Dreaming the Shadow

Beware, this is likely to be a long one - full of pseudo psych babble and the like!

Last night I dreamt, this is no surprise, but those dreams disturbed me, a lot. In one I was keeping a dead man's body in my washing machine. In the other, a convalescing soldier nearly raped a school girl - sort of.... Not easy dreams. No way I was not going to analyse them, you get dreams meant to disturb you like that for a reason....

The message form the first dream went as follows - Shadow killed with love. But parts of it have been kept. The memories are spoiling life a little but are being kept clean. Time to go further and remove them completely. Love can remove the majority but the root has to be attacked piece by piece and given a really hard time.

This refers to a very particular shadow I believe, that steaming back to my late teens and the older man who was a very recent ex. He raped me and as much as I have a normal relationship now and I have dealt with the flesh of that experience, some of the bones are lingering. Over a decade of hard work, nearly two and it is time...

The second and third are in many ways more interesting and less straight forward. They offer some intriguing insights into the way my head works and I love all this stuff. These two lead straight on from each other and this is how it goes....

There was a group of convalescing soldiers - the sort that have seen hard battle in defence of their land. A haggard, close - knit group, some a little crazy, all sorts of folk who have been to hell and back but would still fight to defend their country. The group got separated and in order to get back together, they played loud brass instruments (as bold as brass, *laugh*). One of them, a little more damaged, a little more crazy than the others decided to bomb a nasty old nurse's vegetable with a cannon ball.

Then the dream flipped to a group of girls, young, fresh-faced, naive, spirited. School-girls, maybe nurses. They slept at school, hospital, nursing school, whatever and one of them decided to be a little rebellious and try and smuggle some kittens in. This caused her to be separated from the group and she ended up escorting the crazy convalescing soldier along with Dr Gregory House, via horse drawn cart. Then she had premonitions of being in a place and the soldier trying to rape her and then the group was arriving in that place and he tried to rape her but House sedated him and I woke up....

So the meanings I took from these.... My shadow self has had a hard time protecting me. It is good at this, co-ordinated but unruly. My shadow was divided but was bold and is recovering but is focused on the wrong enemy, sees the self as the enemy. My feminine self is learning, young, healing but rebellious. My shadow, self and higher consciousness are moving slowly together. My self has knowledge and knows where she is. Shadow attacks self and is sedated by higher consciousness.

I find the way I am starting to understand how my mind portrays parts of itself as intriguing.... My shadow turned up once before and he was a nameless, faceless man. Now I have a whole group of nameless faceless men, shadows. My feminine archetypes are so naive, so protected. That nurse the soldiers saw as mean, nasty and old - oh she is a crone for sure.... And House, he is my Higher Consciousness - or an aspect of it...

This all kind of reminds me of something from many years ago. I used to have a real problem with anger. As a kid I went through a very unhappy time at school. I was young and my unhappiness showed itself as temper. I would lose control, see red. I hated it. I learnt not to feel anger, completely and utterly.

Then the bad things happened, destroyed my naive little view of the world, destroying the way my mind understood the world. I eventually had a nervous breakdown and from there I had to re-build how I saw everything, how I thought it all worked. Somewhere in this process, I started feeling anger, huge great bubbling bouts of it.

A friend helped me. We did an exercise where I spoke to my anger. It was astounding! My anger turned out to be a terribly sad aspect of myself. It had tried to defend me and being a child's anger, all it's understanding was that of a child's, it got things wrong, but it was always just trying to defend me, and I banished it, disowned it, hurt it and I had to welcome it back, to love it, this shadow of myself. Now my anger is that of an adult, with an adult's understanding....

My shadows, they are all like my anger, all parts of me that have only ever done their best to defend me. The disturbed and wounded soldiers. Having trouble with reality. Protecting me as best they know how - and let's face it, they are war veterans - what do they know of love? But they have the power to hurt me, to damage me through their lack of understanding, but never through lack of love, just lack of understanding and acceptance. They love me, I just have to love them back.

But it seems, one of my shadows is ruining some things for me, is getting out of control. My higher consciousness has sedated it to protect me, but sedation is only temporary. Some crazy shadow is going to come round and need dealing with, probably soon. And all those other shadows to, I need to own them, to love and accept them back as well. They are what is stopping me from having my perfect life, my BIG life, they are scared for me.

I analysed my dream first thing this morning and then had a shower. As i came back in to the lounge, there was some Simpsons clips showing. Smithers was being told to hug his shadow, and he did, he got down on the floor and hugged it... How appropriate - how right....

It also takes me back to a night of dreams last week - a hurt stray black dog that got eaten by a shark (my damaged shadow self?) and a buff coloured pup I had to defend as it was going to be killed because it would not hunt (my normal self - weak and lacking teeth). I guess if I had listened the first time, I might not have had to have had the far more disturbing dreams I received last night. I think there are a lot of lessons here..... Now I just have to figure out how to make friends with my shadows.....