Drink and dreams
What I learned about myself and my drinking habits through Jungian analysis
Many years ago, in another life, I had weekly meetings with a woman who exists in my mind now as a white witch. I would walk or cycle to her house, and she would open the door, unspeaking, and lead me up the bare wood stairs, to a stark room, and I would lie on the couch, look at the ceiling and talk. If you can call it talk. Words would tumble out of me from some place I had not previously known: questions, doubts, nervous laughter, dreams. She sat to my right, a still creature, like a whisper, and she listened. She might nudge, or show interest, but often she mirrored what I said by repeating, or giving me a counter view to think about it again. I was in a difficult place at the time, unhappily married with two young children, but for some time I had been stalking the streets, looking for distraction, standing on tiptoes to reach into someone else’s garden. My energies and desires were displaced.
Over many months, and maybe even years, time seemed to melt into itself. But over this period, I began the extraordinary process of unravelling, in order to piece myself back together again slightly differently from before. The white witch helped me to listen to my thoughts and to understand my desires, to get to know what really mattered to me. She helped me face the difficult stuff, to stop turning my back and running in the opposite direction.
She was an odd presence. She was mature and neutral, and must have been very short-sighted because she wore glasses like saucers, that shrunk her eyes. When I think of her now I see only greys and shapes. I don’t see her engage with me at all - although I know she did - because this is the impression she wanted to leave with me. She was a figure in a room, a spectre almost, but one with an immense silent power. The room with her in it was a blank canvas with reflective walls; there was nowhere to deflect or escape to.
If I asked her anything about her life, she turned it back on me. ‘Is that your cat in the garden?’ I would ask, testing, as we walked up the stairs. My question would be met with silence. I once asked her for a glass of water and she refused.
I was struggling then with alcohol. I was struggling with lots of things. I spoke about drink a lot. It had killed my father and yet I still turned to it. I knew I wanted to give it up, but I also didn’t.
Whenever I said something affirmative – ‘I want to cut down drinking,’ – she would counter it by saying, ‘but lots of people drink.’ She very rarely made suggestions. Never gave advice. I wonder now if this was because she wanted me to make the decision with the whole of me, not a flighty fad or thought that would pass and be overcome. Perhaps if she challenged me it made me reflect. It made me think hard about it.
She was very keen on dream analysis. The longer I saw her, the better I got at analysing my dreams, reading them, seeing their significance, learning about myself through symbol and meaning.
And the more I recalled my dreams in that room, the more vivid my dreams became. One day I took a dream to her that I was in a dungeon, strapped to a chair, and I was being tortured. My torturer was tall and dressed in black, his face covered by a hood, and he was pouring liquid over my face, and into my mouth until it suffocated me. My hands were behind my back and I was unable to defend myself. I knew the liquid was alcohol. ‘Alcohol is not good for you,’ she said.