A recurring nightmare
Gwen, now in her fifties, had a very unpleasant recurring nightmare for 20 years. It began when she was a mother of four sons, and was married to a man who refused to listen to her whenever she tried to tell him that she wasn’t coping.
I would be in places where people wanted me to talk to them. My mouth would fill up with little grey air-gun pellets, like stones, hundreds of them, all in a gluey gelatinous mass. People would ask me, What’s the matter? I couldn’t speak, so I’d put my hand in my mouth to take the mess out, and throw away a handful, but then it would fill up again, coming up my windpipe from somewhere round my diaphragm, suffocating me. I couldn’t get air out, or the stones out. They’d ask me why I wasn’t talking, and I’d keep on taking handfuls out, over and over, till I would wake up panicky and utterly frustrated.
I used to lie there, wondering what on earth it meant. The marriage broke up in frustration, but I still didn’t make the connection till I went to a dream workshop at 50. The facilitator asked me to draw the pellets in my mouth, which made it clearer. Then she asked me what in my life I had not been able to talk about, and I started to recall all the frustrations of not being able to communicate. I never had that dream again, thank goodness.
Gwen’s dream was an accurate portrayal of her emotional experience. She could not get the words out to express her feelings of frustration in her marriage. Air-gun pellets are a surprisingly good metaphor for angry words – shooting without intending to kill. They came from deep inside her, endlessly blocking her mouth in a gluey mess of feelings unexpressed. In fact, there were earlier issues of abuse in her life she had not been able to talk about either.
This experience in the group was the beginning of a healing journey for Gwen, as she recognised her desperate need to be heard. We are left wondering: what if she had been able to understand the message of her nightmare when it first came? If she had sought counselling then, could she have learned how to communicate better with her husband? There are two sides to a relationship of course, but her own inner spirit was doing its best to show her what was wrong on her side.