Witches, Manhunt, Tiger and Shark
Recurring dreams, 1976, by Sidarta Ribeiro
When he was five years old, the little boy went through a disturbing phase in which he had the same nightmare every night. In this dream, he was living without any relatives near him, alone in a sad city beneath a rainy sky. A good part of the dream took place in a maze of muddy alleys that circled gloomy buildings. The city, which was surrounded by barbed wire and illuminated by insistent flashes of lightning, looked more like a concentration camp. The boy and the city's other children would invariably end up at a scary house where cannibal witches lived. One of the children--never the boy--would go into the three-story building and everybody would watch the many dark windows, waiting for one of them to be suddenly lit up, revealing the silhouette of the child and the witches. There would be a horrifying scream, and that was how the dream ended, only to be repeated, in detail, every night.The boy developed a terror of sleeping, and informed his mother that he had decided never to fall asleep again, so as to avoid the nightmare. He would lie still in bed, alone in his room, fighting desperately against sleep, determined to remain alert. But ultimately he would always succumb, and a few hours later everything would start over again. |
The fear of being the child chosen to go into the house was so great that he was unable to prevent the repeating of the narrative, unable to avoid falling into the same oneiric trap. His earnest mother taught him to think about flower-filled gardens as he was drifting off so as to calm the beginning of his sleep. But after the dark curtain of midnight, the nightmare would return, relentlessly, as if the dawn would never be allowed to return. Soon afterward, the boy started to have sessions of psychotherapy with an excellent specialist. The memories he retains of this period are of board games kept in an appealing wooden box in the consulting room. At a certain point the psychologist suggested, cleverly, that the dream might somehow be under control. And then the nightmare of the witches was replaced by another dream. This one also had a disagreeable narrative, though it wasn't a horror story so much as a piece of Hitchcockian suspense with surprising image editing. The gray thriller was experienced in the third person: the boy didn't see the dream through his own eyes, but from outside, as if watching a movie about himself. The dream, which took place in an airport and always ended the same way, was again repeated every night. |
After some more play psychotherapy and more conversations about controlling one's dreams, the boy developed a third dream narrative, this one no longer a nightmare but an adventure dream--still filled with peril but accompanied by much less fear and anxiety. It was about a tiger hunt in the Indian jungle, and the boy featured clearly as the hero, a Mowgli in British colonial clothing, watching from the outside, in the third person. The same dark-haired adult friend was with him at the beginning of the chase as they passed through the thick forest, until they sighted cliffs and a rough sea. On the right-hand side of the field of vision there was a tall island, tall and surrounded by sheer cliffs, and in the background the sun was setting, brightly colored against a gray sky. |
Why did that boy have recurrent dreams about witches, criminals, tigers, and sharks? Would it be enough to say that those dreams were evoking the terrifying encounter with the wicked old witch in Walt Disney's Snow White, or the shark in Steven Spielberg's Jaws, both of which made frequent appearances on the screens of the day? What do they mean, the elements and plots of these nightmares that are so clear and so filled with emotion? Do they actually mean anything at all? Is there some logic behind the dream? Is the dream an inexplicable fact of human existence or an unfathomable arcane mystery? Is dreaming chance or necessity?
Months before the appearance of the first nightmare, one Sunday at sunset, the boy's father died, struck down by a heart attack. At first, his mother reacted serenely, but a few months later, now a widow with two children to bring up, working every day and taking university courses in her spare time, she fell into a violent depression. It would be months before the boy's younger brother asked where his father was. It was in this context of family suffering that the terrible recurring nightmare of the witches appeared. It provided a richly detailed illustration of the feeling of orphanhood, as well as the loneliness of the fear of death, which the boy had suddenly discovered to be a real thing. It was an irreversible, chronic situation, and he could see no light at the end of the tunnel. The recurrent dream was an expression of that dead end, which at that moment seemed concrete and inescapable. |
The professional intervention was positive. Not long after the therapy began, the dream of the witches gave way to the dream of the detective and the criminal. Horror gave way to suspense, the inexorability of the sacrifice to the witches gave way to a mission, and the boy gained an adult friend with dark hair-like his father and the therapist himself. The setting for the dream was no longer the concentration camp of an orphanage, but an airport, a place from which you set off on a journey to far away. Then came a third dream, the hunt for the tiger and the swim with the shark suspense was replaced by adventure, the separation of the father figure was accepted as necessary, and the clarity at the end of the dream left an assurance that the shark was not going to eat the boy. The understanding that our journey is a solitary one was recorded in the memory in orange, red, and purple. The twilight in the dream was painted in the same colors as the moment, on that Sunday as ancient as it is unforgettable, when my father fell. SOURCE: The Oracle of Night by Sidarta Ribeiro, translation by Daniel Hahn, 2021, pp. 3-8. |
This isn't just moving; Ribeiro chose this milestone in his life to illustrate his theory that dreams generally don't need to be interpreted intellectually, just lived, for their messages aren't facts so much as experiences. Dreams test possibilities, make you face hopes and fears. At least over the long haul! A single dream can't explore all choices. Depth psychology had it right; growth and healing take time. Over the next few hundred pages he justifies it experimentally, too (in detail I find tedious, but for him necessary; he's a scientist fighting an old guard who deny dreams mean a thing).
Many of my own dreams fit Ribeiro's model. Not all; but many.
--Chris Wayan
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