If we have been curious about dreams for long enough, surely we have read or been told that whenever we are running away from something in our dreams, we should turn around and find out what it wants.
In our dreams, we may have the police after us, killers stalking us, someone we are sure wants to hold us hostage. We are being prosecuted, we are hiding from captors, we are being accused of something terrible, sent to jail or sentenced to death for something heinous, and we do not even know what it is.
The dreamtime police and justice system, armies, Nazis, conquistadors, pirates, gangs, clans, and so forth, each with their own ruling systems, often point to the variety of codes and standards of our superego. The superego is the administrator of internalized ideas of right and wrong with accompanying sublimated rebellions against what was considered ethical and moral by authority figures in our early life. These introjected rules and laws are comprised of the limited beliefs, words, actions, behaviors, attributes and attitudes of others and the immediate world that surrounded us. They were set in place during our childhood development through the process of acculturation and early conditioning, resulting in the suppression of our innate human, creative, and intuitive instincts and impulses.
While there is a necessity for the development of a superego in the civilization and socialization of disruptive, aggressive, destructive and otherwise unacceptable behaviors, there comes a time in our development when the rules and laws of the superego, which were blindly assumed, must be reviewed and revised. As we begin to know ourselves more—with the generous support of dreammaker—we begin to have a clearer sense of what is true for us, and of everything else that is not. Ultimately, our authority must come from our inmost truths.
The inner conflicts between who we are and what we have innocently believed we should be bring about our most persuasive projection of blame onto others, or our most passionate self-criticism, self-judgment, guilt, and shame.
Our superego is responsible for the many internalized models of an ideal self—the amalgam of those often disjointed and disparate, unconsciously assumed idealized standards of who we should be or were led to believe we need to be in order to survive, be accepted, and loved. Striving to become these models also kept us from knowing and being our most authentic self.
Along with the myriad idealized images of who we could be, should be, ought to be, or would rather be—most which are at odds with each other—the superego administers self-criticism and self-judgment as corrective strategies that easily turn to self-loathing. Never able to fully measure up to one or more of these ideal models, we, in turn and with an unwavering sense of failure and powerlessness, look for someone or something to blame or we generate guilt, which mostly serves as fruitless, potentially paralyzing punishment, deterrent and distractor.
Blame is our most cavalier and conveniently justified avoidance strategy. If all of this inner discomfort about who we are is someone else’s fault, there is nothing we can do. Guilt, along with shame, is our underhanded way of throwing in the towel in the face of a hopeless, unresolvable situation. It is our stalling tactic, a self-serving, self-soothing tactic. It is addictive. If we feel guilty, there is nothing we can do; feeling bad about it will have to do.
Because it is truly impossible to be healthy and whole feigning or attempting to be someone we are not, blame, guilt and shame would seem to be our only options. Far from criticizing us, dreammaker offers us the opportunity to objectively observe ourselves instead.
Whoever or whatever is after us in our dreams is pointing to the source of our own inner prosecution or most active deflecting projection. The dream ego is convinced we are erroneously accused or it cannot remember why we are deserving of death or punishment. The me-in-the-dream sure acts guilty as we hide and run away, self-righteously defending ourselves or pointing the finger elsewhere.
Potentially, feeling wrongly accused reflects our assumption or the projection of our judgment that something we have witnessed someone else to have said or done—perhaps that has negatively impacted us—is wrong. In waking life, this is our blaming others for our inner experiences and our externalized reactions to them. Clearly, feeling hunted reflects either the fear or the fact that something we have said, felt, thought, or done has been judged by us—sometimes with the help of others—as wrong. In waking life, this is our blaming ourselves for our inner experiences and our externalized reactions to them. Any impulse and desire to fight back, or actual retaliation in our dreams may reflect our anger or resentment toward, our frustration about, our resistance to the wholeness of what is, stemming from the assumption that it is wrong.
Dreammaker encourages us to consider that perhaps there is no wrong, that there is actually nothing to be punished for or to be defensive about in the first place.
Contemplating such dreams, it may be a good time to ask ourselves how and why we are feeling victimized, and what is the benefit in remaining the victim. We may examine what we might be offended about, and what aspect of ourselves is offended. We may question our purpose in deflecting responsibility by blaming others, by paralyzing ourselves with guilt or shame, or torturing ourselves with self-blame. We may then explore how this is all a result of still holding on to obsolete internalized standards of right and wrong.
Once we take the time to candidly answer these questions, perhaps we are ready to consider dreammaker’s proposition.
To be continued . . .
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