... Golden Worm...

Thought it’d be fun to journal on some my dreams lately. Maybe this will help spur me to habituate a dream journal again like I used to do on the regular.

A Golden Worm in My Tooth Dream

There’s a pain in my tooth and I go to look at it in the mirror to see what it is. I open my mouth up and see a golden worm is living inside my tooth. It squirms back out of view.

Commentary:
This was an incredibly bizarre dream for both its content and the clarity of the experience. The pain was very real – it was that dull ache type of pain one only feels in their teeth. It was pulsating like the beginning of a tooth ache.

In the dream the worm did not disturb me, I was only concerned with what I could grab it with to pull it out. Once I woke up though the imagery disgusted me.

Teeth and Dreams
Everyone seems to have weird dreams involving their teeth. They’re usually not the most pleasant of dream scenarios. I’ve not extensively researched the subject, but this is the first time I’ve seen a tooth dream that involved a worm or other creature living inside the tooth.

Connections & Meaning
I recently had a dentist look at my mouth at a healthcare event and she suggested I get a filling redone on this one tooth – the opposite tooth that had the worm in it in my dream. I’ve been increasingly concerned about not having health care and would like to get a check up and I think this dream is a reflection of that concern.

The Librarian Hypnopompic Lucid Dream

A librarian is helping me with something then leaves around the corner. I tell her to go away and command a better looking woman come around the corner. I’m laughing at my request and at the dream itself. I watch the brick corner but know no one is going to appear. The dream dissolves into grey sparkly matter and then I watch as house like structures disappear and reappear – a kind of hypnopompic psychedelic show.

Commentary:
It’s fascinating how the mind generates dream characters based on unconscious expectation.

Something in my brain has a code that says: if you dream about librarians, make them nerdy.

I knew I was dreaming and I told her to go away (it sounds so mean after the fact) and I commanded a hot woman replace her. The dream did not grant my request and then dissolved into hypnopompic imagery. It was really beautiful and lasted maybe 5-10 seconds and that’s all I remember.

The 2 Patients, a Lobotomy and Light Cells Brain Dream

There’s two guys sitting side by side who have had brain operations.

The first one has had his entire brain removed. I ask him to show and he lifts up his hair and you can see the hollowed out portion of his head. He is aware he’s had his brain removed but takes it all in stride. I try to give him a high five and he misses, then apologetically mumbles something about the fact that he can’t do it because of the operation.

Next to him sits another patient who has had a brain experiment done to him. His brain is not gone but has instead but interjected with tiny little masses of light or light reflectors. When a light is shined into his brain, they reflect and have an effect on his consciousness. He pulls up his hair so we can look inside and I see a hollowed out area followed by portions of his brain, various areas of which are casually lit up with tiny lights.

Commentary:
I had just read the August cover story of Wired Magazine called Extreme Science in which they detail some mad scientist style experiments that will never happen because of ethics (and shouldn’t happen because of ethics!) but if they did happen would provide us with some valuable insights into human nature, the brain, and consciousness. (The article is not yet online but when it is I’ll try and link it here.)

One of the experiments involved details incredibly similar to the patient who had light reflectors attached to cells in his brain and I was really intrigued by this experiment.

This dream is practically verbatim of what they described for an experiment in a field called optogenics, which uses beams of light to control neurons and thus effect the consciousness of a human being. The idea is you can esssentially turn off certain brain cells and then study what effect this has on the person. Once the light is then turned off, the cells return to normal. This would allow scientists to do all sorts of amazing research into consciousness but of course doing this on a live person presents a lot of problems – for instance, no one seems to sure if the effects would be temporary or not.

But I found this so intriguing it crept up in my dreams in a huge way. It surprised me though how literal it was as far the experiment I read about and then what I dreamt about.

Also…

Over the weekend my friend told me she had an interesting dream about me last Wednesday. We were all in a room and she said that everyone was blurry -  except for me. She could see me clearly and I was in lotus meditation posture!

