Hi Gerard,

I dreamt this exactly one week ago just a couple days before starting my writing retreat.

It's a dark evening. I'm coming from the Shell roundabout back to the house. I move into the turning lane and hear my name being called by many voices: "Angie!" It's urgent and the leap of my feelings when I hear my name this way is almost palpable. No one calls me 'Angie' anymore. It was my childhood name. The voices are muffled and seem faraway yet all around me. I feel a sinister/dark presence. And there's a powerful pull to the left. It's all energy, but it's physically pulling the car and me left, away from the right direction to my home. The feeling is coming through the window, grabbing at my hood. (I must have a hood on my jacket.) And now the hood, which is stretching to a large wind-whipped blanket is lifting and being pulled out the window. I am being drawn out too. I am completely terrified by this power and wake.

*****

I've been wondering about the hoods. I keep getting them in my dreams, particularly when someone is trying to get my attention. Could be related to child'hood'?

Hmmm... I'm having a sudden memory of wintertime when I was going to go skating with neighbours on a frozen pond. I hadn't even got on the ice when my parents came running, screaming my name (it would have been Angie at the time) because they were terrified I would breakthrough the ice. It was a particularly deep pond and the temp was warming up. My mother had at first given me permission and then was alarmed by my father after I'd left that it was far too dangerous. Mom was wearing a hooded jacket... She was crying. It made me cry.

Do you see anything else, or do you have any questions that could make this relevant to my present day?

Thank you!

Angela

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Angela,


Yes, the hood combined with the childhood name 'Angie' does suggest a possible childhood link. The dark/sinister presence also could be addressing something that is being covered up in the unconscious {the hood being a metaphor for 'covering up'}.


But there may be other elements intertwined with past childhood experiences. You state you are starting a writing retreat. Could that be the pull to the left. In mythology the hero/heroine takes the left hand path to adventure, self discovery, enlightenment. What particular avenue of writing do you seek to produce? The unconscious may be trying to alert you to past childhood experiences through your writing.


Another possibility to the childhood references could be associated with your writing and not about your actual childhood. That could be realized if your writing is focused on children's literature. Is that your focus. If not, and if there have not been a continuous influence of children's literature then I would look to past childhood experiences that have not been given due attention. Are there other possible childhood experiences that may involve dark/sinister' forces? The experience at the pond could produce an impression that is still imprinted in your unconscious but the dark/sinister forces would seem to be more involved that just that one experience.


gerard

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Thanks a lot for your time, Gerard.

I do two kinds of writing -- historical literary fiction novels and poetry. The latter does often use my childhood as the backdrop. It could certainly be partly that left path pull -- yes. Although, I don't write children's lit., don't have any children and there aren't any children around me presently. So, I'll also lean in your other suggested direction because, with the writing, that dark force is not addressed. I'd agree that it must be stronger than a frozen pond where nothing happened...

There was actually an instance when I was 4. I (wearing a hooded jacket!) was walking to my neighbour's house, while my mother watched from an upstairs window. A car pulled up and a man with a mustache asked me if I wanted a ride. I told him I wasn't going far and pointed to my friend's house. He kept coaxing me to get in and was getting more and more insistent. I was about to 'obey the adult', when my mother came bursting from the house screaming -- curlers, dressing gown, the whole bit. The man tore off in a swirl of dust and screeching tires.

Nothing happened there either. But the intention did seem an obvious dark one with his racing off reaction.

About 20 years later I was visiting my mother and happened to be sleeping in that upstairs bedroom where she'd been watching me. I had an active nightmare, where I leapt out of bed, threw myself at the window and started down the stairs screaming before I woke properly. It was as if I had become my mother in the dream. So, there is certainly an intensity of vigilance and fear surrounding that experience.

But I wonder why it would come up now?

Thanks again.
Angela.

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Angela,
Perhaps the 'roundabout' is the reliving of your mother's reactionary experience when you were 4 and your own nightmare 20 years later. But there would most likely need to be a more recent stimulus to this 'dark' experience to have it included in a dream in the present. An imprinted fear perhaps of that childhood experience was resurrected by some recent experience. Jung spoke of how simple smells, noises, etc. can bring up old experiences that were forgotten. The fact your poetry uses your own childhood as a backdrop may have some relationship to that. And the calling of your childhood name 'Angel', there does seem to be a connection somewhere to past childhood experiences. And the urgency of the experience in the dream language, "It's urgent and the leap of my feelings when I hear my name this way is almost palpable" also seems to fit neatly into the equation.

