Your Dreams Don't Lie
They show you where the wound lives.
My partner’s gone and I don’t know where. I know she’s with her new friends, but I can’t reach her, only getting clues from other people who have seen her. I don’t understand why she’s gone without me.
I “come to” after blacking out with five hours gone, no memory of where they went, and I’m standing in my parents’ home with her phone in my hand. I don’t remember how I got here. I don’t know how I got her phone. I just know that she’s out there somewhere, on some kind of trip, and I can feel the shape of what it is even if I can’t name it; something celebratory, something ritualistic, something that has the feel of a threshold being crossed. And I have the one object that should connect me to her, but I can’t reach her
I wake up in bed in my apartment. It’s 3 am. I’ve been dreaming.
But barely. The dream is a symbolic replay of something that happened late last year that, for some reason, excluded me. It didn’t feel like she fought for me to be there, or that my presence, as her partner at the time, mattered. It felt, simply, like I wasn’t chosen.
I've been doing a kind of Jungian analysis of the dream, sitting with it the way you'd sit with an honest letter from someone who knows you better than you know yourself. Because I know there's more going on beneath the hurt than I'm consciously aware of. There almost always is. She was and is a good person who loved me. The dream isn't really about her. This is what I've learned:
The blackout wasn’t random imagery. In Jungian terms, a blackout represents a dissociation of consciousness, a place where the psyche simply went dark because it was overwhelmed by what was happening in real time. The dream was marking a gap. Not just in our former relationship, but in my experience of the event itself. A part of me still doesn’t know how that could have happened, because some part of me couldn’t afford to be present for it.
And I “came to”, not in my own home, not in the life I’ve built as an adult, but at my parents’. When the ego is overwhelmed, the psyche retreats to the earliest ground. Back to the beginning. Back to the foundational place.
Holding her phone and still unable to reach her. Having the means of connection but not the connection itself.
That’s the wound, right there, in symbolic form.
Here’s what I know about myself that the dream was pointing toward: My core wound is a fear of abandonment. It isn’t rooted in dramatic neglect, it’s quieter than that.
When I was just nine weeks old, I required surgery for a hernia. I don’t have a conceptual memory of it, but I’ve thought about what that must have felt like in a tiny, defenseless body that was relying on another to feel safe: cold lights, strange sounds, strange smells, antiseptic, sterile air, nothing biologically familiar. The mask, the anesthetic gas, the losing of consciousness. The prolonged separation from the people whose smell and touch and heartbeat were the entire world. Not to mention waking into pain that no one adequately managed, because in 1986 medicine had not yet accepted that a body and mind this this young was indeed capable of feeling it.
I can’t even read the preceding paragraph without breaking into tears. That sweet little guy would have been so scared and disoriented, registering everything in that alien environment as an existential threat.
At nine weeks old, you have no words, no context, no object permanence developed enough to know your mother is coming back. To that little body, she is simply gone.
The imprint from a trauma like that is left in the body before language exists. Before a self exists that could narrate it or contextualize or argue with it. It becomes the lens through which everything else is perceived. It becomes the shaky foundation the nervous system builds its house on: I cannot depend on the people I love because they will eventually leave. Not a belief, but a deeply stored body memory.
The psyche, in its strange fidelity to what it knows, tends to recreate the original conditions of its wounding because it’s still trying to resolve something it never understood. My exclusion from the weekend away wasn’t just a rupture in our relationship. For my nervous system, it was the little guy in surgery again. It was: “I am alone, unimportant, and no one is fighting for me.”
“Nobody loves me.”
That’s what made it so destabilizing. That’s how ordinary disappointments can feel like annihilation.
I think this is true for a lot of us. The situations that flatten us usually aren’t proportional to what’s actually happening. They’re proportional to what they remind us of. “If it’s hysterical, it’s historical”, they say. We’re not overreacting. We’re reacting to the present moment sitting on top of every other moment it resembles, all the way down to the bottom.
The dream placed me at my parents’ home for a reason. It was showing me where the thread leads back to.
The Jungian answer to what do I do with this won’t be found by thinking about it. Understanding the wound is necessary, but understanding alone doesn’t reach the place where it lives. The wound is pre-verbal. The healing has to be largely pre-verbal too. Somatic processing. Safe, therapeutic work with psychedelic medicines. Dance. Breathwork. The body remembering and releasing. Active imagination, not visualization, but a process that leads to a genuine, felt encounter with the infant who was alone and exposed in the operating room. The practice of returning, again and again until it sticks, to that visceral place and not abandoning yourself there.
And just as important: being in reparative relationship. Being genuinely witnessed by another person, over time, without repeating the original wound. The nervous system slowly beginning to update its model of what’s possible or likely to happen. With both oneself and another safe person consistently showing that little guy he is safe now, he will not be abandoned. He is loved and cared for. And in the moments when things go sideways relationally, establishing boundaries and actions that show the inner child that there are limits to how you’ll allow him/yourself to be treated, you’ll protect him now, and the firm, loving, protective actions you will take when those limits are violated.
Because this is the profound paradox at the heart of healing: the wound was created in relationship, and it is in relationship, the kind that stays, that it is slowly, tenderly, unmade.
What I want to say, and mean completely, is that this woman gave me some of the most fully alive moments I have ever known. Deep laughs and playful silliness. The way we'd sometimes look at each other and just dissolve into tenderness. Our shared skepticism toward the modern world and society, laughing about the absurdity of it all while talking about how we’d escape to a more sane life. The adventures, the experiences, the electric sense that what was happening was rare and precious. A passion I have not experienced in that way with anyone else. A depth of care and love between us that was real, deep, and mutual. She loved me in the ways she knew how, and those ways were extraordinary. The relationship wasn't a mistake. I don't regret a moment of it. It was, in many ways, a masterclass in what's possible in how good it can feel to be truly seen by another person, to move through the world alongside them. I will always carry that, and her, in my heart.
If you’re somehow reading this, please know that I’m not trying to assign blame, because there are many ways that I let you down too. This was just one important piece in a deeply loving and tender relationship that I’m profoundly grateful for. The awareness that this pain has unearthed is an incredible gift. I’ll always care for you.
I’m writing this because I think a lot of people are walking around with pre-verbal software running in the background (I will be left, I am not worth staying for, closeness is a threat, etc.), with it superimposed on their adult lives without even knowing it. Confused by the gap between what they know intellectually and what their body insists is still true.
The dream showed me something I thought I’d moved past. That’s what dreams do. They don’t let us skip anything.
The choice now isn’t about what should or could have happened differently in those moments some months ago. The past is the past. It’s more important and empowering than that.
The choice now is:
Will I allow this experience to shrink me? To close my heart from the full spectrum of life?
or
Will I see it for the gift it is, and use it to bring me closer to the wound still asking for my love, to heal the places that keep me from meeting myself, others, and life wholeheartedly? So I can live with the heart of a lion.
Onward, with love and gratitude.