Day 361 - Finding Self
Dreams are funny things, but important too.
I don't think we give them enough credit for how much they tell us about ourselves.
My earliest dreams that I can remember are houses. Not that unexpected, considering how often we uprooted from one house and went to another. But most of the time, these dream houses were never a reflection of my real childhood, just houses...of endless bedrooms filled with multiple beds, duplicate kitchens, trashed out trailers, circular homes of familiar antiques, hidden rooms, rooms behind rooms. Upstairs, downstairs, my subconscious was always wandering through a house. And I know these houses well; I've dreamed of them more than once.
In dream symbolism, a house is thought to represent your sense of self.
What's potentially so fascinating about this is if you consider how a child establishes a sense of self.
The first two years of life were theorized by Jean Piaget to be a stage of rapid growth and sensorimotor development. But more to the point, there's a particular stage of cognitive development referred to as "object permanence." Object permanence is basically when child understands that something can exist even if he or she cannot see it.
What if...a house is a child's first sense of self??
A tangible experience of one's own existence - to touch, explore, make sense of the world...a place to try, to fall down, to make mistakes and also memories...somewhere to belong. What happens to a child's understanding of the world if their world is always shifting? Where does she find her object permanence?
Mom says that when I was a baby there were three places that I was happy: my crib, my highchair, or the cab of our pickup truck. If I got fussy, she would pick me up and just move me to one of those three places. Maybe that doesn't seem terribly unusual, but if home was always changing, then those were my three constants. They were my sense of self.
Not too much later, they sold the truck and a two-year old girl with blonde pigtails wailed desperately as the new owner pulled away, pleading, "My twuck! My twuck!"
So, is it really farfetched to think that for so many years I repeatedly wandered through those houses in my dreamscapes, perhaps searching for that sense of self that always seemed to elude my grasp?
I don't think we give them enough credit for how much they tell us about ourselves.
In dream symbolism, a house is thought to represent your sense of self.
What's potentially so fascinating about this is if you consider how a child establishes a sense of self.
The first two years of life were theorized by Jean Piaget to be a stage of rapid growth and sensorimotor development. But more to the point, there's a particular stage of cognitive development referred to as "object permanence." Object permanence is basically when child understands that something can exist even if he or she cannot see it.
What if...a house is a child's first sense of self??
A tangible experience of one's own existence - to touch, explore, make sense of the world...a place to try, to fall down, to make mistakes and also memories...somewhere to belong. What happens to a child's understanding of the world if their world is always shifting? Where does she find her object permanence?
Mom says that when I was a baby there were three places that I was happy: my crib, my highchair, or the cab of our pickup truck. If I got fussy, she would pick me up and just move me to one of those three places. Maybe that doesn't seem terribly unusual, but if home was always changing, then those were my three constants. They were my sense of self. Not too much later, they sold the truck and a two-year old girl with blonde pigtails wailed desperately as the new owner pulled away, pleading, "My twuck! My twuck!"
So, is it really farfetched to think that for so many years I repeatedly wandered through those houses in my dreamscapes, perhaps searching for that sense of self that always seemed to elude my grasp?
