THE DREAMER WHO WASTED OUR TIME As I was packing up my things to leave after a failed Ullman dream group yesterday in which, for the second time, the dreamer couldn’t figure out the dream she brought to the group, the dreamer came up to me. “Teacher,” she said. “I’m sorry I wasted your time.” I looked up at the tall, sensuous beauty, a relative newcomer to the dream group, who for the second time presented us a dream about a grandmother and a mother, and who, for the second time, had been at a total loss to make the least bit of sense of the dream. It struck me so completely wrong that anyone could judge any Ullman dream group to be a waste of time for anyone else that I looked at the young woman and, without thinking, said what shot into my mind. “It’s like, you meet a very special boy that you like and who likes you. You go out with him and see a touching movie. Afterwards the two of you go to a nice quiet restaurant and have dinner together and find out you have so much in common. Then you go to his apartment and make wonderful love together. Right after that, you say to him, ‘I’m sorry I wasted your time.’ It’s like that.” I think she got the point – it struck me so very wrong that anyone should think spending two or three hours working with a dream in an Ullman group was a waste of time for anyone, regardless of the outcome. Some weeks before she’d brought another grandmother/mother dream to the group. It was a dream she’d had seven months earlier. In that dream, none of the characters were real people. It was like a fairy tale. Two sisters lived in a house with their grandmother who forbade them to go out before they married. As the girls’ mother didn’t live in the same house, one day the two sisters slipped out and go visit her. They have a nice time with her. Their mother accompanies them back to the grandmother’s house. Their grandmother yanked the girls in the door and locked the mother out. Then she tied the granddaughters each to a chair. She took her scissors and stabbed their hands and cut their faces as punishment. The mother watched through the window and screamed. The daughters screamed. The dreamer woke up screaming. As that Ullman group wound to a close, the dreamer still had no idea what the dream meant. She hadn’t been able to remember anything going on in her life seven months ago. Nor could she connect any feelings in the dream with her waking life. I told her the Ullman method works by connecting the dream with what was going on in the dreamer’s life prior to the dream. I suggested that she keep a journal beside her bed and write down her dreams as she wakes up so she can bring us a recent dream and better remember what was going on in her life beforehand. Then yesterday she came forward with another grandmother/ mother dream. This one she’d had two months ago. Just like before, he couldn’t remember what was going on in her life prior to the dream and couldn’t connect any feelings in the dream with her waking life. The dream was that her grandmother and her mother fell down the stairs. First she went to her mother and briefly ministered to her. Then she went over to her grandmother and asked if she had gotten hurt in any way. “Do you know C—? [the dreamer’s name]” her grandmother asked her. “She’s my granddaughter and she’s very sweet and beautiful. She’s a special girl.” The dreamer held her grandmother’s hand and cried. Then she woke up. The first of the clarifying questions we always ask the dreamer after she tells the dream is, “If any of the people in the dream real people in your life, would you briefly identify and characterize them….” This basic information is important to have upfront so that when we turn to the game we might come forth with ideas about how these characters might be metaphors for this or that. The dreamer told us that in this dream the grandmother was her real grandmother and the mother was her real mother. Of her grandmother she told us, “She passed away when I was 17 (5 or 6 years ago). Then she added, “People say that when a relative passes away and then comes to your dream she will be healthy. But every time I dream about my grandmother she’s not healthy. She’s in pain and can’t walk.” Then she said, “I really like her. In my memory she’s always kind and she will cook the food I like when I go back to see her. But she was not healthy the last 5 or 6 years before she passed away. The day she died was Winter Solstice. I always go to see her and say hi to her when I go back. That time I didn’t. I just went to second floor and watched TV. Then my cousin say she can’t feel the breath of my grandmother. So we go to her room and she had passed away.” Her mother in the dream was real too but we didn’t need to ask about her. The dreamer had already told us about her during the playback of the first grandmother / mother dream she’d brought to the group some weeks before. In the Ullman group we try to make a point of not asking a dreamer for information she’s already given us. For the benefit of those present who hadn’t been in that other group, I took my notes of that session from my folder and read her words: “In reality I don’t talk a lot to my mother because my mother always asks me, ‘What are you going to do after you graduate?’ and always tells me I have to improve my English and second foreign language. I don’t want to talk, keep going that kind of conversation with my mother but she always can talk that; so I’m not very like to talk to my mother.” When asked about her feelings in the dream the dreamer told us: • “I feel sad because I want to see my grandmother healthy, but she’s not healthy and still in pain in my dream.” • When I go to see my mother, very quick. ‘Are you O.K.?’ and put some medicine. Then go to see my grandmother. • When my grandmother says, ‘C— is a good girl, sweet …,’ I feel a little shame because I don’t think I am a good girl. I don’t think what my grandmother says, the good part is me, but I glad she think I’m a good girl and thankful to her. I don’t think… I’m not doing bad thing but I don’t do good thing either. Just hang around in my life. I just O.K.” After the game, the dreamer’s response was brief: “I don’t know what it means.” As regards the context, all she could say of her life was: “boring, lonely, don’t know what to do.” In the playback: • “Maybe I miss my grandmother. When she still alive I was only a child, I don’t need to worry, think a lot because I’m a child. Maybe I don’t want to grow up.” • When asked to differentiate between child and grownup: “Child don’t have stress, always feel happy. Grown-up think about your future, respond to everything you did.” • About her grandmother: “…because she won’t blame me. She won’t say you have to do what, like my mother.” The playback ended uneventfully for the dreamer. She had no big epiphany. Every member of the group came forth with a brilliant orchestration. The dreamer’s last words showed that she really didn’t get what the dream was about at all, or that she got it but only in a superficial way. Actually I was left with the same feeling. Again I invited her to keep a journal beside her bed, write down her dreams when she woke up, and bring us in a fresh one. It did seem to me, though, like a failed dream group. Maybe the dreamer read that in my face and that’s why she came up to me afterwards to apologize for once again wasting everybody’s time. This morning I woke up with a dream and, as I lay there in bed and started to think about it, immediately an insight came to me about the two grandmother / mother dreams. In the first dream there had been two granddaughters. This dreamer was of two minds. In the second dream what came out was how very special this little girl was to her grandmother. In the first dream we’d learned how critical this girl’s mother was of her. Though tall, sensuous, and beautiful, this dreamer had no positive feelings about herself. She looked at herself in the way her mother did. She was critical of herself and felt she was a nothing. It suddenly became obvious to me that the first grandmother / mother dream depicted a dynamic between the two sides of her that had gotten all mixed up and was dysfunctional. The two sisters suggested the split. I believe she told us they were twins. But the grandmother and the mother represented the two different aspects that dominated in these two different sides of her. The dream was entirely from her mother’s side of her because her mother was the good person, the one she loved and visited, and who screamed with the two daughters and with the dreamer as she woke up. The grandmother, like a demon witch, inflicted the punishment with her scissors. Scissors cut. They would cut something off. They would cut off that self-critical side and this is perceived by the dreamer in the imagery of the first dream to be some horrible act of mutilation. The backstory would be, “I love my mother. I cannot cut her out just because she can’t accept me as I am and is so critical of me.” But, in fact, her comments during the work with that dream reveal that that’s exactly what she had done in her waking life. The dream expresses how horrified she is by herself, her grandmother side of herself, her living-in-the-moment, self-accepting, part of herself for this brutal act against her mother, whom she loves so dearly and has fun with. So in that dream the grandmother is herself and the mother is herself and what horrifies her is that the part the mother would see as the do-nothing, the unconditionally self-accepting part of herself might pull her away from the part the mother would see as the getting-ahead-and-succeeding-in-the-world part. She’s terrified of being a failure, amounting to nothing, and of the damage that would inflict on her life. This, admittedly, is a facile intuitive take on this first dream but it all came to me in a flash and made sense in the morning as I lay in bed after my own dream – and more importantly, it made sense also of the second dream and made sense in terms of that second dream. The second dream represents the tumbling self-esteem that besets the dreamer at this stage in her life [both sides of her fall down the stairs]. To the self-critical and self- judgmental, living-for-the-future, mother side she pays only perfunctory attention. But when she goes to minister to the self-accepting and adoring grandmother side, the living-in-the-moment, unconditionally self-accepting side, something striking happens. That side of her doesn’t recognize her, but asks her if she knows C—, then goes on to