AGE, DREAMS AND ACHIEVING YOUR DREAM

The unborn baby is in a completely different world physically and psychologically to the adult, or even to the six-week old baby. Although we cannot be certain of what the unborn baby dreams, we can give an educated guess. The information behind the guess arises from the experience of people who undertake very deep psychological explorations into the unconscious using modern therapeutic techniques. In a sense they are like deep-sea divers who don special equipment to explore the depths of the unconscious. What they report is that their baby self, existing as it does without language or focused self-awareness, lives in a world of complete identification with the forces of life creating it. Toward the end of its life in the womb it begins to have a more focused sense of a relationship with another being – its mother. Before that there was no feeling of separation. Because it has not yet experienced vision, its dreams are long slow experiences of sensation, of feeling. One explorer of these deeps, attempting to put his experience into words expresses it as follows:

Unknown to myself I am the swimmer.Music I do not hear moves me toward the sea I do no know.For I am the music - Each movement a beat - Each swift turn a passage in the flow of life.I know not - Yet I am a swimmer in the river,Close to me as my own unknown, without boundary.I am the imperative - Survive!Fear is my being, reaching tendril fingersInto the great ocean toward which I swim -Immense beyond all my experience of fear,Older than I am I go fearfully fearlessTo the sea.

This sea toward which this little swimming life form is moving is birth. Frighten because it is a huge new world that it already senses ahead. Imperative because its whole urge is to live, to survive, and it must enter the ‘sea’ to continue living. This is because all things in existence change, and the little swimmer’s season of life in the womb will end. So not only is it dreaming about what it senses it is moving toward, but also it faces in dreams what its own inner changes are.