The Unconscious 101: Reading the Messages of Your Mind with Dr. Lauren Dolinsky

Transcript auto-generated from the episode audio; formatting has been cleaned up, but wording is verbatim.

I'm Cynthia Marks and I head up the Holistic Psychoanalysis Foundation, established by my late husband, Doctor Bernard Bail. Welcome to And now love and welcome to Doctor Lauren Dolinsky. Doctor Dolinsky is a psychotherapist and very passionate about Doctor Bail's work and your practice is largely based on Doctor Bail's methodology and his theory and wherever. So lucky to have you with us. There should be more people who understand this work and are as passionate as you, and we're working toward that. Yes we are. So thank you for being here. Thank you for having.

And you came up with a great idea to talk about the unconscious. Yeah. I mean, we've been talking about the unconscious on here, and you have quite a bit. And I thought maybe we could just spend some time really emphasizing this part of the mind that it exists, and just talk a little bit about it. Thank you. Yeah. I mean, I thought that might be help. It's a huge topic, and I love that we would finally be focusing in on it, because I think it's really unwieldy for most of us. It is. And it's hard to conceptualize. It's a little bit abstract and so vast.

It's a little bit as if, you know, we were going to come in and say, well, our topic today is the universe. I was going to say, is it more like the universe or like the ocean, I guess, or the ocean? It's more. Like the universe, though, because there's sort of no. It's. Boundaries. Exactly. It's so expansive. It is so vast. It's very, you know, it's it's hard to describe and distill and talk about. And so I just thought we'd talk a little bit about it. And of course, we tend to focus on it from a psychological lens. I'll probably focus more on Western psychology.

But really the unconscious, it involves everything. Everything outside of our conscious awareness. So that that's just hard to even imagine. It is. I wonder if actually now, given the scope of the world, we're actually talking about it less maybe. I mean, I think it's a little of both. I think some people are more interested, maybe collectively less certainly in our field and psychology. People have moved away from psychoanalysis that really, I think, wanted to put a focus on the unconscious. So maybe but also I do think there's a real interest, there's an interest in what's beyond our conscious understanding.

And a lot of people have the sense that there's just more than what we know, and there's more than just the material world. A lot of people like to just stick to the material world. And even when we're thinking about our consciousness, people like to try and say it's located in the brain, but we have enough actual scientific evidence at this point that consciousness is not local to the brain, and certainly the unconscious is not either. We're not talking about a part of the brain. And so when we talk about the mind, it's not a physical entity.

And even when we're talking about the unconscious, so many theorists have tried to map this out. And some of the popular ways of thinking about this are the personal unconscious. And that's certainly where Freud was focused. And then Jung came in and introduced the idea of the collective unconscious. And both are correct. I think the collective unconscious is a hard thing for most of us to wrap our brains around. Yeah, well, it really shows that we are all so connected. But I think my sense is when we expand into this, we get to see what's really possible and grow our own minds.

And the reason we focus so much on this is because it happens to be that what we refer to as the personal unconscious is really this receptacle for generations of this unprocessed, unhealed, really painful material, which is another reason why people don't want to touch it, because it's whoof. You've got a full swamp land of just the scariest, most primitive, most painful stuff in there. So there's a big push for people to go, no thank you. And people think that just pushing these thing, keeping them in the unconscious, keeps the person safe. The problem is, as we see, it's not inactive in there.

This is all very alive. So even when things are just relegated and pushed away into the unconscious, there's still up to something in there. And they end up driving a lot of people's behavior and their relationships. It's going to touch every aspect of a person's life, every aspect. Truly. And so the more that we can start to develop a relationship with this part of the mind, I think, you know, the more we grow and the more we can heal. So many of us either. I won't be sure. It's a multitude of reasons, but we end up being satisfied with our life, with our position in the world, with our families.

Everything is fine. It's status quo. We don't series. And to dive deeper, and I think that goes for so many of us. And I would love for everyone to just have an opportunity to say, what if I just explored? What if there is something more? We're so interested in doing that when it comes to science and education and being able to take advantage of those kinds of opportunities, places we can go to expand ourselves individually or communities. This is an opportunity to really do that. So I want to say, even if you think everything's fine, just open the door.

