About two weeks ago, I had a dream. A dream that confronted me for multiple days, and made me contemplate a lot of things about myself. I had been feeling some anxiety a few days before because of some personal issues I’ve been dealing with, and I wasn’t able to sleep. I was tossing and turning for a few hours and when I finally fell asleep, I had a dream that night.
In the dream I was in the bathroom of my Miami Beach apartment. My all-white bathroom with the occasional stains of old age. White square tiles all throughout the bathroom walls that look like they were first installed in the 1960’s, when my apartment building was first built. Anyways, the dream started off with me looking at the mirror and seeing an old lady staring back at me. I remember feeling surprised at what I was seeing, but also in the dream I knew it was me. The old lady in the mirror was wearing a white shirt, and her complexion had a pearly grey color. She had wrinkles all over her face, a drooping face, and loose skin on her neck. She looked like she was 100 years old, but worse if that makes sense. She had grey, frizzy hair, and her yellow teeth were revealed with the evil grin she had.
In the dream, I remember staring at this woman and feeling afraid. The more afraid I felt, the scarier and uglier she got. Her grin became larger and more malicious, her teeth got pointier, her eyes became darker, and her complexion became duller. It was almost like I was staring at an aged corpse. There came a point in the dream where I realized how afraid I was getting and stopped myself. I decided to stare this woman back in the face and tell her through my mind I wasn’t afraid of her. Once I stood up to her, she got less scary and ugly. Her eyes got brighter, her teeth got less pointy, and her complexion brightened until she looked like a regular old woman.
When I woke up the next day, it really got me thinking. The first thing I thought is we have so much internal conflict that creates anxiety, depression, anger, etc. that gets worse over time if you don’t face it head on. Sometimes we’re afraid to go into the depths of our soul, to encounter the darkness we have within us, and the darkness becomes darker when you avoid it. It becomes scarier when you’re afraid of it. I can say from personal experience, the more afraid I was of my own anxiety and facing it, the scarier it got. The more I avoided, the more trapped I felt in my mind.
It also got me thinking of the shadow that Carl Jung, an early 20th century Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist, would frequently reference. Carl Jung describes the theory of the shadow as the darkness that lives inside of us, and he theorized that it could manifest itself in dreams as characters, animals, demons, etc. We all have traits inside of us that are malignant. Need for sex, power, feelings of envy, fear, chaos, and we try so hard to mask all these qualities to appear good to the world. Carl Jung’s theory of the shadow consists of all of us constructing a persona since we are young. This persona grows and evolves with the approval of others, and the parts that get rejected we tend to hide from others and from ourselves. So, what happens when you don’t face the nasty parts of yourself? They don’t get swept under the rug, but rather they manifest themselves in your unconscious. Things that get buried in your unconscious come out in stressful situations.
In my case, stressful situations bring out fear and insecurity in me. I immediately shrink and lose my confidence, I feel like everyone rejects me, and I become afraid of everything.
To me, the dream I had a few weeks ago was very symbolic of what happens when you avoid your own shadow, when you aren’t brutally honest with yourself and face the things about yourself you hate- or are afraid of.
So, what’s in your shadow and buried deep in your unconscious? Unmask it – you’ll realize it’s not as scary as you think.
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