From Rubble and Ruin - An Etymology of Dreaming

Hello all,

In our last article, we explored how dreams show us our narrows and show us how it feels when we are in our narrow spaces – spaces created through our need for survival

Dreams do this, of course. Show us where we have been living, how we have been living. Even in ways we are not entirely aware of.

In my own work, in my early years of working with dreams, as we have seen in the last few articles, I did not know I was “living in small and falling apart places” inside of me in any way. My outer world did not look too bad – I had spent several years traveling all over my own country and Europe. I had lived in many place, begun writing and getting my work published. I had many adventures, friends, my creative life was beginning.

But I was still living, inside, in ruins and rubble. Feeling that I did not deserve anything else.

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But dreams do not just show us how we are living and why. They can also show us where our ways of living in these ways come from. Ways that are not just from our own lives.

They can help us understand and feel how some of what we wrestle with can come from our lineage, from family beliefs and stories, from generations before us.

Generations of survival and handing down ways of survival.

Even if our dreams cannot show us exactly what happened in the generations before us, they can show us how the survival and, yes, resilience of our parents and grandparents and on back is passed along to us. What the experience is, for us.

[We will tackle the issue of what is passed genetically through RNA in another article.]

Since I have been working with a specific example of my own work, let’s continue with it in terms of generational trauma and the passing on of ways of survival.

When I was just entering into high school, my father had a “nervous breakdown” and checked himself into a psychiatric hospital. There are many layers and context around what happened to my father and what a shock it was when this happened but for this telling, I will stick to a little of my father’s story.

My father was a first generation Italian American who grew up in Chicago. My grandfather immigrated from southern Italy to flee poverty and my grandmother’s entire family had done the same, has had thousands of Italians who were fleeing poverty. It was an incredibly difficult time for immigrants from Italy and it was an incredibly difficult time for my father growing up around being Italian.

I mean, it was when Italian immigrants were considered the worst of the worst, not even human. Called animals, wops [a slur against Italian men, especially, meaning thug] and greasemonkeys. I found one op-ed cartoon from the time with ships dumping out immigrants on the shores of the U.S. – and the immigrants were shown with human heads and rat bodies. The caption read, “Direct from the Slums of Europe” and some of the rat people had hats that said Mafia and were carrying weapons. [See below.]

When my father married my mother, who was second generation Irish, he left his Chicago life and moved to Cincinnati [where my mother was born and raised], a very conservative and very segregated city. Even in Cincinnati, he was treated differently, especially by my mother’s family. Still treated as a “dirty Italian” in many ways. No matter how successful he became.

Like most of my Italian family, my father never spoke his feelings. Really. Never. Ever. It was not done – you had to hold it together, be tough. There was no room for feelings in the way my father was taught to learn how survival.

So, when circumstances around the marriage created problems with his business and he ended up not being able to work, he collapsed. And, surprisingly, he got help. It was getting the help that helped him leave his toxic marriage to my mother.

But afterward, for the rest of his life, he carried shame about what had happened. Shame that he had had a crisis. Shame that he had not been tough enough. Shame that he had left us with my mother and had “failed” as a father.

I feel how my father’s shame was related to the shame my grandfather carried about his family not being able to make in Italy and having to leave the country. Shame around coming from poverty. Shame around being Italian immigrants. My grandfather used to say he just wanted us to be “Americans” and he never taught my father to speak Italian.

I don’t know that my father ever felt right. I think he always felt he was wrong or had failed, even as a kid. Even to his dying day. And he was a master of hiding his feelings and hiding himself from me and my brothers. The same way my grandfather had been master at keeping his feelings to himself.

As I said earlier, there are many more layers to this, of course, but the core element of feeling wrong, of carrying shame was not something I just made up and not just something that arose from my own imagination around my parent’s difficult marriage. It was handed to me from generations and probably generations of ancestors carrying shame and hiding their true selves to survive. [There was and still is shame around being from southern Italy – even before my family immigrated to the U.S.]

And my dreams literally helped to show me this. Here’s a dream from early in my work about my father:

I am in a big city and looking for my father. I find him outside a warehouse that he owns. The entire building has collapsed and is in utter ruins. He is standing in the alley and muttering how his place is filled with rats. He tells me not to go in because of all the rats. I go in anyway and pick my way through the rubble. What I find is not rats, but a small boy who has been waiting for me. I kneel down and he runs into my arms.

Oh, this dream still breaks my heart.

Just as I had lived in ruins in my dreams, my father had and was still living in ruins, too. The moment he tells me that his warehouse, a place for storage [oof, all those feelings], is full of rats is a moment where my dream showed me how my father felt he was just full of rats. Just like that political cartoon.

The way I often felt that I was full of darkness and was always wrong, too.

But in the ruins of generational trauma was not rats, but a beautiful, healthy, young boy just waiting for me to fetch him from the rubble of the past.

That boy, of course, is some part of my boy-self. Taught to find a way to survive in the ruins, in the rubble. I also think there was part of my father’s boy-self in that dream boy, too. A part of my father that I did, sometimes, see.

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One thing about shame – it is, in fact, a way to survive just not in a resilient way. When we are shamed or we carry shame, we carry the story that something is wrong with us, inside. But if something is wrong, then maybe we can change it. Maybe we can do something to “not be shameful”. We may try to be “better”, we may keep our lives very small, we may do shameful things to prove the point and live those ways as ways to survive. I think about my grandfather just wanting us to “be Americans”, erasing our Italian heritage, as if that would solve all the issues he faced.

Why does this matter? Because it creates a larger context for my work, for my beliefs about myself and how some of them did not come from just me. Helps to know that my ancestors were considered no better than rats. It has helped me to have compassion for my father and for myself. Especially when I find I am still trudging along the “I’m wrong” path. Knowing it is a path my ancestors have walked helps me to have the option to maybe stop walking it.

Helps me to know that maybe I am not wrong and shameful at my core, but many wrongs have happened to my ancestors and to me. Which gives me space to work on my own difficulties and mistakes in an entirely different way.

It also matters because this larger context can show not just the trauma, the shame, the survival stories that are passed down to us – but also the possibility of something else. Of the resilience that can also be handed to us. So that we can have different possibilities. More on that in the next article…