INTERPRETATION OF A DREAM

INTERPRETATION OF A DREAM

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© October 1, 2012

REFERENCE:

My daughter Jennifer is a cancer patient.  She had a nightmare and shared it with me asking me what I thought it meant.  Once she read my explanation, she wrote,

“Hi Jimbo,

“Thanks for dream interpretation.  After I reread the dream, I made all the connections linked to cancer.  Our minds are pretty powerful tools. 

“The past nine months I haven’t let cancer get me down.  I just go through the motions and deal with things as they come at me.  I really try and look at everything in life as, ‘If you can’t change a situation, why dwell on it.’

“After saying that, though, I do feel myself getting frustrated when people don’t get it.  They forget my struggles.  I don’t want recognition or sympathy.  I just want them to understand me when I get a little moody for no reason.  I could go on and on about little details of my dream, but I’ll leave that for another time.

“If you want to send this out to people, I am open to that, too. 

“I love you very much and am thankful that I can always turn to you for advice, guidance or just to talk.  Thanks for that.  You are an awesome dad.

Jen”

THE STORM BEYOND THE CALM – CANCER IS LIKE PTSD

We know men and women who return from war often experience PTSD (post traumatic shock disorder), but appear the same on the surface as when they went off to war. 

Little glitches in their behavior start to occur, however, behaviors we cannot associate with them.  We think we understand, but how can we?  We ask them to share what is bothering them, but how can they? 

Shock of war and the awe of surviving have changed them.  They are possessed with something that is not apparent, something we cannot see, something they cannot understand or know what to do about it. 

War and life threatening illness have much in common.  We lack sufficient sophistication to know how to deal with this something, with this evil that can metastasize through us like gangbusters only to hide behind the eyes. 

Medications have a limited and temporary efficacy.  The only palliatives that work over time are love, patience, understanding, trust, devotion, and spiritual renewal.  It is when we are thrown out of the norm that we discover we are much more than a physical entity.

Once the ritual of prescribed medication ends, PTSD sufferers have been known to retreat into alcohol, pain pills and other drugs, crime, promiscuity, even physical and psychological abuse of loved ones.  Only a minor upset can jar such sufferers into uncharacteristic rage. 

Retreat is often saved by a terrible dream or nightmare.  It is the unconscious mind attempting to make connection with the conscious mind.  Funny clues surface subject to rather accurate interpretation.  It is not uncommon for the sufferer to be introduced to a higher consciousness in sleep where spiritual palliatives reside.  

Cancer is unashamedly evident whereas this is not always the case with war zone PTSD returnees.  Nonetheless, cancer sufferers can develop symptoms close to theirs. 

The shock of cancer, its life threatening nature, its disruption of one’s normal routine and that of loved ones can be extremely consequential if the cancer or PTSD is ignored.  The subconscious mind is a reservoir for what the conscious mind would prefer to disregard. 

A nightmare as with other dreams is the two sides of the mind talking to each other in a way the conscious mind might prefer to repress.  Often this conversation is wrapped in many disguises, metaphors and subtle images and imagery. 

Jennifer’s description of her dream and my response can be taken in this context.  I am not a dream detective, but a father with no special skills in dream detection.  Why then share it with you: because dreams are a puzzle that cries out to be solved to increase understanding and more appropriate action, and who better than by a loved one? 

YOUR NIGHTMARE

In my dream I was being detained into this holding area, which was a classroom style but outside over a covered area.  It was nice out, not hot, kind of breezy.  I think I was being held over because I was trying to pass a gate to another country, and they were randomly pulling people in.

Anyway, while sitting there, I noticed a lot of very colorful people.  Some were mad yelling out obscenities.  This one guy to my left kept telling this guy to shut up, who was sitting near him.  Every time the guy started to rant it would anger this gentleman, and he would say, “Here we go again, crazy guy won’t stop acting up.”

Well, I happened to finally look at this crazy guy who wouldn’t stop making noise, and realized he was possessed by the devil. 