This is interesting because I’d been trying to do some Eckart Tolle inspired “breathe work” lately – unknown to her though – and then she has this dream where I’m meditating. Ha!

Alas, dreams are a strange beast.

Photo by Beatrice Murch.

Photo by Ben

I’ve noticed before how my intentions with my own dreams often strike back in clever ways.

For instance, when I was readily working with Calea Zacatechichi, it’s powers alluded me, even mocked me. I would have dreams about taking dream herbs instead of having lucid dreams or crazy vivid dreams! Ha! Oh Calea Z…

Anyhow – I wanted to share a dream today that’s about having a hole in my palm.

This comes from the fact that one of my favorite means of reality testing, and by extension, testing the reality (or lack thereof) in the dream world, is putting my hands through things and putting a finger from my left hand into my right palm, or vice versa. (As I type this out it sounds a lot creepier than it is when I actually do it in a dream, which is that context is like striking gold.)

This is a great method for reality testing because you can do this no matter where you are, in any context, in both the dream world and in waking life.

I had a dream that tied into this method for reality testing, which is both clever and maddening at once. It hints at some kind of intelligence operating within our dreaming minds, unconscious or irrelevant to our intentions.

Here’s what I wrote down in my dream journal:

I’ve got this hole in my left hand. It’s not huge, but it’s there, and it’s kinda freaking me out. I mean, maybe I should see a doctor about it! Couldn’t it get infected? I look it up online and find some dumbass who posted on Yahoo! Answers something about a hole in his hand, complete with an obviously doctored photo of his hand with a big hole in it.

After this post, the responses included many beautiful pieces of art that were created in the shape of a hand. For instance, ballerinas or dancing figures, that overall are in the shape of a hand.

I realize if I take a picture of my hand, it’s going to be hard to see the hole. The palm side of the hole is larger than the top of my hand, which is sort of black around the edges of the hole.

I realize one thing I can do is shine a laser through it! So I shine a laser through it, putting this large flashlight-like device over the top of my hand, cupping it, and then it comes out in a laser beam from my palm, down towards the bathroom counter. I’m showing N and someone else this, in my bathroom, and they think it’s a magic trick.

It’s not, and it actually seals up the hole mostly, causing it to burn like hell and bleed a bit too.

I added the following commentary about this dream that morning:

Note: Hilarious that I dream of a hole in my hand when everyday i do reality checks counting my fingers, sometimes followed up by imagining a hole in my hand and/or trying to put a finger through my palm.

It’s almost like inside of all our heads, there’s a little shaman dream prankster, ready to push back when we overly get attached to setting a certain intention with a dream – whether it be a dream sign or getting to excited about the idea of using a dream herb to have vivid dreams or lucid dreams.

Why do you think it is that it works like this? What’s going on here when our dreams mock our intentions to work with them?

Art by Ben | Copyright 2010 | Dreaming Life

Lots of people have their personal nightmare; you know, the one that re-occurs overs the years, the one that horrifies them to the core, even if sometimes it doesn’t seem very scary when talking about it.

Mine is something most people are familiar with: the 1970′s horror film, The Exorcist.

When I was 10 years old I saw The Exorcist. It was on TV and I watched it with my brothers. Not wanting to look weak in front of them, I acted brave; oh no, this movie doesn’t scare me!

The truth is, it scared the living shit out my 10 year old self. I vividly remember being scared of possession, so much that I  purposely slept in a crooked position because of those scenes in The Exorcist where they showed her body floating in the air, possessed, straight as a nail. I thought if I slept straight I would be more susceptible to demon possession.

This fear slowly dissipated in its intensity over the years; but instead of becoming something I ignorantly feared, it just turned into a fear deep in my head, somewhere. The only place it had to come out was my dreams. You know, that wonderful place where logic doesn’t apply so well like it does it the real world to contain our fears.

That little girl from The Exorcist has now appeared in my dreams for years, making many a guest appearance. The dreams are some of scariest I’ve ever had. It did not help that last year I read the book – which, mind you, I thought was a brilliantly written piece of fiction, and by far the most elegantly disturbing horror novel I’ve ever read – but reading this book absolutely planted her little seed in my head again and she made quite a few appearances in that time frame.

