Complicit

What gets your goat? What can you learn from the things that set you off? In this dream I learned I wasn't an innocent victim.

The Dream: A young boy is tortured and murdered. I am aghast and very sad and upset when I learn about it. Then I discover that he was complicit in doing the same to someone else. I don't know what to think. Then I begin to wonder why I am following this story. Am I getting some sort of enjoyment from these sadistic acts? Am I also complicit?

Interpretation: This dream was triggered by an exchange with a photographer friend. Although his situation and the dream boy's dilemma seem very different, they both deal with an apparent injustice that might not be as unjust as it first appears. My waking life friend was disappointed and baffled by the placement of his photograph in a group exhibit. He said that since the show was hung by artists he couldn't understand why it was in a spot where it couldn't be seen well. Surely they know better? He conjectured it might have been because it was a photo rather than a painting. I said that, in my experience of group exhibits, artists were only concerned with where their own pieces hung. As I said it I realized, but didn't say, that that was certainly true of me. My friend thought about it, then said that made sense: he realized it was true of him. The take home lesson? We just might be complicit in creating what we complain about.

Compassion

As if to form a counterpoint to the previous two “laughing” dreams, last night's was horrific.

The Dream: My best friend from high school is going to be tortured and killed. She will have her skin removed and then be executed. I am distraught and hope that she will be killed before she is flayed; thinking of this procedure has made me hysterical with anguish.

After a while she returns. She has obviously been hurt, tortured, beaten, but she's alive and has her skin. It seems her ordeal is over. I am afraid she's going to tell me about her experience, and I don't want to know: it's too upsetting.

Interpretation: A friend from the past is having her skin removed; the friend is from my vulnerable teenage, high school years. One of the triggers was someone else's dream that I had read the night before that featured underwear falling down. Both the skin being removed and the underwear falling down represent an exposure. At the same time, I was reading Elaine Pagel's book on the gospel of Thomas (a name similar to my friend's last name). Pagels lists the tortures and ignominious deaths meted out to Christians.

This distressing dream tells me something I had not realized: that my distancing myself from the suffering of others (not exposing myself to it) comes from my reaction to their pain and, at a deeper level, to my own. I turn away; I try to ignore it—because it is so fundamentally upsetting. Just as my friend has survived the dream ordeal,  I can survive becoming aware of  painful events that occurred long ago. And once I can accept that, I will be a more compassionate person.