I wrote yesterday of a very powerful experience during the night – I called it a nightmare because parts of it were terrifying to me, others would call it a dream and I am still feeling it and thinking about it. It felt something like an exorcism to me, something powerful passing through me, something deep and old. I have been stirring the pot a lot lately, turning inward: meditation shamanic soul retrieval, spiritual counseling. Something important was bound to come up and it did – an extraordinary dream in which I turned to my parents for  help, felt as safe as I have ever felt, and then awoke in terror to the realization that they are dead and I alone can help me deal with my life.

Many of you have read my writing or heard me talk about the power of attachment theory, John Bowlby’s landmark research into the birth of anxiety in pre-verbal infants whose mothers and fathers do not sense their worry and do not or cannot comfort and soothe them. I believe – so do many attachment theorists –  that Bowlby’s theories apply to people and their animals as well, in that humans constantly replay attachment issues in their own lives with their pets, especially dogs, cats and horses. When I wrote “The New Work Of Dogs,” I studied attachment theory and I learned to see people and their animals and tell them what their mothers are like. Maria calls this my hat trick, and it rarely is off the mark. Our interactions with our pets are like video replays of our own attachments, or lack of them. They are records of our own emotional histories. We love to talk about what our pets think, but are not so quick to explore what we are thinking when we choose and live with animals, when we adopt and rescue them, when we project so many things onto them.

I believe my dream was powerful on many levels, and one of them was that I believe it led me to understand the birth of fear in me. I have strong memories of being alone and frightened in dark rooms, and of calling for help and learning that no one would come. This is a template for many of my night and other fears about the world. I consider myself pretty strong, and others who know me consider me strong, but not always at night, not when I am alone feeling fear. In my dream, I called out to my parents, and was comforted by the idea that they were there. I felt a strong sense of peace and safety.

Then I woke up and remembered that they were not, they were never there in that way. I have been working backwards for years to understand the source of my fear, the birth of anxiety. And I believe the work I have been doing – especially meditation and shamanic soul retrieval – brought me back to that time and place to show me two things: one that I was frightened and reached out for help, and secondly, that help is there, it is always there, that I am never alone. That was the peace and safety I felt, perhaps the most important part of the dream.

The terror I felt was old stuff, my old story, my struggle and lament tales, the stories of my consciousness and of my life until I awakened and began working on other stories. The shaman Carol Tunney said of my dream that fear is perhaps nothing more than the panic that comes when we forget that we are not alone. I think that is so. But I think the dream also showed me that I am alone in a sense. I have people around me that help me and love me, but they are not soothers, not enablers, they are not responsible for me. Maria and I love and support one another, but she can not make me feel safe in the world, only I can do that.  When I call out to help, I am the one that has to answer, and affirm this: I can take care of myself, I am connected to many things more than myself, and I am learning that fear and panic do not work, they do not solve problems, they do not make anything better. For me, they have always made things worse. They don’t work for me any longer.

So my dream suggested that I continue to let them go. There is peace and safety, and it exists inside of me. Time for it to come out and into the light. Everything is a gift, even a nightmare.