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Male 36-40
 Pictures Shared: 2
Stories Shared: 17		 Experiences: 32
Friends: 24

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turtlesplash's Dreams

  • turtlesplash - 36-40 years old - male

    It Took Me Nearly Thirty Years to Understand this Dream

    Monsters Dream

    As a young child of perhaps ten my father showed an uncharacteristic lapse of judgement when he took me to see Jaws at the cinema. I absolutely loved the film but was also somewhat traumatized by it. I've always had an overactive imagination and I was afraid to go swimming even in pools for years after this.

    Our dreams do draw on the seemingly random happenings of our life to help populate their narratives with detail, but it’s far less random than it seems. The monster in Jaws tapped into something very deep in my being, and the fear there leaped upon a symbol ripe for its particular problem. The dreams that followed varied in form and content as dream series usually do, but the most constant theme was being on a sinking boat hunted by an unstoppable giant shark, just like in the movie, except I don't remember having significant allies. I could never get away and would usually wake up in terror as the shark was about to devour me. Eventually I accepted I could never escape and I finally just jumped into the shark's mouth. After that the dream pretty much stopped recurring. A simple narrative with an elegant closure.

    Yet when we resolve the unconscious impasse that such dreams represent it is rarely a conscious thing. Years later I realized that the water probably represented my relationship to emotion. I was a sensitive child but I already had a ruthlessly overdeveloping intellect and it was well into my late twenties before I began to appreciate how emotionally atrophied I had become. In this context the ocean represented the depth of the feelings that I was terrified of acknowledging. I was struggling with desperate futility to stay nice and dry, just like I wished my life to be. Of course we can never stay dry in life. As a child I had hardly formalized this rationalist aspect of my being, but the unconscious psyche sees far further into reality and the future than does consciousness.

    It was only recently that I re-speculated on all this for I’d never thought long about what the shark itself represented. I've long understood that the monster in dreams usually represents our struggle with the world generally but I'd never got much further than that. However about eighteen months ago I had a religious awakening that threw my life into turmoil [or I produced the turmoil so I could find God]. I won't digress further here but essentially I experienced an explosion of unconscious knowledge into ego-consciousness. One of the many shocking realizations that came to me during this time was that the shark from my childhood nightmares was, perhaps more than anything else, my mother.

    Now first I need to say a couple of things. No dream symbol means any single thing, but is always the intersection of many meanings, all of which can never be consciously grasped together. The monster in this dream certainly also represented the outer universe that as an overly-introverted child I was afraid of facing. However because this meaning was already closer to consciousness than the emerging conflict with my mother, it represented a less critical part of the symbol for the ten-year old me.

    I also want to say that I have a healthy relationship with my mother and that she is a thoughtful, humble, kind and compassionate woman who loved me wholeheartedly. This though, with the typical irony of life, was part of my problem. Sometimes it felt just a little too wholehearted, that she never quite ‘cut the cord’.

    Mum had a difficult childhood in many ways. I don’t think she ever felt truly emotionally safe and has struggled much of her life with some form of anxiety. She wasn’t unloved, but love has an incredible range of depth, quality and texture. I just know that I got better love than she did. Just part of evolution I suppose.

    Her love certainly filled me with self-confidence and power, however because of the nature of her own wounds her love also had a smothering quality. Whenever we love with too much attachment, we do violence to the object of our affections. She cleaved to me with all the energy of her own unconscious childhood terror, and as a child my unconscious spirit was terrified in turn. Her love was devouring me. She was God but she was also the shark I couldn’t escape. A monster from primal, emotional depths my barely formed consciousness was already denying.

    I don’t pretend this interpretation is comprehensive. Truly I don’t think any dream interpretation can be. But I think the moment I stopped fighting the shark, my relationship with my mother and with my 10ish-yr-old world entered a new phase. As a child certain psychic elements hardened from potentialities into more solid formations. It certainly wasn’t a simple victory because I continued to dream of monsters, but the symbol evolved as did the context and my relationship to it.

    The important new knowledge here for me is the awareness of my mother’s suffering. I have been a selfish man in many ways. Not cruel or unkind but self-absorbed, and this in part was my psychic defence against aspects of her love. However by taking this attitude I may have defended something of my egoic integrity, but I was also often helping to reinforce some of my mother’s oldest fears, rejections and humiliations. Truly do we always hurt the ones we love.

    The moral as far as I can understand it seems a simple one for me, even though I yawn over a chasm to say so. I mustn’t get defensive or argue when she worries about my life or lectures me about things I well understand [or think I do]. Often it’s true what she says, even if she sometimes exaggerates the problem. I usually only make things worse by trying to argue back my own reasoning. Editing this I‘ve realized in how many subtle ways I’ll always be trapped in this old power-struggle with mum, even peacefully. Where we love with excessive attachment resentment inevitably arises. Every relationship has its own history as well as its own dynamic pattern. To a large extent the pattern orbits the history.

    It’s not even really hard to give her more love, attention and patience. Especially since one of the fruits of my selfish life have been solitude and a relative lack of commitments. I have just always enjoyed being alone a little too much. I can never repay Mum for the gift of my life. In fact the very intellectual power I love and am learning to guide with emotional intelligence, grew in part out of my defence against the claws of her love.

    And all worldly love has claws....[more]

    By: turtlesplash | Dream Interpretations 0 | Dream Rating 5.00

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This is the Experience Project profile for our valued member turtlesplash (photo), found at: www.experienceproject.com/about/turtlesplash.