In the dream, I’m a smoker, even though in real life I’m not. In the dream, I’m wearing a baggy jacket and have 1/2 dozen loose cigarette butts in each pocket but no full cigarette. I’m with a bunch of smokers and ask them for one and they all say they don’t have any. I say it’s okay, it doesn’t matter, I’m quitting anyways.
Then an ex-boyfriend arrives. In real life he’s an ex but in the dream I am still trying to salvage the relationship. I ask him if he wants to catch the ferry with me and go do something off the island. At first he disagrees but he concedes with my insistence and he even offers to pay.
I notice right away he starts taking photos with his phone which is a strange & uncharacteristic behaviour of his. He does it so much that he has no emotional connection or interaction with me at all as we wait in line for the ferry, board and start traveling. I see a huge piece of ice float down a river and point it out and he takes a photo and I hear him say, “This one is for you (meaning me)” and then he takes another one saying “And this second one is for you (meaning another woman)” and he sends the second pic to someone.
After seeing him do this 3 times I confront him with it. He doesn’t deny it. I say why didn’t he just tell me and we could have ended amicably. He said he couldn’t tell me. He didn’t want to hurt me.
So I tell him I’m not going on this trip with him and when the ferry stops I board a returning boat to go back home. He continues on.
I feel a mixture of sadness and relief.
When I get back, it’s too late to make it all the way home so I stay at an Air BnB which has a lot of others staying there too. Recollection of this part of the dream is foggy. It seems we were moving furniture around. There were a lot of people but I don’t recall more than that.
When you live with a psychopath they will only be thinking of themselves. They love the feeling of angering people and feed on it like a drug. That’s why they create conflict at every chance they get. If someone you share a home with doesn’t do their own dishes, or their own laundry, or help with meal prep and yet expects you to be contributing equally to things like bill-payments, you just might be dealing with a psychopath.
When you tell someone No, and then they wait a few days and ask again and you say No, and then they wait a few days and ask again and you say No once again, and then they wait a few days and ask again, as though it’s the first time they ever asked and your answer is still No, you might be dealing with a psychopath.
If the person you share a house with eats a lot everything but refuses to get a job and contribute to providing food for the family, you are probably dealing with a psychopath.
If the person you live with has done things which are offensive & crude during the week and then you try to ignore them so you can do things for the children on t he weekend and they “accidentally” touch you on your buttocks or breasts while you walk by, you are likely dealing with a sexually-perverted psychopath.
If you’re driving in a car and the person you are close to is talking in an aggressive tone, talking about self-centered things which are distracting and confusing you and then something happens on the road, like a stone hits the windshield causing a lot of damage, but the person doesn’t see how their negative behaviour distracted you and caused the situation to occur for damage to the car, and refuses to help pay for it, you may be dealing with a psychopath.
If the person you live with watches 12 hours of television, eats chips all day and then goes to bed, you might be dealing with a psychopath.
If the person you suspect is a psychopath has a group of close friends or family who they confide in regularly to convey their version of events (however inaccurate or illusionary they are) and if those close friends or family believe that person’s lies and fabrications without consulting you or judging the situation for themselves, and they collectively turn against you and target you at “the problem” then you might be dealing with a psychopath.
If a person you live with stands at a door, with their arms folded, staring at you until you respond to their unreasonable requests, you are likely dealing with a psychopath.
These are some examples of the kinds of traits you may find in a spouse who is a sociopath or psychopath. The key to identifying a psychopath is realizing that they are “in it” for the long haul. They play the long game. They play to the end. Knowing this you can adjust your actions accordingly and deal with their negative behaviours without allowing them to knock you down or knock you over. When you can flip every negative into a positive you’ll realize that no matter what they do they cannot take you out of your positive space.
Developing positive qualities, new capacities, strengths and skills allows you to keep moving forward no matter what you encounter on the way to achieve your positive vision for yourself and those you love.
