Issue 93, May 2006
Guilt Edged Dream
©Jane Teresa Anderson, May 2006
Actually it wasn’t guilt. It was a deep, sickening sense of horror tinged with disgust. Anton sat on the edge of the bed, shocked awake from his dream at the point where the villagers were about to stone him for molesting a six-year-old girl.
He replayed the dream in his mind, trying to hang on to his conviction that he had been innocent. Yet as fast as the dream faded, a nauseating feeling began to anchor. Wide awake, Anton had the terrible thought that he may, just may, have been guilty.
Later in the day he still couldn’t shake the growing feeling of guilt gnawing away at the edge of his mind.
“It was crazy. I was going crazy,” Anton said a few days later when he had gathered enormous courage to speak about his dream. “I knew that I was not the sort of person to abuse or molest, but the guilt kept nudging at me. I didn’t want to talk to my family or friends about it, because of the totally irrational feeling that I might reveal too much.”
“What was your worst fear?” I asked.
“That this was some kind of repressed memory, from teenage years or from a past life, not that I believe in past lives, or maybe I do now,” Anton quivered. “No, that’s not it,” he added, “my worst fear is not that I did this thing in the past, but that I might do it in the future. My fear is that my dream was some kind of macabre wish fulfilment from an evil part of my mind. Is that what it is?”
It’s exactly these kinds of fears that stop people sharing, or owning up to, such dreams. Instead they question themselves over their sanity and whether they carry the seeds of such actions. Can you begin to imagine how this affects the way they live their lives and family relationships? Yet these dreams are common and normal. More than that, they are helpful and healing. Here’s Anton’s story:
As far as he could recall, in his dream Anton had seen the girl sitting playing in a muddy creek. He had gone over to sit with her, suddenly overcome with an urge to play in the mud. Together they scooped out a mud castle, a bit like building a sandcastle, only this one was wet and sloppy and difficult to keep in shape. Anton remembered laughing in his dream, really having fun, like a child. It didn’t matter that the mud castles kept collapsing. They just kept trying different shapes and experimenting. “At least, that’s how I recall that part of the dream,” Anton told me, biting his lip nervously.
The next thing he remembered in the dream was the villagers beginning the stoning.
“How did you know they were villagers?” I asked.
“This sounds really bad,” Anton said, “in fact, as I say this I think I may be digging myself in even deeper, but I noticed they all looked similar and I thought to myself, in the dream, that they must be inbred inhabitants in an isolated village. Does this mean my mind was relating in-breeding and incest?”
Anton was shaking by now, terrified that his nightmare fears were only just beginning to reveal their awful depth.
“Tell me about the stones,” I suggested.
“People get stoned for adultery, don’t they?” Anton winced, feeling the knife edge of a recurring theme, but then added, a little more curiously, “What was really weird was that the stones were the exact ones I’ve been experimenting with at work.”
Now I knew we were onto it, but I had one more question:
“The girl was six-years-old. How do the stones you’re using at work relate to six years? What’s six-years-old now at work?”
It came down to this: Anton had graduated with a garden landscaping diploma six year previously, and had immediately joined his father’s landscape design business, as they had always planned. The first years had been exciting and full of new learning opportunities, but in the last year Anton had become restless. He had some new ideas and had been experimenting and playing around with new designs and new ways of doing things, just as he had been playing and experimenting in the dream with new ways of building mud castles. He had reached a point where his work was breaking with tradition. It was drastically different from his father’s approach and contrary to many of the design theories he had been taught at college.
Anton’s dream revealed his conflict. Should he play safe and do things the way they’ve always been done, working with his father in traditional ways, or make drastic changes? His dream revealed his belief that to change the ways things had always been done was a bit like interfering, molesting and adulterating the theories and practices he had been taught. He feared that his new ideas, represented by the stones in the dream being the same stones he had recently been experimenting with at work, might be used against him. He feared he might be judged harshly by the traditionalists who really, when he thought about it, had just been propagating the same old ideas just like the incestuous isolated villagers in his dream.
Once Anton understood some basic dream theory – that everything in a dream is about the dreamer’s own beliefs and feelings – he saw that the real judge and jury of his innovative ideas was none other than himself! On the one hand he wanted to introduce new ideas, but on the other hand he felt guilty for interfering with and adulterating the traditional ways and academic theories. He was trapped in his own conflict because he judged himself guilty of molesting his six-year career.
What did Anton do as a result of his new self-understanding? He realised the conflict was getting him nowhere, so he made a decision. He decided to continue to work for his father but, with his father’s surprising blessing, start a sideline consultancy under a different business name to trial his new garden concepts. He transformed his guilt-edged dream into the gilt-edged, golden rewards of joyful exploration of his creative ideas. Pure dream alchemy.
Jane Teresa Anderson
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