How Do You Know What Is In Your Unconscious?

Let’s start with the easy stuff first:  nightmares.    They are defined as something panicky,  anxiety producing, terror, proximity to death, strangling, feeling crushed,  out of breath and cannot breathe. And that is just the beginning.  But where does it come from?  Why, your unconscious, of course. So why don’t we feel it all of the time?  Because at night in your sleep you live in the unconscious and your gating system kicks in to keep it hidden and suppressed.  But, and it is a major “but,” the gating system is weaker when we are unconscious, which, after is what sleep is. It is only when the charge value of the imprint is so great (heavy methylation) that it can burst through to higher levels and provoke conscious/awareness to make us  aware of the pain and terror.  Here we become aware and awake to stop the terror/pain.   Awareness becomes the final defense against up-surging feelings.   We are suddenly conscious and now aware of the unconscious; but we don’t say, Oh my, something is up from down bellow.  We say instead: I just had a terrible nightmare, and we do not question it any further.  We think it is the nightmare itself and not what provoked it; not what giant force lay below to heave it to the top.  That is how alienated it is from conscious/awareness the precise origins in our remote past.   When we walk around the world, aware and awake, we can keep busy and keep deep feelings hidden.

Now there are sleep clinics who treat it as a disease and do all kinds of ploys to deal with it.  Not once have I heard them discuss it as a memory imprint on lower brain levels.  Not once a mention of the unconscious.   But the nightmare says loudly what it is and what force it has; a force that can burst through various gating sites/levels  to bring us sharply into awareness.   So we need to be aware to stop that force in the unconscious: hyperaware to block the unconscious.   Enter the intellectuals.   They continue to provide awareness in lieu of consciousness.

If we look closely we see that all of the reactions/symptoms of the nightmares are exactly those of the traumas at birth and before.    No air, feeling crushed and squeezed, blocked, no exit, need space, need to move, etc.  Instead, what they need to do is to deal with act-out against the feeling.  Aah, another sign of the unconscious at work; forcing our act-outs, our continuous behavior which is repetitious and compulsive and also obsessive.   In one sense, psychotics or deeply disturbed individuals are running off their nightmares.  For obsessives we need to look deeper.  What is the function of the act-outs?  To bring closure to the early traumas.  To finish the sequence; and no act of will can stop it because it is most often a life-and-death matter.  An example:  we have patients that have to be constantly on the move.  They plan and make projects without cease, just so long as they travel and go and do.  That is trying to provide a proper ending to the “no exit.”  Of, “I can’t move and can’t get out.  If I stay still I will die.”   And many of these patients when deprived of constant movement do feel hopeless and helpless.  In therapy they finally can arrive at the memory.  Over many months, however.  Getting there too soon can be overwhelming and produce mental aberrations, as the top level becomes aware much too soon, as is the case in nightmares where there is the burst-through of terror that cannot be dealt with immediately.  That is why Primal Therapy is done in small steps, a bit at a time.

Let us not confuse a feeling with a reaction to it.  Because when we do that we start to treat the wrong thing—the reaction.   If is something makes me angry cause they scared me and made me afraid, we need to treat the anger and then the fear.  First the reaction  and then the feeling.  We must not stop at just the reaction because we miss the first, basic step. That is the stop that is resolving; the stop that contains the feeling that needs experiencing and resolution. Banging the pillow and screaming out will never get us anywhere; it does not involve the context of the feeling and the feeling itself.   You can cry and scream; and then you can really feel.  Feeling is the answer.

An allegory of this is the big planner who has scheme after scheme to make it big and get rich.   He never gets anywhere because he forgot about evolution and the need for a methodical pace.  The system knows this in preventing us from becoming conscious prematurely.  Except when one takes gate/crushing drugs that plunges us into the unconscious. And then you know what happens?   You become “one with the cosmos,” and other pseudo almost psychotic states.   Too much is being released forcing the top level neo-cortex to try to make sense of the input; to try to make it rational, providing rationales for what is happening.   And even over time the person is engaged in finding constant rationales through booga booga.  They call it mystical experiences and I call it pre-psychotic conduct.

They come to believe in magic, in special people who have all of the answers, who will lead us and guide us toward Nirvana.  Or special nutrients or exercises provided by experts; never realizing that they have the answers inside of them; all they need to know is already there. They can get there and trust themselves if they know about  how reality awaits.   When you have lost touch with that self and therefore can no longer trust it you need to believe in something else, something “far out” of this world.  That is when the boundaries of your existence cannot surpass the outer layer of your skin.  You become all wound up with yourself, looking for answer after answer.  They take special oxygen pills never knowing where the lack of oxygen lies.  They do learn a lot about nutrition, which is important. But the world of feeling and the world of booga booga never seem to come together.  One can be real in one’s work and irrational outside of it.

So for those therapists who don’t believe in the unconscious, which is the case in the cognitive/Behaviorist world, ask them where nightmares come from and why?  They have an evolutionary function; to keep us alive by keeping us aware of danger. The problem is that now the danger is inside and we need to be aware of it to avoid menace.  But what if we are only aware of danger from outside? We will die much sooner from the danger inside which we have neglected.