I am that I am

From the dream:

I am a boy. My penis has been cut. A girl who is older than me checks out the wound. We both look at it and she takes it in her hand to move the bandage so we can see how bad it is. When she moves it, I feel pain and I tell her it hurts. She asks me if I understand that it won’t work right when I get older. I think she is wrong and I will be OK.

Reading this, you might think of this as a trauma dream. Certainly it is about trauma, but for me, this dream is a gift. I have had several dreams where I see the boy and I see his wound even when he does not (see my very first post in which the Anima pulls a huge creature from the boy’s backside and a recent post from my work in Bermuda where the boy has thorns embedded in his back but isn’t aware of them until I point it out). The difference here is that I am the boy. This means that I not only know the wound is there, but I see my wound on my own body and I feel it in a visceral way. This pain is not the pain of trauma, but the pain of knowing the wound. It is real. It hurts in a physical way. Being the boy with my wound also allows me the real gift of the inner knowing that the wound can be healed and that I will be OK. The boy knows this and as the boy, I know it too. To be the child in the dream is the goal, because when we are the child we are in our true self, our soul self. The soul self that cares nothing for things of this world and knows its own true need.

The fact that my boy has been attacked and had his penis cut speaks to the way that I experienced reactions to my boy energy as a young person. I am that I am. Despite the fact that it was the 60’s and early 70’s, my parents were of a different generation. Girls weren’t supposed to act the way I did. I was the tomboy girl who was daring and fast, funny and exuberant. I hated dresses, I didn’t like girly things, and I wanted to be like the boys. My father told me girls don’t play the drums. He scoffed at the idea of me being an archeologist. My mother, terrified of my passion, libido and expressiveness, sought to crush it out of me, break my spirit, put me in my place.

In the dream, I think I have done something wrong and this is why I am attacked. This is a familiar feeling. But the boy has done nothing wrong. He is that he is. The part of me that has always believed that there is something wrong with me tells the boy-me that I will have problems when I am older. She is, in fact, right. I have had problems. I have compensated for them by being overly independent, extroverted in a big way, telling stories and trying to convince you of how big my penis is.

The gift of this dream is in being the boy and knowing that the part of me who has suspected I won’t be OK, and lived from that place, is wrong.

More from the dream:

Then I am in a mall and I am with a man and some other people. The man has a brief case and they leave walking through the mall. I think I am not supposed to go with them, but I want to know where they are going and so I follow them. I try to act nonchalant, but I know they see me. Then they go around a corner. I run to catch up and I don’t see them anywhere, I see a side corridor and I think they have gone out that way. It is an exit and I know I am probably not supposed to go through it. I run up to it and hit the crash bar with my foot to open it. Sirens and lights go off and I fall to the floor. I know they couldn’t have gone this way. I feel lost. Some people come to help me.

In this part of the dream, I am still the boy with the wounded penis. But I know I want to be with the Animus. I follow Him, but act all nonchalant. I lose Him because I don’t want to show my hurt or vulnerability, but in the end, I just feel lost and disappointed and upset. I am lost without Him. This upset place is a familiar one for me. I typically project it onto the world, usually onto my partner. It is so much easier then to live in my skin even if I hate myself for it. At least I have a reason to be so upset. Who wants to thrash around saying they just feel separated from God? It’s easier to be upset because I am late, because you didn’t help me, or you are helping me too much, or because someone harmed me, or I can’t find my phone, ad infinitum.

What could be more simple than “I am lost without Him”?