The Car Pool

When the unconscious speaks through us, it is time to pay attention.  This communication from the spirit might be in a Freudian slip of the tongue or an overwhelming attraction to another person.  Those people come into our world for a reason;  there is a lesson to be learned.  A few months ago I met such a person, one whom it was impossible for me to ignore.  He was in his twenties, muscular and well disciplined, probably had a military background.  I was registering people at a sacred ceremony. One of my colleagues, himself an amazing psychic, brought the young man whom he had met on the east coast.  I thought this might be a wizard-apprentice team.  Whether it was the Medicine of synchronicity or the ayahuasca that did it, I was compelled to get my eagle feather out of my cedar box and bless this young wizard. 

After the ceremony the young man thanked me and told me that he is a dreamer.  His girlfriend had given him a copy of Carl Jung’s recently published Red Book, which he was reading.  He asked me about my practice of interpreting dreams.  After several phone calls, some of them a month apart, when he shared his dreams with me, we have established a very deep level of trust.  He felt my interpretations were “spot on”.  This process was relatively easy because he is willing to talk freely about the dream symbols and his associations with them.  Dreams have a lot to teach the dreamer and those who hear them.  In the world of dreams we travel differently from the ways of ordinary consciousness.

Linear time doesn’t seem to be of any importance in the dream world.  Linear arrangement of events is something our consciousness evidently needs, but not the divine source of dreams.  We like to have a way to place events in meaningful sequences so that we can understand how their occurrence in history produced the person in the present moment.  But that isn’t how the unconscious communicates in the world of dreams.   Yes, there usually is a story.  Things occur.  Objects are present.  To assign meaning, we have to ask ourselves why are these people in my dream and why these objects?  When we tell the dream by recording it or sharing it with a friend, more details of the dream might be remembered.  Sharing dreams brings us into one another’s psychic realm; it builds bridges between us.  The process can be very interesting.

My young friend from the ceremony spent the weekend with me.  He shared his dreams.  It was exhausting work for both of us.  On Sunday morning we had planned to attend a church service together.  Over breakfast I told him how much he reminded me of my son John.  There were so many areas of shared interest, the musical instrument he played, his love of singing and physical activity, interest in biology and psychology.  There was also the depression around the loss of the love of his life and the resultant concerns about suicide.  The star crossed lovers Romeo and Juliet seemed to have emerged from the collective unconscious.  His mother has a strong and abiding interest in shamanic practices.  She has four sons, and like my ex-spouse, she decided to go her own way.  There are probably other things I can’t articulate. 

 

When we got to church I had a bit of panic when I introduced him.  Since my 68^th birthday I have been having trouble remembering people’s names.  This creates an identity crisis for me because I used to be known for my ability to remember hundreds of people by name.  After the initial anxiety the introductions felt seamless.  After church when we were having lunch, one of the college guys at an adjoining table asked me if the young man were my son.  “No,” I said, “he’s a friend I met in ceremony, but I feel really comfortable with him like I would with one of my sons.”  When we got to the privacy of his car and were driving into town, my friend told me that I had introduced him as “John”, my son’s name, not his. 

That was totally unconscious, one of those Hermes moments, which we now call a “Freudian slip of the tongue”.  I apologized for that and he said, “it’s OK.  Actually it was kind of flattering.  After telling me about your son earlier today, I realized I was holding that same energy for you.  Don’t worry about it.”  And that is exactly the way my son John used to talk to me!  My unconscious was saying something through my behavior, something I needed to hear.  The encounter made me think more and more of my son, whom I haven’t seen in several years.  And then last night I dreamed I was helping out at a summer camp in the country and had parked my car on the grass beside other vehicles.  I couldn’t remember where it was and I went looking for it.  After making a wide circle and being unable to find the car, I noticed my son John was backing the car out from under a tree where I had parked it.  I wondered how he had been able to start the car.  How did he get a key?  He had a mischievous smile on his face and he was looking directly at me.  He had my attention.  And then the car became a pool of water surrounded by water plants.  I was shocked and amazed.

Given yesterday’s slip of the tongue and today’s dream, I feel the need to figure out what the unconscious is trying to say to me.  I miss having a relationship with John.  It was good to see him in my dream.  I think the last time we spent time alone was in the winter at some hot spring on the river.  I was embarrassed to take off all of my clothes in front of a couple who were soaking in the pool of water.  John was annoyed with my prudishness and said, “get real dad!”  He remembered all the times when nudity was not an issue.  My public face, my persona, which appeared socially and politically appropriate, was covering the Hermes/Dionysos aspects of my personality with which my children had been living.  I later learned to accept my shadow side by identifying with the Native American Trickster, the Coyote. 

At the time of this hot pool incident I was emerging from the long standing image of the loving and protective hard-working father.  My youngest son had just given me a card with his drawing of a horse.  On the outside under the horse it said, “Happy Father’s Day”.  Opening it up, it said “to Dad, the work horse.”  It was his way of saying thanks for all the work and the inviting me to consider how all that self denial should have been coupled with self care.  His mother, my wife of thirty years, had asked me to move out, to find another place to live and “fix myself”.  She was tired of living with my denial of the shadow.  She saw the Deer (the Horse) as the conscious side of her husband.  But the unconscious side was dark and destructive of our marriage, more archetypal, wild and autonomous, which had its own purposes and was able to possess me.  She had come to see my acting out this shadow side as something like a psychic vampire.  In the beginning I think her mothering instinct led her to believe she could change me through her commitment to our relationship, marriage and the family we created.  But I was too afraid of the shadow to turn and face it, so it got stronger and stronger.  Working together on a daily basis for sixteen years had brought more and more of the shadow to the surface, but it wasn’t cooperating with her plan for a working relationship.  That is when our paths parted and I felt free to hire a psychotherapist.  She guided my process of self discovery and my attempts to embrace my compulsive sexual self.

