How Paying Attention to My Nocturnal Visions Has Impacted My Life By Rev. Dr. Todd F. Eklof May 24, 2015 A few weeks ago, on the very day I learned one of my dearest friends and greatest mentors passed away, I had the following dream: I m in a place, kind of like a retirement center, where lots of older folks are hanging around. I see Phil Smith there, though I know I m just seeing his spirit because he s dead. Everyone else can see him too and are aware that it s his spirit, but go about their business and conversations as if having spirits around the place is nothing unusual. He s in a dark, tailored suit and is much younger than when he died, perhaps around 60 or so. Although he s a spirit now, there s nothing ethereal about him. He can touch and be touched, so we embrace each other with great affection. I leave the facility afterward and am walking down a path when I encounter Phil again, only now he s a newborn infant sitting in lotus position meditating on the road. I d recognize his face anywhere, though his thick head of white hair is now blond. He s also wearing a vest that s extremely ruffled. He smiles at me and says, I still have a few wrinkles to iron out. He then instructs me to eat your cake and be careful where you park your car. As I reflected upon this dream the next morning, I associated the facility the old folks were in as a place where they transition from this life into whatever comes next, which is why nobody is bothered by a few spirits roaming about. I also enjoyed seeing Phil in good health and of sound mind, given that he suffered from Alzheimer s the past few years. At the same time, he still appears old enough to resemble the wise sage I always knew him as. Although our spirits embrace, we don t speak together because the living cannot communicate with the dead. But it was good to have the chance, if only in my dreams, to embrace my spiritual father one more time before he moved on. Once outside the facility, however, we can communicate again because he has been reincarnated. Phil was a Buddhist and often spoke of what he was learning and working on this lifetime. So it was fitting to encounter him sitting in lotus mediation, having brought the lessons of his past lives with him into his new form. I also know my old friend was all too human, so it is honest and humorous for him admit he s back because he still has a few wrinkles to iron out. The best part of the dream, however, is the sage advice he offers, telling me to eat my cake and be careful where I park my car. I take this to mean that I should take time to enjoy life but be careful not get stuck in negative patterns, no matter how comfortable or pleasant they might be. That s pretty good advice, especially coming from a reincarnationist who has to be born again so he can iron out those wrinkles.
So that s an example of a dream and my brief analysis of it, but how do we really know what it means or if it means anything at all? How do I know my encounter with Phil s spirit wasn t just something I ate before going to bed that night, a little out of date gravy, as Ebenezer Scrooge thinks upon seeing Marley s ghost? Perhaps my associations are indicative of our human capacity to make meaning out of just about anything, like the man in the moon, a bat in a Rorschach inkblot, or Jesus face on a slice of burnt toast. Are dreams divine messages, as many peoples throughout history have believed? Are they a royal road to the unconscious, as Freud famously said? Is Dreamtime more real than waking life? Is it something that continues before we re born and after we die, as the Australian aborigines believe? Do we understand more in deep sleep than when we re awake, as the Hindus say? As Chaung Tzu asked, Was I dreaming I was a butterfly, or is the butterfly dreaming it is me? To be honest, I don t know the answer to these questions, nor do I care. As with other images, like those on Tarot cards, or the Zodiac signs, or the hexagrams of the I Ching, and so on, it doesn t matter to me if dream images have any special meaning or not. What matters to me is that I can find meaning in them meaning that gives me insight and positive guidance for my life. What does it matter if they are angelic messages, a bit of indigestion, or are just something I ve unconsciously made up? I first began doing dreamwork more than 25 years ago, shortly after I met Phil Smith. Phil was the guest speaker at First Unitarian Church in Louisville, Kentucky the first time Peggy and I ever stepped foot in the place. We were both fresh out of the Southern Baptist faith and didn t quite know what to expect. I must admit, most of what he said was way over my head, yet there was something in his words sending shivers up and down my spine, something stirring inside me that I didn t understand. All I remember is that he was speaking of the Soul in a way I d never heard before, not as something we re saving for the sweet bye and bye, but as something always present in our lives we must attend to. I remember thinking that even with all the talk of saving souls as a Baptist, and all the education I d received studying for the ministry, I d never heard anyone talk about what the soul is or why we should care. Why is the soul worth saving? Shy as I was, something inside, my soul, compelled me to introduce myself to Phil after the service and to ask for his number and the opportunity to visit. We got together for lunch a couple days later and, to make a very long story short, Phil and his spouse, Sharon, became close and dear friends to Peggy and I. Phil also became a great mentor to me, who, as a retired Unitarian minister turned Jungian psychotherapist himself, was mostly responsible for sparking my interest in psychology and for my eventual return to the ministry as a Unitarian Universalist. Shortly after we met, Phil began a new dream group, which he invited me to join. Participants in the group would usually share the dreams they had during the week and Phil did most the analysis. Others could always join in with insights of their own, but Phil was a master of dream interpretation. But I didn t want him to simply interpret my dreams, I wanted to learn how to interpret them for myself and 2
