All Episodes
Previous Next
Sept. 11, 2008 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
22:45
1146 Stef's Baby Dream - A Self Dream Analysis

My first recalled dream about my child to be...

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Good afternoon, everybody. Hope you're doing well.
It's Steph. 11th of September, 2008.
Seven years since the buildings came down.
What have you done with your time?
Anyway, I hope that you're doing well.
I just wanted to, you know, I had a dream.
Several nights ago, and since we just had a big chunky dream analysis and this is nothing quite that amazing, but since I'm always talking about other people's dreams and not mine, I thought you might be interested in Hearing about a dream that I had, which I think was very, very helpful to me.
So what started this was Christina's pregnancy is now she's, her baby's 25 weeks.
And you can see visible movement on her belly when the baby kicks or turns or pokes or moves and so on.
And so we have this, you know, we'll sort of spoon and Christina I'll sort of try and not tickle, you can't really tickle because the baby's got your skin and placenta in between the baby and me, but I'll sort of try and flutter the baby and then the baby will kick in a spot and then I'll tickle and whatever,
the baby will kick. And the baby's getting so strong now, I don't think particularly strong to us, but strong.
And the baby kicks like it's hard, like it's a poof!
And I'm actually a little scared, to be honest with you.
It's a little unsettling because Christina's all like, woo!
You know, like she really feels that, right?
So when I'm sort of playing with the baby in this way, it's actually unsettling.
It's actually a little alarming.
And I was sort of talking about that a little bit.
But I went to bed and I dreamt that...
I poked the baby, but I poked the baby too hard while the baby was still in the womb.
And the baby kind of bleated out in a frustrated or agonized kind of way.
And I heard the baby crying.
You know, something frustrated and hot and bothered and so on, right?
Helpless and frustrated and, you know, that it was unpleasant and so on.
And I was really saddened by this.
And of course, I mean, like any dad, I'm dad-to-be, I suppose.
I'm fanatically careful about, you know, the baby and never, you know, tickling too hard.
I mean, I'm ridiculous that way, right?
Christina has pants on or has a seatbelt on.
I'll grab the seatbelt and pretend that I'm letting the baby breathe.
You know, I'm very, very concerned.
Obviously, babies are very tender and sensitive creatures.
So, So I didn't feel that this was any kind of warning in the dream for me that I was going to be any kind of roughhouse dad.
But I was thinking about it.
It made me feel very sad, the idea that I would poke the baby too hard and that the baby would cry out.
But it was the crying out that was the clue, right?
So dreams are not random. And violation of physical laws, as I said to Colleen in the last Dream podcast, the Falling Stories podcast, Violations of physical laws do not occur randomly in dreams, right?
They indicate something that is not real.
And, of course, you can't hear a baby cry when a baby is in a womb, right?
You can't hear the baby.
Baby can't cry, or at least can't be heard.
So this indicates that there's something unreal about the situation.
And when I was tickling the baby, and I'm sure it was the foot, and I can't imagine the arms that strong yet, but I was tickling the baby.
And the baby really kicked and it startled me and it startled Christina.
I hate to say it, but it felt like there was a kind of violence to it, a kind of strength, a kind of assertiveness, a kind of energy to it that really was amazing to me.
It was thrilling and scary and intense and so on.
So I was thinking about this and it sort of came to mind when I was thinking about this dream.
It sort of came to my mind that a lot of people who have problems with their babies, right?
Problems bonding with their babies or hostility towards the baby and so on.
A lot of people report that the baby, you know, like one woman said, as I was reading in a book on psychology, one woman said, The baby screams at me just like my mother did, right?
That what it does is it actually infantilizes the parent to be in the presence of a baby, right?
If there's stuff that still has to be worked through from childhood.
And so what happens is the baby is doing the baby thing, right?
I mean, it doesn't care about your It's not capable, really, of caring about your state of mind, your moods, and so on.
So, in a sense, or in a way, it's kind of like a domineering parent.
And this is why a lot of people get kind of messed up around babies, because babies are uncontrollable in the way that, when we were children, if we had domineering parents, our parents We're uncontrollable.
The babies don't care about our emotional state in the way that, it's not that they don't care, just so you know, they have the capacity for and they bond and so on, but their internal stimuli obviously are infinitely greater than their capacity to read external cues, at least when they're very young, like the empathy phase comes as two to three years old.
So babies just scream when they're unhappy and don't care about your emotional state, and that for a lot of people triggers Memories of abusive parenting.
And that's one of the reasons why people get into a war of wills, so to speak, with the baby.
I'll show you and I'm not going to crumble and I'm going to be tough and I'm going to toilet train you and so on.
There's a war of wills because people have this flashback to their early initial parenting.
So, the alarm that I felt with this, and I'm using all these terms that make no sense, like I understand that, right?
But there's this sort of violent, assertive push from the baby in the womb.
Like, I was describing the dream to Christina and I said it was like the baby was pushing back, right?
And that was unsettling to me because in my family, you know, whenever you would interact with someone, they would push back violently, they would be aggressive, they would be Abusive and so on, right?
So stimulus or contact, which is me tickling the baby.
