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ON GAY MEN OUR LOVES, OUR LIVES, and OUR DREAMS
The world is full of people that have stopped listening to themselves, or who listen only to others to learn how they ought to behave, or what the values are that they should be living for. For gay people in particular, this describes a large part of our experience of growing up. We absorb the negative beliefs and stereotypes that equate gay with being weird, bad or wrong – even before we have any inkling that other guys turn us on! Sure, we finally take like a duck to water in the arms of another man. Indeed, we often use our sexuality as one of the primary vehicles to relate. What is unacceptable or otherwise difficult to acknowledge, however, often remains hidden out of sight. At some point these lost parts begin to bubble up and, when they do, they come calling by way of our dreams. They come in service of more fully embracing our own place in the world and to help us discover our true personality instead of what others expect of us - though, at first look, we might not recognize them as such. Indeed, with a guy named Brian, he could not recall his dreams at all. During one of our first conversations, Brain became agitated when I informed him that research has established how a person who is not allowed to dream may become insane. Of course, there’s an important difference between not recalling your dreams and not dreaming at all. Indeed, researchers have shown that everybody dreams. Only when prevented from dreaming – such as through the use of alcohol or sleeping pills, or otherwise disturbed from our sleep due to ongoing conflicts - do we begin exhibiting bizarre characteristics. Things may get bottled up, but they still try to make themselves known whether we want to face them or not. Indeed, it’s been established that the prevention of dreaming not only results in symptoms for humans, but also produced death in otherwise normal and healthy cats and rats. In the case of chickens, the physiological signs of dreaming are apparent even before the egg is hatched. What this suggests is that dreams occur even before memory - that dreams are an expression of a self-regulating and compensatory function of the organism and, as such, are indispensable to life. For Brian, unable to as yet mediate these inner realms, he would turn to alcohol abuse and other self-destructive behaviors as the means to push away the uncomfortable feelings generated by a night out cruising the town. Often times he would meet some guy but find himself unable to sustain an erection, or otherwise wake the next day with no memory of the encounter. He turned from there to ecstasy or other such psycho-active potions and, much like Pandora opening the tempting box, all sorts of things came swarming out - too much all at once. It’s why Brian originally sought me out. As he did, he soon found himself on a recurring, nighttime journey, one taken by way of his dreams, only to each time be met in opposition by a shadowy, evil dragon. Such a dream, much like the original experience of our being gay, can at first seem frightening or threatening. Brian often awoke unsettled and gasping when facing his dragon. We’re all familiar with the experience of the nightmare. But there is no such as a “bad dream” – only dreams that sometimes take a dramatically negative form in order to grab our attention. Soon Brian began to consider how the dragon was a displaced part of himself. One thing leads to another when you embark on such a journey. Like Brian, maybe you, too, attempted the model of perfection as an adaptive way to survive. Or perhaps you became overly tuned to the feelings or moods of others in the effort to be acknowledged and loved -- learning to meet the needs of others, that is, at your own expense, as if your own feelings, your own experience simply did not matter. Later in life, this extra sensory perception makes its way out when we discover that we instantly know that someone else is gay. Not a bad thing, after all! It carries on in the form of other more pernicious behavior, however, such as with the “straight acting” ways we describe ourselves in the personals ads today. Underlying the drive for acceptance and pleasure comes the equal risk of a very painful wound: rejection. At bottom, Brian’s nocturnal visions began to inform him about the original fears and the shame inculcated in him for no other reason than having grown up gay in a non-gay world. Brian now dreams of making a movie – his story – his own story – perfect at the moment of conception. It’s a vision that emerges from his own inner center, one which more authentically guides and shapes his behavior, his growth and his life.________________________________________ * All dreams are authentic and are cited with permission of the dreamers. Some dream series have been compiled using dreams from different individuals as the means to depict themes and dream motifs commonly found in gay men’s dreams. * If you would like your dreams considered for discussion in future columns, please submit them to DREAMS, P.O. Box 93133, Los Angeles, CA 90093, or e-mail them to DREAMS. Please include contact information. |
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