Dreams Hold Key to Life's Puzzles

Pic: La Citta Vita

This morning I woke with the gradual wash of a dream pulling back its hold on my brain so slowly that I was able to catch the salt granules of its content before they dispersed.

It was a healing dream, creating a synthesis of past and present in an elegant, compact way. Everyone’s unconscious is a skilled novelist in its ability to find patterns among all the disparate memories and sense impressions that people our minds.

The dream took me to a disco nightclub that was incredibly fashionable, and there I swanned around with two people from my past – yet it was set in the present. My age didn’t stop me from being relevant and accepted in this ubercool place. The two people I was with were among those I shared a house with for a short time in the then edgy suburb of Fitzroy in 1983. I have fetishised the inner city ever since this time. It represents my personal Eden, my lost paradise, my Shangri-La.

I suspect most of us have more than one of these lost worlds. My dream brought two of them together and in doing so it allowed a psychic healing.

For this dream nightclub was located in the daggy suburb of Glen Iris. In real life this was where my maternal grandparents lived when I was growing up. Their tiny orange brick veneer not only housed the remains of their own family (my mum was the oldest of eight kids) but hosted a growing horde of grandkids. The suburb was boring and middle class in that unpretentious seventies way that is gone forever – hardly the place for a nightclub!

But Glen Iris was more significant than that, because my grandfather ran a tennis clinic every Saturday morning at the tennis courts of the parish primary school. The famous ‘Mister Mac’ taught kids from all over the area, and from all social classes. Some of them came from the posh private schools, some from the humble Catholic schools and some from the ‘state schools’ as the public schools were called.

This was a cushion for a shy child. Not only did my older sister attend the clinic but some of my cousins. I had a secure base from which to socialise.

This earlier childhood experience, I now realise, is why I have obsessed about Fitzroy and its gentrification for so long. Fitzroy represents a  part of my past that I will never get back – a communal household that only lasted six months but was a cushioning influence on a harsh and lonely life in my final year of a university arts degree, where I struggled with lack of motivation, immaturity, social terror, loneliness, undiagnosed eating issues. The decrepid terrace house, before it too became frightening, was a social refuge.

The dream was bringing these two, seemingly disparate periods of my life, together. It was telling me not to worry about my own personal loss of the inner city any more, as well as the larger cultural loss caused by gentrification. For that seminal experience in Fitzroy – that unique sense of community – had already been experienced, much earlier, in a much daggier suburb. And I could therefore experience it again.

I don’t have to live in the inner city to experience community. Thanks to my peer support program, my growing up is happening right now, right here, in Gardenvale and Elsternwick.

The unconscious is incredible in its ability to show us what is happening on a psychic level. Once we start paying heed to its puzzles it rewards us with greater detail, more overt symbolism and sharper recall.

But the dream also gave me another gift. I have started writing about the social causes of mental illness. Not that there aren’t biological and genetic elements – of course there are – but a return to biology, which some psychiatrists are keen on to the exclusion of other factors, would be  a hugely backward step.

Lack of community is one of those factors, perhaps the most vital.

The dream – not just its content but its healing and synthesising qualities – seemed to be telling me I am right to pursue this line of thinking.

Because in those two different stages of my life, I experienced the strength and ballast of true community, and it gave me some protection.

And now peer support is performing this function once more as I slowly, gingerly, reluctantly, take my hesitant steps into the wider community, even as I witness that fragile community being fractured, thinned, diminished by the log cutters of neoliberalism.

Community on the macro (government policy and spending) and the micro (peer support and self-help) levels is worth not just safeguarding but enhancing. It’s not just a tool in mental health, it’s the very basis of it.

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Back after a Blog Break

Apologies for the long gap between blog posts of late. And for also deleting a previous post – something I’ve not done previously, as far as I remember. An explanation for both is needed!

First, about the break. I’ve started to get a couple of my comment pieces published online. This is fantastic – however, a few caveats. I’m not getting any editing work, and the number of hours that go into an article isn’t commensurate with the pay (who’d have thought?).

I’ve had three articles published in online newspapers/journals, and two of these were on paying sites (well that’s what they’ve promised). Of course two paid gigs do not a writing career make!

If the editing work starts back up (and it’s usual for me to have gaps, especially at the beginning of the financial year) then it would be a nice little combination – the writing satisfying the creative genie, the editing work channelling the left-brain-dominated control freak (and paying much better per hour).

But it is great for my confidence. Truth is it couldn’t have happened earlier.  I just wasn’t ready. I can’t help wanting to use the word ‘maturity’ at this point, which is a bit sad considering that I’m 51 years old.

Blogging alone has helped develop my writing – just doing it – but the willingness to bend my own concerns to the needs of the journals just wasn’t there earlier. Getting my point across in 800 words or less? Where did these people get off? Any subject I was interested in required at least 2500 words.

Now I am slowly developing the art – not unlike haiku, or any kind of poetry – of making my points succinctly. After a while you realise that it actually takes less time to write a short article than a long one, so it’s an advantage.

But it’s bloody exhausting in a way that blogging is not.

Now about the little um blog entry deletion. Self-censorship? Perhaps.

The entry was about the revolution underway in the mental illness treatment community. These changes are both exciting and controversial. (As an aside, there doesn’t seem to be a consensus in the psychiatric community at the moment about what causes mental illness, and this in itself is all at once interesting, promising and disturbing.)

I originally started the article before moving house in May, and then other concerns intervened. When I went back to it a few months later I didn’t really think the issues through before completing and publishing it. Much of the impetus had come from reading the book Anatomy of an Epidemic and the blog Mad in America.

But the issues that these changes bring up are challenging and potentially life changing for many people. As someone with OCD, who is always concerned about the effects her writing may have on others, I’m more aware now of the caution that it is preferable to exercise when covering this area.

I’m probably overly cautious, but that’s my hang up – the internet is scary in its ability to disseminate information, and change the way people behave, very quickly. When it comes to mental health, that makes writing about it a big responsibility.

The other thing that made me pause for thought was that the health system in Australia is so different from the American one. The Australian system is a chaotic hotchpotch of public and private services, and everything in between, while the US system is, in my understanding, almost completely controlled by health insurance companies.  It’s quite possible that there is more mismanagement and a greater reliance on drugs in the US, and therefore much more angst among consumers. In fact in Australia some of the new approaches, such as peer support, are being adopted by mainstream services, which is very exciting.

This doesn’t change the fact that the public system in Australia is desperately under resourced. My impression from the limited reading I’ve done is that psyche hospitals, which should be soothing, welcoming havens for recovery, are for the acutely sick only, and that after being stabilised on drugs you get kicked out quickly, leading to a revolving door syndrome for those without adequate community support (there are good community services available in some areas, but I’m not sure how comprehensive these are, and they are in flux right now).

The other problem is that I don’t find myself in either of the major narratives – the biological idea of illness and the anti-psychiatry push. Not that the anti-psychiatry movement denies the existence of acute mental suffering at all. It's just that for me, labels themselves aren't the problem - it's the kinds of treatments that they too often give rise to which need monitoring and review.

Anyway I am not going to weigh into any debates for the minute. I am very interested in writing about  new treatments, but my OCD is a factor that I need to take into account. Still, it is an exciting time that may well lead to a synthesis of the best of old and new treatments.

And whether my other writing leads to a new 'career' is something that only the future can reveal!

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