A Therapy Dream

I dreamt last night. I haven’t remembered a dream in a long time, but when I got up with the dogs at 5am, I was aware of one. I wondered if I could pull together the ethereal ribbons to discover what my mind was processing. It was a therapy dream. No surprise since T is out of town for three weeks, and I am grappling with this new relationship as well as her absence.

<start dream> I was at a hospital, but they had run out of rooms. To make accommodation, they hung a sheet at each end of a hall, wrote room numbers on a pieces of paper and taped them to the wall. The thing was, though, that there were no beds, and the hall was crowded, chaotic. Certainly no place for a patient.

Then I was with my therapist, a man, in a sublet office. Suddenly, two women walked in. One was the office owner, the second, her patient. Oh no! I feared there was an error in the office scheduling, but when the owner looked at the color-coded schedule, my therapist did have the time slot. It didn’t matter to the woman; it was her office. My therapist did not protest.<end dream>

So layered, these therapy/therapist dreams. I am often surprised by what I learn from them. In this one, no one spoke, there were no words. Most apparent is that there is no “place” for me, and nobody cares. Who is the male therapist? I don’t and have never had a male T. Is he my father? Maybe, but that doesn’t resonate. What might he represent, if not a person? Then that hospital: noise, chaos, lots of people, and a system that didn’t work – all things I find hard to tolerate. Still, no room for me, even the most inhospitable.

And more: no speaking, no words, yet everything had meaning. What the female therapist looked like, the scheduling mishap, events taking place in a hospital. Plus, the fact that I was in session, yet no words, no meaning, no ideas or thoughts had transpired between me and T. Hmmm... perhaps he was a parental figure.

In the waking world, to what do these ribbons connect?

Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths. -Joseph Campbell

Both dreams and myths are important communications from ourselves to ourselves. If we do not understand the language in which they are written, we miss a great deal of what we know and tell ourselves in those hours when we are not busy manipulating the outside world. -Erich Fromm

And . . . Every writer dreams of writing .... that will touch people. (Bruce Feiler)