across the wire

Well the dream journal is underway. I thought that this was going to be fun, but I am beginning to realize that there is probably a good reason I forget my dreams as soon as I start my day. My first dream I recorded was of my all time biggest phobia...spiders. Not the great dreams I thought I would record.

A quick run though some of my old texts in psychology revealed a wildly fascinating theory from Freud about phobias as he began to study them in the case study of little Hans and his phobia of being bitten by a white horse. Yes, as you have guess the name Freud cannot be found with out some seemingly crazy sexual cause - to Freud, phobias are linked anxieties to the egos insatiable and inappropriate desires. But I digress...

Back to dreams and spiders. Dreaming about spiders is ok, as long as I don't remember that I was dreaming about them. Now with the dream journal, I am reminded and faced with my fears. I have often thought about "curing" myself with a variety of behavior treatments such as systematic desenstization, where your fears are divided into an anxiety hierarchy; 10-15 stages or levels of increasing anxiety provoking situations involving the phobia. This would me I could create 10 steps of approaching or facing my phobia say from seeing a small spider outside as stage one, to the last stage of having a large hairy spider crawling on my body.

Fuck. I think I just threw up in my mouth a little bit. It has been done by others in this way and throughout my undergrad degree, we studied this concept and it has great success rates...if you get the courage to even try it. I will stick with facing my fears in my dreams.

What is your irrational fear?