I popped past the forum back yesterday to see if my response to the response about the dream experience had elicited further response and it had, from you Jed, indicating you concurred …which was mildly interesting because I thought you had been agreeing with the original poster to whom I was responding, guessing that I had misread that part.
So last night I'm trapped in my bathroom with an inquisitive and rather annoying young boy, part of a much larger, more convoluted and complex scenario that included me smoking my own rather than accepting one from a young and attractive, nervously edgy Russian girl, at a pop-up karaoke bar in the small urban park nearby, whose equally attractive Brazilian boyfriend at the mic also only smoked his own and who, she informed me without implied criticism, was gay. I should've guessed by the glitter encrusted cigarette butts in the ashtray at her table. It was before that, in the nice big bathroom back at my place, I locked the door and turned around to go and found the boy there. Because of the party outside I couldn't just tell him to get out and we agreed to take turns. And even though he was annoying, he was sticking to the other side of the big bathroom and not looking, yet I was unable to let go and urinate, because he was there. I just couldn't.
I woke up and my bladder was full…I'd drunk too much water in yesterday's humidity… but wondered if I'd just go back to sleep. I kind of dozed, as I faded, wondering why I couldn't just let go and urinate, right there in my own bed. And it occurred to me: what kind of conditioning….?
I read somewhere years ago in my studies that the reflexes built in the process of toilet training permeate even the dreaming mind, the failure to close that connection which results in partially-trained bedwetters. Over time the muscular 'letting go' response associated with relaxing the sphincter area down there becomes a fused connection, allied to the same area of the brain that stops your body thrashing in dreams where you are moving around and doing things.
And then I wondered curiously what part of A Course in Miracles applied here and the first thing that popped into my head was "Forgiveness"… my one function here, so, duh. Forgiveness, as you'll recall, is about letting go of criticism and grievances towards others. Not because you're the bigger person, but because in a dream nothing is real, including sin, and such feelings are merely part of the larger dissociation that created and now maintains the sensations and certainty of separation in what is only ever One.
And then I was really awake. Conditioning.
Here's the thing: you actually can let go and urinate in a dream, or even awake in a bed. You just have to cut through a lot of conditioning in order to make it happen… or your waking self needs to be somehow incapacitated or psychologically traumatised. I know about the former from when, as a younger adult self, after a heavy night on the town and confused about which level of the dream I was inhabiting at the time, wet my bed. The latter is well-documented in psychology studies.
So the mind seems very adept at retaining the larger context. Even in the dream, the narrative wrapped itself around the waking 'reality' that I was asleep in bed…my dream self - which is no different to the waking self, just inhabiting a different but yet not unconnected context - experienced a physiological need which permeated the dream but, because of that conditioning, projected into my dream a small child that kept me from wetting my bed. In the dream he was annoying because of the inconvenience of him being there, not because he was unendearing.
As it turns out, he was a small saviour, although I couldn't see it in that context… how very ACIM.
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