CUT TUMMIES
There was a girl of about 17 years of age. She was being operated on a couple of metres away from me.
We weren't in a hospital. It just looked like a normal staff-room.
It looked like they were cutting into her stomach.
Once they stitched her up, they asked me to sit with her for a while so I did. We didn't talk for long when she got up and started walking out the door with about 4 of her friends.
She had a hole in her shirt and was clutching at her wound.
I asked the lady to stop her but she said she'd be alright. I decided to follow her just to make sure she was alright. I knew it was too dangerous outside for her.
When we got through the door, it became like a computer game. There were zombies and demonic ladies that the group had to fight to get past. They did quite well fighting but after a while I had to step in to help.
I turned around to the girl that I was trying to protect and she looked in pain. I asked if she would be alright.
At this she handed me some blood and guts, bit of liver and all sorts, replied yes, and went back to the room where she'd come from.
Note:
I had a second, similar dream within a couple of weeks of this one:
In the second dream my father was sitting in a chair clutching at his stomach. When I asked what was wrong, Mum said he'd had an operation. He had no shirt on and all this blood was gushing out of his wound. It was a horizontal cut just in-between the bottom of his ribs in exactly the same place as the girls' cut.
INTERPRETATION
The beginning of a dream usually refers to the situation your dream is addressing. What was happening for you when you were 17, or what happened to you 17 years ago? Dreams are quite precise with numbers, so the fact of ‘17’ will be accurate, but it may refer to either of the above timelines.
The point of an operation is to restore health and function. It works by opening you up and altering what’s inside in some way (removing, mending). So an operation, in a dream, is often about ‘opening yourself up’ to ‘look inside’ to see what needs removing or fixing to make you healthier and better able to function. We’re not talking physical, of course. We’re talking about opening up to deeper examination of your inner world, in order to make some positive changes.
Everyone in a dream represents something about the dreamer, so I’m talking about ‘opening you up’ because the 17 year old girl represents something about you, something that has been recently opened up with a view to healing.
The girl is still in pain, so this dream is about an emotionally painful situation that occurred for you either when you were 17 or 17 years ago, something you’d like to heal now. Since a dream always processes the last 24-48 hours before sleep, this old painful issue was triggered during the two days before your dream.
The clues so far will have been enough for you to identify the exact situation this dream is addressing.
In the dream, you weren’t in a hospital. You were in a normal staff room. This helps put context. My feeling is that the issue came up in the two days prior to your dream, in a work or staff room context.
The stomach/tummy is one of the most vulnerable parts of the body. There are no protective bones. (Above are the ribs, below is the pelvis, but the guts in the middle are totally vulnerable to attack.) So the issue here is one of emotional vulnerability. At age 17 (or 17 years ago) did you feel vulnerable to emotional pain? Did you feel unprotected in some way? How did you respond? Did you try to hide that pain deep down inside? Did you become over protective of yourself, not let your emotions show, kind of ‘zombie’ (numb) your feelings? Did you become over protective of others as well?
When you were 17 (or 17 years ago) did you feel ‘easily wounded’, easily ‘cut up’ by people’s remarks? In the two days prior to the dream, did someone do or say something that – just for a moment – brought back that ‘easily wounded, cut up’ kind of feeling? Did it open old (emotional) wounds?
A hurt from way back in your past cannot be healed by burying it deep and numbing (zombie) yourself to it. Unhealed, buried, the pain affects the way you respond in the world – it makes you over-protective, unwilling to risk exposing your emotions, a little to cool, zombie, numb. This is not the best way to be in the world!
The only way a hurt from way back can be healed is to bring it to the surface – bring it out into the open – feel it, examine it, understand it and then let it go. Once you’ve let it go there’s nothing left to protect, hide, numb. And, hey! In this way you are healed, returned to health so you can respond in the world by expressing yourself openly (not being protective) and warmly (in the moment, passionate, not zombie numb).
