Cast Not the First Stone

The Dream: I'm in a living room with a long mural that I had painted, made up of several separate pieces the same dimensions as a series of family history embroideries I had made in waking life. My brother and his friend have painted over the mural to shift the color to a different, warm shade of brown. They are pleased with themselves and feel this is an improvement. I am incensed, perhaps even more so because it is a rather nice shade. I yell at them enthusiastically, but it seems they are impervious to my attacks; as people used to say, “They couldn't care less.” I'm as frustrated by their lack of seeing the insult they've perpetrated as I am by what they did. “You have denigrated my work!” I say.

Getting no satisfaction from them, I declare that I will never again come into this room. The next scene, however, finds me in it. My brother is now without his mocking friend. I try again to get him to see the gravity of his sin, and he says, “Now you know how I felt when you . . . . “ I don't remember what he accused me of, but I do remember I had done what he said, and that I, like him, had been unaware of its impact on the other.

Interpretation: The dream was triggered by a falling out between a couple of distant family members, and my realization that their anger and frustration with each other is rooted in their shared past (the family history embroideries).

The dream has an interesting resolution: I go back into the living room (the place where I live) and realize that I have done exactly the same thing that I was angry at my brother for doing. In other words, I've taken on the role that a family member once played: since I do the same thing that my dream brother has done, I am the critic who denigrates my work. I am doing it to myself.

The dream tells me a few important things: First, it's time to lighten up. Second, it is time to learn how to accept a good criticism (the new color is actually an improvement), and third, my family history holds the key to my overly critical thoughts.

The Intruder: the Dead Bolt

This post marks the 300th to this blog. It seems fitting that today's dream deals with some very basic stuff: the archetypal images of mother, life, and death.

The Dream: I am in the parlor of my grandmother’s railroad apartment in Brooklyn. I notice the door that leads to the stairwell is not shut properly. As I notice, someone in the hall shuts the door; I think it’s a helpful neighbor. I go to secure the door by turning the deadbolt lock when the person outside pushes on the door, attempting to get in. I push back and manage to bolt the door. I awaken in terror.

Interpretation: I had this dream shortly after Mother’s Day. The most remarkable thing about it is how frightened I felt when I awakened. My grandfather died when my mother was very young, leaving my foreign-born grandmother to support three children. She avoided remarrying because she had been mistreated by a step-parent and didn't want to risk that possibility for her own children. My mother was born in the apartment. So for me the place symbolizes these two gentle and loving souls, mother and grandmother, the unsung heroes of my life. Both are deceased. My distress is brought on by realizing my mothers have been lost (railroaded) to death (the dead bolt). And, of course, I will be as well.

At first the outside presence seems benign; my first impression is that it is helpful, and there is a helpful aspect to death once the losses of old age become apparent. But still, for me, terrifying.

A New Old Home

The basic work of our psyche is to create wholeness by integrating all the sometimes warring elements within. Some dreams show that we’re on the path of integration; this dream shows the opposite.

The dream: A friend has bought a Victorian house. I am thinking about buying a house nearby, and my friend is  condescending toward it. I feel hurt and diminished by her reaction. The house I am considering, which I defend as being “Queen Anne vintage,” has elements of both an older style house and a modern tract home. There is a large laundry room downstairs which I joke can be the children’s playroom. I am not sure that I like the dining room, or rather the living room dining room combo: one large rectangular room. A moment later the dining room splits into an L alcove with a half-height white fence.

Interpretation: The friend represents the part of me that has made an accommodation to collective reality. She has found a Victorian house in which to live, with all its symbolism of a strictly ordered public life and the hint of a secret private life. Another part wants a home that combines the old--the values and expectations of the very different culture of my youth—with the contemporary. Of course there are hints this modernity is narrow in its own way, with its tract homes, but in the dream it was presented as practical and serviceable. I make room for the disruptive anarchic children, even if the space (downstairs, in the laundry) seems grudging and tentative--not to mention implying they need to be cleaned up. I can’t combine all the background chatter (din-ing room) with life (living room) so I split off the unconscious elements (the L shaped alcove indicates the unconscious) and fence them in. The future work is to face these elements and give them adequate space.