Issues From Past May Not Surface Until Later

Dear Nancy: I am a healthy, married 66-year-old woman with a comfortable life. I am the second of seven children. As a child I was singled out and suffered extreme emotional and physical abuse by my mother. She died in 1981, and this is the first dream I have had about her. - Lou

I’m in the kitchen of a home I once owned. (In other dreams this house has been haunted.) I feel a strong urge to go upstairs to an unfinished bedroom. I’m very anxious because I don’t know what I will find behind the door. I open the door and see a bed at the far end of the room. It’s dark, but I can tell someone is lying on the bed. Although I’m afraid, I go closer. My mother leaps out of the bed and grabs me. She is angry and ugly. Terrified, I struggle to get away. I wake up yelling, “Who are you? Who are you?”

Dear Lou: Houses in dreams usually represent the dreamer, with each part of the house a different part of the dreamer’s psyche. Could your memory of your mother’s abuse and the emotional pain of it still be haunting you?

During our phone conversation, you mentioned you had resolved the relationship by “disconnecting” yourself from your mother. Your mother, locked away in the upstairs room - an unfinished room - suggests this is an issue you have ignored and avoided. It is “unfinished business.”

Was there an incident to cause you to have this dream now? Events and people in the dreamer’s current life can “trigger” past issues and buried memories to resurface. You mentioned that your sister, who reminds you of your mother in several ways, recently visited you.

Settings can give us important clues about issues being addressed in our dreams. You mentioned the abuse usually took place in the bedroom - where you find your mother in the dream.

This dream may be an invitation from your deeper self to heal the painful childhood wounds your mother inflicted upon you. I believe long-buried issues resurface only when a person has the capacity and ability to deal with them. A good counselor can help guide you through this.

Tips for readers: When we begin to watch our dreams, we have no idea where the dream world will take us. To be open to the dream, we must become vulnerable, which can be difficult when faced with threatening images such as found in the dream above. Sometimes we would rather just forget the dream, pretend it didn’t happen, that it won’t affect us. But all dreams come in the service of healing and growth.

Opening to the dream’s message may be painful and challenging, and yet dreams always offer us an invitation to heal the past by bringing to light old issues and situations affecting us now. The process that begins with a dream of terror and remembered pain opens us to the awareness that we are in need of healing and balance.

This column is intended as entertainment. But psychologists who work with clients’ dreams say that dreams can hold a tremendous amount of significance; a particularly disturbing or repetitive dream may indicate the need to see a therapist.

, DataTimes MEMO: Nancy Huseby Bloom has studied dreams for 18 years. Dreams may be sent to her c/o The Spokesman-Review, P.O. Box 2160, Spokane, WA 99210-1615, or fax, (509) 459-5098. Please send a short summary of the circumstances in your life and include your name, address and phone number. Bloom conducts dream groups on a regular basis. For information, call 455-3450.