Dreams: Between Terror and Redemption

“All our crises, blockages, petrification and helplessness point to one thing and one thing only: our terrifying inability to bear the truth about ourselves.” (roughly translated) Lavinia Bârlogeanu, Rătăciți in Labirint

Unless you consciously and lavishly serve your brain frightening fare before sleep by watching “Psycho” or “The Shining” (or both, a perfectly designed combination for young, strong-hearted people who miss doing bungee-jumping), we should be grateful for our nightmares – they are often the only keyholes through which we can catch a glimpse of our unconscious fears, self-sabotaging patterns, unprocessed emotions and parts of ourselves we’ve rejected.

I know this too well: after a dream I’m lucky to have survived about five years ago, I felt compelled to see beneath its surface, to decipher its hidden message.

My attempt was doomed to fail: it felt like stepping further and further into a tangled forest, all alone, with no idea how to find my way back.

In retrospect, I realize that the decision not to share this shocking dream with anybody, not even my therapist, was an unconscious way of sabotaging my own quest to understand it.  

So, as is often the case, I put the bloodcurdling dream out of my mind altogether, which worked, let’s say, pretty well – until two months ago.

I was reading Rătăciți în Labirint (roughly translated as Lost in the Labyrinth) by dr. Lavinia Bârlogeanu, a must-read book about how myths can become maps on our journey toward truth and about how, in the therapeutic process, the very thing that haunts us may ultimately lead to our redemption (I know, it’s exactly the type of book one needs on a pampering holiday in sunny Greece).

Now, what were the chances that I would read about the infamous labyrinth while in Crete– the very island where it is said to have been built?

And what could the fierce, powerful beast lurking in the Cretan maze have to do with that sun-drenched day and the crystalline, sapphire sea gently lapping against the beach where I was lying?  

Apparently nothing.

And yet, a lot – as I was about to realize. 

What does the myth tell us?

The Minotaur is the monstrous offspring of a perverse union between Queen Pasiphae, King Minos’ wife, and a superb white bull. Like any shameful secret, it must be locked away in a place so ingeniously designed by Daedalus that escape seems impossible. However, as the creature must be fed, another monstrous decision is made: every eight years, young innocent people from Athens are sacrificed to the beast. It is only Theseus, the Athenian hero, who finally dares to fight the Minotaur and bring the curse to an end. He ventures deeper and deeper into the maze, finds the Minotaur, slays him and finds his way back with the help of  Ariadne’s ball of thread.     

As Bârlogeanu eloquently explains, the Minotaur symbolizes anything within ourselves that is too atrocious, too overwhelming or too painful to confront: fear, envy, jealousy, perverse impulses, sadism, rage, hatred, etc.

The labyrinth is the trap of our unconscious, the extremely elaborate prison of our psyche, the maze of our inner dangers.

When we experience an intolerable emotion, we unconsciously bury it deep within ourselves where it can remain hidden for years, even decades, or – how very sad – a lifetime, while silently wreaking havoc, feeding on and corrupting the innocent parts of our psyche. 

According to the author, Theseus’ fight with the Minotaur is essentially the soul’s struggle to fulfill its capacity for good.

The Athenian warrior personifies a positive spiritual force, a conscious, abiding desire for transformation that each of us needs in order to confront and acknowledge the drama within.  

A dream was about to confirm just how veridical these insights were.

In the dream, the devil appeared.

The woman, one of Bârlogeanu’s patients, woke up in the middle of the night trembling with terror. She wished nothing more than to howl like an animal – endlessly, but she swallowed the urge, fearing that if she let her deafening pain loose, it would destroy her and everyone around her.

In therapy, she would come to understand that the visitor in her dream embodied a dark part of herself she had been denying for years. By allowing herself to fully live through the agony of her spiritual downfall, she was able to move closer to her authentic core – the guiding light she had preserved within herself all along, albeit unbeknownst to her. 

As the author points out, such a horrific dream is a cry for help from the depths of anyone searching for the truth within themselves.

It is, as Bârlogeanu beautifully puts it, a spiritual crucifixion.

How can we authentically reclaim the lost parts of ourselves, including our innocence, other than through assumed martyrdom?  

By now, my heart had been beating faster and faster and my breath had grown shallow.

Looking out at the resplendent sea where people were swimming and splashing carefree, I felt a desperate impulse to plunge into its waters and put someone else’s nightmare behind me (one, two, three, poof, if possible). 

Instead, I remained rooted to the golden strand.

What was it that I really wanted to run away from?

Of course I knew the answer.

How could I have forgotten? It was my own dream – the devil staring at me with a hatred out of this world, the terror that refused to subside even after I woke up.

But the worst was yet to come:

What was I hiding from myself?

My chest felt as if squeezed by a tight claw.

The answer refused to reveal itself.

I looked out at the sea, the sky, the sun.

How could I possibly find the truth with so much beauty surrounding me?

I closed my eyes.

And here I was – again, stepping further and further into my Labyrinth, passing shadows, some recognizable, others faceless, some quiet, others wailing.

And here it was, staring at me with a hatred out of this world – my Minotaur: an absolutely implausible, incomprehensible, inadmissible feeling. The feeling I shouldn’t have felt. The feeling that had been devouring me from within. 

How everything made sense now: the traumatic event that had pushed me to the brink of sanity. The lies I had been telling myself to survive. The decisions I had made.

The strangest thing was that now I felt nothing – as if my heart had turned into ice. 

I don’t remember how long I lay on the beach, dumbfounded. When I finally walked towards the shimmering sea, my body felt heavy, and swimming, one of my sources of happiness and freedom, felt reduced to mere mechanics.   

As I swam further and further away from the shore, I could hear a plaintive voice: “Don’t go away, don’t leave me now.” The song was coming from a white boat floating nonchalantly nearby.

“Don’t go away, don’t leave me now.”

Oh, wasn’t that me?

Stuck in the past, unable to leave it, clinging to it for dear life.

Tears started rolling down my cheeks and quiet sobs filled my chest.

My heart was beating with humility, regret, acceptance, compassion, relief and love – for myself and for anyone who had been part of my story.  

I wiped my tears and snot from my face while my legs were frantically moving underwater (getting drowned on my healing journey was not exactly my idea of a happy ending).  

The healing process takes time. Not only do we need courage and unwavering determination to keep going, but we also need an Ariadne’s thread: it can be therapy, coaching, prayer, meditation, books and/or conversations with the people you trust deeply.  

The way I see it, appalling dreams don’t just happen, unless we experience significant distress in our lives (don’t worry, I won’t mention another horror movie – sometimes, life has enough horror in store for each of us).  

Luckily, while we sleep, our unconscious doesn’t. If it needs to scream at the top of its lungs, it will.

Are you paying attention to yourself?