NO EXIT

................................by Stanley

....I’m in a crowded bus going to town. I’m going to meet my girlfriend to buy her some underwear for her birthday. The bus is jammed packed with people. I think we must be getting near town so I start to work myself towards the exit. People are standing in the aisle. I push my way through. It’s a struggle. Near the exit I’m jammed in even tighter. The crush of people around me is unbearable and I begin to feel claustrophobic. Suddenly I wonder if I’m on the right bus and maybe it’s not going to stop to let me get out. My anxiety turns to panic. I wake up with a sense of recognition.
....How many times have I dreamed variations of this! Always it’s being confined in some sort of small space and unable to get out. As a boy I remember terrifying dreams of being shut up in a coffin and buried alive. Later of being locked in the boot of a car where I go screaming mad. It was always more or less the same scenario.
....I know what this is all about, so it doesn’t scare me so much now. I discovered what it was some years ago when I read about Stanilav Grof’s work with patients – regressing them into the birth trauma in full reality using Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD-25). Dozens of patients testified to the same terrifying experience: the last stage in the birth canal where you are being crushed by massive forces and there’s no exit. I didn’t know about the felt-sense at that time – but reading this made an impact and connection so strong that I knew for sure. Thank heavens my claustrophobia has always been confined to the imagination and to a very occasional dream. The Germans have a colourful word for this experience: torschlusspanik. It means, literally, ‘gate-shut panic’. Like the ‘have-to-get-out’ scare that swept through East Germany when they built the Berlin Wall to keep them all in. It was a mass stampede to escape to the West.
....Although I have never had any fear of being in lifts or crowded places, like many people who suffer from claustrophobia, I have great sympathy for those who have.
....The birth experience is universal; for some it is highly traumatic. Some get over it, some don’t; and people can re-experience it in different ways during their lifetime.
....The interesting variation in my dream is that I am going to town to by a birthday present of underwear for my girlfriend. Very curious! Whose birthday are we dreaming about? The day of my birth, no doubt. And when I get out I will have a girlfriend. Not a Mum, but a girlfriend – which is even better with its promise of intimacy and underwear.
....The past is factual enough, but nothing in one’s history has a fixed meaning. Dreams reflect how meanings have endless possibilities. So far as meaning goes, my history is always being rewritten – not according to my whim, but to the way my life needs to go.