Healing dream
In 1982 Miriam was a young mother in her 30s when she heard that her father was ill in hospital. She and her family lived three hours’ drive away, and went to visit him on the Sunday. She and her mother and sisters sensed that he could be dying, but the doctors did not think so. Then he died suddenly on the Monday night. The dream came 10 days later.
Dream Report: Healing from a Boil
I dreamed of a large open boil that looked like a crater. This was the only image. Although the wound was open it looked clean and about to begin healing. I felt I was the boil and an observer of it at the same time.
I experienced a great deal of energy being thrust upwards from within the boil in the dream. This seemed like the energy of a volcano coming from deep within. The energy felt a pure force, as if it was a cathartic process in motion.
As we were leaving Dad in hospital he asked me “Are you going too?” As I had no other arrangements for care of our children I was going, and said so, even though I sensed that Dad would die soon and he was asking if I would be there for him. Also the hospital staff were giving no indication that he was near death so I thought their judgment would be better than mine.
I felt devastated that I had not been with Dad when he died and since his death was sudden, during the night, he died alone. I thought if we had been told by medical staff that Dad was dying we could have made decisions as a family to take turns to be with him.
Two days later, two Doctors made an appointment and visited my mother and me at her home. They humbly apologized for my father’s death, saying they had no sense that he was so ill, and asking could they do a postmortem to establish the cause of his death. He was found to have died from septicemia that came from a tooth he had had removed about a month before his death.
Prior to my dream I felt unable to grieve normally for Dad as I felt excessive and irrational guilt that I had abandoned him at the time when he most needed support and loving care. I was unable to accept my leaving before his death as a realistic behavior in the circumstance.
But the dream liberated me by helping me to accept what seemed like purity of intent in the circumstance. The energy coming up under the boil seemed to me like the deepest longings of love and compassion. This I accepted as loving energy that I felt I needed to focus on my husband and children at that time. As well, the fact the boil was clean, even though raw, seemed a positive optimistic sign of healing potential. The boil as a whole, I interpreted as the great pain of the loss of the father I loved.
Recently, in working on the dream, other associations with boils have come to me. First, when I was separated from my parents in going to boarding school at 13 years I got boils. Second, the boil could represent the look of my father’s gum where the tooth had been removed. Third, a Doctor suggested, my dream could represent the releasing of collective guilt of all who had failed in care of my father.
Miriam’s dream is remarkable for its simplicity and aptness as a metaphor of healing. When a toxic foreign substance invades the body, its natural defences build up pressure to expel the toxic material, like a volcano erupting through the earth’s crust. Miriam’s grief at her beloved father’s death was compounded by painful irrational guilt that she hadn’t been there to support him when he was dying. Then her inner spirit or psyche created the metaphor of a boil as a way to cleanse the emotions, and allow her to heal in a natural way.