There is a feeling of great security in resistance. Resistance gives us that solid sense of refusal, of the hard, reassuring solidity of a wall when our back is pressed up against it. Our backs against the wall feels good, it evokes the Americanism – the expression when a friend has “got our back,” meaning they are looking out for us. But whether we are looking back into the past, wanting to run backward, having someone watch our back, watching someone else’s back, or wanting back what we have given away or lost, any reference whatsoever to the past is dying – dying in order to be reborn as our new self, our true self, our natural identity before the conditioning, the indoctrination, and the struggle to survive in life came about and absorbed our spontaneity, our vibrancy, and our responsiveness to existence.

We are called upon to be self-referring, to be truly adult, to be not authoritarian but authoritative. To rely on our inner knowing as well as our inner unknowing is a demand now and it relies in turn on the bringing together of our unconscious and conscious worlds, our inner and outer worlds, past and future into the relative present, as our wholeness and our daring strives to overcome our resistance.

Dreams of Birth

People at this stage may have experience important dreams of giving birth. These dreams may help to describe and point out where they are still holding on. Here is one such dream:

This dream expresses the fears the dreamer has about transformation. The new birth is the transformational process; the baby represents the transformed self. Transformation has not yet occurred hence the lack of attention to the baby or the unreality of it since he doesn’t appear in the dream. The dreamer fears that she may not be able to trust the birth process. She is worried that all her plans, predictions, and preferences for the birth or transforming will be ignored. Not only that she is anxious that the process will not be complete and that everything will be sewn up, or finished with the source of her baby’s nutrients, the placenta (which represents her therapy, her inner work which nourished her inner journey and brought her to this point) concealed and atrophying inside her, perhaps poisoning her… that her entire inner journey will have been for no purpose at all like a placenta discarded, no longer useful. The sister who appears in the dream represents poignamt betrayal, particularly because she was close to her in waking life.

Dreams of Making Love

Dreams of birth go hand in hand with dreams of love-making and intimacy as we approach the threshold. Here is an example; the dreamer is the same woman:

I am making love with my first boyfriend, Sean. We have had a lot of difficulty attempting to be alone together and now it is lovely, beautiful, and very sensual. The windows are wide open and I begin to feel a little uncertain about people looking in and seeing us. It is Sunday morning and I am due to be at church. I’m not sure who I want to please, but I feel a lot of pressure to attend the church service, when really I want to stay in bed with Sean.

The first boyfriend refers to first love – original primal love, which is psychologically the love of ourselves in our whole form or pure form, unsullied by life’s insinuations or insults. At the brink of transformation the dreamer refers back to the closest, nearest event of a primal nature in her life. Making love symbolizes union (remembering other kinds of sexual activity are likely to symbolize something else). The windows are open showing us that the dreamer is concerned or unconfident about others or perhaps about being seen, perhaps in her transformed state. She is concerned about what she will become when she has passed the Threshold.

Richard Harvey is a psycho-spiritual psychotherapist, spiritual teacher, and author. He is the founder of The Center for Human Awakening and has developed a form of depth-psychotherapy called Sacred Attention Therapy (SAT) that proposes a 3-stage model of human awakening. Richard can be reached at [email protected].

Blog entry #174