Background noise and ‘emotional ears’
5/2/07 Wed 1040
It’s funny to come back to this journal and then see what I wrote last the day before. I’d completely forgotten that image of having me be the ‘working end’—the ‘cutting edge” of a larger Whole of which I am only a part.
It’s Wednesday, & Sharon won’t be in her office tonight. I feel it as a hole. I wonder if the violence in the dreams of the last 2 nights has anything to do with that.
For I had another dream last night that involved some images of brutality.
I am visiting Rich N. in his parent’s home. In this dream we’re in Bend, OR, and there are flashes of being in driveways, and making turns out of parking lots. There is some discussion about his brother George who in the dream I see in glimpses and feel attracted to him and wonder if the attraction is mutual. There’s a sense that he may be a womanizer, and he’s married with children. In the dream I am conscious of raising the age of his children to present day—in pictures they were babies and very small children, back in 1989 when I saw them at Rich’s parents’ house. So I’m accounting for the 18 year’s difference. These kids should be grown, or teenagers at least. Rich and his brothers’ and sister’s families are all there, like a family reunion. I don’t know if I’m there at my own initiative, or if I was invited, because I feel uneasy when Rich and George seem to be gone. Rich’s mother is very nice to me, but I sense it’s more out of being kind, or courteous. It seems there’s an uneasy feeling in the air, that my reasons for being there are gone. The children are much younger than me, so it’s not about playing with them that gives me some legitimacy to stay and wait for Rich and George. I want to stay until they come back, but I feel and fear that there’s a resemblance to my being a little over-familiar in being there as if I were their family and part of the reunion. I think Rich and George come back, and so I feel legitimized again. Then there’s a part where I got into a bathroom and there’s a tiny figure in the bathtub skateboarding. It doesn’t seem at all unusual to me that there would be a very miniaturized human skating in a bath tub. I kind of take it for granted, just like the character did in a movie where the exhibits come to life at night. I look again a moment later, maybe after having used the toilet and washed my hands, and to my surprise the skateboarder is gone. I’d assumed the barriers and hurdles in the skatepark he was skating in were harmless, but it appeared that he may have hit one and was gone as a result. He left behind a full-sized joint which I picked up to put in my pocket for later. I knew it would be a last straw to be caught smoking pot in the Ns’ bathroom, so I was conscious of a decision-making process I went through before putting it away. I thought maybe I’d smoke it with Rick, and/or George later. Then I discover that there are many stashes of huge amounts of drugs and paraphernalia. I think I call Rich’s attention to it and he comes in. We either bag it all, or maybe we lock off the bathroom door, using the bathroom as a bag, in effect. We may have taken some; I think I might be stoned in the dream. Then the whole family is about to go see “the Three Lives of Thomasina”, a movie from my childhood. There is some sort of irritation in the air about not being ready—I’m not sure if this is still Rich’s family. Then thugs break in to the house, looking for the drugs as they’re making a trade worth lots of money with them. They are quick, and brutal. Rich is not revealing that he has the drugs, and they are brutalizing children. His father marches up holding a large bowl or pie plate as a weapon and fearlessly approaches the guy to get in his face but the guy is unfazed and grabs the plate and rams it into Rich’s father’s crotch. He’d been in a very vulnerable position, slightly above the intruder with his legs spread as he bent his knees to get in the face of this guy. So it was a direct hit and he dropped immediately to the ground, groaning. It was awful to witness, and I think, counter-intuitively, that Rich was even less likely to reveal the existence of the drugs, maybe out of some misguided sense that his father would have suffered for nothing if he surrendered it. Then these guys are swarming all over, and I see the brutality going on but with a much more fuzzy focus than when they hit Rich’s dad. I felt terrible dread at seeing more of it, and I feel terrible dread at the prospect of experiencing it.
That is so bizarre, I can’t remember having images this violent in dreams since I was a child. I think I had a fever the last time I had a dream so violent: (it was a man, someone I recognized, maybe as a TV show host? There was some sort of war going on in the background, and he was next to a tent. He had a time bomb handcuffed to his arm, and was trying to be calm about it. But at one point he turned desperate and begged, ‘hurry’. That succumbing to panic was what most affected me about the dream. It bothered me, and made me feel a little sick about the man. As if he was degraded in pleading for help. Perhaps that dream was an early version of that sort of sharp intensely focused feeling of deepest dread. Perhaps I feel there is some degrading, or shedding of dignity that repels me toward the person experiencing it. The fighting for their life and willing to do anything to stay alive. Abject. Perhaps it’s the sword of those highly concentrated feelings that causes the abject groveling. There is something potent and primal, in that feeling that appears when I re-imagine that man saying, “hurry”—begging. Why would I have had experiences in dreams like that at age 7, maybe 8?