Your dream is so positive because the operation took place. In this dream you went in deep to excise the pain. Remember – before the healing comes facing and feeling the pain, and this is the part of the dream where she feels a ‘hole’ in her being, where she ‘clutches at her wound’. This is you reliving the original emotional hurt you experienced at 17 (or 17 years ago). It was an emotional wound that left you feeling alone, as if there was a gaping hole, and you were left clutching at … what? What did you try to hang onto? What did you lose? What did you vow never to lose again? What did you zombie out to, why did you bring in the protective guards?
Now, remember I said that everyone in a dream represents something about the dreamer – you? So the ‘you’ in the dream who sat with her to look after (protect?) her and who “knew it was too dangerous outside for her” is the over-protective part of yourself that has been standing guard all these years. You even say “the girl I was trying to protect”. This is how you have been ‘operating’ all these years – trying to protect the wounded ‘girl’ you have carried inside all this time.
In order to heal, to move through this pain and emerge healthier, both the 17-year-old you (or you from 17 years ago) and the ‘protector you’ must change. You have been relying on each other – now you must evolve, heal and emerge as one.
And this is why you both “got through that door” in the dream, beginning the process of emerging.
You didn’t quite complete the process in this dream, which is why you returned to the theme in another dream a couple of weeks later. (We’ll come back to this.)
But what your dream did do was begin to face the pain, begin to understand. You met the zombie part of yourself (the part that has been numb and asleep to the pain, refusing to awaken to it and deal with it) and you met the ‘demonic ladies’. The demonic ladies were your personal demons – the fears that stop you from moving forward. These are the demons that resulted from the pain you felt at 17 (or 17 years ago). You could say that ever since then your demons and zombies have been at war. On the one side – fear (demons); on the other side numbing out (zombies). It’s a no win situation all the time the zombies won’t wake up to make peace with the fear. (It’s a no win situation until you wake up to face your fears and make peace with them.)
No wonder the world out there can also feel like a computer game from time to time. Do you feel this sometimes? Do you feel emotion, colour and feeling are missing sometimes? Do you feel you are removed from reality, isolated, not really relating deeply, perhaps lonely sometimes?
Now that you can picture your situation as a zombie-demon computer game (well, yes, dreams love to over-dramatise, but they deliver the message!) can you see what you need to do to get the kind of life you want? You must follow through with feeling the pain, facing the old demons, waking up the old zombies (so they become human), letting the pain go and letting peace, vitality and deep unguarded relationship take its place.
You can see this process is in motion, at the end of the dream, where the girl tells you she will be alright, and where you begin to get in touch with (handle) the ‘blood, guts, liver’ of the issue. The liver is the organ that filters toxins from the bloodstream, so you’re literally facing the way you filtered out toxins (painful emotions) as well as looking at the guts of the old emotional wound.
You could also say that you’re now letting your guts show, being gutsier, no longer hiding or protecting your guts for fear of being wounded.
So near – but still a little more to face, as she returns to the room for a while, not yet quite ready to emerge fully healed. And this is good too. It can take a little time to work through an old wound so that you can let it go. Healing takes time.
In the second dream a couple of weeks later, it’s your father who has had the operation and who is now feeling the pain. In this dream you recognise a similar pattern in the way your father coped with the world, and you are healing your feelings about this.
DREAM ALCHEMY PRACTICE
Visualisation:
Visualise walking with the 17 year old girl (or yourself at that age if you prefer) through the zombies and demons, only this time, as you walk, the zombies and demons transform into peaceful, loving human beings, new friends, welcoming you into a colourful world. As you walk, notice how calm your tummy feels, how healed, how peaceful, how relaxed, how lovingly open to a wonderful new world.
How often to do this:
Do this visualisation 20 times a day for a week, ten times a day for the second week and twice a day for the next month.
How does this work?
This practice ensures that change occurs for you in the best possible way – a positive healing transformation. Your dream expressed your waking life situation using dream language – the language of your unconscious mind. By reliving the dream with changes, or by transforming one of the dream symbols (or by reliving and intensifying the dream in the case of a dream with a positive ending) you are using vision and feeling to reprogram your unconscious beliefs.
Jane Teresa Anderson
|