worked hard reading Carl Jung, whom Phil also introduced me to, along with others, like mythologist Joseph Campbell, poet Robert Bly, and self-help guru John Bradshaw, trying to gain the depth of soul I needed to understand such imagery. Having only recently abandoned Christianity and the Southern Baptist ministry, Jung s voluminous writings had become my new Bible, and inner-work my new spiritual discipline. I was 25-years-old, had, supposedly, been prepared for the ministry, yet had never been asked to look inside myself or to deal with my childhood trauma. I won t go into the details, but am very open about the fact that I had a lot of childhood trauma. Suffice it to say, I recently discovered and took the Adverse Childhood Experience, or ACE test, during which I answered yes to 7 of the 10 markers for abuse. That s pretty serious. Research suggests, With an ACE score of 4 or more, things start getting serious. The likelihood of chronic pulmonary lung disease increases 390 percent; hepatitis, 240 percent; depression 460 percent; suicide, 1,220 percent. 1 Thankfully, at 51, I remain healthy and have never been terribly depressed or suicidal. This isn t to suggest that I don t have scars leftover from my adverse childhood, or that I haven t been permanently shaped, even disfigured by it, but I am healthy and whole and my life is happy and filled with love, much of which I attribute to the inner work I embarked upon after Phil Smith came into my life. As I mentioned, Phil also introduced me to the work of Robert Bly who had just published, Iron John, a book about men based on Bly s interpretation of an old myth about an archetypal wild man. Without going deeply into its content, I began reading Iron John just a week after I had a dream in which I encountered a wild man covered with hair running around in the basement. I was astonished to discover this was precisely how Bly described Iron John, the hairy wild man in his book. For me, this corroborated Jung s theory of a Collective Unconscious comprised of archetypal images. In other words, I was born with a wild man inside me that, until then, I had been keeping suppressed down in my subconscious. At the end of the dream, I m hiding from the creature in a dark room when I hear it scratching at the door. When I finally open the door to see if the coast is clear, it s now a large red dog that bursts in on me. I m on my back clenching its thick mane in my fist, wrestling to hold it back. Half its face has somehow been ripped off, exposing its bone and sinews. It s almost too grotesque to look at, yet, In that struggle I realize it s not wanting to attack me, but only wants my affection. So I release my grip and let it fall upon my chest as I embrace it, whereupon I immediately awaken with such a potent feeling of love and compassion that it remains with me to this day. That was the dream in which I embraced my wildness, my natural Self, my authentic and spontaneous self that had spent years being trained to hold back, to get a grip, and to never let go. 1 http://acestoohigh.com/got-your-ace-score/ 3
After a year or more, Phil had enough confidence in my abilities that he began asking me to lead the dream group when he couldn t make it. Phil was also a regular guest speaker at the Clifton Unitarian Church and, likewise, asked me to speak in his place when he was away. That was really what got the ball rolling again, eventually leading me to return to ministry as a Unitarian Universalist. After Phil retired and moved away entirely, I eventually became minister of the Clifton Unitarian Church, where I also started a dream group that I maintained for several years. During that time, while I was working on my doctorate, I also took a class with dream expert Jeremy Taylor, author of numerous books on the subject, who also happens to be a Unitarian Universalist Minister and a professor at our Starr King School of Ministry. Reading the collected works of Carl Jung also greatly influenced my understanding of dreams. Jung treated dream imagery like he did all imagery, myths, and symbols as originating from the Collective Unconscious. Since the Collective Unconscious is shared by everyone, many of our myths and symbols recur across generations, cultures, and continents. He called these images archetypes, meaning first or primal images, because they are an inherent part of the human psyche. Each of is born with the Shadow, the Wildman or Wildwoman, the Wizard, the Crone, the Devil, the Trickster, the Great Mother, the Hero, the Shadow, and other archetypal images already in us. Jung s genius here should not be missed. For unlike other psychologists, he didn t view the unconscious as a cramped recess in the back of an individual s mind used to store suppressed feelings and memories. Quite the opposite, the Unconscious is a vast realm of reality that is independent of the individual, meaning it s possible for the analyst to understand a particular patient by understanding the meaning of humanity s images in general. As early as 1909, Jung said, I realized that I could not treat latent psychoses if I did not understand their symbolism. It was then I began to study mythology. 2 Unlike Gestalt psychology, for example, that asks us to consider each image in a dream as if it is represents an aspect of our self, Jung believed we can have what he called, little dreams and big dreams. Little dreams are those we have about our own lives as we unconsciously process what s happening to us. Big dreams, on the other hand, can hold important meaning for everyone, which is why many tribal cultures take the dreams of individual members as messages for the whole group. If he had an adult patient who didn t dream or couldn t remember dreams, furthermore, Jung would ask about the dreams of his patient s children, through which he would then analyze the parent. Once the walls were broken down, the patient would usually start recalling one s own dreams. As I began paying attention to my own dreams, mostly by recording them in a journal, I soon realized my unconscious has a life of its own, that things are 2 Jung, C. G., Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Vintage Books, Random House, New York, NY, 1961, 1989, p. 131. 4