The dream took me back to the situation on the river.  My son had given me his car.  It was the same size and make of his twin brother’s car.  John’s was bronze, Nicko’s was red.  John’s intention, which he didn’t share with me until years later, was that I would leave town in the car and find a life far away from his mom and brothers.  Having given me his car would explain how he had a key to the dream car.  It was in some way his car.  There is no such thing as time in the unconscious. The vehicle in the dream looked like my present car which happens to be red, like his twin’s car.  My red car was also a gift, from another young man whom I treated as a son.  The latter’s intention was to thank me for being there when he needed someone and to help me continue my work.  The red in dreams usually has to do with passion and sexuality and my son is driving my car, which is the same color as his twin’s.  Sexuality as a vehicle of relationship needs to be addressed.  My oldest sons and I are driving the same bodies in a sense.  We have a common wound, one I was given by my father, one I gave them in turn.  The son in the dream is backing up and connecting eye to eye, with mischief (malice?) in his glance toward me. 

In writing those words “eye to eye” I remembered that in church yesterday, we were asked to stand and gaze into the eyes of the person beside us.  I was focusing on my young friend’s dark eyes and noticed that twice he shifted focus, his left eye changed from looking directly at my right eye to look at my left eye.  I remember thinking, “he’s left eyed and right brain dominant”.  That’s the kind of thing I would discuss with my son John, the effects of brain dominance on personality.  I have continued my research on that topic for several years now.  John turned his research literally inward to the cellular level of the neurons.

Thinking of the setting of the dream brings up summer camp in Madison, Wisconsin.  It was 1956 and I was 13 years old.  My aunts were working so they sent my younger brother and me to YMCA camp.  We learned to become better swimmers, row canoes, sail, and tie knots.  We learned Indian crafts (that’s what they called weaving plastic strands of colored rope into necklaces).  But the most memorable event of the summer was when we got back to our bunkhouse after swimming.  Our camp counselor, an extremely handsome swimmer, stood there in his navy blue woolen speed o type briefs and told us he was annoyed with our hassling each other.  He said it was normal to be embarrassed to strip off our clothes around strangers, but it was something we needed to get comfortable doing.  Athletes have to get naked all the time.  The trouble maker in our group challenged the counselor with “we’ve never seen you nude.”  And much to our surprise and amazement, the counselor stripped off his shorts and stood there naked.  As he turned slowly around modeling his beautiful body, he said, “is this what you wanted to see?”  He had gotten real and shown his genitals, proudly demonstrating his claim that we should be proud of our bodies.  The more shy and prudish like me were very embarrassed, but our eyes were glued to that naked body.  Never had I seen that kind of confidence.  It was just what I needed.  And it was unforgettable.  Now days the counselor’s behavior would be considered suspect.  It was definitely provocative and it raised the issue for me of my sexual orientation.  I liked guys as much as or more than I liked girls.  It was a very ambiguous time.

The dream brings me back to the issue of integrating the shadow with the conscious personality.  Both my son and my young friend are expert swimmers and ocean divers.  We all swim in the waters of the unconscious at night, every night, and sometimes during the day as well.  Acknowledging those memories and feelings which were split off of conscious awareness during childhood, puberty and young adulthood, is the first step of reconciliation with the shadow.  We are invited to own our actions and our feelings, those things we said and did which are inconsistent with our picture of ourselves.  In a dream the night before I witnessed bullies teasing a group of 8 to 10 year old boys, who called them “the fruit patrol”.  I told the older boys that it wasn’t OK to make fun of the children or call them names.  When the bullies didn’t stop I wrapped them up in a white buckskin and smashed them to the ground several times, telling them that worse would happen, if I ever heard them calling two spirits “gay” “faggot” or “fruit” again.  This was all in the context of indigenous ceremony during a pow-wow.  I awoke from that dream with the ambivalent feelings of satisfaction and disappointment. 

I had fought back and won.  I was proud to have stood up for what I believe.  But I had resorted to violent means to do it.  I allowed my shadow to come out with his violence, anger, and hurt.  The good thing was that this scene had happened in my inner world of dreams.  This vengeance dream had a similar setting to the car dream on the following night, the group encampment.  The setting’s similarity meant the issues were similar. The feelings of alienation and weirdness around being gay, a two-spirited person suffering abuse in Native American circles of today and the feelings of shyness and embarrassment at confronting the dark side of my personality were being brought to conscious awareness by the unconscious.  Exploring the associations with the dream symbols brought the bridge up out of the depths and into consciousness.  What came up?  My unfinished issues from puberty and adolescence came up, as well as my son’s admonition to get real, to be proud of my sexuality, to be vulnerable and trust that I am loved.  And maybe, now that I am remembering and sharing these issues, I will be able to talk to my son about these things and how they manifested in his life and mine. 

At the very least I am talking with my inner child, my “son”.  I am remembering and sharing his story, he needn’t be in the closet any longer.  He can come out into the light of day and talk about what happened, the good, the bad, and the ugly.