repeat offender

I dreamed I was back in the high school classroom again last night, a recurring nightmare that I'm hoping will eventually go away now that my true feelings about the fifteen years I spent there are out in the open.

And the truth is, when I was in the actual classroom, as opposed to the one in my dreams, I usually didn't encounter anything even close to the extreme hostility and resentment exhibited by the students in my nightmares. What I'm seeing in my dreams, then, is my own feelings projected onto the people I was supposedly teaching, many of whom were quite attractive and likable in real life. Sadly, however, as personable as they were, they mostly had no interest in learning anything.

The sorrowful fact is that anyone who teaches high school has to be ready for a wrestling match every hour of every day. The classroom is a test of wills that never ends, since we want to see our students' best effort and they, or most of them, want to get away with doing as little as possible in exchange for whatever grade they think they deserve. And my anger grew out of that endless bashing of foreheads, a perpetual contest in which the only goal becomes winning, and surviving to fight another day, a strategic objective which replaces the learning objectives to which we pay lip service.

Up until now I had managed to repress and bury these sentiments, in spite of having an aversion to ever going back into the classroom verging on phobia. But now that these insistent messages from the subconscious have surfaced, I'm at last forced to acknowledge my real feelings, even though others may find them offensive and politically incorrect.

But social disapproval is nothing of any consequence to me, and the only real problem I have with all this is that it's a very superficial use of the subconscious. When we repress our true feelings, we're pushing them down below the conscious level, and using the subconscious as a garbage can. Dr. Jung explains it this way in his "Symbols and the Interpretation of Dreams:"

If (the subconscious mind) contains too many things that normally ought to be conscious, then its function becomes twisted and prejudiced; motives appear that are not based on true instincts, but owe their activity to the fact that they have been consigned to the subconscious by repression or neglect. They overlay, as it were, the normal unconscious psyche and distort its natural symbol producing function.

Therefore it is usual for psychotherapy, concerned as it is with the causes of a disturbance, to begin by eliciting from the patient a more or less voluntary confession of all the things he dislikes, is ashamed of, or fears, This is like the much older confession in the Church, which in many ways anticipated modern psychological techniques.

Clearly, then, I have not yet even launched the voyage into the deeper parts of the mind. I'm still engaged in the process of making the vessel seaworthy and clearing away the debris in the harbor.

There's a lot more to come.

Illustration, "Nightmare" by Daniel Montuoro.

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