Yesterday a post which was written last September in 2017 was published on this blog. For those unfamiliar with the language of metaphor used by dreams to communicate messages about transformation, the dream described in yesterday’s post may have seemed appalling, maybe even scandalous. The post is no longer visible on this website, but for those who did not have the chance to read it, in the 18 hours it was published, I’ll briefly describe that the dream had a scene of sexual abuse in it, with a mother sexually violating her daughter. Some might call that kind of dream a nightmare. These kinds of nightmarish dreams are one of my favourites to work with because they embody a high degree of fear & disgust. With daily attention and diligence, Fear & disgust can be transformed into Courage & Contentment.
Even though the dream scenario was a metaphor and to the best of my knowledge did not depict things which happened in the real world, the reason I decided to publish it is to initiate a conversation through this venue around the complex issues of sexual abuse of children and the society of secrecy which surrounds it.
Coincidentally, there was a show on CBC yesterday which I listened to while driving to work. The show featured an author who was originally from South Africa, and moved to Canada with her family when she was 10. Her book talks about her experience of racism and also of having been sexually abused by someone close to her family. What I found so interesting about her telling of these stories is that she said even when she was sexually assaulted at the age of 7 she knew to keep it a secret. She knew to speak of it would bring shame to her and “mark her” as tainted or spoiled in some way. When she experienced a racist incident at 10 she knew she could turn to her family for help and support. Instinctively she knew the difference between these two types of attacks and way her reaching out for help would be perceived. In the program she described that her father, an outspoken revolutionary, taught her to “not own” the problems of the racist. If someone is ignorant and acts out of a racist mindset, they must be held accountable for their actions. In that way, you give them their problem and do not own it.
But for sexual assaults, it is not so easy to disown the violence. Even as a child she knew to keep it a secret, that the man would not be held responsible, even if she reached out for help and in that way, she sort of “owned” his assault. She owned the problem. It wasn’t hers to own, but she did, because what other options were available to her? None.
The dream I shared yesterday was about this issue. It was about an adult in a position of trust manipulating those in the environment so that she could get away with violating the dignity of someone who she perceived she had power over. When a person perpetrates sexual assault they are trying to go for Power, power over the recipient of the attack, power over those who watch but do nothing, power over the situation which they want to control with a vengeance.
Since the dream was a metaphor, and not about a real life situation, what it means is that the dreamer has someone in their life who is saying things and doing things which are as violent and abhorrent as sexual abuse. To solve the problem in the dream, the dreamer must begin to see themselves as capable of driving the situation forward, out of the power struggle. The sexual assault happened in a car in the dream so that is a metaphor for the solution to drive forward and out of the power struggle.
When I work with women who have experienced domestic violence and when I work with men who are in jail, I often see that the violence they’ve experienced or perpetuated has clouded their abilities to envision a positive future for themselves or others. Trauma has a way of doing this. The part of the brain responsible for responding quickly to threats is the small almond-shaped amegdala, which connects the temporal lobe of the brain and is responsible for fear & aggression. When someone experiences a high degree of fear, the amegdala is activated and a flight or fight or freeze response is triggered. One traumatic event is enough to rewire the brain’s fight or flight response but even more so when there is a pattern of abuse, such as with children growing up in abusive homes, or with women (and men) caught in domestically abusive patterns of behaviour in adulthood.
The work for someone who experienced abuse in childhood is to become conscious and “wake up” to the ways in which the abuse affected them and then change the negative emotions and patterns to more positive. It is more difficult work because many of the abuse scenarios may have happened before the age of 4 and are not a part of the individual’s conscious memories. This is why dreams can be very healing and therapeutic, because the dreams reveal the unconscious memories or fears which have been buried away for so many years.
Alternatively, if a person had not experienced abuse in childhood but had experienced it as an adult, their nightmares can be a direct result of that fear-filled experience and as they work through the metaphors they can process the negative emotions associated with the violence and they can take the lesson from the experience and develop themselves to be able to help others even more than before. The purpose of our lives is to continue to transform, to grow, to change, to evolve so that we can be ever-more capable of supporting and accompanying more and more people in their personal & collective evolution.
