Here on New Years Eve, the penultimate Holly Day we consider Forgiveness. I sleep less soundly at my age, and am often awakened by intense emotions elicited by a moment in a dream.
Last night I was dreaming about helping some boys at a playground who were trying to hop onto a spinning merry go round. Some other kids were enjoying finding ways to block them from managing to get on, and I scolded the blockers and chased them away, then helped push the merry go round and help the kids figure out the best ways to manage their game. When the disruptive kids returned, I began yelling at them pointing toward them and shouting that their behavior was ugly ugly ugly. Even as the words were coming out of my mouth and I felt myself burning with rage, I noticed that one of them, a young black girl, was walking toward me, with a conciliatory smile, but I was carried away by emotion and just continued to point and repeat my ugly insult. She turned and ran away in tears, and I was overwhelmed with guilt and regret for not being able to respond to her obviously friendly affect. It was this rage and regret that woke me up.
For some period after I awaken, I often find that I am unable to escape the reality of the dream and feel an urgent need to resolve whatever was happening in the dream. Sometimes it’s a powerful longing to return to a numinous dreamplace, more often a desire to follow through on the dream’s unresolved frustration. It can take a while for my waking mind to stop planning a resolution to a dream dilemma. Sometimes that full return to reality is a huge relief, like the one that lead me to abandon my work as a production designer, when I realized I didn’t actually need to suffer the panic at having 20 minutes to get my messy house ready to be used as a cover set on my own film. This time the guilt and desire to forgiven by the dreamgirl persisted even after I grasped that it was only a dream and that, while I did not actually need to find and ask forgiveness for my unjust injury, I still tried to return to the dream, perhaps hoping to heal self loathing it had evoked.
It was complicated with a component of white guilt, knowing that “ugly ugly ugly” would be especially painful to a young black girl living in a world of “missing white girl syndrome” and so tried and eventually succeeded in maintaining this intention as I was falling back to sleep. Occasionally, when dreaming though a series of snooze alarms, I have managed to actually return and resolve such imaginal dream dilemmas. But in this case, I slept for several more hours and even though I did not awaken with a recollection of such a dream resolution, I still recalled the episode and remained haunted by the shame I had felt after that dream exchange.
I don’t know what portion of folks occasionally lose their temper or, when they do, if they are as frightening as I am when I do. I think my sister Deena felt my own tendency to rage was an an ASD comorbidity, but I have always deeply regretted the rare instances when I have found myself so enraged that I am barely able to recognize the world. I’ve seen people in the grip of road rage or swinging at each other in a fist fight, but they seem more engaged with their opponent and righteous in their aggression and not lost in their own minds in the way I experience my rage, which I always, as in this dream, deeply regret even as it is happening.
I recall having a few regretted moments of rageful blindness in almost every close relationship I’ve ever had. When I finally understood that my pompous arrogance, poor manners, oversharing, and other hurtful aspects of my personality were a result of my aspergers, I was eventually able to forgive myself for them, but I have never really been able to really forgive myself for my temper. A therapist once told me that appropriate anger was like gentle breath of breeze. I didn’t really believe him (though after him I never want to have another male therapist) and continue to try to suppress my anger. Maybe he’s right that if some folks could express their anger in every moment rather than trying to repress it, it would become like that little breeze. This may be true for others, but I am nonetheless philosophically opposed to expressions of anger and don’t believe that all of our instinctive urges must be released lest they explode. I tend to take my maladaptive urges as signals that I need to listen and to respond to, but not necessarily indulge. Maybe this is only because my ASD rage can lead to this disturbing disembodied state. Thankfully these are very rare occurrences except in my dreams, but I recall and regret every instance in my whole life, from my earliest recollection of yelling at my my sweet kindergarten teacher, Mrs Anderson, to my most recent outburst at my son in law.
Our lives, as I described in my earlier posts about free will, are carried on intersecting and swirling currents beyond our control, which leads me to easily forgive others. I know that the path of forgiving is the one most likely to lead to our safety and harmony. Today I am resolving to try harder to forgive myself. Today “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive them that trespass against us” feels like the wisest thing that guy ever said.
Fantastic Forgiveness!
HOLLY DAYS 