You state in your original post, "I've been wondering about the hoods. I keep getting them in my dreams, particularly when someone is trying to get my attention. Could be related to child'hood'?". The childhood experience at age 4, and your mother's dire effort to get your attention could be the stimulus for such dreams. The hoods could be metaphorical language {the language of dreams} for 'covering up' something from your past. Traumatic experiences at an early age often are imprinted on the psyche only to be revisited later in life for one reason or another. Discovering the stimulus for why it has appeared {if it is related to that experience at age 4} would be what you need to answer to get a grip on why you had these dreams at this time in your life.

What is it that is in need of 'getting your attention' in your present life? The dreams may be using childhood experiences in an attempt to alert you to something else in your adult life. 'The powerful pull to the left'. The car is you and you are being taken toward your 'home', perhaps a reference to your true self, the inner home of creativity/writing? Are there issues that prevent you from being that complete creative person {I am well familiar with that experience, the draw to the right just to survive that takes me away from that creative direction of the left hand path}? Dreams have a funny way of using the past to illustrate a need to right ones ship, help create a balance that fulfills the need of the inner self. Jung and Campbell state that inner need is centered on the spiritual/creative aspect of the psyche. Since you do have an established creative venue, perhaps there is something in the dream that is calling you to give more attention to some aspect of that part of the psyche.

But I do believe there would be some stimulus to the past experience at age 4 that would be needed to be used as metaphors for some other aspect that is in need in your adult life. Give some thought to what I have suggested and see what you can come up with.

gerard

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Hi Gerard,

Oh thank you, thank you! After some heavy duty thinking these last few days, I might finally understand this. The recent stimulus to bring on this dream, that you challenged me to find, seems to have originated from a conversation with a friend a month or so ago, when I was told about his father's traumatic accident on the very road -- near the very spot -- where my dream self was trying to turn right to go home, but got forcefully pulled left. My friend's father was hit by a car there and became brain damaged. My friend arrived at the scene to see his father *covered up* with a *blanket*. He said that nothing in his family was the same again.

I believe that the link between my friend's father's brain damage and my father's mental illness (a kind of brain damage) is the key here. As I hit 40, in the next few weeks, I am reaching the very same age when my father's paranoia began, culminating eventually, over many years, in the end of my parent's 40 year marriage. There must be unconscious memories of the feelings I would have felt at the beginning time, when my father entered the paranoia, changing our childhood forever.

My family did not understand that he had delusional paranoia until just 4 years ago. The paranoia had become somewhat of a personality trait. But the timing of when the friend told me of his father's accident, was the same time of year that my own father had a psychotic break and went missing for 2 weeks.

And of course... ...He was driving fearfully across the country, racing away from those *evil forces* that were supposedly trying to kill him.

As I come 'roundabout' to this age myself, my unconscious must be fearing that this pull off the course and away from 'home' would happen to me too as a natural process in family life.

So, there seems now to only be a tenuous link to my experience at 4 years old, but I can see how it did eventually lead to the full disclosure, when I think of the innocent pedestrian and the 'possessed' driver. My friend's father was hit by a woman driving 'madly' to work; and my father was driving 'madly' away from innocent people.

Now it's possible that my unconscious is afraid of 'driving' myself crazy...

I see that the number 4 can be relevant in so many ways too. 4 years old AND 4 years ago, when we realized about my father... There is also *four*ty. My age shortly, AND the number of years my parents marriage lasted. Everything seems to be colliding for me right now.

************
Gerard, I also wanted to comment about the changes you are in the midst of for this website. How well I understand the need to move your focus on dream work into something more concentrated. It seemed a truly mountainous and impossible task to be taking on every person who entered a dream.

I would love to remain part of what is to come and look very forward to hopefully joining in when time affords this to happen for you. Your site has been a god-send to me these recent months.

Take special care,

Angela.

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Angela,
It is amazing how dreams will take an event and use it to focus on aspects of the dreamer's life that need it most. Your memory of the stimulus for the dream event is important. And your being able to put the pieces of the puzzle together is a very positive thing. As you move further into the 'mid-life' thing such abilities to realize and rationalize will be of great benefit. I hope you will continue to be a part of the Forum and lend your experiences so others can learn from them. I hope to have the new format in place by next week. Thanks for the follow-up information. Look forward to seeing you when the new Dream Forum returns.

gerard/Jerry

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nightmares are caused by unresolved conflicts, and you seem to still have a deeply rooted childhood trauma aggravated by the fact that you seem to think that "nothing happened" in spite of the dramatically exposed potential danger. imagining danger, especially if repetitive, in the end results in the same level of trauma as if one experinced the horrors from which one has been protected. you are coping with trauma inflicted by well meaning by neurotic and hysterical parenting which has not allowed you to work out how to stand on your own feet in the real world because you were protected from bad experiences. your nightmares are giving you a message that this is the area you need to work on - under the risk of destabilising your sense of reality. your writing is a very good answer - you might consider writing a novel in which you explore all the "what if..." that both your conscious and unconscious are in conflict about.

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