I thought it’d be interesting to share one of those dreams. This dream is special in that it also includes someone whom I have much admiration for, a friend named Juan who wrote about his experiences in Peru under a shaman and allowed me to share it on Dreaming Life for which I’m very thankful. His appearance in this dream is very intriguing to me. (You can read more about his experiences here.)

Here’s what I wrote in my dream journal in February 2009 about a dream with Juan and the demon from The Exorcist. In ths dream, she is in the next room chained to a bed when I get something from Juan in the mail and then have to into her room for some reason.

I’ve received a package in the mail from Juan. It contains various shamanic plants, including ayahausca. His letter says we must have the girl come stay with him immediately or she will die. He will perform a shamanic ritual in order to save her. But the thing is, I know she is already dead.

I have to go through her room to get something. I am terribly scared of her. I walk through her room and she watches; intently, intelligently.

I do not make eye contact, but I can feel her eyes on me. I am pulled into returning her stare.

She’s lying on the bed. Her face is pale, with blue and white rings. She is terrifying to witness.

There is an electrifying, intelligent look in her face beyond the years of a young girl.

I wake up in fear.

I added after this some commentary:

The energy of the little girl – the demo – was so sharp, so focused – her eyes were on my like a wild animal stalking its prey. And the color of her skin, a pale blue and white blended together, similar to the color contrasts I’ve been using in my art. A visually and emotionally captivating dream experience. I finished reading the Exorcist book about 2 weeks ago – fascinating how the fear lurks in my mind and comes out so much later in this dream.

Isn’t it amazing how something we saw that scared as children can haunt is our dreams as adults?

Much in the same way of what I wrote about recently in that there’s a goddess archetype that developed in my dreams over the years, this demonic little girl from the Exorcist has become a kind of reoccurring nightmare concept that has appeared in my dreams on and off for more than a decade.

It gives me the creeps just writing about it and thinking about her.

Photo By Colleen | Copyright 2010

False awakenings are one of those gifts from the dream gods.

Ever so strange, even eerie, and somewhat rare in the grand scheme of dreaming – although I think everybody has one at one point or another.

A couple years ago, in an attempt to induce a lucid dream, I had a series of repeated false awakenings. It’s crazy how many I had – 4 in total – one right after another!

Here’s what I wrote in my dream journal that morning.

Dream Journal: April 23 2007

Slept in about 2 hours longer than I need to try and have a lucid dream…

had strange dreams where I had false wakenings instead.
I’m in bed with IL and I wake up and IL is there; I tell her to describe to me what’s happened this morning. She can’t. I realize it’s because the memories I have of us getting up already and doing this are just dreams. Somehow this doesn’t lead me to realize I am dreaming though.

then another false wakening dream…
IL comes to bed to wake me up and bring me the mail. I’ve got some shirts and other things. She’s excited to give me a letter from Rob Bryanton, author of Imagining the 10th Dimension. He writes to me ‘So I’m in Toronto right now’ and I try to read the rest but I can’t I know I’m dreaming to some extent, and each page starts with ‘I’m in Toronto’ because my dreaming mind can’t come up with anything better. His letter was like 5 or 6 pages on oversized paper, written in ink, with doodles in the background. His handwriting was big and happy.

another false wakening dream…
I wake up and about to start shaving before I notice there’s a long patch of hair that’s already shaved off my beard. I don’t know how I did this! On top of that, I see gray hair coming into my beard to. I go to get IL to look at this and get her opinion. She sees the grey hair and the shaved spot. I make a joke about it and then something happens and I know it’s a dream. It’s a very weak unpowerful realization and leads to nothing else, save for the fact that I know my beard is, in fact, normal.

another false wakening dream…
I wake up and it’s pouring rain outside. This is strange since it’s supposed to be 80 degrees today. I notice there’s still blue skies in the distance. I see rainbows – thick rainbows, like you can grab them. I move and they move. I realize the rain might mess up my plans to go hiking.

