The Sitting Duck
It’s 6am. Too early, according to my mom, for me to get up. She tries her best to see to it that I go to sleep, while she begins her morning household chores.
I refuse and take out a book and start writing to jot down the dream that visited me last night. The long dream that was vivid and went on like a movie from the start to finish.
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Uma says that I should get down to the core of what I feel, so that I don’t end up avoiding or running away from my feelings. She advises that I don’t resist my feelings, and be Still enough to watch it and understand it, so as to be in control (i.e. maintain my Stillness, be centered in myself, look at myself as a 2nd person) and at the same time not resist looking at my feelings.
A well-known Psychiatrist in Bandra had termed my condition as Panic Disorder- anxiety avoidance disorder, when I was 17.
Meeting Uma, after 9 years (2years ago), I learnt that anxiety by itself is not a basic feeling.
“…it’s a vague feeling that can turn from a healthy sense of anticipation, to worry, which is actually fear. It’s like tipping off balance to the wrong side…” “…but then fear is not the core feeling. It can still be split up. It’s a cover-up for some other feeling…like dislike for sadness etc.”
So now I’m trying to step into my fear and look what it has to do with. In my sessions, I saw how I can run away from stepping into my ground-level feelings by running into words (of “cosmic” proportions like ‘Astronomy’ (!) ). Intellectualization can be a way one can try to escape from one’s feelings. I could catch myself doing this in our last session. For the last few sessions I’ve been able to be unusually Still and that helps me see things and helps us to catch my mind trying to run away on a ‘words-trip’. It’s like separating grain from the chaff, reality from rhetoric, intellectual crap from basic feelings.
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Recently I’ve been having this strange experience of dreams. I’ve been having very vivid dreams at night. Whenever I would recount a dream to Uma in our earlier sessions she would ask me, “what were you feeling then, in the dream..”
In our sessions, I have been able to watch how one does run away from his feelings. Many-a-time though, when I get down to the feeling, I am unable to determine what I am feeling. The feeling is like a ‘lump’ in the body and I can see it; however I cannot convey to my Mind (i.e. formulate a word for) what I am feeling.
Dreams, I feel has a way to speak to us in images. It is a visual depiction of our feelings, in imagery.
The night before yesterday, I dreamt a long dream, in which there were many feelings, a theme, and imagery (symbols). Like all of a sudden in the dream I would find myself naked.
This particular symbol has been a dominant theme in another dream related to work ( I found myself sitting naked on the corridors of my office and wondered how can I go back in the office).
So perhaps the sub-conscious introduces us to our feelings in visual imagery by way of dreams.
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Yesterday night I dreamt that I belong to a mafia family. And we always had guests- intellectuals and celebrities. Then one day, we see images of one of our guests being murdered on TV News scoop. It’s a horrible murder, and alarms us. Some other mafia group is out there to get us, and kill us one by one. Then come 2 policemen who terrify us.
I decide to escape with my mom. Mom, the big-mouth in the dream, keeps blabbering as we take an auto-rickshaw in Rajasthan. She keeps chatting with the rickshaw-driver and I’m scared that she will spill the beans. So I ask her to shut up but in vain.
Seems we are Jews, we end up in Palestine and am afraid for our lives. We walk amidst Extremist Muslim gatherings (mom dressed as a Jew lady!).
We spot a Jewish shop-keeper and ask for guidance to our destination. He informs us that the destination we are looking for – a Jewish settlement – is on the outskirts of this place, far from where we are standing. Somebody mischievously guides us to Jewish-slaugher-place, but then I impulsively choose not to go there but the other way.
Fear was a dominant theme and feeling that I felt in this entire dream. A sense of threat prevailed.
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NNP, the place where I lived for 2years was the nation of Palestine in a way. And I felt like a Jew there.
There are many pockets like NNP in Mumbai. These are places where the native Marathi-speaking population live together and look on the non-Marathi-speaking populace as aliens. When you look on somebody as aliens- Prejudice, suspicion and even insecurity sets in. That leads to discrimination, sectarianism, etc.
Perhaps the fear that I feel deep within is not just my own fear but a basic reaction to the prevailing insecurity outside, that looks upon you as an alien – a non-marathi person, a gay guy, an educated person etc. When you walk the city of Mumbai, you are aware of this Sectarian divide as you walk through various pockets of different communities of people. Gujrati pockets in Mira Rd, Muslim pockets in town, Christian pockets in Bandra, Marathi pockets in Thane etc.
It automatically puts you on the other side of the divide and in the defensive. And when there is confrontation and defense… threat and fear is the feeling that prevails.