What else could there be? Yeah. Why not, why not? Look, I think collectively we have a lot of work to do. We look around at the state of the world. And I think if you're doing an honest evaluation, we go, oh, my gosh, we as humans have a lot of work to do. So we're just offering this as an avenue to help all of us. So let's help everyone better understand this vast, unconscious. And you brought some fabulous dreams that I think really help illustrate what it might be like to start to make contact with this part of the mind. And I really felt when I read them, I was like, oh my God, so many people are going to relate to this.

Oh good. Well, I will share those. And and they are progressive. Yeah, they tell a nice story. And these are the dreams of a few years ago. Yeah. And thank you so much. That's so generous and gracious of you to bring your dream. Thank you. It's my pleasure. All is dark. Reminds me of a television screen. Then a black shape appears. I'm not sure if it is a big black tiger. A big human or something in between. It yells super loud. Never! The voice is ominous, deep. That's the whole dream. Yeah. If we were working together, if this were a session, it would go a little differently.

And I'd want to hear all of your thoughts about all the pieces. And we're not going to do that today. And there's sort of enough familiar territory in this little bit. Yeah. They tap into what we're talking about with that collective experience. Would you like to share your thoughts about this dream first, that you have ideas about it? I do, I do. I felt like I was on the edge of maybe exploring some truth about myself. But all of this darkness came in and these images of this. Could it be a big human or a big black tiger? Both of them were very scary.

Don't go there. But I still felt like a little courageous. And then this voice never in this giant, ominous tone. Never. Yeah. That said, okay, just go back to the way things were. Yes, you open that door a little bit and that didn't go well. So I thought that was such an interesting one to start with because there is this universal quality to it. I hear so many like this, especially early on in a treatment where people have the idea that they're not allowed to go there. And again, I talked about that might be the protective part of the mind trying to say, don't, don't touch what's back there.

It's too scary. It's too painful. Now, you even brought in the idea that it might be a big white tiger. Was a big black tiger. A big black tiger. So that gives us a little clue that you're probably talking about something in the feeling realm. A big cat. Cats oftentimes point to the feminine. They're very intuitive, instinctual creatures. So we get a big black tiger. We know there's going to be a lot of feeling back there. And the message is no, stay away. Never. Never. So some people might hear a dream like this and go, forget it. That's too scary.

Why? Why would I keep going down this road? And I've just been told never. I was told never and were very good. Unconsciously. Usually we don't think about it like most people wouldn't wake up from this dream and go, you know what? I'm never going to do that, you know, not necessarily. But we're good at following orders from that part of the mind. So a lot of people would unconsciously just follow that and go, nope, nothing to see there. I'm not interested. If I'd had that, I only I believe I only got to the place where I had that dream because I had been conscious of my dreams for many months prior to this dream.

I had been paying attention to them, and the little windows and doors were beginning to open. And then this was intended to slam those shut, right? Yes. And we see that a lot, too. Right. And you can get a dream like this at any point in your exploration of this territory. Right. It isn't just because we're starting here again. We're going linear with it. This part of the mind is not linear. It could be that because you did start to touch something very sensitive there, something very emotional that that's why you get this message back off. You never shut it all down.

And it's very true because I had formed my truth based on a complete untruth. I had turned this thing that was not reality at all into my North Star, and it had misdirected me time and time again. But I could never straighten that out. I could never turn that thing into what it really was. I still, no matter what, had to support that thing and say, no, no, no, this is love, this is love. And every other time I try to find love, it's got to match that thing. But it wasn't love. That's such a brave thing to start to face. It really rocks people's worlds.

When you start to see that what you imagined was love was not love. It's unbelievable. I mean, just talking about it, it still gives me goosebumps to think that I held onto this thing for dear. Life, for survival, for dear life is the right way to put it. That's very true. We all do this initially because we have to imagine that we came in with all this amazing, wonderful love to survive, but to start to question that and shine a light there and go. But what's the truth? What's really happening? And go, oh my God, I might need to turn everything on its head and start questioning everything.