A few observations:

• It seems the fact that I was forced myself to go back to bed after having woken up in the morning in real life was a huge factor in having several dreams where I woke up and started my day.
• It’s odd to me that each dream sequence of a false awakening is disconnected entirely from the one before it. It’s like each time my brain “reset” itself and starting over, dreaming and then falsely waking up.
• It’s too bad this didn’t lead to strong lucidity, even though I knew I was dreaming the first time I realized I hadn’t really woken up.
• It is really weird to have a false awakening over and over that has someone else in the dream who is really sleeping next to you and you normally get up with. It just seems so damn real each time with her in the dreams waking up with me or interacting with me once I (dreamed I) woke up. I felt like she was really there, ya know?
• The dream where I got a letter from Rob Bryanton, author the fantastic book Imagining the 10th Dimension, is great because I was in fact actually in the process of interviewing him for this blog. (You can read the Rob Bryanton interview here.)
• FYI I’ve had so many dreams where I look in the mirror and something is different: my hair, my beard, even my face. It’s something I should consider using as a dream sign since I dream about it a lot.
• Because I was able to so easily bring this experience about through going back to sleep after waking up, it’s something I’d like to try again to intentionally induce false awakenings, lucid dreams, or both.

What kind of weird false awakening experiences have you had?

Untitled Art by Ben | Copyright 2010 | Dreaming Life

Having a dream where you are simultaneous you but also someone else is such a strange yet common occurrence.

Here is a short dream I had where I was someone else not just once but twice, in the same dream. The first person I barely knew, he was  someone who helped spearhead some events I was a part of and the second one is a person nearly everyone on the planet knows – Homer Simpson. What a strange thing to merge the two.

Dream Journal: 7:32 PM 10/11/99

I’m R, the PFT organizer. I’ve cut myself in a horrible accident and am bleeding all the way from my hands to my shoulder on my right arm. I’m trying to hold down the skin broken around my elbow yet it’s just bulging with overflowing blood. I’m taken to a doctor and now I’m in The Simpsons. Every one is trying to convince Marge that she didn’t not to sew up my cut. I think I’m Homer.

This ability to be someone else in a dream is, frankly, entirely weird.

Whatever concept or dream logic that allows for this feat seems to be the same principle at work when you dream of going to your friends house, except it’s not your friends house but it is, or you dream of your coworker at work, but it’s actually your best friend, but its still your coworker. And so on, all the way on down to your own identify in the dream as being someone else, all the while this being just the way it is and nothing you or anyone gives any notice to as being odd.

I am fascinated by what mechanism is at work that allows for this to occur commonly in dreams.

I would love to hear your thoughts on what you think is happening or why this is such a common experience in dreams. Furthermore, if this is discussed in any scientific theories on dreaming you’re aware of, please share!

Art by Ben | Copyright 2010 | Dreaming Life

This is another dream from the vaults, the experience of which has always stood out in my mind. Only 1 person has ever read this dream – he told me his Mom did dream interpretation, so I sent him this dream, to which he was sheepishly responded it was really long and maybe another time she could interpret it. Ha! Anyhow, here’s a condensed version of it.

Dream Journal: 1:12 PM 9/19/99

I’m flying over the United States we a group of people. We see a small little town in the country and immediately swoop down into it. This experience of flying is amazing and the large areal views are astonishing.

We’re lying on a grassy hill, spying into someone’s home. It’s night time yet a lot of people are out. No one sees us, which is surprisingly since we’re so obviously hiding out looking like burglars.

We’re inside their home now. I’m standing on the counter. The house is full of chaos and tension – the people there are very fearful. The town is full of violence, and I scream out “Violence begets violence! This town will be overcome with locusts!”

At the same time, using sort sort of mental / magical power, I throw my left arm down and without touching him, I explode a mans head.

The entire town knows what’s going on and everyone is screaming, everyone is trying get away from the impending locusts.

