On fathers, writing, and dreams

and writing about dreams, and dreams about fathers

As I write this, my partner approaches me and asks, “What are you writing?”

I answer vaguely, “I’m writing about dreams… but also about real life!”

To which he replies: “They’re the same, aren’t they?”

That’s what the Jungians claim. The psyche seeks, and without fail always finds, anything that will push us into consciousness—in real life and in dreams alike.

I’m currently reading a book by Jungian analyst Marion Woodman titled Leaving My Father’s House. She works with dreams to make the unconscious conscious. Leaving My Father’s House came to me years ago on the $1 rack of the local community college library. The title intrigued me, so I bought it, unaware that the book was related to incest and unaware that in just a few months, memories of my father’s incestuous sexual abuse would resurface to consciousness. Collecting dust on my shelf, the book watchfully eyed me for nearly six years until I was ready to crack it open a week ago.

I finally opened the book in response to an alarming experience which shed light on the stranglehold my father still has on my unconscious mind. The experience made me realize that I am, to a degree, still living in my father’s house. This wake up call, which broke me out of unconscious projection, occurred while playing with the six year old girl I work as a nanny for. At the end of each day we spend together, her strikingly normal, all-American father returns from work and relieves me to go home.

I can be honest with myself; I’ve been fearfully projecting onto this man since before I even met him. Upon meeting him, my irrational fear grew larger. While I call it irrational, it’s really not—he is a big man, and I’m afraid of him hurting me. As a child, I was raped by my big father. This is another big father, so he is scary—simple logic. My body classifies big, middle-aged men under the “people who will hurt you” file. This man seems like a kind and loving father, yet I can’t help but project terror onto him. My intellectual reasoning that this man is probably safe can’t override the primal fear triggered in my body.

One day, the 6 year old and I were playing a game we made up, dancing and jumping around to music, when we heard her father return home from work an hour early. She wanted to keep playing, and I too was enjoying myself, but the presence of this authority figure snapped me out of play and into duty. I told the child that, yes, I want to keep playing too, “but first, I have to go ask your Daddy if he wants me to stay or if he wants me to leave early now that he’s home.” He’s my boss, after all.

Frazzled and a bit disoriented by the sudden transition from child’s play to adult mode, I couldn’t recall her father’s name to go approach him. So, I asked the girl, “What’s your dad’s name, again? Bill?” She replied, “Joe,” and as I walked downstairs, it dawned on me: “Wait… Bill is my father’s name.” A name I never utter aloud, never even think about—yet the first guess to come out of my mouth! I don’t know any other men named Bill. I haven’t seen my father in over a decade. Yet my slip of the tongue made it clear—I am relating to this man as my father, imbuing him with the same terror and authority, and this is precisely what projection looks like. And projection is purposeful—it reflects the psyche’s tireless drive toward wholeness. We unconsciously recreate unresolved psychological dynamics in an attempt to bring them into consciousness, and ideally into completion. For years, I have been recreating my father everywhere I go—I haven’t yet left my father’s house. That night, I took Leaving My Father’s House off the shelf and started reading.

Marion Woodman is a pioneer in Jungian analysis, and the book weaves dreams and stories from three of her analysands in their journeys toward consciousness and individuation. Only 50 pages in, I am currently reading Kate’s story, a story eerily resembling my own. Kate is a survivor of incest and childhood sexual abuse. All her life, she performed with the aim of pleasing others, crafting herself into a “princess” and striving for perfection, thinking it would keep her safe. After a major life event shook her out of this trauma trance, she entered analysis with Marion Woodman, began documenting her dreams, and wrote her own story despite the textbook fear, shame, perfectionism, and extreme resistance that typically come with the whole incest package.

I, too, am trying to write my own story, and I, too, am resisting. I have 15 different tabs open with 15 different documents full of unfinished theories and disjointed sentences I promise myself I’ll eventually weave into cohesive narratives. I file away the profound ideas as they come, but I resist workshopping them into “completion”. Aside from the textbook and totally stale fear of being seen, I think publication troubles me because I want to honor the writing process—the motion of thoughts and feelings—over the product. The act of publication feels to me like an objectification or calcification of sorts, freezing my very alive ideas in time. A lifetime of dulling and deadening these ideas for academic approval crushed the joy of writing.

