The Nazis Are Coming, a dream

This morning I had an unusual dream. The Nazis were coming after us --myself and a group of people...We were hiding and engaged in survival practices...I miss the details of this one.  Unusual because, though I've dreamed very often of generic 'bad guys', even once or twice of terrorists, they have never been actual Nazis.  Of course I had a depressed childhood and a youth spent focused on atrocities and I went through several periods where I consumed Holocaust history and literature voraciously. I identified not so much with victims as with, as it turned out,  the children of Holocaust survivors, but that is another story. 

Maybe it was also because I just discovered an author, Arthur Magida, who has written a book about a Sufi princess named Noor Inayat Kahn, daughter of a great Sufi teacher from India who introduced Sufism to the West.  Noor fought the Nazis as a British spy and paid with her life.  She made the ultimate sacrifice.  Rarely have I experienced such a deep connection with a story that I have dreamed an aspect of it so immediately, (even as a premonition because I have not read the book yet).  Maybe it is also due to the fact I have been engaged so obsessively with the real and current struggle of my country (and the world) against far right populist and fascist forces engaged in an ongoing attempt to seize power. 

In the brief searches I've made online I found mention of the fact Noor apparently made some complaint to the spy agency she worked for about her father regarding her childhood. Doubtless he was not able to be present for her that much. I originally found Mr. Magida because I had seen a true crime documentary about the famous case of Fred Neulander, a New Jersey (Cherry Hill) Rabbi who hired hit men to murder his wife, and I wanted to order a book about it.  Mr. Magida had written one of the only two books available about this case (The Rabbi and the Hitman, 2003).  What intrigues about this and similar cases is the juxtaposition of presumed holiness and evil deeds.  (Isaac Bashevis Singer explored this theme masterfully):  the great Sufi teacher perhaps failing in his ordinary humanity;  the Rabbi who commits the ultimate betrayal and offense; 1930's German Christians becoming the personification of Haman himself.  Light cannot be divorced from darkness it seems.  I guess I relate to this paradox so well because my own father was an emotionally crippled, tortured and abusive narcissist incapable of love or nurture. Yet the child relies so desparately upon the parent's affirmation of its self.  There was a news story recently about a six year old boy who died because he grabbed hold of his mother's vehicle when she was in the process of abandoning him somewhere in a parking lot. This recapitulates the tragedy of 'soul murder' ( Leonard Shengold, 1989) perfectly:  you long with all your being for a person who denies you in every possible way, because you depend upon them for your very life but even more importantly, for your future ability to live well in the world. 

Now to tie all the fragments together,

my conflicts with religion are directly attributable to my status as an adult child of  alcoholic narcissists.  Having been deeply emotionally deprived, I was always searching for nurture but when it came to the meaning of life, love, and religion or spirituality this longing expressed itself as a desire to lose myself completely in A Bigger Whole Outside Myself (my therapy regression went to the umbilical cord, or the primal level of passive feeding). I once dreamed of a wall of water, as if the sea surf at the edge of the beach  stood up. In the dream I kept trying to 'dive in' to the wall of water but kept getting spat out! Dreams can be hysterically literal at times... 

I am defined and shaped by rejection.  All my life I've been searching for re-union with the mother or a maternalized male who would finally give me emotional sustenance. By the grace of God I've healed a lot and become independent in most ways, but when it comes to religion I can't seem to resolve the paradox of the great good it offers with the great evil it commits.  Having been betrayed and violated, I can never trust again. The pattern is:  idealization, disappointment, condemnation. I idealize people/places/things and delve into them until I am inevitably let down and then I in turn, reject and condemn that which hurt or rejected me. 

Psychotherapy gives us the maxim that a wish is a fear and a fear is a wish. I wish to find a way to lose myself as part of a larger whole but could never really trust anything outside myself to that extent. Now that I am more integrated and able to take responsibility,  I no longer believe I should seek to lose myself in any way.  In my early days of religious conversion the biggest obstacle was:  if I cannot trust a person how can I trust a living God? In retrospect, these healing processes took place simultaneously, like doing time for multiple convictions to be served concurrently... 

I don't know if Noor's sacrifice was made easier by a lack of rootedness in life possibly due to an early childhood disappointment or betrayal.  Perhaps she truly is a martyr of the first order.  Looking back in my own life I don't see nobility or self-sacrifice as much as a terrified little boy desperately trying to hold onto a person, place or thing that is only destroying him...The good news is, I survived, and now I can thrive. 

The Lady of Shalott, William Holman Hunt