I briefly consider my friends in this town who may die here because of the locusts, but cannot remember where they really live.

I’m in my chemical lab in high school. I’m with the same group of people I was flying with. We might actually be vampires. We are all very upset for some reason and make everything explode and then fly off at once. I’m planning on leaving the school and I think that I will have to disappear from this time forever. I see a few friends on my way out, give them a hug, and tell them I may not see them again.

At the same time, I hear people in a nearby classroom talking about us. I stick my head in and ask what they’re saying, and the teacher jokes that they heard we can fly. I laugh at this and then see another friend, hug him, tell him I may never see him again. I remember thought that I can check my email from anywhere in the world, so please email me! Then I fly off, then we all fly off, all 4 or or 5 of us, towards a field.

A few thoughts on this dream:

• I had graduated from high school only months before, so it’s interesting to see how I kept noting in this dream I was leaving my high school and hugging friends goodbye and telling them I may never see them again. What’s odd is my actual last day of high school was entirely anti-climatic. I saw nearly no one and told nearly no one goodbye. Perhaps this dream is a projection of my desire to have had a better last day of school!
• At this time in my life, I really, really loved the movie Interview with the Vampire. I was also very interested in weird Bible imagery like demons and whatnot, so the whole locusts things fits in well with that fascination. This is the main part of the dream that sticks with me to this day.
• I think it’s really odd that I shout something about violence begets violence and that locusts will overtake the town. This type of aggression is nearly completely absent in my real life.
• Beyond this idea of relating the dream to leaving high school, I have no idea what it means. It’s just a very weird dream. The flying aspect of it was fantastic. The only other dream I’ve had of flying that rival the experience are some of the flying lucid dreams I’ve had which were amazing.

Photo by Marisa

It’s rare that I have a dream whose meaning is so easily and obviously symbolic to what’s going on in my life in such blunt terms. This is one of the most literal dreams of that sort that I’ve had.  This dream is about problems my girlfriend (at the time) and I were having in our relationship.

Dream Journal:
6:56 am May 24, 1999

We’re outside of  a business. I’m arguing with an employee who then turns into A. I’m shouting and ranting and raving because of the bad service. Then A and I start throwing things at one another – drinks, food, even rocks and stones! We both get hurt, cutting one another with the things we’re throwing.

After running in circles and throwing shit at each other, I realize this is horrible! what are we doing?

Standing about 10 feet away, I raise my arms out. I briefly realize this may appear to be an invitation for target practice, but I was intending to motion for her to hug me.

She puts down her rock and goes to give me a hug, and then I can’t remember anything else.

This is perhaps one of the most easily symbolic dreams I’ve had and that’s why I like it. While so many dreams consist of that David Lynch-esque disconnect between what’s happening and why, this dream just smacks you in the face:

You and your girlfriend throwing rocks at each other! And then you realize wait, this is pointless, what are we doing? And then you move to embrace and comfort one another .

What’s also interesting about this dream is that she did work as a waitress and it was from a waitress character then she emerged into my girlfriend.

Also, just now something has come to me as I review this dream  11 years later.

I noted in my dream journal that the things we were throwing were leaving cuts on another. This is interesting because self mutilation and cutting was a topic between us and something of a problem for her, I’m sad to note. I never saw this additional layer of meaning in the dream. Very interesting.

Untitled By Ben. Copyright 2010 Dreaming Life

There is a woman who has appeared in my dreams for many, many years. A little while back, I realized she ceased to represent the person who she appears to be and had become a kind of archetype in my brain; a woman that represents some sort of ideal woman, a highly sexualized archetype, a kind of goddess almost.

In fact, in real life she had a very big “energy” or presence to her personality, style, and image, so this archetypal concept is not too far off to be honest.

So yes – she is based on a real person, a girl I had a huge crush on in high school – perhaps infatuation would be a better word, actually – but it’s no one that I’ve had any relationship with or even spoken to in about 12 years. But for the first 5 or 6 years after not having seen her, I had many dreams with her. In fact, it was almost like the energy of the archetype got bigger and bigger after having not seen her for 2 or 3 years – this was the period where she would regularly appear in my dreams, more so than any other period of my life after having met her.