Academia teaches us to view thoughts as commodities, concretizing our living verbs of knowing into dead nouns of “knowledge”, and splintering the interconnectedness of life itself into “fields”. The cult of academia worships a profane god called “Objectivity” and various saints: “Legibility”, “Credibility”, “Specialization”, and “Professionalism”, to name a few. Through deliberate mystification of the producer and production process, academic “knowledge” is sanctified and unquestioned. Even when an entire “field”, epistemology, emerges to pontificate on the study of “knowledge production”, such exploration is done only when adorned in the designer robes of professionalism.

Anyone wishing to participate in the exclusive club of “knowledge production” must perform “objectivity”, erasing the self—the messy, feeling self—and only including “I” when it serves the tone of certainty and professionalism required to earn academic credibility. “Thou shalt not get too personal, lest undermine thy credibility,” warns Father Academia. What could be more spirit-crushing? With only dull and patriarchal language to play with, as Marion Woodman ponders, “How does one fashion a pipe that can contain honesty, and be at the same time professionally credible? How can a woman write from her authentic center without being labeled ‘histrionic’ or ‘hysterical’?”

In Leaving My Father’s House, Kate’s relationship with academia mirrors my own, prompting me to assume that perhaps this is a universal tragedy:

“Kate decided to return to university. Writing papers was still agony. Free and high-spirited and angry as she was in her analytic sessions, the world out there was where she had to live that spirit. She needed the high grades; she knew how to get them; she knew what she was betraying in herself by warping both her content and her style in writing. She had learned that being aggressive was not feminine; she knew that displeasing her professors could lead to rejection. Therefore, to use the passive voice, to distance herself from action even in her grammar shielded her examiner from the directness which might be perceived as an attack. If a female writer is subliminally saying, ‘Don’t attack me, I am only guessing. I am only trying to tell the truth. Please don’t hurt me for it,’ her muted undertone is probably masking her real passion and her real creativity.”

I, too, learned to speak and write passively, precisely because I did not want my directness to be perceived by anyone as an attack. Abused children learn to find safety in passivity. I can stay safe so long as I do not threaten anyone with my power. While I am fully aware of my capacity to speak with passion and authority, the kind that either triggers or magnetizes people, I have been harshly criticized for this style of speech. I’ve been told with hostile disapproval, “You have this way of convincing yourself and everybody else that anything you say is correct.” And how dare you have the nerve to pull that! From now on, make sure everything you say sounds like a mere guess. Wholehearted belief in your own correctness is deeply threatening.

Academia asked me to erase the truth in my writing; uncomfortable peers asked me to erase the truth in my speech. But once I graduated college and began devotionally writing down my dreams (knowledge that is undeniably mine), I experienced a creative freedom I had never before accessed. Kate’s experience was identical—“Her creative spirit began to leap out when she wrote down her dreams. Writing in her journal she was free of the system that had silenced her… Her real ego had been buried years ago under layers of duty and responsibility.”

Writing in my journal, I, too, feel free of the system that once silenced me—I write wildly and rebelliously and freely because I can, and because it all makes sense to me, and because I don’t need to worry about Credibility, Legibility, and friends. I don’t need to prepare it into a refined and digestible dish before revealing it to the external world’s unforgiving gaze. And like Kate, my creative spirit leaps when I specifically write dreams. The symbols in dreams are alive, always in motion and changing through time—you can’t freeze them. Language and our limited tools for meaning-making can only scratch the surface, yet written documentation of dreams, contrary to the calcification I once feared, allows us to play with their images over time.

Obsession with dreams has been called self-obsession, navel-gazing, pointless or mundane. People question what productivity or value could possibly be derived from hours spent on dream analysis. For lack of eloquent phrasing, that’s bullshit. We deserve to give ourselves this time. It is soul work. In paying close attention to dreams, we gain faith and confidence. We dig up old emotions and process them. Decision making can become effortless, because everything we need to know is already inside of us, waiting to be explored. Dreams are the soul’s most trustworthy compass.

Writing about my dreams affirms value in the wisdom that can only be found in my body. It restores an intimate body-wisdom that incest denied me. It’s a new kind of knowledge production that says, “This is the truth, and no, I will not be providing you with any evidence.” It is a knowledge production whose sole requirement is speaking from the heart, a knowledge production who actively avoids Objectivity and his associates.

Writing, in more ways than one, is about leaving my father’s house. In giving myself a voice, I am breaking out of incest’s psychological stranglehold, the one that claims I was never supposed to exist, let alone speak. And in allowing myself to speak with authority, I individuate from Father Academia, the voice that claims “I” is never allowed to exist in credible writing. So, I write incredibly, and I celebrate that beautiful word: I, I, I, I, I!