tell her about C—, and how special C— is to that side of her. The dreamer takes the hand of that side, feels the fullness of it’s Zen-Master-like “grandmotherly love,” and cries. Her mother is attacking her for what she’s not. Her grandmother accepted her for what she is. The dreamer’s great shortcoming in her mother’s eyes is that as regards what she intends to do in the future the dreamer said she doesn’t know. As I lay here in bed this morning after my dream thinking about all this, a Zen story came to mind that I heard the famous Taiwanese Ch’an Master Shen-Yeng tell many years back: “A monk who had attained enlightenment walked away from the monastery and wandered deep into the mountains where he came across an old tumbledown temple, long abandoned. He went in and wandered about from room to room. To his surprise in one of the rooms he came across another man, who had also gone wandering deep into these mountains and who had also come across this temple and gone in to have a look around. This man was the most enlightened Ch’an Master in all of China. The enlightened monk stood there silently face to face with the great master. “Where are you going?” the great master asked after a moment or so. The monk looked at him with a blank face. “I don’t know,” he said. The great master smiled softly, greatly pleased with the answer. “It’s good,” he replied approvingly before turning to walk onward on his own journey, “Not to know.” I then remembered how when the dreamer had kept berating herself for not knowing what she was going to do after graduation, I finally spoke up (inappropriately) and said, “Steve Jobs didn’t know what he was going to do after graduation. In fact he didn’t even graduate, he dropped out of school altogether and went on to found Apple Computer and then Pixar – and become a billionaire.” So often when an Ullman group is a failure, and the dreamer can’t find any connection between the dream and her life — in truth the meaning has actually emerged unseen by us all, somewhere in the course of events. It’s just that there’s too much material flying around in our minds. We need to sleep on it. We have a dream that somehow sifts out what’s relevant and what’s not. We wake up pondering the strange dream and wondering what it might mean. Then suddenly the relevant bits of the previous day’s dream group stand out from all the rest of the information, and we get a possible glimpse into what it might have been expressing. Does it matter so much to know where we’re going, where we’re headed? As John Lennon famously observed, so often it is the case that, “Life is what happens while we’re making other plans.” The critical, self-judgmental part of us is the ego ideal, the conceptual self. There’s another, vastly bigger and more important part to us and we can recognize it by its non-judgmental, unconditional acceptance of what we actually are. This is the part that can grow. This is the part that delivers up our future, not the little know-it-all ego part. I wonder how many others in the group woke up this morning from some dream with a similar understanding. The dreamer never wastes our time. Always she injects into our live what can bring each of us in the group, knowingly or unknowingly, to a more intimate understanding and acceptance of ourselves. This is not a waste of time. This is real education. It’s only when we stop wasting our energy badgering ourselves that we have the gathered power it takes to really begin transforming and becoming what we have it in us to be. This dreamer did not waste our time at all. She gave us a precious gift. This morning after I wrote the above I happened to look more deeply into my notes from the first grandmother / mother dream. It turns out the dreamer had told us what she most loved to do was making things with her hands. She’d wanted to go to a private university where she could study the kind of thing she was interested in and be in an urban environment that could stimulate her in the creative ways that mattered to her. She and her father had a big fight over this. Her father told her if she went to that private university it would sever the father / daughter connection between them. So actually it’s not true that this is a girl who doesn’t know what she wants to do. She expressed her desires and was expressly forbidden to pursue them. Then she’s accused of not knowing what she wants to do. And she’s stuck here on this national university campus, as far away from a big city as she can get, high in the central mountains – bored. It all seemed like such a perfect storm of forces designed to defeat who she really is and make her feel guilty and worthless for not deciding on something else to be. The only positive force the poor girl has is her grandmother, who has been dead these five or six years. In the dream she goes back to draw from that relationship something that might enable her to persevere under the present circumstances. She doesn’t like this university. She doesn’t like her department. She was denied the chance to study what she did like in a place suitable to her. Then she’s blamed for what her mother perceives to be a lack of direction. * * *
Posted on: Thu, 08 Jan 2015 00:57:02 +0000
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