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| by Devan Duke |
A column dedicated to exploring the role of dreams, voices, and visions in the integral yoga.
by Douglas M.
In
my last article I talked about the problems I’ve been having with depression
and anxiety as a result of living with chronic pain and showed how some dreams helped
me in dealing with that. This article
will be a continuation of that and includes two dreams. This is the first:
A few days
before I had this dream I had gone to the dentist to have two fillings repaired
in my top right back molar and my bottom right back molar. They were both a little sensitive for a few
days, which is not uncommon I guess.
Three days later when I got up they were both noticeably better so I
thought the thing was done with. Then I
had lunch at work and after that I suddenly had major pain in both teeth but
especially on the bottom. The pain went
up into my jaw joint making it difficult to chew as well as speak.
Now for the first
35 years of my life I had a sort of faith that I think most people have while
they’re young that pains and things like this will heal and go away. The first major blow to that faith was when I
did something to my back at a yoga class and the problem never went away. That wasn’t as devastating as it might have
been (though it was devastating enough) since I had had an injury to my back 10
years before as a result of a fall and it was pretty clear these back problems
were related to that. A year and a half
later though and without any apparent injury both my knees started killing
me. There was no redness or swelling or
anything. I went to numerous doctors and
had every test imaginable but modern medicine was unable to determine exactly what
was causing my knee pain. So I’ve just
been living with it. The problem I have
now though now is when something like this tooth pain pops up the vital gets in
a panic that it will never go away and become a permanent affliction like my
knees and back. So the vital was in a
panic about this tooth pain.
This latest vital
problem had been going on for a couple of days as the tooth pain
persisted. In the midst this difficulty
I had this dream:
I’m
on the roof of a building as the observer.
I see a young woman being menaced by this strange contraption made out
of spare parts like boxes, pipes etc.
The front of it has a sort of appendage with a vinyl record on the end
whirling like a buzz saw. The young
woman is initially terrorized but she discovers that she is able to stop the
record from spinning by pressing her palms on the side of it. No longer afraid, she is examining the
machine and handling some other records attached to it which are still in their
cases. Then suddenly one of the records
pops out of its case and embeds itself in her.
It went into her chest or her stomach of maybe both. I can’t remember for sure.
Upon awakening I reflected on the dream and
was able to see it’s meaning. It was
clear that the contraption in the dream represented these gloom and doom
thoughts about my tooth pain spinning in my head like a broken record. The girl I believe represented me or more
specifically my vital and how it was being menaced by these thoughts.
Now this wasn’t
exactly a stunning revelation but the dream gave me such a clear picture of
what was going on that I was able to dig my heels in and break the cycle. Then for a few days after that the dream
stuck with me and helped me to stay vigilant against the thoughts. After a time though the dream went out of my
conscious mind as I have found every helpful dream, vision, insight or thing
you read recently eventually does. Then
sooner or later (often much later in my case at least) the next dream, vision
or whatever comes along and you can grab on to that for a while. That just seems to be the way the process
works.
In this case the
next ‘thing’ came along two days later in the form of this dream:
Had
a dream about a girl I know through work named Christina. There were numerous events in the dream which
I don’t remember exactly but the interesting point is that throughout the dream
she went back and forth from being her normal slender attractive self to being
grossly fat. She would get so fat she
looked like Jabba the Hutt. She had this
disease called ‘Surge’ which caused her to gain and lose weight with great
rapidity. When the dream ended she and I
were traveling in a car together and she was driving. She was slender and attractive and I could
feel desire but was trying not to let it have its play. Instead I was asking her about her dreams.
At this point, I
was managing to keep from getting possessed by anxiety about my tooth pain but
waves of it would come throughout the day.
I knew how miserable I’d be if one of those waves were to settle in and
stay so I did my best to resist getting pulled in. By doing this, the wave would move out after
a little while and I’d be clear again.
Like the last
dream this one is using a woman to represent my vital and shows how it was
getting ‘fattened up’ on these surges of anxiety which despite their
unpleasantness are still a source of a perverse pleasure; i.e. drama, feeling
sorry for oneself, etc. But in the dream
Christina didn’t stay fat the whole time.
She would slim down again, which is what would happen since I resisted
hooking in to the surges and they eventually moved out of the consciousness
until the next surge came along.
I definitely remember
the moment when I put two and two together that day and saw the meaning of the
dream and what was going on. If I hadn’t
seen that maybe I would have eventually gotten sucked in definitively by one of
the surges. It’s hard to say since I was
already resisting them but the dream drove the point home that if one resists
the movement it will move out and the vital will ‘slim down’ again. This wasn’t an understanding that was new to
me but I guess for whatever reason I needed it to be pointed out again. I’m happy to say that the tooth pain didn’t
stay and become an ongoing problem so perhaps the dreams came to keep that from
happening. When my knees first started
hurting it was extremely painful and I was completely swallowed up in the fear
that it wasn’t going to go away. It’s
hard to know for sure but maybe that’s one of the reasons why it didn’t.
To end this
article I wanted to reiterate what I said above and that is that my life is not
a continuous succession of helpful dreams, or visions or things I’ve read that
my mind reflects on throughout the day. It’s
quite the opposite in fact. Most of the
time life I’m just dealing with the drudge of day-to-day living and not feeling
helped or inspired by anything and it was like that even before I had to live
with chronic pain. I think I’m probably
the rule and not the exception so I just wanted to say that because it might be
helpful to others reading this who are in the same boat.
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