HOW TO WORK WITH DREAM DIARYIf you are curious about the meaning of your dreams, try keeping a dream diary (see accompanying box). Whenever you awaken during the night, immediately write down everything you can remember about your most recent dream—characters, events, settings, colors, sounds, and any emotional connotations you find. Eventually you may begin to discern a pattern which holds some particular significance for you. There are a number of dream dictionaries and other dream workbooks available that are intended to help you interpret your findings. I suggest, however, that you take such books with a large helping of salt. If dreams have any meaning at all, such meaning is a very personal affair; you are the only person who can state whether a particular image is significant, based on your own experiences, feelings, and associations. As Nietzsche stated and as Freud himself believed, “nothing belongs to you so much” as your dreams.*294\226\8*

Unconscious state. In this state the person is not aware of anything and cannot be aroused easily. We enter the unconscious state during general anaesthesia and perhaps as a result of head injury. The person who has been unconscious cannot remember anything that happened to him or his immediate surroundings during the period of unconsciousness.

Conscious state. This includes the fully awake state, the sleeping state, and the hypnotic state. When we are fully awake our awareness of our surroundings is at a maximum. When we are asleep, our awareness is minimal and sometimes non-existent. In the hypnotic state, our awareness of what goes on around us is limited and is in between the fully awake and sleeping states. Psychologists call this a state of dissociation, as we are dissociated away from our normal awareness of our surroundings. This limited awareness is usually directed towards the contents of the suggestion given by the hypnotist.

*83\174\4*

It is well known that fear, fright, or anxiety may cause diarrhoea. Soldiers going into battle experience it, and to a lesser extent so do students facing an important examination. The diarrhoea is of course caused by the contraction of the muscle of the bowels. Sometimes in these cases the contraction may be quite violent and uncoordinated. Pain results from the stimulation of the nerves of the bowels, but the contractions were the result of psychological causes. Such a condition is technically known as true psychosomatic pain.

A minor business executive in his fifties had been tense for some years. At periods of greater stress and greater tension he would be stricken with cramp-like pains in the stomach. The patient was well aware of the association of the pain with anxiety. This seemed to be a real psychosomatic pain in which anxiety caused intense contraction of the muscles of the stomach and so produced an organic type of pain.

He was a very enthusiastic patient, and in the course of four or five weeks lost all his pain and most of his tension.

We must not get diverted into a complicated discussion of the relationship between body and mind. I think we have gone far enough to see that this is a very complex relationship, and as a result organic and psychological causes are continually interacting where pain is concerned.

I have mentioned that I have had teeth extracted without anaesthetic. This would appear to be a matter of the control of purely organic pain. But it appears more simple than it is. The fact that I knew the dentist to be a kind, gentle, and competent person was undoubtedly a psychological help for me to feel no discomfort. So even in the simplest cases, both organic and psychological influences interact to determine the severity of pain.

*105\57\2*

A helpful analogy is using the ‘sort’ command on a database. The database contains a lot of data which needs be sorted into alphabetical order. The computer operator presses the ‘sort’ key, and the computer sorts and rearranges the information into strict alphabetical order.

Meditation works something like this. It helps to process all the information we are holding in our ‘database’. It begins to sort everything into a more ordered view. Sometimes the process of meditation will ‘throw out a file’ for us to look at, other times it gets on with what it has to do without any reference to us. Just like a computer! The result is a changed and more ordered perception of ourselves and our environment.

This is part of the reason why meditation and psychotherapy ‘complement’ one another. One study of meditation states that ‘meditation may facilitate the psychotherapeutic process’ (Task Force on Meditation 1977).

*65\94\8*

Recovery is a step-by-step process. While cognitive behavioural skills are the most important, short-term medication may be required; conversely if drug or alcohol dependence is involved, this will also need to be worked with. After your cognitive skills are sufficiently developed and your life is coming back on track you may want to address any outstanding personal issues by seeing a skilled psychotherapist. The secret is to use the various therapies we need when we need them. Combined together we can take the power back.

*47\94\8*

This control again makes it seem to family and friends that we are continually dwelling on the problem. We are, but not in the way it appears. We can become totally self absorbed and, more often than not, we will be accused of being selfish. Most of us would probably agree, but at this stage there is not much we can do about it.

Most of us who develop the disorder would consider ourselves as having been extroverts before it’s onset. As the anxiety and the panic attacks take hold, we become extremely introverted and self absorbed. Our preoccupation is extremely exasperating to others in the family.

To understand this control we all need to be aware that everyone who suffers from the disorder, particularly those who are beginning to develop secondary conditions, are caught in an ever-growing maze of anxiety, panic attacks and fear. There appears to be nothing we, or anyone, can do to stop it. The result of this is completely devastating. Our whole life, as we have known it, begins to disintegrate around us.

Under the circumstances it is completely normal and natural to become preoccupied. The preoccupation is a means of trying to find a way out of our distress. We are trying to find an answer to what appear to be unanswerable questions.

The preoccupation is also part of the monitoring process. Monitoring each symptom is another way of defending against it. By continually monitoring symptoms we hope to gain advanced warning of a panic attack. Although we are not sure how, we feel there might be time to stop the panic attack, or at least to get help before anything happens.

There is much truth in the statement that by ‘dwelling on something only makes it worse’. With an anxiety disorder, not dwelling on it is almost impossible. We feel as if our lives are in constant danger, so it is difficult not to think about it.

*28\94\8*

Anne was thirty when she had her first panic attack. She was driving to the office where she worked as a secretary. She had just pulled up at a set of traffic lights when for no apparent reason she felt an ‘electric shock’ go right through her body, which reacted to the powerful tingling surge. Anne’s heart began to race and she had difficulty breathing. A wave of nausea followed, and her hands and legs began to tremble. She felt she was looking down at herself as if she had left her body. Everything appeared unreal. All Anne could think of was that she was dying, and she panicked.

Tom

It was 1.00 am. Tom had been asleep since 11.00 pm. He was due to return to his teaching position the next day, after two weeks school holidays. Tom woke with a start as his body jerked violently. A surge of heat went through him. His heart was pounding and he was gasping for breath. His shoulders and arms began to ache and he felt as if he were going to faint. Tom woke his wife, who then called an ambulance as they both feared he was having a heart attack.

Elizabeth

Elizabeth closed the door to the children’s room and walked into the lounge. It had been a long day and she was looking forward to being able to relax. A tingling feeling went through her and it felt as if her heart missed a couple of beats. She felt as if ‘a volume control’ had been turned up in her head, as the sound from the television and the cars in the street began to seem intolerably loud. The lounge floor seemed to move up and down. Elizabeth began to experience pins and needles in her arms and feet. She was frightened by what was happening to her. She was alone with the children and her husband was not due home for another hour. Her fear intensified.

*12\94\8*