If there’s one question more than any other hangs over my whole life — it’s the question of how do I relate to the opposite sex. What does it mean to love a woman. What do I think about women, what do I feel about them.
This question, or set of questions, is as important to me now I’m 59 as it was when I was 19. Indeed, my struggles in this respect go back even earlier. All the way right back to early childhood. There were disturbing sexual dreams at the age of five, where I seemed to be engaging in coitus, even though I didn’t know the word and hadn’t had the mechanics of sex explained to me.
In fact I used to have three different recurring dreams at around that age:
1) I was petrified silly by the dim figure of a witch at the foot of my bed. My dream had me lying in the bed where in reality I lay asleep. In my dream however, I was awake and only pretending to be asleep. I thought that if the witch believed I was asleep, she wouldn’t harm me: so I kept my eyes tight shut while she threw me around in the air like a ball. Even though I was scared, I also enjoyed the fear — the intense adrenalin rush. I remember feeling as though I could will myself to have this nightmare because I enjoyed it.
2) I was the leader of a marauding band of soldiers or sailors. We had captured a large number of women and we lined them up naked in order to have sex with them. The word is rape I suppose. But the odd thing was, it felt as though I were somehow passive — as though the woman were controlling my desire. I had no clear visual sense, of what a woman’s naked body was like — either to look at or to touch. It was more as though I just came together with her in some vague, undefined way involving an erection on my part, and the most intense desire and excitement imaginable. Again, as with the first dream outlined above, I would wake drenched in sweat and with the feeling as though I had somehow chosen to repeat this dream again because I enjoyed it.
3) The third recurrent dream around the age of four or five or six, was of being involved in some kind of war, on the battlefield. Except that I wasn’t fighting at all. I was pretending to be dead, because I thought in this way to escape getting killed.
Thinking about these dreams in the latter half of my life, I noticed there are certain common themes. Passivity is common to all three, and, in dreams (1) and (2), this is passivity in relation to women (which also entails an enjoyable adrenalin rush). Dreams (2) and (3) both involve the army. And common to dreams (1) and (3) is the idea of remaining safe by feigning either death or sleep.
I told dream (1) to a Jungian analyst in 1977. He said it represents my feelings towards my mother. But I have never told the other two dreams to anyone. All three would seem to betoken a certain cowardice which I’m not proud of. Even though of course dreams in general are outside our conscious control and these dreams in particular came upon me at a very early age.
Viewed psychoanalytically, a determination to keep my eyes closed — to appear asleep or dead — must surely suggest some kind of refusal to become conscious? Some kind of situation where I must be prone to take refuge in deliberate unconsciousness. This sounds very clever. It even sounds, to my ears, incredibly important. And yet it also feels like a wasted insight, because I don’t know what to do with it.
sciencegoodmagicbetter 