In one of her stories dedicated to the topic of emigration, Dina Rubina said “the soul is divided in half” and for many of those who have gone through any kind of a radical change, that phrase is very clear.
I would like to start with the concept of home. After all, speaking about the immigrant dreams, we are always meaning to say about the relationships with home in the inner and outer space. Where do I belong, and do I belong at all? Where is home? Is it here where I am, left behind, or is it just to be found?
Passing space through imagination, we inhabit it inside our unconscious, we are making it ours. We are mapping our soul in accordance with it. Our life begins from the cozy space of the mother's womb, then moving to the "father's house". We inhabit it as well as it inhabits us. The house is built into us at the physiological level. Even in the dark, we can walk along its corridors, feel for the handle of the door or find the necessary drawer. We repeat the same movements, wandering through its nooks, we physically remember.
This happens with every familiar space. I still remember in details the way from home to the metro station in Moscow. I remember that part of the road where I always remembered the dreams of the last night.
Feelings are spread in space, both inside and outside. The space plays an essential psychological role in our life. Localization in space is more important for the psyche than chronology. And the chronology of the dream, the period about which it wants to tell us, is often communicated precisely through the place: it contains the experiences of that segment of life. When I started working with dreams, I have written extensively about the landscapes of the unconscious. After all, the place of action is determined by its affiliation: when you see some specific apartment in your dream, most likely it wants to report on experiences related with the period when you lived in it, feelings and emotions that are relevant in this space.
Gaston Bachelard wrote: “The normal unconscious knows how to make itself at home everywhere, and psychoanalysis comes to the assistance of the ousted unconscious, of the unconscious that has been roughly or insidiously dislodged”.
The exercise:
Think for a moment and imagine the home of your unconscious. Its geography. How does it look, how comfortable is it in this home? Where is the most intimate space for you in this house?
Is this home your childhood house? Or a fantasy, made up bit by bit from the spaces of life?
Perhaps you would like to draw it?
In addition to the space and events of our past, the unconscious contains a potential “home”, the Self. It builds up in us through the process of individuation and self-discovery. And through this thought I would like to draw a thread from the past to the potential. After all, the soul contains all these dimensions: past, present, future and eternal.
The unconscious and dreams bind into a single, continuous continuum, form integrity. Although the Ego is not always ready to accept it with all those feelings and experiences that are stored in the hidden places of our inner world: fear, guilt, shame, anger, grief, homesickness, loneliness, unaccepted happiness.
But is there a homesickness at all? I think yes. Always. It manifests together with consciousness, as of a lost paradise, regardless of whether the experience of moving has happened to us in a day life, we all have moved from the unconscious to conscious state of mind, left Edem. This kind of psychological refuge and the relationship with it, as well as its with reality, largely determine the level of adaptation. Even if the image of this paradise is difficult to compose from the surroundings offered by the past and the present, and especially in this case. How deep is the difference between this refuge and my reality? Am I hiding in it, or do I still choose to build my dream home in the present, using it as the reference?
Y. V. Vlasova in one of her lectures talked about such a psychological refuge using the example of the sad fairy tale "The Little Match Girl". There, the heroine, an orphan who sees the world from its hostile side, does not have the psychological tools to build a relationship with reality, eventually dies, lighting matches one after another. Their light allows her to escape to this psychological refuge, where there is food, a loving grandmother and warm house.
However, normally, such a psychological refuge can provide us with a resource and inspiration for building an actual present.
The more spaces and experiences we assimilate into the home of our unconscious, the more difficult and at the same time easier it is to relate to this lost paradise as our identity is being transformed. We can come very close to it in reality, or vice versa, move far away. Perhaps both at the same time? After all, there is a huge difference in leaving for something or from something. And this will manifest itself not only in relationships with the home of the past, but also in building a relationship with the home of the present, in the degree of readiness to assimilate a new culture around, including it in one's own identity.
But regardless of this, the soul really acquires these additional dimensions: before and after, here and there, a fantasy of “what if”.
“What if” is always contained in us and any dream, in essence the dream is a kind of exercise in this, inviting us to be with the Other and Different, showing that each of us contains absolutely everything and we just need to find the courage to give it place in our soul and establish a dialogue.
Around the second year of university, I had a dream: I was sitting in a lesson at school and the teacher loudly notifies the whole class - “So, children, and now we open our passports and write“ Islam ”in the column for religion.
I remember back then this dream amused me very much and even though I wondered what such Middle Eastern my Self is calling me to include in my identity? But then I reacted more with resistance. All this seemed very alien to me and caused rejection.
It is important to say that at that time Israel practically did not exist on my mental map of the world. I am Jewish from the side of my paternal grandfather, whom I never knew, and this identity was practically not represented in our family, being limited to casual mentions. Looking back, I understand that it left an imprint on me. It's like a quarter of your soul remains filled with speculation. At the same time, all the pregnancy, my parents were sure that they would leave for Jaffa, practically sat on suitcases, but then changed their minds, I learned about this much later, after the move. I often think about this story when I catch myself looking in the direction of old Jaffa now and feeling a strange, unlike and completely irrational nostalgia.
And now, 10 years later, after this dream, already 4 years as an Israeli, I am writing about it, and think, how did it happen, that suddenly I ended up here? And how amazing is it that my dreams even then seemed to lead me to the Middle East?
One of my Instagram followers also shared some interesting dreams with me: “I had a dream that I am at home in Istanbul, checking my work mail and see a message coming that my future employer bought me a ticket to Paris.
