I have been dreaming about dogs for months now. Before getting Gorby, before ensuring that our new house was indeed ours, before all of that. When I go to sleep at night dogs lurk at the corners, they walk through the woods, they amble silently along corridors, their toenails clickless on the floors. The dogs are always large, and they are always a dark color.

They never intend any harm. I don't know how I know that, I just do. They whisper in and out of scenes in the endless monologues that are my dreams. Sometimes they pad in and out of my nightmares, when I wake from dreaming the world was on fire or something wicked this way came.

When I wrote my post at Christmas time about the Ghost of Christmas Past it was a natural progression that the ghost was a dog. Sitting down to write I simply checked my brain at the door and my brain came up with a ghostly dog. It could never have been anything else. It had to be a dog.

I gave those stories to my therapist to read, and the next time we met up he said simply that they were touching. I know that nothing goes unaddressed with him, that the stories will come back in a later session and will manifest into something that I didn't understand at the time. In psychotherapy everything is based in the subconscious, and my subconscious is one screwed up little fucker.

I talk to him of my dog dreams. He tells me that in many cultures, the dog is a guide. It's a symbol of loyalty, of strength. It is a constant companion, a protector, a representation of kindness. A dog is something innocuous to most of us, a sympathetic and benevolent figure that we seek for comfort.

I have always loved dogs. I love cats as well, I'm not picky about the animals I adore, but dogs have a special acceptance that the more independent cats lack-a dog needs you full stop. A cat may need you too, but only on their terms. I have endless love for my two cats but I do accept that I can give it to them only when they choose to receive it.

There is something calming in being with a pet. People, not so easy to deal with. A dog will accept you for your faults and love you regardless. A dog will not judge you. A dog will forgive and forget and will work with you to pull them out of their shell that they may or may not have been beaten in to, all the while unknowingly they are pulling you out of your shell, too.

Love is not patient, love is not kind, and love is not forgiving, unless it comes in the form of four softly padded feet.

Sometimes we have dreams that stay with us for our entire lives. Many, many years ago I dreamt I stumbled upon a lake, with children drowned in sleeping agony. That dream haunts me to this day. It will never leave me, and my therapist says that those children are all representations of myself.

I drowned a long time ago, but at least I know what happened to me.

And every once in a while, we have a dream that makes us think a little differently. Maybe it's a good dream, maybe it's a bad one, but there may be one that when we wake up, we think Thank God. There's something in me after all. I am alive, and long may it remain so.

A few months ago I dreamt I was in my childhood home. My family were being difficult and humiliating me. I couldn't find my way out of the house, I couldn't find a way to escape. I remember standing at a window and looking outside and seeing a tiny shed. I had never noticed that shed there, a ramshackle wooden house made of dark wood and a V-shaped roof.

I was suddenly outside, in front of that shed. I open the door and see permafrost on the ground. It has frozen into the hills and valleys that footsteps made when the ground was soft. The floor is dirt, and hard and uncomfortable. The shed is freezing cold, and my breath appears like whispy egg whites when I exhale.

There, in the middle of the shed is an enormous black dog. It has ice crystals frozen into its fur, droplets that hang in suspended silence. The dog is curled up motionless in the middle of the floor. I walk to the dog and kneel hurriedly, wrapping my arms around the neck of the great animal. I know without knowing that the dog is still alive, only frozen so deep down that it can't move. I know that the animal can come back to life as long as I keep trying. I know that I will spend whatever amount of time is needed to bring it back. I keep it cradled in my arms and prepare to help.

When I woke up I was rocked to the core. That dream stays with me. I can't shake it, nor can I shake the feeling of frozen black hair draped over my arms. My knees still feel what its like to be perched on the edges of frozen ground. It was so real I still wonder why it is I can't see that shed in our back garden.

My therapist smiled gently when I told him of this dream. 'What do you think the dog represents, Helen?' he asks softly.

'I'm no Freudian,' I reply. I am not sure what to make of dreams and he's not huge on dreams either, but he does think that sometimes they are composed of our subconscious thoughts forcing an opinion on us when our conscious stubbornly won't listen. 'But I know what it is. That dog is me.'

He nods. 'That's right. That dog is you. You have frozen all of your emotions, all of your thoughts, all of your progression into yourself as you surrounded yourself with coping mechanisms designed to help you survive. But the point is that although the dog is frozen, the dog is alive. And you know it's alive. And even more to the point, you finally know that dog is there. This is a big thing, Helen. You've finally seen that you are in there.'

I confess for a moment I thought: Is sometimes a dog just a dog? I don't do dream therapy, I can't subscribe to that, mostly because most of my dreams are such images of horror. But that dog was so heavy and cold in my arms. That dog had such a strong, slow heartbeat beneath my arms. I had such grave, deep concern for it, and even further to that it was curled up frozen in the backyard of my childhood, which had to mean something.

I can't decide what to read into this. So maybe I am in here, and in order to help me face me, my subconscious has neatly packaged me into a perfect metaphor, one that won't make me crazy. Months and months of therapy have passed and hopefully I am finally beginning to reach into my frozen and void core. Therapy is singularly the hardest and easiest thing I have ever done, and that's as good as I can get at explaining it. It's not an easy task to open packages that have been sealed since they were created. Therapy is manifesting itself in physical ways, too-I suffer from bouts of exhaustion which my therapist says is all part of the process-the body will break down when forced to confront some things. This exhaustion is something new to me, episodes when I literally can't move off the couch unless it's to throw my guts up, whimpering in silence. He says it will all get worse before it gets better.

Battling my way through BPD is sometimes a daily struggle as I force me to stay within myself, as I try to stop the movie that is my disassociation, as I take a pitchfork and rake over whatever tattered memories I hold inside of myself. I have to face all the things I have buried, and I have 32 years of burial to deal with. To get through the other side of this I have to undergo something called CBT, or cognitive behavioral therapy. This will basically take all of my coping skills, all of my behaviors, all of those things that make me so fundamentally fucked up and erase them.

CBT will teach me how to be a human being.

And finding my big, black frozen dog is maybe proof that there is a human being in there.

-H.

Posted by: Everydaystranger at 06:09 AM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
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