happening inside me, getting worked out, healing, even evolving, whether I m aware of it or not. This was about the time John Bradshaw had published his book Homecoming: Reclaiming and Championing Your Inner Child. PBS also did a six-hour series based on it. I read the book, watched the series, cried a lot, and, for the first time in my young life, began facing the trauma of my childhood. To do so, I decided I would take all the dreams in my journals involving my inner child and spend some serious time reflecting on them. I had about a dozen dreams and the entire process took nearly two years. What I discovered was astonishing, and the work remains one of the most transformative, informative, and healing experiences of my life. What s most astonishing is that all but the final dream, which came after I finished working with all the others, showed that a relationship between myself and my wounded inner child had been forming, evolving, and healing all on its own, prior to me ever having examined the dreams. In other words, I didn t have to consciously understand the dreams to benefit from them. Just dreaming is healing. Just dreaming is enough to help us work things out. In the first dream, for example, I m at the funeral for a child and know my mother is somehow implicated in his death. I m concerned about how his parents are feeling about my presence at the memorial. I then realize that I ve never mourned my mother s death. For a long time afterward I couldn t figure out what the heck this dream meant! What was it telling me about mourning my mother s death? Had I not grieved enough? Was there a flood of tears in me still needing to find release? But it finally dawned on me that I had been overlooking the obvious, that this dream was about my misplaced concerns. For the funeral was about remembering the lost little boy, yet I was only concerned about his parents and my mother. In short, I was completely out of touch with my own pain, with the suffering I d endured as an abused and neglected child. So this dream was about getting my priorities straight. In the following dream my inner child is alive but still not well. He lives alone in a dark cave, cared for only by an unseen, shadowy figure, and I m yelling at him for something he s done. Then I hear the shadowy figure say, Hey, ease up, he s only a kid. This is what happens when we suppress stuff, especially our pain. It retreats into the unconscious to be cared for by the Shadow, the part of us we don t know about, the unseen self. Ever since having this dream, I ve held great affection for my Shadow, for I ve come to realize it s not a scary, evil quality, but an unconditionally loving and safe place where we can send all the truly scary stuff we re not yet prepared to deal with. The Shadow wants all of it released into the warm light of day, but, until then, nestles it in her womb of darkness. In this dream my Shadow was letting me know that all the shame I learned to swallow was keeping my inner child down. I needed to lighten up and learn to forgive myself. In the next dream I encounter myself at age two, working as a circus strong man. The child is in the back rehearsing his act by throwing a heavy iron shot put. I approach and try to make friends with him, but he s very mistrustful and wants nothing to do with me. So I toss a ball to him, which he tosses back. Before long we re playing a game 5
of catch. He then allows me to pick him up and hold him. So, at the very least, I m not shaming him, but am actively trying to engage him in this dream. Even if he doesn t quite trust me yet, it s a major improvement since the last dream. Even better, in sharing the burden with him, in sharing and owning my own pain, the heavy iron shot put is replaced with a light, airy ball, and, for the first time in this work, I m able to hold and embrace my wounded inner child. For the first time, that is, instead of being alone in the dark, pretending to be a strong man, I can embrace and comfort my vulnerable wounded inner child. For time s sake, I won t go into all the dreams in this series, but in the last dream of the series I hear an abusive neighbor yelling at and threatening his little boy. I confront the man, tell him he s not fit to be a father, pick up the child and take him home to live with me. I won t go into the details, but what s amazing is that this is exactly the point of Bradshaw s book on Homecoming: Reclaiming and Championing Your Inner Child. It s about learning to love and nurture the part of us that feels abandoned and abused. And here, at the end of this series of dreams, prior to ever having worked through any of them, my psyche had gone from a child s funeral to bringing him home to live with me. As I said, dreams are healing, whether or not we remember and understand their meaning. As I mentioned, after I finished working with this series of dreams, I had another dream in which I return to my boyhood home and knock on the door. My father, now older and crippled than I remember him, answers. I tell him, You could have loved my child. He steps aside and I enter. I go to his bedroom and discover a young mother nursing her newborn infant. Psychologist Erich Fromm once wrote, Eventually, the mature person has come to the point where [one] is [one s] own mother and [one s] own father The mature person has become free from the outside mother and father figures, and has built them up inside. 3 This is precisely the point of this final dream. That s why I called him my child. In going through the pain, in returning to the source of my hurt, not into the kitchen where my mother stayed, or to the security of my own bedroom, but into my father s den, I discover the most healing and beautiful archetype of them all, a new mother breastfeeding her baby. Regardless of my past, I found healing and rebirth, and developed the inner resources to parent, and nurture, and love myself. Thank you for allowing me to share such a personal part of my own journey with you. I hope it will be useful as you reflect upon your own dreams and upon your own journey along the path between hurt and healing. 3 Fromm, Erich, see, The Art of Loving, About the Author, Harper Perennial, Modern Classics addition, Harper Collins, New York, NY, 1956, 2006, p. 34. 6