Even now, a dozen or so years since having seen her, she still appears in my dreams, albeit only making the occasional guest appearance. I can only recall one off the top of my head a single dream with her from the last year. She was in a dream where – comically – I saw her driving a car on the beach, right on the sand, like it was no big deal to be doing such a ludicrous thing.

Out of all the dreams I ever had about her, there was one that was really strong, which is the dream I want to share today. I think I’ve thought about the experience so much that it’s taken on a sort of poetic license of its own, coming to be bigger than the dream itself. I now question my own memory of it; my thoughts about it have effected my memory of it, surely shaping it into something else. (Which is actually true of every memory every has on every experience, but…that’s for another post, another day.)

Anyhow, about 10 years ago I wrote down the dream and intended to publish it as part of the zine I did as a teenager. That issue never came out, and the dream has always remained in various zine-to-be notebooks, having never seen the light of day.

Here is a copy of what I wrote down back then. I’m 29 now, and I estimate i was 17 or 18 when I had the dream and wrote this in my dream journal.

She’s lying on the cave floor, arching her back, in the distance. The rave around us has become distant, a mere flashing of lights in a far-off corner, a beat to be heard as background music, acknowledged but not pulsating through my body. We are alone, made tiny by the largeness of the cave. Her ribs are poking up through her skin, her red hair is falling behind to the floor as she tilts her head back and exposes her neck. Thoughts of making love to her tonight flash through my mind. A large skull lies on the floor next to her; it’s phallic horns jutting into the air. I walk closer to her, and the look in her eyes is one of mere acknowledgement, not surprise.

If it’s not obvious, without being overtly sexual in content, this dream was still very, very sexual

I can still feel the experience of the dream so well – the pulsating lights, the arch of her back, the emptiness of the cave aside from our presence. It’s like I’ve watched it happen over and over.

I’ve often thought of collaborating with a close friend who does freelance video work and making a few short films out of my dreams; if that ever happens, this would go to the top of the list. I would love to direct my own dream.

Addendum:

One benefit of keeping a dream journal is that themes become evident, especially over the long term. If I hadn’t made a habit of remembering my dreams, I never would have noted how this woman became a kind of personal archetype of mine. It’s observations like this that make long term dream journaling very interesting.

If have you any experiences or thoughts on the archetypes we meet in our dreams, feel free to share it below.

Art by Claudio P

One of the earliest dreams I ever had was an experience that scared me because for the longest time I never realized it was a dream.

I reckon I was 4 or 5 years old at the time. Nearly 25 years later, I can still remember the man in this dream who threatened me. Here’s the dream retold from the perspective of my 29 year old:

I’m lying in bed, going to sleep. My bed rests up against the white walls of my bedroom, and as usual, I prefer to sleep towards the wall, as opposed to the other side where I may fall off in my sleep.

A man appears on the wall. He is made of a fuzzy, pasty material that outlines his body. He’s probably 6 inches tall, and his body is just an outline. Then he threatens me: he tells me in no uncertain terms that if I lay too close to the wall, he will poke my eye out!

Being 4 or 5 years old, my experience was taken quite literal: all I knew was that this man appeared in the wall and he told me that if I slept too close to the wall, he would poke my eye out. Of course I believed it would happen! It was terrifying and I yielded to his threat. For some time afterwards, I purposely slept with my body and face resting completely on the other side of the bed because of this man.

Wow, what a strange dream!

While this is not actually the earliest dream recollection that I have, it’s the most memorable. There are 2 other dreams I had (one with GI Joe, and one about the local pool) that I remember remembering as a very young child, and continued to recall my entire life. But they had no psychological impact on me, other than impounding on my psyche the weirdness of dreams. (I recall being astonished of having a simple dream of a GI Joe character turning his head twice at me. Why would I dream of such a thing, I wondered as a child. The “why” behind this question was astonishing to me.)

