I've been thinking about things that go bump in the night.
My mother’s ancestors came from England and Scotland, and throughout her life she carried with her remnants of these noble forebears. She loved tea and marmalade, the nineteenth-century Cries of London engravings and the porcelain figurines her dear brother Jack sent her when he was in England during WWII, and this little snippet of an anonymous Scottish poem/prayer which she’d say as she lay me down to sleep:
From Ghoulies and Ghoosties, long-leggety Beasties,
and Things that go Bump in the Night,
Good Lord, deliver us!
I think of her, and of these Ghoulies and Ghoosties, long-leggety Beasties, whenever I’m startled awake by a frightening dream or night-thought.
In the 1970s, with the inspiration of the counterculture (albeit without the assistance of several then-popular hallucinogenic drugs), I taught myself to remember my dreams, and the lessons have lasted. Whether I wake in the middle of the night or in the morning, I know what I’m dreaming about and, if I choose to, can commit the dream to waking consciousness.
BECOME A FREE SUBSCRIBER TO I’VE BEEN THINKING
Earlier in my adulthood, when I was under the kind of stress that agitates sleep, my dreams were violent and frightening. I remember one dream in my late thirties that I spent hours in therapy unpacking. In the dream, I’m walking through a barren battlefield littered with land mines, a few of which explode on their own not far from me; I’m terrified that I’ll take that lethal wrong step, the kind of self-destructive impulse I was currently flirting with in my personal and professional life.
My dreams and night-thoughts calmed down as my life did; still, I remember them. Like this: for the past several months, when I’m first conscious, I’m singing under my breath the final lines from a verse from Leonard Cohen’s magical song, Hallelujah:
I did my best, it wasn't much
I couldn't feel, so I tried to touch
I've told the truth, I didn't come to fool ya
And even though it all went wrong
I'll stand before the lord of song
With nothing on my tongue but hallelujah
For the life of me, I cannot figure out what it all went wrong is pointing to, but there’s the lyric, as predictable as the sunrise. Go figure.
Go figure, indeed. That’s what people have been trying to do since the first morning when the first person’s eyes opened. (Maybe also when the first animal awakened. I used to watch our Old English Sheep Dog’s body twitch as he slept on the kitchen floor, and assumed he was chasing rabbits across a field in his dreams.) Various cultures and generations have developed unique frameworks for figuring out their dreams.
In the religious and Biblical tradition I grew up in, and in other spiritual cultures, dreams are made sacred. They are a prominent means by which God calls for our attention and gives us instructions. Joseph the Patriarch, the youngest of Jacob’s sons (the father who favored him with a coat of many colors), has a series of dreams in which he is chosen by God to rule over his older brothers, who vengefully sell him into slavery in Egypt, the beginning of an epic Biblical narrative that goes on for chapters.(1) Joseph’s namesake, Jesus’ biological father, has a series of dreams in which God instructs him about Jesus’ birth, a family flight to Egypt, their return to Israel, and residence in Galilee.(2) The Apostle Peter has a dream in which his belief that faith in Jesus is solely for Jews is contradicted by God, who indicates that even non-Jews are welcome in this new faith community.(3)
While these and myriad other ancients sacralized their dreams by looking upward, Sigmund Freud insisted that dreams direct our attention not upward but inward. For Freud and many of his successors, dreams arise from unresolved psycho-sexual conflicts lodged in our unconscious, remnants of our attachment to our opposite sex parent and anger at our same-sex parent. Freud wrote that with an analyst’s help, the interpretation of our dreams is the royal road to our unconscious.(4) Much of this understanding of dreams, especially their psycho-sexual origins and their availability through analysis, has become embedded in our culture, though without any persuasive evidence that such access to our unconscious is available to us.
Modern neurological researchers cannot determine (and therefore do not claim to know with any certainty) what dreams are made of or why we dream. One theory proposes that our dreams and night-thoughts single out current emotional issues that are searching for a place to fit in our vast emotional history. The hippocampus, deep inside the temporal lobe of our mid-brains, plays a central role in our ability to remember, imagine, and dream. Thus, dreams function like dialysis for our emotional life, allowing the insignificant elements to fade while integrating into our synapses what is worth storing. My deepest dreams are the material which I’m trying to add to my life-long memories that, stitched together, are the vague tapestry that depicts who I am and what I know and feel about myself. However true this perspective might be, I find the possibility fascinating.