And to expand a little on yesterday’s thoughts, the stuff above seems to illustrate more of what I was writing about that fever-pitched hum. A very strong buzzing. And then back to some of my thoughts several months ago about anxiety. In the context of writing the earlier part of the dream, where a social misstep is my first concern (and actually, there is an expression of illegitimacy there, and needing someone to ‘make me’ legitimate.). As I was righting I could feel the buzzing inside me grow and sort of fill me up. No, actually, it wasn’t in response to last night’s dream, but the one from before, the feeling of the imminent feeling of death, and a drive to give life it’s best shot, though it’s unlikely it’ll be effective. That’s what that sound was, in that dream. For some reason I have an aversion to it in others; at least I did as I was writing in that journal. But I’m seeing now that if the background noise is too loud, I can’t ‘hear’ in the foreground. When my overall feeling is a background of high anxiety, then if I feel anxiety in the presence of someone, that only feels like a protrusion sticking up in the midst of that background anxiety. And I’m unable to then discern its voice and what it might mean or need. When I’m talking about this feeling in terms of being social, I see that it would be useful to have the background anxiety cleaned up enough so that each little string can be heard, and responded to. I guess the state of overall anxiety I felt, often feel, and am reading about has been high, and then is it’s OWN cause for anxiety—for, if the purpose of anxiety is survival, then a loud background noise obliterates an important protection I have—the ability to ‘use my emotional ears”, to see what I resonate with, how that resonance feels, and can make choices. I wonder if this is an area where we actually don’t have a choice—the basics of the vibrations of experience.
A better image of what I was saying about ‘resting in’ to emotional pain is of being able to live my life in contact with it—but not have it so painful I have to jerk my consciousness away. I can settle myself around and on it, and call it good. Incorporate the pain into my overall being, as something that rings a deeper note, or provides grounding—a part of The Big Picture. I wonder if that, back when Rick broke up with me, if part of what kept me aloft above it was anxiety? Anxiety about feeling those feelings?
So anyway it seems I need to be alert to my ‘emotional tone’ as I read these diaries—re-experience the ghost of them, in today’s context. I can feel though how easily I slip into that message of high caution—the background anxiety noise. It’s been a false floor, I think, that’s kept me from discerning many things.
I suppose that’s why there’s been a sort of relief at the times that what I’ve been so anxious about has come to pass. Because at least I’m touching solid reality below the fog of anxiety. I’m oriented, even if it’s from the bottom, often of wretched feelings. But a feeling of coming up solidly against something.
In a way I’ve lived my life letting others carry me, and sort of expecting to be carried. Not noticing obvious things, because I don’t need to if I’m being carried. Then reality breaking through where I’m NOT being carried at odds with my sensation and context of BEING carried. I guess that was another source of anxiety too.
So what I was writing about painful feelings is summed up by saying I have to include them as realities in my life. I have to. I can’t exclude anything from my awareness without losing an important part of the picture, or paying consequences. Perhaps the underlying buzz of anxiety is the ‘sound’ of my anxiety screening out the awareness of something that would be an intrusion on my reality. Screening out something that needs to be included and instead is being excluded. Yeah, I suppose that’s a function of anxiety, to repel, to propel (away), refuse to include.
7:10
So instead of seeing Sharon tonight I took my time going to the bookstore to get Theresa my standard gift that I give in this group: a book. I hope she enjoys “The History of Love” the way I got pleasure from it.
So I’m at my usual watering hole, The Coffee Shop.
To check back in on current events I was listening to Dianne Rehm and a discussion about the bill congress sent to him to supplementally fund the war and he vetoed because it includes a timetable for withdrawal. So what does a Democratic (just barely) Congress do to respond? Points being hit on are the political issues: what happens if Congress keeps the pressure on the president to withdraw and troops are withdrawn and then things become really really bad? Most likely the public won’t be saying, “This is what we told them to do”, but will be blaming Democrats.
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