Faceless Gollum (re-post from another forum)

[Vertigenius]

Hi Everyone, I meant to post this topic here but put it on another page first by accident and I don't know how to delete it. Lately I have dreams about huge old dark abandoned places, like the dungeons of castles, underground railway caverns or empty blocks of flats. In them I generally feel cold, overwhelmed and frightened. In the most recent one I noticed a whitish figure in the shadows. Sort of Gollum-esque but full human size and with completely pale, maggot-coloured skin. Like the skin of someone who hasn't seen daylight. It/him kind of looks like Gollum, with that kind of wiry strength, but also they have no face, just the strip of monk-like hair encircling a bald dome. I felt afraid of them at first, and when I recorded the dream I wrote down that they were chasing me, however I feel now (and I could be kidding myself) that I was chasing him/it. Also they are completely silent. I have noticed these dreams (abandoned places, feeling small) coming up more and more recently. I'm not sure if it has something to do with my ability to trust others, take risks etc. Those being things I fret about in everyday life even though I struggle to take more risks and open up to others in therapy. Anyway I hope someone can help with this dream, I think if I could understand it would make sense of a lot of the other dreams too which have similar themes

[Athanor]

Although in order to provide a more accurate interpretation it would usually be best to have some additional general background information about you (and a description of events just before the latest dream), it’s safe to say that the dreams overall have been showing your current psychological situation along with some clues about how to improve things. For example, in therapy you’re probably exploring some parts of your unconscious mind that tend to have been left behind and not worked at for whatever reason (e.g. the dark abandoned places). Other life situations may seem to be confining and unpleasant (e.g. the dungeons) while relationships to others as you mentioned might be strained and difficult, making them hard to deal with (e.g. the dark underground railway caverns and the abandoned flats). In the dreams, you feel cold, overwhelmed and frightened. Although it might seem a little odd, dreams don’t usually tell us what we already know, so maybe you understandably do feel as shown in the dreams but don’t really let this into your awareness enough. If so, perhaps your therapist could help you with this side of things if by chance they’re not already doing so. It looks like the basic cause of some of these feelings could have appeared in the latest dream in the Gollum-like figure. Dreams express themselves through analogies and metaphors, so probably the character of Gollum in the Lord of the Rings in some ways indirectly reflects certain issues in yourself that might be painful and have been understandably kept from being very conscious (e.g. in your dream, the Gollum-like figure looks like someone who hasn’t seen “daylight”, i.e. “consciousness”). Maybe some of these issues came up in recent therapy sessions and were seen more clearly for the first time. If so, the dream could be trying to clarify and build on any valuable insights that were experienced. First off though, the dream seems to be saying that gradual, steady work will still be required because what this inner figure represents has a “wiry strength”. Also, its nature is still not understood very fully as yet (e.g. it has no face, it’s completely silent). It’s possible that the monk-like hair suggests the positive potential in the Gollum-like figure, hinting at the potential for spiritual “healing” that can come from accepting various parts of yourself in order to make yourself “whole” (since the root of the word “heal” comes from the word meaning “whole”). The problem is that it’s not easy for any of us to accept and live with all parts of ourselves because of course, some of them tend to be mean, unkind and selfish etc. This is something like the problem that the Gollum character faces in the Lord of the Rings because he too had "come to love and hate the Ring, just as he loved and hated himself." That is, the “Ring” symbolizes wholeness and it isn’t always easy to accept the darker sides of ourselves, of others and of life in general. Like with the Gollum character, certain incidents may have led to your having some problems feeling trust for others and maybe you also try to be overly-friendly sometimes as a way to overcome this fear. Maybe other emotions might also seem jumbled and unclear at times, symbolized by, for example, mischievous elves who appear on the scene and upset things. This might be the symbolic reason behind the Gollum character in the Lord of the Rings hating anything that was “Elf-made” because “elves” unexpectedly come and go from inside us, causing all sorts of problems. The solution is of course to build up strong techniques to corral and calm down any such inner feelings and impulses so that they then can become helpful, adding to the all-round healthy nature of a person. So it looks like the latest dream could show that you’ve made some very good progress since the underlying problem now has a visible form; that is, you’re more fully aware of it and therefore should be able to face it more fully in the future. At first, it might indeed have been the Gollum-like figure who was chasing you but maybe later, it was you who was chasing it in the dream. If so, this would tend to represent the idea of how well you were, in the end, “tracking down” and “unearthing” this previously hidden side so that you can work with it in a kind of co-operative way to make things better over time by becoming more whole as a person. The Gollum character was torn between his lust for the Ring of wholeness and his desire to be free of it, so things won’t always be very easy, but the effort will really be worth it as hinted at by your dream. Just to add that dreams can be very hard to understand and there’s no easy “dream dictionary” approach to them, so maybe it’s best if you just sort of keep an eye on them and maybe write them down without really trying to figure them out too much while you’re in therapy. Maybe in the future though, you could read the useful introductory book by the professional Jungian analyst Katherine Olivetti called “Dream Work: 10 Lessons for Understanding Dreams”. Anyway as mentioned, without knowing anything much about you, this way of looking at your dreams might not fit your personal circumstances very well, but I hope these ideas can be helpful in some way.