Grief Dream after Separation
Joan was in her 60s when her husband left her, after 40 years together, to live with another woman. This she found very hard to bear. She was also close to retirement from her full-time work. This distressing dream came nine months after the breakup.
Dream report:
Cold, Empty House
I was feeling my way around a cold, very dark, empty, unknown, badly designed house. There was a bitterly cold draught blowing, no matter which room I was in. I felt very frightened and bewildered. Eventually I discovered a high window through which the wind seemed to be entering. It sounded as though a storm was coming. The window was dirty, the hinges were rusty – it seemed to have been open forever. I had to stretch to reach it, but I shut it, with great difficulty.
I woke feeling very shaken at coming out of something so scary. It was so clear, and I don’t often remember dreams. The cold dark, empty, draughty house felt like my life after the separation from my husband. I was still experiencing feelings of bleak loneliness and abandonment, chilling every corner of my life. Shutting the window represents my decision to close, shut, put behind me something which made my life cold and bleak – but it was a very difficult thing to do. The baby, which appeared only after I had shut the window, was a symbol of my new life – possibilities of new joys, new activities, etc. There was a good feeling of doing something positive (bathing the baby) in spite of the still gloomy surroundings.
Then I found I was carrying in my arms a warm, plump, very active baby. I wanted to put it down somewhere while I was getting its bath ready, but was afraid it would roll off the table in the room I was in – which seemed to be some kind of kitchen-living room – still almost pitch black. The baby was quite unaware of its gloomy surroundings – it was gurgling happily.
I now noticed a man sitting at the table, reading a book (still in the dark!) He was a stranger to me, with dark hair, apparently uninvolved, remote, oblivious to the cold and gloom, engrossed in his book. He reluctantly agreed to look after the baby.
The unknown man was like my husband in many ways, dark, uninvolved. But he was also my own animus, my own dark, controlled masculine energy. There was now a real need to involve that side of myself in caring for my new life, instead of trying to escape the situation. I needed to activate latent parts of me, take more initiative on my own. So I decided to create a new ending to the story:
I turned the lights on, and sat down to have a shared meal with the stranger-man!
From the time of working with the dream, Joan began to rebuild her life in positive new ways. In real life, Joan was starting to create a new life for herself, including selling the big house, and buying a smaller, cosier one to suit herself. The dream crystallised her emotional situation: finding herself without light, warmth or comfort in her "living-space," yet responsible to nurture a new life. Symbolically, the kitchen is a place of transformation, where raw materials are trimmed and cooked to be used for nutrition, so her new ending is highly appropriate to symbolise the beginning of big changes in her life. And getting to know the strange inner man symbolises the move to befriend and mobilise inner resources she had hardly known she had.