Introspective #1: We are two worlds

My worst dream, which may happen once or twice a year, is of me as a middle-aged completely lost soul. The feeling of desperate and anxious life-failure helplessness is impossible to put into words. I am around forty-five or fifty and I have no profession or job, no way to support myself. In my real life I used to be a typographer. In the dream I may be the most pitiable “anxiety sack” looking around for a typing job. The salient fact is that I am never a psychotherapist in these dreams, never someone who is someone other than a name, an identity of non-competence and a telltale childlike affect. I cannot describe how awful the feeling is to never have grown a way to live well into my plateau years.

I have no skill in dream analysis, but I can assume that this is how I really feel about myself below consciousness: a lost man-child. How can that be? I have always – since I morphed into this profession at age forty-three – had a stable pride in my skills and in my self-discoveries and acts to reach those skills. I never feel unmanned. Yet deep down . . . .

There are also dreams of the most wonderful romantic and sexual feelings, but the scenes and feelings always stop at a place of childish touching, no consummation, with “opportunities for advancement” that numbly fade out from unfair or circumstantial reasons. That must be the latency-stage me. And yet that is my most wonderful feeling in dreams. Is this how I really see myself? Is this who I am?

I am not one of many who have “another person” at the base of their self: I am one of every. Did Citizen Kane feel Rosebud, or was he Rosebud? How much do we change? My teenage clients show their little child every session. My adults manifest their parents every session, parents who were still children. And in all these deeper selves is the whole world as we lived it then. Strange question, but consider: Do we really have room for another whole world on top of that one?