And the second dream is that the artist Francis Bacon gives me a tour of his exhibition at the Center Pompidou, and I tell him: "I'm sorry, but I work in another museum." To which he replies: "You are a fool, come to me."
How this dream was played out: the dreamer came to work in the Louvre, and then she was lured to the Pompidou Center, where there was just an exhibition of Bacon.
But what kind of dreams do we see when the fact of the move has already happened? It is certainly worth mentioning that the topic of emigration in a dream can be distinguished very conditionally. In this case, we can focus either on the factor of the presence of certain images and symbols, or on the subjective sensation from a dream. But if in the case of specific images this is understandable, with a subjective feeling it is much more difficult. Potentially, in almost any dream, given the relevant life context, we can find something on the topic of finding a place. But that will involve detailed analysis, which stage such dreams may not reach. After all, if we ask about the dreams on the topic of emigration, in the absence of indicating symbols, the dream will not be taken into consideration.
Even before the conference, my friends and I often shared our dreams and found one similar motive, which I then discovered in other sources. The motive of "emigrant dreams" is the following: in a dream you return to your homeland, you feel good there (or not, it may vary), but in one moment you realize that you cannot go back to the country of immigration, most often because you lost your documents or missed the last plane. Or sometimes you would just stay in the dream space questioning 'what the hell am I doing here, I want to be back'. Such dreams are not occur for everyone, but they are very common.
Here are just a few of them:
"as if I returned home, it is not clear why, how and why, the boss laughs angrily and says - well, I told you not to quit, I asked you - I persuaded, and you ?! ... and now your place is taken. For some reason I am bustling somewhere, I start to work, save some money, look for ways to return to Italy ...
.. some details change a little, but I worry terribly in a dream and wake up in a cold sweat with relief that everything is fine and I'm here ... "
“I'm back in Moscow, at my old job at school. I’m standing in the corridor and the bell rings. I’m insanely ashamed and uncomfortable that I’m here again, the schoolchildren are looking strangely. Why am I here at all, should I be in Israel? How can I get back? "
"Oh, horror ... I dream almost every night, I leave home, I come to my old job, they take me, but they give me the most disgusting section of work, the worst table, etc. I want to go back and then same horror, planes stop flying, or my husband does not want me to return ... "
"It is one of the nightmares I have. Something like this: I am leaving for Italy from Russia. I want to leave. But it does not work, because the plane was late or the documents were lost, or the planes do not fly. And the visa is about to expire tomorrow. "
I was also interested to find out if those who lived outside the post-Soviet space have similar dreams. The sample here is not that large, but here is an example of a dream from a native Argentinian who moved to Israel:
"I am flying back to Argentina, but before leaving the airport, the Israelis at the border tell me that if I return, I will not be able to enter the country and will lose my citizenship. I still go and then it turns out that I do not have the necessary documents, to cross the border of Argentina.
Then the picture changes, and my friends and I eat steaks. "
We often tend to be one or another, choose something instead of embracing it all at once. The unconscious here seems to call on the dreamer to stay in that space in between for a bit. Digest and assimilate it. After all, a person is much more than the identity, despite the fact that the country certainly plays an important role in building it up.
In the process of experiencing a dream, with the involvement of emotional experience, we activate the same areas of the brain that are responsible for these emotions during wakefulness.
But what is the connection between fear in sleep and emotions after waking up? To answer this question, the researchers conducted an experiment. They asked 89 volunteers to keep a dream diary for a week. Every morning, immediately after waking up, participants in the experiment wrote whether they could remember the dream, and, if so, what emotions they experienced in the process. At the end of the test week, each participant was examined using functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).
The scientists then showed subjects both neutral and disturbing images such as robbery. The result, according to the researchers, was startling: those who had nightmares longer and more often reacted less emotionally to these negative images. "They had less activation of the insula, cingulate cortex and amygdala when viewing negative images. In addition, it turned out that the prefrontal cortex was more active, and this is the area of the brain that can suppress the activity of the amygdala in anxiety situations and thus , to ensure that we are not paralyzed by fear and can act according to the situation" (Virginie Sterpenich (University of Geneva, Switzerland) et al., Human Brain Mapping, doi: 10.1002 / hbm.24843).
Such nightmares are standardly played out in people who have experienced or are in a state of extreme stress, and the fear of losing the conquered new living space is certainly one of those.
The unconscious, through dreams, helps us to comprehend and live through this difficult experience of detachment from the place. Provide an emotional experience that helps to cope with the trauma caused by it in the safe space of the dream. Sometimes we doubt whether the choice to make the move was the right one, how our life would develop, "what if," but how our Ego reacts to this depends more on the attitude. But there is another aspect here: in the context of such a split space and a change in the internal concept of home, identity, we often begin to project the inner contents of the psyche into these spaces "before" and "after". Often this is a projection of the Shadow onto one of them. Everything that we consider as unwanted, everything that is difficult for us to accept in our soul.
Waking up after such a dream, we often stop at the thought of how good it is that I am here and these complex emotions are not so relevant now. But just after such moments, in a safe space of communication with oneself, it is worth returning to this dream image, taking a walk through it, trying to listen to your feelings, and interacting with the characters of the dream. What is it about for you? Why did the unconscious consider it necessary to include you in this space, to include this space in you? This landscape and the feelings that fill it can hint the path to wholeness. We want to find a ticket and go away, but the psyche hides it, apparently wishing that we still stay there longer, meet, experience, collide with ourselves there.
Sources:
G. Bachelyar "Poetics of Space"