I immediately jumped up and started saying exorcism prayers as if I were a priest.  The demon is snarling back at me telling me to shut up, but I keep praying.  I threaten the demon with my holy water (it was a bottle of water), and tell him that I am a licensed priest who specializes in exorcism.

Deep down I’m trying to remember all the steps and prayers I’ve seen from all the exorcist movies I’ve watched.  I tear my white shirt and make it into a Roman collar, and tie it around my neck.  I keep saying over and over again “Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name..”  I also attempted to say the Hail Mary, but I don’t even know the prayer.

I am telling the demon to come out of the body of the mad guy, that it wasn’t welcomed there.  I keep yelling at the demon saying, “You’re a coward.  You have to take over innocent people’s bodies because you don’t have one of your own.”

The demon starts spitting on me and telling me things of my past, guilty things that no one knows about, speaking to me in tongues.

I yell to the crowd of people around me that they need to help me with prayers.  Everyone, I tell them that they should be chanting a prayer, any prayer they know.  But no one participates.  I don’t think they know any prayers.  

I then yell to the guards that they had to contain this mad man in a private room so he wouldn’t spread his contagion with anyone else.  They also declined by cry for help.

Finally, I knew what I had to do.  I had to give up my body and compel the demon to come into me.  I told the person next to me, the one not mad, that once the demon entered my body they would have to kill me because I did not want to live possessed.

I thought to myself, “Am I really ready to give up my own life for this stranger?”  Without hesitation, I knew the answer was yes.

That is when I woke up.  It was 5:30 in the morning.  I got up to get some water, and I just felt an uneasy aura in my house, so I started to pray out loud, and told the demon to leave my house.  I told the energy that I love God and I am on his side.  It took me about a half hour to get back to sleep.  I got Chloe and had her lay next to me.  They say cats are our guardians from evil, so I felt it would help.

Jim, any thoughts as to what this means!

*     *     *

RESPONSE

In my view, dreams, and yes including nightmares, are our unconscious minds speaking to us from the depths of our nature.  The unconscious mind speaks to us when the conscious mind refuses to listen.  There are several reasons for this.  Perhaps it doesn’t want to deal with an issue, a situation, a concern, or problem and so the conscious mind in survival mode denies its existence, pushing it deep into the subconscious.

Dreams and even nightmares can help us better understand ourselves.  The quality of your dreams, as you have shared them with me before, reflects an engaged rational mind.  They are so structured that it is not difficult to peel the onion, so to speak, to reveal the meaning of the clues.

It is interesting that you see yourself in a “holding area” which is like a classroom (structured), but “outside” over a covered area (semi-structured), comfortable (breezy) with a gate (an obstacle) trying to pass through to another country (could this be health?).  Others are being pulled into this same holding area, and they are not all so accepting.

After a nine-month duration involving three surgeries, you are in the holding pattern of going from a cancer patient to a fully recovered normal person free of cancer.  You are at that gate, one that has pulled many others towards it, often unwillingly so, and you have an awareness of the situation close to hypersensitivity beyond the realm of most others. 

Your mind is filled with all the anguish, frustration, self-doubt and recrimination that comes with a person who worked long years to acquire professional credentials to have a career, and when that career was soaring, when everything seemed to be in sync and going your way you were slowed down, first with Bell’s Palsy, then trigeminal neuralgia, but stopped completely with breast cancer.

It is normal for one to wonder how you might have contributed to this devastating setback, perhaps not at the conscious level but almost certainly at the subconscious level. 

Your dream moves from a breezy calm to the noise of one person, a madman and the calm of another.  The two sides of your mind are speaking to each other.  There is the calm side and the angry side, the side that accepts your plight and the side that does not. 

You are by nature a person of action.  You are a problem solver, quick, efficient, and thorough.  Madness demands action and you think of exorcism.  This requires that you be an exorcist, a priest, and so from your experience (exorcist films) you say what you believe are exorcist prayers, and use exorcist ritual (holy water) as you understand it, and even fabricate the Roman collar to give yourself legitimacy.  Consistent with this role is the Lord’s Prayer, which you know, and the “Hail Mary” of Catholicism, which you do not.

(Inherent in your unconscious mind speaking to you in your dream is that legitimacy is constructed on ritualistic authority of roles.)

