Dreaming Your Memories

There is a strange thing going on with the human mind. Certain childhood memories linger on for a lifetime and they lose nothing of their energy. Even if the memory is disturbing, crass, or violent: within its center there is something smoldering. Like glowing pieces of coal. These memories are like hot beads on the string of life. And the remembering of the memory is like circling those hot centers. Trying to make sense of them.

I have a memory like that:

I am around four years old, and in front of my grandparents’ house in Stuttgart, Germany. There are stone steps leading down from the apartment building to the main street. I stand at the bottom looking up. This is how the memory starts. I know I have fallen down the stairs, but I cannot remember the fall itself. As I stand there, I am just aware that I fell down. How and why, I don’t know. I start climbing the steps one by one. I am slightly shaken, but not crying, I don’t feel pain. As I go up, I see my grandmother above me. She is descending the stairs and coming towards me. We meet somewhere in the middle. She stands above me, behind her is the sky. She says nothing, reaches out and touches the top of my head. This feels soothing. Then she retrieves her hand. She turns over her hand, and with wide eyes shows me her palm: it is full of blood.

Usually, we review these events and ask: why did this happen? Why do I remember this? What is the significance? How did this shape me as a person? What is the pattern? And so on. The memory is sorted and contextualized and put into categories together with other memories. The result is not satisfying. The memory is ravaged by analysis, and this leaves a stale aftertaste.

There is another way.

If I look at the above memory as if it were a dream, the results are surprising:

Within my example, what first springs to mind is the oppositional movement on the stone steps. I move up, and my grandmother moves down. It’s a descent from above by a wiser, older mother figure, while the young boy seems to strive up, after “taking the fall”. They meet in the middle. One could say “between heaven and earth meet the masculine and the feminine, the past and the future”. Then follows the motion of the hand, the touching the top of the head. The gesture reminds of a blessing. But the blessing reveals something: a wounding. The grandmothers are wide open. One can say: awake. The “blessing” has shown one’s own mortality. “The Wound” is also an opening in the head: a realization.

The memory now becomes a deeply meaningful. It has now revealed its “hot center”, its paradoxical quality. It is the paradox, which has created the symbolic content of the memory.

And it goes further: the mind, though its symbolic meaning making ability, is fascinated by exactly this (!) event. Not a different one. This one. As if for a short moment the mind and the world are connected and not separate.

And that what connects both is something which transcends the event itself.