When the sexual abuse post was published yesterday there was not a lot of explanation about the metaphor so today I thought I would write more about it even though I am fully aware that our society is just at the very beginning of being able to speak of these atrocities with any degree of capacity. The “Me Too” movement has made great strides in this arena so in a small and trite way I’m addressing the issue of sexual abuse and the way it is handled by all parties through occasionally sharing violent dreams on this blog.
 I have a very positive vision of the future where families are healthy and free of violence, where children are safe & protected and free from threats of all forms of abuse. When I write about things which are negative or difficult in nature, I do it to expose the Negative Truth. In this way, the lesson can be learned and more positive relationships can be developed. That is my aim. That is my intention. That is my goal. And that is the purpose of this blog.
Last night I dreamed of being in a large hotel-type place and I was in a room with an elderly woman who was handicapped physically but very alert & intelligent mentally. It’s not clear why I was there although it felt like she knew something about a crime her husband was involved in or something like that and I was getting info from her at the same time as helping her with some of her physical ailments.
Anyway, at one point she positioned herself on the couch in a bit of a contortion and she asked me to massage sore areas on her back which I proceeded to do (at that time someone came up from behind me but I didn’t pay them any attention) but then she turned herself around without alerting me and she lost her balance and she hit her head on the floor and when I reached to help her I could see the blow killed her. I quickly put her head back on the couch pillow and shouted to the front desk to call 911 even though I knew she needed a coroner not paramedics.
I stood up and went to the door and the attendant gave me thumbs up that paramedics were on their way and when I turned to look back I found that the elderly woman was sitting up in a wheel chair. She was fine. I was confused because she had been dead and I approached her cautiously and turned her around towards me. Then I saw the woman was black and shorter and was not at all the woman who I had just been talking with but the person in the room was saying this was her and I knew it wasn’t. On the one hand I was relieved because her not being dead was better for me because I didn’t want the questions from paramedics since I was the last one to see her alive. If she was not dead then I wouldn’t get questioned. But this woman was not the same woman and the man was up to some sort of hoax and he wanted me to play along. I was afraid of him and I had no idea what to do next and how to be prepared for when the paramedics arrived. How would I explain what was going on? They weren’t even trained to be able to really understand what I would try to convey. The man in the room was a psychopath and he wanted to make me look crazy. I was trying to think of how to tell the truth of what had happened without him harming me or the woman he was bribing to lie and i was wondering what happened to the real woman? Where did he hide her.
So this is another trauma-related dream coming from working with the prisoners. This is about the psychopath behaviour. They are very good at staying in the shadows and then messing things up when they think no one is looking. They also think they can get away with murder. In my dream, I saw the truth of the situation and was not going to let him get away with it.
When there is an abuse of power in a relationship someone or both partners are seeking always to take over the life of the relationship.
Depending on the ego of the individuals involved the conflict patterns will vary.
But one thing that remains the same is that the negative behaviour is based on Fear.
Sometimes in a relationship, one or the other people take on the role of being the “fixer” so when issues show up then the “fixer” starts fixing. The problem with this scenario is that it keeps “the fixer” tied to the “breaker” in a negative way. And since it is the intention of the “breaker” to always keep breaking things, well then nothing can truly ever get fixed.
This can leave “the fixer” feeling depleted, embarrassed, emotionally drained and without a positive vision of where things can go next. It is common for empathetic people to be drawn to those who are perpetually negative because they always feel that they can help when in truth they can’t. This is such a big lesson to learn.
A relationship of this nature is not balanced or harmonious and it’s not good for either individual. It would be better for the empathetic and caring “fixer” to find ways to avoid the conflict, to avoid the negative behaviours and to surround themselves with more positive people who are not taking so much from the relationship.
Dreams For Healing 
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