PS I’m smiling as I write this because here I am presenting one of my earliest recollections with dreams and I’m not so sure I’ve ever told anyone about it.

Addendum:

What’s the oldest dream you can remember from when you were a kid?

Did your dreams mean anything to you or have any impact on you as a child?

Do those childhood dreams have any meaning to you now?

Dark Days Ahead by Perry McKenna

Few readers of this blog know this, but I am going through a divorce right now. In fact, I am 3 months separated.

It would suffice to say this is a pretty terrible period of my life.  The upheaval this has caused in my day to day living is one reason why my work on Dreaming Life has been so spotty for most of 2008.

What I find interesting and want to talk about in this article is how I can see reflections of my marriage and divorce in my dreams.

…

I got married 4 years ago last month.

Around that time, and for many months, I had dream after dream of fighting off sexual encounters with women.

All the dreams were of the same theme: a woman trying to seduce me or otherwise become intimate with me, and my struggle against it.

In most of the dreams, I would not do anything sexual with the woman. Sometimes I would.

These were weird dreams & I often felt guilty about having them. Here I was just recently married, and I’m having dream after dream about trying not to have sex with other women!

I know these dreams were about my (unconscious) anxiety of being committed to one woman for the rest of my life. Having had a step-father who had an affair and seeing first hand the horrors this brought on to the family, I believe my psyche had a fear of myself somehow doing the same thing.

Even though I very often told my wife about my dreams, I never mentioned these dreams to her.

After some months, they faded away & I didn’t think about them anymore.

…

Fast forward a few years, and you can see from my dream journal some crazy shit.

In March of 2007, after a gut-wrenching experience of seeing my wife performing tango for the first time, a hobby that came to be one of the biggest points of tension in our relationship, I had the following dream, as noted in my dream journal:

Some horrible dream with <my stepdad>  in it…
He’s sitting on the couch, and he gets up, and I’m trying to push him back
He suggests/threatens that maybe he should go see her/touch her/in some way interact with <my wife>, and I’m forcibly trying to push him back

This is the same step-father who had an affair.

In this dream he represents what I saw her dancing as; a threat to our marriage. And here I am struggling between my wife and my step-father, trying to push him away, and he keeps fighting to get at her.

…

The weeks after we physically moved out from living together,  I have many emotional dreams on change, fear, feeling suffocated, and so on.

Here’s a snippet from June 19th, 2008:

I’m outside and suddenly there’s a enormous force in the atmosphere, pulling everyone and everything out, uprooting them. I realize it’s the end of the world -  this is it, some natural disaster, global warning, something – and I’m going to die.

I try to think to myself of something important, of something to hold on to while/if I’m going to die, and I tell l myself “I love <my wife>.”

Having a dream about the end of the world is bad enough, but the end of this dream was just… brutal.

I woke up and felt terrible. What was this all about? Holding onto my feelings for my wife when everything is changing? It was incredibly painful.

The next week on June 24, in my journal I find a summary of a different dream as:

>intense dream – unable to move, captive, going to die.

And so on.
…

While we were still together, I recall a dream of drowning and trying my hardest to keep my head above the water. (Which I did!)

Long before this, there was this dream of beautiful cinematic quality, again touching on the end of the world theme. It’s our final moment, and we know this. We hold each other tightly, exchanging a final  “I love you.” Then we die together, arm in arm, as we (and the world) burn up in ashes.

…

And now in the present, where I am struggling with just going to work and staying afloat and deciding what to do with myself and my life, it’s interesting to see how this manifests in my dreams.

Hours ago I was in a different world, one in which I experienced many things such as being paralyzed by fear and unable to move or make a decision, with dreams of humiliation, fighting, and belittlement.

It’s no coincidence that I had these dreams last night after an evening of some rough emotional reflection my life.

…. …. …..

In summary:

Well, there is no grand summary, or happy ending to this story. Life is rough.

But like my Grandma said to me recently:  this too shall pass.

Photo by Perry McKenna.