Auntie Jean's Dream

A few weeks ago I was due to make a long drive to visit my mum and sister. The day before I was travelling I began to notice a little apprehension about making the journey. This was a familiar feeling about long car journeys, it’s popped up year after year, not enough to be a problem, but noticeable as a vague sense of unease.

I’ve been learning a new technique called Tapas Acupressure Technique, another of the energy psychology processes, it has some similarities with EFT but is quite different in other respects. I’ll be writing about TAT (an unfortunate acronym) in later posts.

Where EFT thrives on the specific, TAT works well with general and vague issues. Since the ‘journey apprehension’ counted as a vague issue I decided to use this approach to deal with the uncomfortable feeling. Just a few moments into the process I flashed back to a vivid childhood memory.

When we were young, we often went out on day trips with family friends, taking trips to the beach and further afield in my dad’s campervan. Since ‘Auntie Jean’ didn’t have a car all four adults and seven children squeezed into my dad’s van and off we’d go. One summer weekend (I must have been about 8 years old) we’d planned to visit a local seaside town that had the exotic attraction of a Victorian pier.

The day before this trip, we were visiting Auntie Jean’s house. While we were there she told my mum about the bad dream she’d had the night before. She had dreamed that (for some reason) my dad had driven along the pier and off the end into the sea! As we sank down into the murky depths she’d been paralysed with indecision about who she was going to save as she was the only adult who could swim.

Being a seven year old with a vivid imagination, I imagined vividly what this would be like, and I didn’t like what I imagined. I don’t recall having bad dreams about this myself, I don’t even remember the trip itself, but I do remember the way I imagined sinking whilst trapped in a van with little hope of rescue. Not suprisingly, I remember being quite anxious about it. It seems that this feeling of anxiety has been available all these years, being triggered whenever I’ve thought about making an unusually long car journey. Having got to the source of the feeling it was quite easy to neutralise it and relieve the anxiety I was feeling about my long drive.

This is an excellent example of how to be affected by somebody else’s vivid anxiety and how that anxiety can be kept ready to be triggered by current circumstances. Are there times and circumstances were you have inexplicably uneasy feelings that shouldn’t be there? Maybe you’re experiencing a ‘blast from the past’!