Dreams provide us with vital information. 
When I was a substitute child care worker at Trinity School in Ukiah, an eight-year-old boy woke me up in the middle of the night. He had a bad dream and had wet his bed. After getting him to take a shower and put some warm clothes on, he told me how he had come to live in the home for emotionally disturbed children. His Native American father had left him and his mom in San Bruno. It was Edwin’s birthday and his mom decided to leave the apartment to buy him a gift. She was struck by a car and killed. He never saw nor heard from his dad. Some time later the boy’s hurt turned to anger and then to rage. He set a police car on fire and since the court considered him an orphan, he was placed out of the county. That night he had dreamed of an ocean liner in a storm at sea which claimed his parents and left him soaking wet struggling to swim in the debris. It sounded like the dream was validating his situation; he was lost, lonely, wet and cold. A very bright child, born the same year and month as my goddaughter, I wondered if we could adopt him. He didn’t fit the normal profile. There wasn’t a history of problems with the law, just a very passionate cry for help in the midst of incredible grief.
My wife wasn’t interested in my proposal, nor was my Native American best friend, who said he wanted a son. Jack was envious of me; we had twins. He wanted twins too. Their Native American backgrounds were similar. Jack’s Shawnee father had been killed in a bar fight while in the US Marines. He was raised by his mom and uncle. I thought he could relate to the problems Edwin would be experiencing. They were even both left-handed. And what a good environment for the eight-year-old boy, a college math professor and a librarian for foster parents and two beautiful, smart sisters would be the perfect family. Although they lived in Southern California, we would be able to stay connected. What I learned from this experience was that people talk a good talk, but aren’t interested in the walk. No one was interested in changing their lives for an unknown child just because my intuition said “we must do something”. I never told Edwin about my ideas, but I did show him as much love and attention as I could. He wasn’t a trouble maker at school nor in the facility, just a very sad little boy with no one to love him.
I saw him in town a few years later. I recognized him among the kids from Trinity School, who were shopping in the same store. I pointed him out to my wife. She said, “oh, he looks like Jake”, who was one of our Montessori School students. Yes, he even had a similar personality. After Edwin had graduated from high school, I asked the staff psychologist what happened to him. He had gone back to San Bruno or San Mateo. He would be about forty now, the same age as my son Tony. And this morning he was in my dream.
I was holding the now older, teenage boy on the ground, who was dressed in brown, Edwardian servant’s clothing. I was lying down beside him, pulling him back from the precipice, to safety. Then there was a scene change. He was still lying beside me. We were covered by a large quilt, the bed was on wheels, and the nurse noticed we were both wounded on the left leg. His shin was scratched; my large toe was black and blue. He didn’t want me to accept the prescription she offered of gauze bandages, but I did. It was $9.53. We didn’t pay for it. We rolled out a side door to my car. We folded up the massage table/bed and put it in the car. We were together again.
This dream was so vivid it brought back a lot of powerful memories and associations. The dream was certainly a spiritual message; my unconscious was telling me that I have rescued and reunited with my inner child. The ways in which I needed love and affection from a father figure would be perfectly demonstrated by Edwin, the boy from the past. His Edwardian clothing was the key to remembering his first name. The unconscious loves to associate with similar sounds. I couldn’t remember the last name until I had told the dream to my sister and had been wondering about the abuses plaguing large childcare facilities. Then suddenly I remembered the classic movie Kramer versus Kramer,
a divorce and custody movie from the past, one which reminded me of Edwin’s arguing parents. Then it clicked. Edwin Kramer, that was the name I couldn’t remember. And what was the historical context for this remembering?
Yesterday I was puzzled about what I was feeling. Things were shifting again and I needed a different perspective, one of a wise person. At times like that, it is my practice to turn to the Oracle, the Book of Changes. What came up in my I Ching reading was Treading (in the tracks of the tiger). It advises us to talk with the powerful energy symbolized by the tiger, energy I associate with the Unconscious, whose voice for me is in dreams. The meditation evolved into Diverging, which counseled “be open to strange occurrences, sudden visions and non-normal ways of seeing things.” This concept set in the imagery of this morning’s dream reminded me of the movie Divergent.
In a culture separated into five basic factions, the struggle with personal identity is huge. Adolescence is that time when we diverge from our friends and family. We sometimes have to look at things differently, even if society is threatened by our visions. And that has powerful consequences, ones which both create and destroy. Pulling the innocent and trusting fool from the edge of the cliff is an action which is both brave and bonding, it means you care about the future of the person you save and of your relationship to them. Ancient wisdom suggests you have responsibility for the life of anyone you save. You become involved in their destiny. And so it is with the dream.
The prescribed treatment in the dream has a cost. $9.53 is not a lot of money, but in dreams we must look at things differently. The dream numbers (9 + 5 + 3 = 17) add up to 1 + 7 = 8, whose shape is reminiscent of the caduceus of Mercury/Hermes and hence of infinity, also of balancing the material and the spiritual. The inner child doesn’t want that kind of completion, having just found his father. The father, on the other hand, does want that kind of balance, it is symbolized in the father and the son, the old and the new, working together, reunited. Both of us (the inner child and the dreamer) are wounded in the leg or foot, the foundational area, that which supports the body. The left symbolizes the feminine side. Although I didn’t experience the death of my mother as such, I did have a similar loss. My dad was the warm, affectionate and playful parent, who nourished me emotionally. When he left us for extended periods of time, it was like losing a loving mother. My mom was the intellectual and expressive artist, a person who had little training for her role as mother. She was in many ways more like a father than a mother. She did the best she could, for a child whose father died when she was four years old. She was always longing for the father in her husband and projecting it onto her sons. Her loneliness resulted in emotional incest. In her failure to emotionally let go of my brother and me, she wounded us.
What the dream seems to be telling me is that 32 years after the period of the initial meeting with the dream boy, I have finally rescued him and have integrated him to the extent that we are packing up the bed on which we sleep and getting into the car (the body) together. No more dissociated acting out needs to occur now that the child and the adult are living harmoniously in the same body. That is symbolized by the fact that we are nude under the quilt. No one sees this nor can they, the inner child and the adult are totally vulnerable to each other, but since we share the same body, no one can see beneath the skin (the quilt). I awoke with incredible energy and excitement to record and explore the dream. I feel very different, sort of like 8 in the dream.
Who knows where all of this might go? I wouldn’t be surprised to get a call from Edwin. Those kinds of things have been happening lately. I would love that.
Merlin and the White Eagle 