In my family when I was a kid, stimulus always bred pushback, violence, aggression, and so on.
And I think that when I was tickling the baby and the baby pushed back from the womb, I experienced that in a similar kind of way.
And the cry...
The cry that I dreamt, that cry that I dreamt in the dream that the baby was making when I poked it too hard actually reminds me, and I've talked about this memory before, my first memory is almost exactly the same cry when my brother was teasing me and pushing me around when I was an infant.
That's my sort of first memory, is my brother sort of dancing around saying, Stefan is a baby, Stefan is a baby, and I couldn't even...
Stand up and sitting there like I was a very very young and Being helpless and me saying no, you know like Rejecting that but feeling helpless right and so on and and I think that The dream is saying that this is not the same, right? That this is not the same.
And I don't want to mistake the baby for my family, right?
Even unconsciously, at any level, semi-consciously, I don't want to make those conflations because the baby is a beautiful, pure, wonderful, innocent, joyous, passionate, original, untainted, unbroken, un-messed-up human being.
And I don't want to react to the baby Through an unconscious association with my family, right?
I mean, obviously that would be unjust and unfair.
Now, it's going to happen from time to time.
I don't have a standard of perfection or anything, but I want to be as conscious as possible of where these associations occur so that I can make sure that I separate the history, my history, from the baby's future, right?
Because that is not fair or just to the baby, to lay or any of that.
It's not the baby's fault that my mom was a bitch, right?
Or my brother was a jerk.
So, I think this is the way that I think it sort of worked for me in the dream, and this is why I sort of think I had the dream the way that I had it, was that I am projecting my infant self into the, like, unconsciously, I was projecting my infant self into the baby.
Because any kind of contact or input from my family was always negative, and I had to push back.
I had to push back mentally or physically to survive the craziness, the abuse, the insanity, the screaming, the beatings, and so on.
And I'm sure that these occurred at a very young age.
I'm sure that it's a pre-verbal memory that I'm sitting on, which is why this is a sound, not a word.
And so, I think that, I said, I want to make sure that when I become a parent, I don't put myself in my parents' shoes, so to speak, and poke the baby and then the baby has to push back.
This is not the same situation at all.
It's analogous. It's not the same.
It's a completely different situation because I have empathy and I have self-knowledge that my parents just never really worked or managed to achieve or attain.
And I have all of these amazing things and I have a great community and I have a wonderful wife and a joyous marriage and all these sorts of great things.
And so I think that the dream was really saying that it's not Infliction, pushback.
It's not attack, defense.
When I'm playing with the baby and the baby pushes back as I perceive it that strongly or dare I say violently.
And I hope that this makes some kind of sense.
But what I found to be quite emotional when I was talking about it with Christina was that it wasn't I mischaracterized it.
I mischaracterized it in my mind which is obviously the result of my history or I guess still has yet to be fully processed aspects of my history but when I said that the baby was pushing back When I was tickling through the womb,
through the skin, through the placenta, when I said that the baby was pushing back, that is a characterization that comes out of my family history, but that's not true.
The baby was reaching out, right?
The baby was feeling stimuli and the baby was reaching To respond to that stimuli, as babies want to do, right?
I mean, you put a milky nipple to a baby's cheek, it will turn its head, right?
It's a response to stimuli.
It's a program to do that, but obviously it takes pleasure in responding to stimuli, even at this age, right?
Even at 25 weeks.
So when I said that the baby, when I was tickling the baby and the baby was pushing back, there's a kind of aggression or hostility, even in the characterization of saying pushing back, which is...
Unfair. It's not empirical to the situation.
It's not rational according to the situation.
It's only rational according to the history and the past is not the future.
The past is not the present. So it's not in the moment.
to feel or to characterize the baby's response to pressure to to a little tickle the baby's response to a little tickle which I say is pushing back is like I'm invading and the baby is pushing back which was my family experience My family experience, my Foo experience was of invasion and resistance.
My mother would be crazy and my brother would be teasing and invasive and punchy and I would have to push back.
I couldn't do that much physically when I was young but mentally I had to always push back against my mother's craziness or her insistence that the world was out to get her and to sort of push back.
And so I think that the dream was putting me in the position of my mother to get the difference or you could say my father because my father would have been around at least during the pregnancy and during the early part of my very early part of my life first couple of months but the dream is saying your mother was aggressive or violent in her poking so to speak and you responded with that cry of pushing back Right?
That resistance, that frustration, that discontent, that unhappiness.
And that's why in the dream, and maybe I'm my father in the dream, but I'm pushing too hard.
But of course, I never do that.
In reality, I'm probably even too gentle and considerate with the child, right?
I'm always saying, Christina will rub her belly and so on and jiggle the baby a little and I'll be like, ooh, gently, gently, right?
So I am hyper-cautious around the baby and of course that's entirely right because it's not my body right so I don't have the same sensations or the feedback but I think that the dream is saying the cry the pushing back the resistance the frustration the negative response that you had as a child was because your parents were aggressive in their poking in their invasion in their imposition upon you and that's what caused what you characterize as pushing back but of course since that's not what I do as a father-to-be in that I am exquisitely and extraordinarily and even perhaps too gentle with the baby to the point where he may not be I'm not even playing with him because he didn't feel anything right who knows right but The dream is saying that it's not pushing back.
