that something is terribly wrong? That love, relationship, eros has no place in the world where the ego ideal is money, power, greed, and narcissistic self-importance. As Jung said so famously, “Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking.” (Jung, 1966, para 78) Hillman also comments, in one of his late-life interviews, that greed and predatory capitalism may be inbred in human beings making it hard to wake up to just common sense. As most of us are living, unconscious to our extreme power motives, we can’t see the commonsense realization that we are destroying the water we need to drink and the air we need to breath
This brings us back to Ellen and the dream she had about 3 weeks later in therapy. I
believe this is the most crucial dream in the group and will tie into the wolf and greed motif in Claire’s dream.
I'm walking down a dark hallway made of stone. It's dark and feels like the hallway of an old fortress. The Coronavirus is sweeping throughout the world with no end in sight. It has mutated and is even more deadly now. I'm on a mission to find the source. I pass people as I walk and make sure to maintain social distance between us. In some of the people I can sense an inherent corruption, and in a select few true evilness. Others I sense are puppets that do not realize the true intentions of their masters. I come to a stairway to spirals upward. I climb upwards until I'm in the tip-top rafters of a turret. The rafters are wooden and maze-like. After searching for a while, I find an anvil hidden behind a thick beam. It is black color and the surface looks smooth. However, looks are deceiving and as I move closer, I can see it is marred with dings and cracks.
There is a person, a man, standing behind me who says it is also giving off a sense of putrid sickness. I pick the anvil up and feel the heavyweight in my arms and against my chest. A person in the distance asks if I found anything and I say no. I must find a way to secret the anvil out of the fortress before anyone else can find it and strengthen it. I carry it down the winding stairway. With each step, my arms and chest ache, but I push onwards. Eventually, I come to car outside the fortress. I sit in the front passenger seat and lay the anvil heavily at my feet. My arms feel weak and I can finally draw a full, deep breath. A man sitting in the driver's seat puts the car into gear and drives us away.
She is dealing with the mutating and even more dangerous virus and her association is
that the virus is a metaphor for all that is going wrong in the world. As if nature is attacking us for the lack of care of the earth and all that is occurring socially. Again, there is this sense of evil as per her previous dream. She is looking for the source. Where is it coming from, this evil? It is above, up in the rafters…She must go up to find it. That often means up into the intellect, ideas, beliefs—what makes up the spirit of the times. When she gets there the source is discovered to be a black anvil. She associates black with saying that most anvils are not black, and this reminds her of something dark, ominous, and depressing. An anvil reminded her of blacksmiths and using the anvil with heat and fire to mold metal. We began to talk about the alchemical idea of people having metaphorical metals inside them that needed to be shaped over the course of life into
character. One famous story tells how souls are led from heaven by their daimon and stop for longer or shorter amounts of time at the planets. Each planet is associated with a metal: Venus/ Copper, Mars/Iron, Saturn/Lead, Moon/Silver, Jupiter/Copper, etc. These unformed metals make up a person’s character and are shaped over a lifetime. But what if the anvil that they are shaped on is now comprised of attitudes of greed, avarice, and power at all costs. That love and compassion are left out. What if schools, family, society, and the ego ideals now linked to our current Zeitgeist are shaping human beings. This is the anvil now brought down from above to earth and the realization of its heavy reality. It no longer hides in the rafters, tucked away in our intellectual defenses. It is now visible as the vehicle that drives us and we can begin the hard work of repairing what may be the true psychological cause of the virus. These dreams give us hints about actions we can take, but also put out a clarion call that the bag of tricks that most therapists use for anxiety are not enough. Much of anxiety and depression in this epoch is not about just childhood or biochemical causality; it is about the world in extremis and only the deeper work that dreams allow can heal both our patients and possibly the world.
Bibliography
- Jung, CG, Jaffee, A Editor (1963) Memories, Dreams, Reflections. New York, New York. Random House, Inc.
- Jung, CG (1970) Civilization in Transition. Princeton, New Jersey. Princeton University Press
- Jung, CG. (1966) Two Essays in Analytical Psychology. Princeton, New Jersey. Princeton University Press