I had a dream a few minutes ago. The beginning remembered only vaguely and spottily, I find myself in some group of people like a social club; I mostly keep to myself. Some how I have a borrowed motor home that I am having trouble getting ready to operate. I think I have borrowed the motor home for a task. When I get it unlocked and started there are complex foot controls and 2 or 3 foot brakes, hissing airbrakes that seem to turn vehicle in small confusing ways as I try to get out of a parking stall in a parking garage. I leave before crashing it in parking space, embarrassed at my inability. I am walking, for help maybe. Suddenly my Dad comes out of a large home garage – he has lumber on his roof rack; heavy fresh bright timbers. He appears robust and healthily flushed, handsome, and looking at me a little quizzically in his face as he sees me, maybe at what I want by being there. I am surprised by his youthful, fresh, full, self-poised appearance. As I walk around the load following him suddenly I see other people. A South American couple is in a playful word game in Spanish and English with some edge of competitiveness that I wondered if it would turn bitter and hurtful – they seem familiar to me from my past and I am surprised by their lightness. (The man maybe had a friend with him.) Then immediately I see mostly relatives in small groups helping unload and carry, cheerful, playful, smiling and laughing together, into a long wide garage that was reminiscent of a Quonset shaped railway station. I see some youthful robust cousins, and a sister. I feel emotionally distant, perhaps flat, apart from them with my worry, probably still with my inner ‘problem’ (though I don’t seem to be thinking motor home anymore), and that apartness, outsideness persisted throughout my exposure to my dad and then seeing the happy productively working family coming and going. I maybe wondered a bit why I wasn’t glowing and moving happily among them. Standing aside and behind from them, I woke up.
Upon waking I wondered more about maybe being in some depressed-like condition, where everyone else was/is happy and enjoying life. Yes, this is a dream, and I think many people in life are actually only semi-happy or struggling. Yet the image is so startlingly clear and unequivocal of robust happiness and playfulness while working on a task that incidentally revolves around my father and his load of fresh strong beams and lumber.
A connection and question arises between myself and my recently posted ‘story’ version of Ken Wilber in his expanded, robustly pumped up frame, in the evolutionary biology thread. I am wondering about ‘transference’.
http://multiplex.integralinstitute.org/Public/cs/forums/4/49655/ShowThread.aspx#49655I am wondering about a good, long-time robust army era friend who I pulled away from a couple of years ago because of judgments by me about his confident, self-certain living, socio-political, philosophical views, and his verbalized attitudes, judgments and advice for me and my varied path of discovery (probably relatively mildly or normally critical). On some more essential level I’d say I loved him, I love him, and he, me. We communicated this a little indirectly to one another in a recent exchange. He tried to reestablish contact a few months ago and I connected distantly by e-mail, withholdingly sort out of “courtesy”, I thought, and semi-consciously giving him a chance to repair our rift and my hurts, but I kept my distance and “righteous” perhaps resentment. (I’ve been thinking more lately about my severe severance from him and feeling some shame and some desire to repair and connect; and I don’t want the whole old package of relating back, either.) And I wonder about a somewhat similar pattern of a robust childhood friend who lives in Canada and who is into some Internet sexual exploration and playful dabbling in topics spiritual and wider, who I keep at a distance, though without the overtly expressed severance. And there are other friends and family with whom I have to varying degrees overtly and withholdingly disconnected.)
I keep so many people at a distance with some judgments and aloofness about their suitability for me. I often have kept one foot in, one foot out. This has grown in the last 30 years replacing a more innocent insecurity and maybe puppy-like approach/departure pattern, sometimes marked by being rejected for my social ways, it seems. This withholding and false personae seem to be part of my personality now, though apparently I have my various rules of courtesy and often connection at our glancing surfaces, and I usually make sure that the connections glance off my self-sufficient, purposeful appearing manner. And now I am thinking of the old, winter dog lying in the warming sunlight, and how he opens an eye, and moves half-heartedly, across the room.
I have felt choked up at different parts of this rendering.
Ambo Suno