Yeah, yeah. And it's interesting that you use that first step, this supporting, this untruth. This is love at the very beginning. And you find similar situations that are your stepping stones. Yeah. And so that's the unconscious at play. We've got what where's examples of the unconscious. Guess what. Your unconscious is going to magnetize these experiences in your waking life to show you what's going on there. And to confirm these ideas that you're holding unconsciously about yourself, about your life, about every part of you. I see why you like doing this.

It's fascinating. It's so fascinating. And so, yeah. This one is just a few months later, and I had lots of dreams in between. I am standing in the foyer of a house I am working on as an interior designer because I am an interior designer. The entry door is just behind me. There is an opening on the second floor that is to align with an opening on the first floor. It doesn't quite align. There are actual doors to the right and left of the opening. On the second floor, and on the first floor. I am deciding if the openings aligning is important enough to change the whole thing, which would be a really big deal.

I'm also deciding if the door heights should match as they're slightly off. I am annoyed that I have to see if I am willing to settle. That makes me angry with myself. This should have just been done correctly in the first place, and I decide that yes, in fact it all needs to be corrected, which is a big job. In my dream big job, I have to do some backtracking. I've got to make sure that this feels right because this doesn't feel right. Yes. Again, if we were working with this clinically, I'd be asking you about every little piece of this dream.

I want to hear all your thoughts. Do you want to give me just what your initial impressions were? Yes. So it says if I'm, you know, living a life where things never feel quite right on and not right on in terms of a perfection not right on. And it's some kind of tangible meaning, but just feeling wise, not like an alignment. Yeah, I feel like I'm giving something up all the time. Like I can't get it to a place where I'm like, oh yeah, that's it. And I get that in order to have that good feeling all the time, I'm going to have to do a lot of work.

I thought this was a great dream to follow that first one, because now you're getting in there and we've moved past the never and we're going, okay, this is like an in-process dream. There's things that have been changing, but now we have to reassess and reevaluate the whole structure. Now it's interior design. I understand this is the work that you do, but this is your interior design. This is the interior design of your mind. And you're saying something's been off kilter, right? We have the first floor in the second floor to often points to the unconscious.

That's a number that we really associate with the unconscious part of the mind. So we go, oh, how interesting. You're saying you're conscious and you're unconscious. Have not quite aligned. Do you have to settle for that? Do you have to settle? I think you're very smart. In the dream. You go. I don't want to settle. Let's do it all over. Let's correct this. That's an amazing attitude to have here. It's just so interesting. In the dream how disturbing it is. Yeah, but I still spend a lot of time thinking about. Am I willing to accept the disturb or do I have to figure out how to move on from that?

Exactly. Well, and we can think about how often people in their waking lives, you know, we hear about settling and relationships all the time, but probably so many aspects of life. How many times the people go, I just have to settle for this or collectively what our governments are doing or all the things that are happening in the world. And we go, I guess we're just supposed to live like this. I don't really have a choice. We don't have a choice. But I think this very wise part of your mind is going, wait a minute, it's worth taking the time to get this right, to get in there, to do the work, to get things aligned.

If we all did this collectively as humans, imagine what we could get aligned in this world. Yeah, I actually can't even imagine. Most of us can weave really straight off course. I think the unconscious is always wanting to get us back on course and it's going to do that for each individual. First it's going to go, here's where you're off, here's where you're out of alignment. You know, it's very humbling going and getting into this part of the mind. It is the most humbling experience because you have to go and face all these things that you have inside that aren't right, aren't aligned, aren't even you.

What did you absorb and take in? That's not you. That's not ever going to feel good to you because it's not really you and it's going to create problems. But the easy path is just to keep doing it that way. You see path. I say, it's not so bad. I can live with it a little off kilter when you're considering that in a dream you go, can I live like this? Can I just it's not right. This doesn't feel right to me. But am I going to settle? And you have this very, I think, wise response and you go, I'm not going to settle. We're going to do it over. Big job critical.

