Dream Recall: I Feel Unrecognized

Following my nightmare workshop last week, I received a dream from someone who wasn’t able to make it live and they said it would be okay to share. First, they wrote asking:

I have quite a few recurrent dreams. They aren’t scary but they aren’t good. I’d call them anxiety based. I assume that they keep coming to me because I’m not getting the message although I have thought about pondered these dreams and asked myself questions about them. What is your take on this?

I asked if they could send me a specific dream to look at, and this is what they sent:

I'm at work in Boston where I review disability claims for Social Security. I'm in my 20s. I'm going to get my paycheck and I'm already nervous. I haven't gotten paid in a few weeks and think there will be a problem, as usual. In different versions of the dream 1) I have to go to a separate building and take an elevator to a higher floor. The desk for getting paid isn't there or I'm told that I have to go somewhere else. I never find it. 2) the woman who works there is brusque and doesn't really look at me. She gives me a check that is much less than it should be. I feel alone and helpless that I have no documents to support me and she won't listen. In this particular, latest version of the dream I say 'this always happens; you never pay me what everyone else gets.' I feel that no one in that office likes me and I say so. As I'm leaving I hear someone say 'did you pay Barbara less?' and someone says yes. I go back and call them on it but there is no response. Back at the floor where I work I tell my co-workers that I get paid less because the bosses don't like me. I don't conform to their standards of dress and behavior. No-one really pays attention to me and I know they don't believe me.

The dreamer also added that in real life they did work for the SSA, but they were always paid, now retired. They said they relate to the feeling in the dream because I feel unrecognized and alone in my work. I am a poet. There are no poets in my family and my only poet friends are far away. There is no one to discuss my work with on a regular basis and of course it doesn’t pay.

I really appreciate this dreamer letting me respond to the dream via this post, and I want to add my forever caveat—these are my loose thoughts on the dream, and as always the dreamer and anyone reading should take what resonates and leave the rest.

During my nightmare workshop last week, I talked about recurring nightmares as the soul’s attempt to awaken the dreamer’s consciousness to a shadow aspect. But this dreamer brings up a terrific point—How do you work with a dream that keeps repeating, even if you feel like you have done the work to understand it?

It’s a tender question really, and I know I have been there many times. Why do I dream of this person again? Haven’t I already gotten over it? Why does this feeling appear again? I already know it’s source, and feel it when I am awake. Why can’t my dreams show me moving forward?

The thing is, we can never underestimate how difficult it is for humans in our current social/cultural milleu to feel our feelings on a somatic level. The reason it’s so important to process feelings somatically, and not intellectually, is because feelings are not subject to logic or rationality. Often verbal or mental processing just leads us to further judgment, repression or shame about our emotional experiences. This is where dreams can be so helpful: they provide imagistic expressions of our inner experiences, often with a more potent somatic valence than we experience when we are awake. So our dreams can be profound teachers in how to process feeling somatically, and which feelings need our attention.

When we are reflecting with our dreams, we are often entering into them from our conscious mind, which is full of our habitual thoughts about our feelings. As such, it is easy to see how a series of dreams like this one could lead the dreamer on a consistent loop—-when I am awake, I feel isolated, unseen, and undervalued in my work, when I sleep, I have the same experience. WTF?

A concept that I think helps is when we consider “secondary and primary” emotions, which has been explored by a number of psychologists. In Anthony Damasio’s conception of this distinction, he describes primary emotions as being more somatic, instinctual, and rooted in the present moment, whereas secondary emotions are more cognitively based, can be rooted in projections of the future/memories of the past, and are often in some kind of reaction to a primary emotion.

Non-violent communication (NVC) teaching talks about this difference as feelings vs. pseudo-feelings, with the pseudo-feelings being ones rooted in a judgment of someone else’s experience. In this way, when the dreamer writes “I feel that no one in that office likes me,” we can understand that this is an expression of a pseudo-feeling, based on a thought the dreamer is having about others. The dreamer writes earlier what is probably closer to the primary feeling experience, “I feel alone.”

When I work with dreamers, my goal is often to sift through the various secondary emotions, pseudo-feelings, or reactions as we call them in Natural Dreamwork, to try to identify and then sink into the primary emotion present. This is work that I think is best done with a friendly ear, because often we are so steeped in our secondary emotions, and they often specifically serve to keep us from identifying with our primary, core emotions—let alone feeling them somatically.

Of course this dreamer does acknowledge that she feels alone, but she lumps that feeling in with another one, feeling “unrecognized”. This is the sneaky way that reactions, or secondary emotions, can obscure our primary, somatic experiences. In the rational mind, the lack of recognition from others causes the feeling of aloneness. But from the heart’s point of view, the feeling of aloneness is primary, it is the feeling that arises from the present moment. Feeling unrecognized is the reaction that allows us some buffer from feeling the full weight of that feeling of aloneness…I feel alone because other people don’t recognize me, devalue me/my work, etc.

What’s unfortunate, of course, is that when we identify other people’s thoughts or actions as the cause of our feelings, we strip ourselves of our own agency. What can we possibly do about feeling unrecognized or unseen except for wait and hope that someone will come along and see us long enough for that feeling to go away? No wonder we can get stuck in feelings like this for years. When we deeply feel what we feel in our bodies in the moment—-they will move. This is actually a key way we can know we are in our secondary emotions—we feel stuck in them.

Understanding this distinction between primary and secondary emotions, we can see the dream from the dream’s point of view. The dream doesn’t come just to remind us what we already know to be true. The dream arises to help us remember the primary emotion that is causing all of our reactions in the first place. In this case, my guess is that the dreamer isn’t currently experience anything as explicitly rejecting, discriminatory and invalidating in her waking life as she does in her dream. In this way, the dream confirms the stories that underly the dreamer’s secondary emotions, “I am undervalued, other people don’t listen to me, other people don’t believe me, I am not seen, etc…”—with the hopes that the dream can draw out the primary emotion that lives underneath. So my question to the dreamer could be, can you sit, linger with the feeling of being alone and helpless? Or when do you feel most alone in the dream? Is there another feeling in that aloneness as well..?

There are many other clues in this dream about how the dreamer could explore or play with elements of the dream in order to more fully embody the emotional experience of isolation/aloneness, or whatever other feelings may be underneath that. For one, that she is young in the dreams, indicating this feeling is actually not new for her, and as such couldn’t be caused solely by her external condition as a poet. Or, we could reflect on how she no longer even works with the SSA, so we could recognize that she really doesn’t have reason to expect payment nor any reason to need or desire recognition or acceptance from these particular “bosses” —i.e., what if they aren’t paying you because you don’t work there anymore?

Ultimately, these kinds of questions are meant to tease out what is the primary, essential somatic felt experience of this dream. As a Dreamworker, I see my role as coming up with as many ways to toss and turn the dream in a person’s mind that allows the dreamer to fall, gracefully, into its depth. In that fall, we surrender with a lot of trust—that our deepest feelings are holy and sacred, even if they are not grounded in essential truth; and that they deserve our attention and our embodied, compassionate presence, no matter what their content. To me, that is the core teaching of any dream that comes, whether once or night after night.

I had so much fun teaching about nightmares last week I’m doing it again! Join me March 13th, 5:30 PM CT this time, click here to sign up :)

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