The woman never had a dream of the rape but her daily life was very much disturbed by thoughts of anger and hate. She felt annoyed by the fact that this criminal was to get away without punishment. Sometimes she felt completely depressed just to think of the rape, mainly because of the brutality the man had carried out on her. She mistrusted strong men in general since then, however married a strong man 12 years later when she was 39. Her marriage lasted only a few years until she got rid of her husband. At the age of 45 years she fell in love with a very lovely man. He was not strong, on the contrary he was rather weak and soft. After one year, they had an argument over his desire to move to another town. She was beating him after she had pushed him down to the floor and held his arms tightly together, just like the man once did who committed the rape to her. The relationship did not last very much longer. Her great love had left her. The woman felt very sad after he was gone. A friend of her lover told her that he could not forget that she had beaten him. She was always dreaming of him. Every dream ended like the other: “He had vanished all of a sudden.” Deep down in her mind she knew that it was her fault that he was gone. She again reflected about the rape and her thoughts revolved around a solution for her life to go on happy and free.
She decided to forgive the man who committed the rape. She heard from a famous female bible preacher that forgiveness achieves health of the soul, which was good for oneself in the first place. She imagined herself having been very pretty and strikingly attractive when she was 27, because she still was at the age of 48. She imagined that the man was not able to act differently. She really tried hard to forgive this man and became calmer. Nevertheless she was still sad about the circumstances all in all, until a very special dream appeared to her: “A man, assumingly very strong, tried to open her entrance-door, made of wood. The door really was of massive wood and kept him outside for a while. However, he had such a power that he finally broke through. She was entirely frightened. Right at the moment, when he forced her down and wanted to do harm to her, the two doors of her wardrobe went open and two officers came out. After the police had arrested the man and taken him away, she looked into her wardrobe wondering about how they both could stay inside there. She saw that blue cushions were lying on the bottom of the wardrobe. She clearly saw impressions on the cushions as if they had been sitting on them for a very long time.” - When she woke up in the morning and wrote down the details of her dream, she realised the wardrobe was the one she had in her flat at the time when she was the victim of rape. Suddenly she felt that it was over. From now on she was in the position to think of the crime without being touched emotionally.
After a while this woman could finally work out the loss of her exfriend as well. Again and again she was dreaming of scenes when they were together, until he had vanished by the rule in the dream. Then a completely different dream rose up: “She saw him lying on the floor. He had grown quite fat and seemed to be unconscious when she bent down on him. She had recognized him by his mouth only.” The fatness of her exfriend delivered the proof that an advantage for the dreaming person would be on its way. The advantage was based on the fact that now the woman was able to close down on him. He had no more power on her, because he actually had been unconscious in the dream.
The classic among the finishing dreams is the dream of a deceased person to whom we had a close connection. When you dream of this person, the grief is going to come to an end. There is no need to be scared about dreaming of the death in general. It mostly means that you can inwardly finish up with something that caused you sorrow and trouble.
The Opening Dream
As a consequence to the description of the finishing dream you probably can imagine which precious work dreams carry out for the mental health. Again let us have a look at the doorway between the sub-consciousness and the consciousness and try to understand that the dream-power is able produce a dream which we can bear, of which the watcher at the doorway is willing to give admission and let it pass. The determination that the dream-power should invent a dream in order to detect something for us, can surely derive from ourselves as well. A certain matter is keeping us busy during life which we cannot put in correctly. There seems to be a special occurrence which continues disturbing our lives repeatedly. We can feel it in our relationships to other people for they are reflecting our hearts in return. We wonder why this and that is always going wrong and why we are misunderstood despite of the belief we had expressed ourselves clearly. Some kind of force portrays us in a different way towards the others as we had judged it.
It probably deals with an experience that happened already a very long time ago. We might have inhibited it and do not remember every detail. One could compare the procedure of inhibition with a wool ball. When the wool was wound up, which should describe the way of life, a knot is developing itself at a certain spot, which should describe the trauma. The wool which is wound up over the knot is going to build up a small hill in the course of time. Exactly at this point of the knot, we are “tripping over” then on the future way of life again and again. With the help of a dream, we can go back the way of the wool, unroll it up to the point of the knot, resolve the knot and wind up the wool in a beautiful style anew. In practise that means we can detect an inhibited trauma through the dream interpretation and work it out on a conscious basis. In other words the opening dream represents the true story of a hidden trauma. So to say, the opening dream reveals an incident of the past which we had repressed and since then lingered in a locked up box deep down in the sub-consciousness.
A lively example: A man was married with a foreign woman. After a few years, she gave birth to a child, a lovely girl. His wife went to the immigration authorities and received her final permission to reside. Afterwards she has thrown her husband from the flat, although he had done everything for his wife and his child. She did not want to keep up with the marriage any longer. The man felt totally abused, because his wife told everyone her husband had beaten her, which was a lie. The summit of misbehaviour was that she withdrew all the money from his bank account. Due to all that the man became sick of cancer and had to stay in the hospital for quite a while. Afterwards he got a flat on his own and started a new life. He went to a local pub every day and was hiding away his anger by generating a funny character. A good friend told him stories about Thailand. This way the man came to travel to Thailand. He met a Thai woman and got together with her. When he returned, he wanted to earn more money to support his girlfriend in Thailand and to travel there more frequently. This is why he began to work as a lorry driver.
After a few years a very bad accident happened to him which he caused by his truck at a crossroad. Due to ice and snow he could not break quickly enough. The man in the car on the main road whom he had taken off the right of way was led into the traffic of opposite direction and collided with another car. The man lost his life in the accident. The man of our story was condemned for manslaughter and went to jail for several years. When he was released from prison, he was a broken man. He had to undergo an operation once again because of a tumour. He could not start working yet when he returned and now had plenty of time to ponder about everything that had happened. As a consequence to the terrible accident and everything that followed, he was reminded of his companion who had died in a motorcycle crash with him as the pillion driver when they both were 21 years old. That meant the accident happened 23 years ago, because he was already aged 44.
During this time the following dream appeared to the man: “He drove in his truck on a highway, which led over a bridge with blue and yellow stripes on the balustrade. A bridge he knew well from trips to the country where his ex-wife came from. All of a sudden, he saw another truck on fire standing right in front of him on the road and used the breaks. At the same time, a motorbike with high speed passed his truck on the left side and raced into the burning truck. Then he saw his ex-wife crossing the bridge in front of the truck on fire along with the little daughter in her arms. She came into his sight when she had passed the truck from the right to the left side. Despite the fact he came to a standstill behind the scene.” - After the dream the man realised eventually that he had inhibited the trauma of losing his companion. His death had been the reason why he left the village where he was born and went to the big city where he was living now.