For you, it was pushing back because you were pushed, not played with.
You were invaded, not tickled.
You were intruded upon, not participated with.
And so, Steph, your response as a baby, as a toddler, as an infant, as a child, was to push back, to experience that invasion as frustration.
But that is not...
The situation. And the reason the dream is saying to me that this is not the situation now is kind of twofold, right?
The first fold is that I'm doing something in the dream that I would never do in real life.
Or, you know, at least we can say with certainty, I have never even remotely done in real life, right?
Christina's always like, oh, no, you can poke a little harder or whatever, right?
And so that's sort of the one instance that I'm doing something in the dream that I would never conceive of doing and I would recoil from doing in real life, which is poking the fetus with my finger or whatever too hard.
And the second thing that occurs that is not real in the dream is that I can hear the baby's cry, right?
Now, since I can't actually hear a baby crying in the womb, here comes the emotion again about it.
Since I can't actually hear a baby crying in the womb, the cry that I hear that I'm confusing with a baby's cry is my own historical cry, right?
And the dream is saying, but that doesn't fit because I can't hear a baby crying in the womb.
Even if I did poke it too hard and it was unhappy, I cannot hear a baby crying in the womb.
And so the dream is saying, if something is functionally impossible, Then the dream is saying it's not real.
So the dream is telling me that if I hear a baby crying, then it's not the baby that's in Christina's womb, it's the baby that I was, because I physically can't hear the baby that is in Christina's womb.
And so not to confuse past pain with the baby's current experience, right?
Not to say the baby is pushing back and to experience the strength and energy of the baby as aggression or pushing back but as a joyful reaching out and a desire to play and a desire to interact and a desire to merge psychologically and physically with a parent right to experience that bliss of union And security,
the security that comes from that bliss of union with the parent, the unity that comes from empathy on my part.
But I can't empathize with the child if I'm mistaking the child for my own self, for my own younger self.
And if I experience the baby reaching out for me, which is what the baby is doing when he pushes back or pushes towards me or reaches out towards me when I tickle the baby.
If I experience that reaching out as a pushing away, then it is because I'm projecting my own history onto this innocent baby, which I really, really don't want to do.
I really don't want to have my history rise up behind us like a vampire and shadow the baby and the baby's experience of the world.
I mean I am a product to some degree of my history but that doesn't mean that the history should be projected should be acted out should be I should not mistake the baby for myself that would be the opposite of empathy and I don't want to experience the baby reaching out for me which is physically what is actually happening stimulus response right feels a flutter or tickle and reaches towards it that's That's healthy,
that's good, that's positive, that's lovely, that's beautiful.
Why would I experience my baby reaching for me as an act of aggression?
Because every time people reach for me, so to speak, they were, in fact, pushing, poking, prodding, invading my space and my body, my mind, when I was a baby and an infant and a toddler and a child.
So I just, you know, I think it's so important to really track these dreams.
The unconscious is so exquisitely sensitive to what is happening in our environment and absolutely wants to help us and wants to heal us and wants to point out how things are different now.
The tussle, the clash of the titans at the base of the brain which is between illusion and truth, between the false self and the true self, between the injustices of history and the virtue of the present and of the future.
I just wanted to share with you something that was quite emotional for me about wanting to make sure that I see the baby for who the baby is.
The beauty and innocence and wonder of the baby and I don't want the baby.
To feel a shred of invisibility because of my history.
Because I was invisible.
I don't want to not see the baby because I was invisible.
And I don't want to mistake and characterize what the baby is doing as having anything to do with what my parents did to me and what I experienced as a child.
And that's hard work and there's some processing that I needed that somebody who is reaching out for you is caressing, is not inflicting.
And I want to have that channel open to my heart.
I want the baby to feel that the avenue to my heart is open, is wide, is in bloom, is flowered.
That the baby can reach and connect with my heart, with my love, with my caring, with my tenderness.
And not feel that I have to recoil from the baby because when people reached out for me they always knocked me over.
But that the baby is reaching for me for connection, not for control.
The baby is reaching for me for tenderness, not for acting out, not for aggression.
And that desire to avoid photocopying the brutalities of history is a real challenge.
And I definitely had some of that when I first met Christina because her heart is as big as the planet.
And trying to catch up with the openness of her heart was for me tough.
I had to pry myself open a little and I want to make sure, sure, sure that that is going to also happen with my baby.
That my baby is gonna...
That I'm going to be completely open and available for my baby.
That connection and that openness and that wonder and that beauty.
If I have to feel like I'm holding a collapsing tunnel up, I'm going to keep my heart open for this child.
For the child, not for me.
I will obviously love it, but for the child.
So no storm clouds come between the sunlight of my love and the heart of the baby as it grows.
So I hope that this helps somewhat.
I just wanted to share a dream because dreams I think are still wonderful and I'm always talking about other people's but I wanted to share one of my own.
I hope this is helpful.
I thank you so much for listening.
▲
Export Selection