Quite interesting is the process of demanding the demon come out of the madman’s body by taunting the demon.  You look to the crowd for support and find none.  You ask the crowd to pray, and you find they know no prayers.  Then the demon turns and spits on you, and reveals secrets of your past no one knows, speaking in tongues. 

This is the crux of the nightmare when the sane side of your mind meets the guilt side, the repressed side.  The madman and the demon are personified, as outside yourself, while you are the white knight dealing with the madness.

Then perplexity enters the dream.  You cannot get help even from the guards (society) to isolate the madman.  You cannot contain the demon (cancer).  So, you feel compelled to give up your body to it (the demon).  Is this surrender or acceptance? 

You answer the question with a question, “Am I really ready to give up my own life for this stranger (this cancer), and you answer, yes.

*     *     *

This dream is an internal dialogue.  It is natural to wonder if things would be different if I had been or lived differently.  Our minds want perfection but to be human is to be imperfect.  Cancer is nature, not a demon, of human cells running amuck, and so, ultimately, sanity tells you that there is no choice but to go with the flow and accept and deal with the demon (cancer), which you have done with quiet bravery.

When you say, “I told the energy (apt expression of life) that I love God,” and that you are on his side, you were making contact with your soul which is God within you, and which is the energy of life.  You were making contact with your spiritual side beyond the limits of your perishable body.  The soul in our culture lives on and is the last to leave the body before it expires.

By embracing your cancer, by accepting your lot, by acquiescing to acknowledge your unsettled state, your demon is manageable.  We are all susceptible to evil as we are to cancer because such demons exist in us all, but often in a dormant state. 

The mind when provoked to question its limitations looks to a higher power, something outside itself, something spiritual, something to anchor it in crisis.  Many call this God.

It is the solace that there is always this unconditional source of omniscience and love.  You managed to connect with this source despite the people, the madman, the noise, the guards, the demon, and sense of helplessness in the dream.

This dream reveals your spiritual side, which has been buried in your relentless struggle to satisfy the demands of your career or material side.  You have dedicated many years to study, to living and succeeding in the material world with little time or attention to your spiritual side, but it was always there.

Your cancer that evil in your system introduced you to your spiritual self as you took comfort in Chloe, your cat, acting as your guardian from evil, allowing you to go to sleep. 

ADDENDUM

Guilt, which we all have, and the memory of missteps, which we are all guilty of as well pressed against your conscience to open in a story in your dream.  These things with which we wrestle, good or bad, make us into the person we become. 

The room in the dream is quite interesting as it is your particular cage.  Now I am someone outside you, talking about the beautiful young lady I know you are. I can only understand what you are enduring from afar. 

You have a fine and quick mind.  You have even a better mind than you have allowed yourself to believe you have.  Yes, you can be devious, cunning and manipulative looking for shortcuts to whatever.  Cancer has introduced you to a situation in which there are no shortcuts, and you find you are coping very well, thank you very much. 

You have stick-to-itiveness and the perseverance demonstrated through many years of academic study.    You persevered through more than a year looking for a job in your field.  And now you are showing the same perseverance with your cancer. 

That said it would be unnatural if you didn’t get cabin fever, become angry and frustrated, be at times bad company, and wish that someone else had to endure this ordeal.  No one not going through what you are going through can totally understand what you are experiencing.  How could they?  They haven’t been with you every moment of every day for the last nine months.  Yet, they love you without walls, without limits.

The hardest thing is to accept ourselves as we are and other people as we find them.  I wrote these words in a book years before your birth, and yet I’ve never mastered the tolerance that my words suggest.

You may see this as a nightmare, but it got your attention to focus on the nature of your struggle as dreams often do.  All you have endured is preparation for the future.  You may find yourself wanting to join a church.  This could aid you in keeping the connection with your spiritual side. 

Your dream is like a story taken from the bible, a story of being suddenly shocked awake, experiencing the terror in that discovery, and being changed forever more.

Sleep well, Jennifer, knowing I am thinking good thoughts your way and always with love.

Always be well,

Jimbo