My deepest dreams are the material I’m trying to add to my life-long memories which, stitched together, are the vague tapestry depicting who I am and what I know and feel about myself.
Sacred, psychosexual, and now this scientific notion of dreams constructing my emotional memory have led me to my own framework for dealing with my dreams, and also my clients' dreams. I’m not one who encourages my clients to remember and share their dreams, but when they do, I listen carefully, often asking them to repeat the dream, this second time including whatever emotions the dream prompts. I begin by admitting I have no idea what the dream means because it arises out of their own complex emotional life and may well have contents from parts of their memory neither of us has much access to.
But equally, their dream may have something to do with the therapeutic conversation we’ve been having; themes we’ve been exploring together may arouse some ancient memory and then be reflected in these dreams. I can focus our attention on this continuing theme to allow us to deepen our understanding about an important therapeutic issue: recurring fear that keeps one client from telling herself the truth about childhood trauma; sadness in another client at the losses and disappointments that linger as dark shadows just beyond consciousness; shame at yet another's persistent childhood failure to meet his parents’ expectations, which he had adopted as his own.
It is surprising how often a person’s very disparate dreams well up from a common source: unfinished emotional business collected in a mist-covered lake of fear and sadness and shame going back to childhood but out of the reach of consciousness. It’s as if each dream is a plea to dispel the mist and wade deeper into this still-mysterious dream-lake as we continue constructing our sense of where we come from and who we’re becoming.
This framework helps me understand one set of my own recurring dreams, all featuring our adopted third child, Jesse. He joined our family when he was 27 months old, and Becky was his fifth mother. He had an infancy and early childhood full of experiences neither he nor we had access to. Our first decade with him was about learning to love this strange little boy on his own terms, and winning a trust from him that was hard to come by since all his earlier family figures – birth mother, natural father, three foster-care mothers, foster sisters and brothers – had ultimately abandoned him. By his teens, as he finally felt the safety of home with us, and with the help of a girlfriend who finally made him feel like he fit in with his peers, he became a delightful though still-quirky young man. It's not a dream, but a recurring dark thought as I fall asleep is a vivid memory of what it was like to view his body at the mortuary after they shipped him home after his tragic death at the age of twenty-four, then two days later sliding his ashes into the columbarium at our church, where we’ve reserved the niche next to his for the two of us.
He played such a complicated role in my emotional life that it's not surprising when he recurs in my dreams.
Sometimes I dream about family settings - either my current constellation of children and grandchildren, or the clan I grew up in - and often, I'll see Jesse as a silent member of the gathering. He doesn't do or say anything, but he's there. As I think about these dream scenarios, I feel a tremendous sense of relief: that somehow, in the deepest parts of my brain, he's still with us, an important part of our family.
I dream about one moment with Jesse when he was five years old. I’m teaching him to ride his new bike in the parking lot next to our house, and as he zooms away from my starting shove, his long blond hair blown back, I say to myself, I love this little guy. What loose thread is this pulling on in my emotional tapestry? I thought I would love Jesse the day we adopted him, like I loved my older two children the day we knew we were pregnant. But love didn't come easily, which was hard for me to admit. For two years, I went through the motions of being his father, without feeling any real emotional connection. I wonder if I have this dream because, in recalling the moment when my affection for him finally broke through my anxiety, I really became his father - and just like riding a bike, it's something you never forget.
In frequent dreams, Becky and I are on the phone with the Director of the Peace Corps who is telling us that Jesse died earlier that day in a terrible auto crash. In the dream, the sequence of events never extends beyond that twenty minute phone conversation that changed my life forever; it's just Becky and I, trapped in the impossibility of trying to understand something that can never be fully processed, that is still unimaginable. It's no mystery why this dream recurs: I'm still trying to absorb it, all these years later.
More than anything else, Jesse is the Ghoulies and Ghoosties, long-leggety Beasties of my dreams that go bump in the night. In my dreams, I’m trying to weave all these threads into my memory’s understanding not only of who Jesse was but of how he still shapes me by forcing me into my deepest pain and most agonizing love, places I visit solely with him.
Genesis 37:5 and following.
Matthew 1:19-2:23.
Acts 10:9-16.
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 2nd ed. (1909), chapter 7, section E.
Thanks for reading I’ve Been Thinking! Subscribe for free to receive new essays directly to your email inbox as they’re published.