Challenging Dreams
Dreams play a critical role in helping us address many life challenges. In particular, dreams enable us to work with the traumas that have occurred in our life, and that continue to “haunt” us—with the “ghosts” of anxiety, troubling flashbacks, and nightmares appearing often and with great emotional power.
Many theories have been offered to explain the sustained appearance (“hauntings”) of trauma. These theories range from the simple fact that something has caused us significant physical and psychological damage that is not easily healed to complex biological theories regarding the interactions of multiple neural systems (primarily the amygdala, hippocampus and prefrontal cortex) and psychological theories (such as the “Traumagenic Dynamics Model” that focuses on the traumatic experience itself as it distorts a person’s cognitive and emotional sense of self and the world, leading to changes in behavior, thoughts, and feelings that are directly related to the traumatic event.
One particular theory resides somewhere between the simple and complex. Trauma is assumed to be precipitated by an uncompleted action (Levine and Frederick, 2009). We feel helpless and powerless when unable to successfully engage in actions that will thwart the threatening event. As a child, we are too small and weak to fend off the attacker. As adults, we are too small and weak in the bureaucracy of our organization to fend off the abuse of our boss. We use the dream to complete the act.
Initially, we are faced with a traumatizing experience that seems to spread by relating to previous traumatizing experiences):
“. . . of danger or jeopardy, by reason of which the dreamer feels helpless and especially vulnerable in the face of powerful forces that threaten to destroy him. . . [T]his quality of helplessness relates to the sense of powerlessness of his existence– and the possibility that he, like the object around him, might disappear or be destroyed—is incorporated into his earlier dreams and finds expression in nightmares.” [Mack, 1992, p. 370]
It is at this point that the dreamer brings all of their weapons to confront the spreading, existential threat of non-existence. The dreamer presents a unified front (Integration), ensuring the Integrity of their ego system. This achievement of integrity might occur by the dreamer assembling a phalanx of all their friends and relatives to fend off the evil force. The dreamer’s long-deceased parents might even join in the fray. The dreamer could even bring in a powerful, archetypal figure (such as a warrior queen or a powerful tornado) to assist them in confronting the equally archetypal evil force (a witch or large, looming wave).
