The Trauma of Everyday Life

phrase is a Buddhist phrase. It refers to the experience in meditation when the self that one was formerly sure was there becomes impossible to locate. The feeling of not being able to find the presumed self is said to be a vertiginous one, and the feeling in the dream bore this out. It was a confusing sensation. I called my wife, got no answer, and then called the police. They put me on hold and I walked home, scared to tell my wife what I had lost. “Prepare yourself,” I told her. But she was not upset. Relieved, I walked with her across an athletic field. People were playing boules on the lawn. One ball came flying toward my head; I ducked to avoid it and woke up with my heart racing. Once again. Now it was six in the morning.
    I remembered my conversation with Joseph when I woke from my dream, my heart pounding from my most recent narrow escape. This was not what I had had in mind when I signed up for the retreat. I had wanted a good night’s sleep, at the very least. And I was still hoping, in my heart of hearts, for a quick infusion of relaxation from all this meditation. I felt chagrined at the level of distress I was subject to, and I had to struggle to bring Joseph’s words back to my mind. But as I continued to have more and more active dreams throughout the week, each of which I remembered vividly upon awakening, the wisdom of his comment became clear. Mindfulness was making it possible for me to observe my dreaming self in a manner not ordinarily available to me. In my regular life, I might be having similar dreams—filled with dissociative elements—but I would forget them immediately upon awakening in my return to everyday life. In the retreat, with so little going on in my outside world, there was tremendous opportunity to explore my inner world. While my days became relatively calm and peaceful, at night, in my sleep, I was racing through a European countryside in a car with no brakes, making 180 degree screeching turns at sixty miles an hour to bring myself to a halt. Whatever else I thought I was doing on my meditation retreat, in my unconscious I was definitely grappling with my anxiety.
    Michael Eigen, a psychoanalyst whose work I have already quoted several times, is an expert on dreams. His reflections, which I read months after my retreat, helped me understand what was happening as mindfulness gained strength and my defenses relaxed. “The Talmud says every dream is an unopened letter from God,” 1 he writes. “We don’t open, or are unable to open, too many of these letters. But sometimes a letter haunts us.” Dreams are a way of revealing and deepening emotional experience, he conjectures, a means of emotional digestion. “The core of the dream is not the manifest content but the emotional experience.” Dreams show us things about ourselves we wish to forget and at the same time help us to forget the things we can’t help but remember. They are a means of holding, and sometimes processing or even resolving, traumatic experiences. As Eigen writes,
Most dreams are aborted. Aborted experience. Something happens to frustrate the dream. An arc of experience falls short, is broken off before completion. Perhaps the dream is attempting to portray something broken, interrupted, incomplete, fragmented. Perhaps the very experience of incompletion and interruption is being dramatized and fed to us. As if the feeling of something being aborted is part of our insides. An intimation of aborted lives or aborted feelings. Something happens that doesn’t go all the way, doesn’t reach absolute fulfillment. A dream breaks off and we have a sense of aborted experiencing. Broken dreams, expressing broken aspects of our beings. 2

    This idea, of broken dreams expressing broken aspects of our beings, seems very apropos. It is another way of talking about the trauma of everyday life, about the bits and pieces of catastrophe we dissociate from but still carry with us. These traumatic experiences are left hanging just outside awareness. They peek out from our dreams or nag at us in the privacy of our aloneness, a lurking sense of sorrow or disquiet that underlies our attempts to be “normal,” but it is rare that we feel secure enough to let them fully speak. While I might have preferred to have my retreat be filled with pleasant feeling, this was not the path the Buddha had in mind when he laid out his teachings. My work in the retreat was, in the spirit of curiosity, to make room for the entire