If you want your interior design, your mind, your inner world, feeling good to you, feeling aligned, that means your heart and your mind in sync. We should all have that. We all deserve, that. We all deserve to be in sync with our hearts. We do. And so many of us say, I'm just living the life I'm like. Yeah, we follow directions. I see it all the time in dreams. You're just following your orders. You've got your script, you're on whatever. You're just you're following your orders. Here are the steps. Here's what you do. The problem is oftentimes what we see it's not aligned.

Something will keep telling us this isn't right. How is it that we have these dreams and there is so much fabulous information in them, but most of us aren't aware. Do you think that at one point dreams were something that humans really valued? I'm not a historian in this way, so I can't give you the most accurate picture, but I know that we've had a dance with that for a long time, and even in ancient Greece there were these dream temples that you would go to and really form a connection. And there's biblical stories of these dream analysts and Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, and we have all these examples of dreams having a valuable role in society and knowing that there's something more to it.

This isn't just static, that the mind is coming up with the reprocess the day or whatever. It's not just noise. But I feel like of late, that being many decades, that we've really just Pooh poohed that whole thing. A lot of people have, because a lot of people are listening to the message from that first dream and saying, well, never, never. You know, that's why I wanted to highlight that for everybody, because I think we all have that. So I think a lot of people have followed then go, but there's nothing to this. It's just noise. And like you said, when Doctor Bail, look, I'll just consider it, open it up and see.

I like that with people who don't love the idea some of them are open to, well, we can at least treat it like a predictive exercise. Maybe they have no no actual wisdom or meaning, but we'll treat it like a raw shark, like an inkblot. And maybe it has some value that I'll just come up with my own ideas. And usually in time, people are blown away because you go, oh God, this is telling me the truth about my life in this whole new way. Like you said, you have to revisit what you held as the truth about yourself and be willing to drop it and go. Maybe I was off.

Maybe that wasn't true. And maybe I'm going to die. If I discover the truth. It feels that severe. It does. We really are getting into the most primitive, sensitive, vulnerable material there. So I really respect the process and what it takes to actually get there to a place where you even consider it, because you have to revisit some incredibly sensitive and vulnerable material. You had to do this, didn't you? And of. Course. And it's ongoing, I imagine. Of course, of course. Yeah. I would never take people where I haven't gone. And is it for all of us then continually ongoing that over the course of our lives, if we listen to pay attention to our dreams, we'll learn more and more?

Oh, that's the beauty of it. We don't get to an endpoint. We don't. I mean, what's the point of being alive? It's not like we get, oh, I have evolved completely and I'm just done. We always have more to learn, and we have this wonderful resource available to us every single night going. Here's something to consider. Have you thought about this? And most of us wake up if we remember that and go and that's it. Yeah, whatever. Yeah. But we're encouraging people to maybe give it a second thought. Here's the last dream. This one is about a year and a half later.

All is black space. I can't see a thing. Somehow, though, I can lift a corner of it. This black space as if it's tangible with my fingers. Almost like lifting pages in a very thick book. When I do, I see a bright, warm, glowing light of another dimension. I see it and I feel the warmth of it. It's not just light, it's another space with things happening. The opening I see is an equilateral triangle. So this other dimension, I'm looking through this triangle to see it. That's the whole tree. Yeah, that's a really beautiful dream. I think even without any interpretation or digging in at all, we go, wow, that's a really beautiful dream.

But do you want to share some of your thoughts? What were your impressions of having this dream? It was as if there was a bit of a safety in coming out of the dark. The dark being the place where I misrepresent everything. I turned things into things they weren't. And lifting that up a little bit to say, here's the truth. You're ready to say you were completely misaligned. Yeah. And not think about what that truth means in terms of how you've lived your life falsely, let's say, or how you kind of continued to hurt yourself over and over again because you were relying on this truth, which wasn't the truth, but to say, sorry, it makes me emotional.

It doesn't have to be this way. And it's okay. You can stop supporting that thing. It's okay. And this thing that I'm talking about was a terrible thing that I turned into a bright, beautiful thing. And along with that came guilt and shame and a huge amount of fear. But I put frosting on it and turned it into a pretty cake. And so to finally say it's okay, it doesn't mean that you're not that thing. You're not this horrible, misconstrued out of alignment thing, as if there was some unknown value that I could now find beautiful about you. So, you know, you open, you have this space, there's all this warm, glowing light.