The following is a dream I wrote and analyzed, a dream where I left my father’s house:

December 11th, 2020: Some friends and I are in a house, and it feels like home—my current home—although it looks different. It resembles my father’s house. We are having a house party, and there is an ice skating rink outside. My friend desperately wants to go ice skating, and she invites me to tag along. We are chatting in the house next to a door that leads down to the basement, and I soon realize it is actually my father’s basement. It is my current home, but it is his basement. Instead of joining my friend to go ice skating, I decide to venture down into the basement alone.

It looks different from childhood, but it is just as messy. The mess puts my body on edge, and I am instantly filled with anxiety. It looks like my father is still living there, even though the rest of the house seems like mine. I explore all of the rooms in the basement, and one of them looks like my father's old office—stacks of papers, books, and a terribly old computer that is humming in the background. I feel a sense of terror, thinking that he must be nearby, because why else would the computer still be on? I cry out for help, but then remember I am completely alone. I move on to the next room, and it looks like a teenage boy lives there—I realize it must be my younger half-brother’s current room, which confirms that he and my father are currently living there.

In a panic, I leave the basement and reunite with my friend outside on the shore of a lake. The lake is beautiful. I sit down next to her in the sand. Tons of people are ice skating on the lake, but water is splashing everywhere like waves, and it doesn’t seem fully frozen. My friend explains to me that she doesn’t think it is safe to go skating because the ice could break at any moment. I sit there watching everyone fearlessly skate, unaware of the danger that seems so obvious to us.

In dreams, a house often symbolizes the self or the body. A basement, just underneath, can represent your unconscious mind or repressed memories. Bodies of water, like the lake, typically symbolize emotions.

Instead of joining everyone outside in actively living life, I was compelled to explore unresolved past memories in the basement, and I discovered how much terror was still living there. I specifically ventured into the basement alone—the exploration of my unconscious being a task I feel sentenced to do alone. I thought I was exploring my father's old basement only to realize he still lived there. It was my house (the self), but it was his basement (the unconscious)—implying that he still possesses my unconscious mind. The basement “looks different from childhood, but it is just as messy”—my unconscious certainly looks different now, but it’s just as messy, and it “puts my body on edge”. A mess in the unconscious putting my body on edge? That’s quite literally how trauma works.

When the terror in the basement overwhelmed me, I cried out for help, but realized I was completely alone. So, I decided to leave the unconscious behind and reunite with everyone outside, yet I was too terrified to engage with the unpredictability of life and my own emotional world, symbolized by the lake that wasn’t fully frozen. The lake speaks to old feelings melting and coming to the surface. My feelings were frozen before, but now water is splashing to the surface in the wake of my exploration of past memories. I was afraid of falling into the water—afraid of falling into the unknown depths of emotions that have been frozen for so long. All of the ice skaters were blissfully skating with no fear of falling in—and this is what I imagine it might feel like to live without trauma, without fear of “falling in” to life’s chaos, violence, unpredictability.

I couldn’t bring myself to skate because I was far too aware of a danger that nobody else could see. One friend could see the danger, though, and she was willing to sit on the shore with me in safety. As soon as I saw my friend, sat down with her, and stared out at the beautiful lake, I felt profound peace, the feeling of calm after a storm. I left the danger behind temporarily, and I could admire the beauty of life with a friend, but I could not yet fully participate in it. The fear was still there, uncertainty over whether venturing back into life was safe. “The lake is beautiful,” I said, recognizing the beauty of life but still fearing it because “the ice could break at any moment.” I could fall into danger at any moment. In a lot of ways, trauma, and specifically the freeze response, makes one feel stuck sitting on the metaphorical shore of life’s waters.

I experienced peace there, though, because I was sitting with a friend who made me feel loved, safe, and understood. I felt understood because she, too, saw the terror that nobody else could see—so we found comfort on the shoreline together. Trauma is healed through safe relationships. Though I may be alone in my father’s basement and in my own unconscious mind, I am not alone out in the world. There are safe, loving people out there who will help me hold the pain.

It is worth noting that though I exited the basement and reentered life, my father was still currently living there. I decided to leave my unconscious behind because there was too much terror, but the terror stayed there when I left; the computer was still on and buzzing. Yet even in the midst of terror, the dream affirmed, I always have the choice to leave my father’s house. I am not stuck there, nor am I stuck in my unconscious. I can leave, I can find moments of solace and safety in friends—the ones who greet the terror with tenderness—and, slowly, I can warm up to the half-frozen lake.