Thread: Dream about a large bear

Dear CosmicKid

I don't know what your dream means but it reminded me about a radio program I listened to in 2009:

Originally Posted by cosmickid

first: im elliot reed, agender, 18 (almost nineteen), currently out of school and unemployed. i live with my mother, my father passed away when i was twelve, i have an older sister who lives in boston, mass. my relationship with my mother is... strained, but my sister and i are very close. my father and i were fairly close before he passed.

a few weeks ago i went to a camp in new hampshire for trans kids. it was out in the wilderness, a good half an hour from any kind of civilization, no cell service, etc etc. i enjoyed it a lot! in fact, i resented coming home.

but on to the dream:

i had this dream during the camp i mentioned before. the cabins we slept in were pretty standard sized cabins; probably a bit smaller than, say, a 4-H cabin. anyways, in the dream, everyone in the cabin (we were all very good friends) was sleeping quite peacefully until a giant bear, bigger than the cabin, ripped off the roof. i think it was a grizzly bear? it was a lightish brown color and very shaggy looking, and the moon was behind it. i think the moon was an odd color, like pale pink maybe?

So obviously im terrified and so is everyone else, but i don't think anyone besides me moved or spoke or really did anything. I was sleeping on a top bunk so i was relatively close to the bear, but it was so big it didnt seem to really matter that i was a few feet off the floor. i couldn't scream or move at this point, but it wasn't in a sleep paralysis kind of way, it was just the dream. the bear stands up on its hind legs so it's even taller and rests its paws on the bits of the cabin where the roof had been. then it points a claw and me and says 'You're my cub.' its voice was really loud and echoing, but i don't think it actually moved its mouth? at this point i wasn't really scared anymore but still kind of tense, and then everyone in the cabin was gone and the bear leaned down and picked me up in its mouth by my shirt. it told me i was its cub again and took me to a really big cave and went to sleep. i was resting on its stomach and it was warm and soft and i'm pretty sure i fell asleep in the dream and then woke up in real life. i woke up feeling very relaxed but also alert and i couldn't get back to sleep after that.

feel free to ask any questions though i think i've covered everything that i can remember.

Here is the bit about a huge bear:

Saturday 28 February 2009 1:00PM

Jungian psychoanalyst and psychotherapist Robert Bosnak is a dream worker. To him dreams are an ecosystem of imaginings—powerful bodily experiences populated by characters with their own intelligences.*

*

Robert Bosnak: Yes, I'll give you an example. This is a dream of a man who is a therapist and is working in a hospital, he's in the nurses room and suddenly he is stumbling down the stairs and there is a huge bear that runs down the stairs, runs through the hall and out the door. We worked this dream in a group and somebody in the group, the person asked, what is the bear feeling. And the man says, 'Oh the bear is really curious, the bear is really curious to what is happening.'

Now at this moment I feel absolutely nothing in my body, so I begin to assume that he's talking very mentally, and that he is fabricating a story about the bear. So we stopped the work at that point, have him look at the bear again, look at what the front paws are like, begin to sense those front legs, and he begins to sense this enormous amount of power in the bear, this enormous amount of energy. And as he slowly begins to through a process of interior miming become like the bear, suddenly he's identified with the bear and he feels this enormous thrust in the hindlegs and is pushed through the hall and out the door and out, out, out, this bear just wants to get out. This bear is totally claustrophobic and you can feel it throughout the body. Now that is embodied imagination, very different from fabrication.

Natasha Mitchell: So what happens?

Robert Bosnak: What happens is that this man is in contact with the claustrophobia of the bear, and in a body that is much more powerful than actually it's allowed to be.

The intelligence in this bear is an intense sense of claustrophobia and a need to get out, that is the meaning that is fully present in a visceral sense and he has now participated in that.

What it then—from there on, what that physical sense is like in his life, where in his life he feels that kind of claustrophobia—it may be in his marriage, it may be in his work, it may be in his studies. That we can then explore, because we have a visceral sense of what it is like to be so claustrophobic. And then from that moment on a whole lot of questions begin to arise that are questions of psychotherapy.


Natasha Mitchell: You work with clients who have all sorts of traumas in their lives, some very serious.*(...)

Here is the 1 hour program: click the transcript or listen to it if you prefer:

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Dreams: the body alive! (Part 1 of 2) - All In The Mind - ABC Radio National (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

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