What did you think that was? It felt like an invitation. It felt like it was love. It's hard for me to separate some of this from Bernard, because we were talking about our dreams together, and I had nothing but this immense loving support which I will forever be grateful for. Knowing that feeling existed and knowing that this man, that our love for each other was so immense. And to be with this man who could understand our dreams, probably before we even spoke them, made it easier for me. That little lifting was like, don't worry, there's love here.

Yeah, I saw that dream and I was like, well, if this doesn't sum up the entire podcast, it's called End Now, love. So I think one of the details that I don't know if you mentioned, but I remember reading it, was that that what you lived was six inches. The triangle, each side was six. Inches. Yeah. What did you make of that? I can't say I mean that everything was equal meant something to me, that it was six inches I don't know anything about, but it was as if you can't go wrong when you look at this from a place of love, everything is. Yeah. If we use numbers a lot in the analysis because there's so much symbolism.

Which I'd love to know more about someday, there's a whole other podcast to talk about that, like you mentioned, the number two often refers to the unconscious, but I have no idea how that coordinates two with the unconscious. Yes. Or six with whatever. There. We always have to look at the context to. So I'm not saying that a certain number always means a certain thing, but we look at the context. I want to hear associations because perhaps you're talking about an age, maybe something at age six here, knowing what I know, having done this work, six is the number of love.

So I go, yeah, that's the other thing that really struck me. And we're cross-referencing a little bit. I listened to another one of your recent podcasts where you had mentioned The Book of Suffering. Yes, that's right, I the book of torture, I think torture. Yes. Life is torture. Right. So I thought it was so interesting. It's like a little wink to because in this dream you say it's like lifting pages of a book. So we get past the big lie that life is torture, that life is suffering. And you go, there's love available. I see, I would think my feeling is this is the divine coming through.

This is divine love. I think Doctor Vale really opens you up to that part inside. I think you did. I mean, there's things I've never felt that I didn't even know a human could feel. And it's interesting, when I was reading to you just now, the first stream where it just never it reminded me of also the book of torture. Yes. And I imagine if we were to look through all the dreams, we'd get lots of flavors of that throughout. But what an amazing transformation just in these three dreams. And this is what, over the course of a couple of years, I mean, you were in very close proximity to Doctor Bail and you were talking about dreams all the time, but you know, as far as I know, it wasn't a formal analysis.

Yeah. You know, I think that's also hopeful for people, maybe that if you really start to develop a, a closer relationship and curiosity with this part of the mind, look at what's possible. We don't do it because it's great to have your dreams changed. Yes, that's lovely, but it changes you. It changes your life. Yeah. If we can all let more love and light in a true way, not in this kind of bypass. It sounds great. Nice in theory. And we all talk about this kumbaya thing, but really let it in and let it change you. Who knows what we could do? And for me, I don't feel as if I'm a different person.

I'm the same person I've always been. But even people I've known for a long time, whom I've been friends with, have said to me, Cynthia, it's like a light has come on in. You and you're still you. But the way you walk through the world with such happiness and love and this kind of glow, it's unbelievable to have someone on the outside actually notice something like that. Oh, it's so validating. Because I feel like it's all, you know, internal. But the idea is that it's not internal. The idea is that we come to a place where we as humans operate from love and spread that out to the people we know.

Let it show, let it lead, let it show, let that light shine. Really. But I was told always, as many of us just be insulated. You have nothing to share. What you have to say is of no value. Well, so many of us have this light dimmed or blown out completely. So really that's our work is is revitalizing. This is turning the light back on for people. It's awesome. It really works. It does. I really felt that people could probably relate to some of these dreams. And you could inspire people because people can see what's possible. The way you speak about these things and the knowledge you have, the feeling you have, and the investment you've made in the process is clearly coming from a place of pure love.

So I can't thank you enough. Thank you so, and we'll see you soon. Yeah, absolutely. Please follow us. Rate and share the podcast if you will, and pass this episode along to all of those people you think might be it. This is and now love. Listen to your dreams and live from your heart. Thank you. And look.