“Shooting the Man on the Bus”

Here’s a dream from a friend which I had a lot of immediate reactions to, so clearly I’m doing my own work in projected form on this dream, and what I say about it tells everyone much more about me than it does about the original dreamer.

I am aboard an old school bus covered in graffiti. There are no wheels and the bus is on blocks. There are several elderly people on the bus, and one young man from southeast Asia. He is screaming at the old people, yelling and abusing them. I wrestle a gun from his hands and shoot him in the chest. The elderly people silently agree to tell nobody…

When I imagine this dream for myself I’m struck first by the image of the bus up on blocks, its functionality limited to being a surface for graffiti and a container for the people. Buses of any kind, for me, often represent teaching, in that it’s a vehicle and so about relationships, but a large vehicle where people come together briefly and then depart, like a class. Since this is a school bus, this particular meaning is reinforced. So the fact that this one has no wheels makes me wonder whether there’s a teaching or learning opportunity that I’ve let stagnate to the point that it isn’t going anywhere. Or perhaps, the schooling that I did receive no longer carries me anywhere.

The elderly people feel old and incapable rather than wise and empowered, so for me, they are my potential as an elder for my community being quiet and intimidated rather than speaking up and sharing my wisdom.

It’s funny to me that this dream has a man from Asia, as I was reminded just hours before I heard this dream of a dream I had more than twenty years ago in which I was a man from Asia chasing after a streetcar. When I’ve worked dreams in groups where the symbol of Asia comes up, someone is likely to mention the idea (first posited by Jung, if I’m remembering right) that for those of us in the western hemisphere, Asia is on the opposite side of the planet, and so represents the unconscious or dreaming self. When I am experiencing day, people in Asia are experiencing night, and vice versa, just as when I’m awake my dreaming self isn’t dominant, and when I’m dreaming, my “waking” self is asleep. So when I imagine this dream as my own, the man from southeast Asia is my unconscious, dreaming self, trying to get the attention of the elder part of me that seems quiescent.

The “I” in the dream, or the dream ego, wrestles the gun from his hands and shoots him in the chest. Gunshots can represent words, as so often in our culture someone with some grievance resorts to using a gun when he feels he’s not being heard. It’s a decisive, instantaneous moment of change when the gun is fired, just as a word spoken in anger can’t be unsaid.

The death in this dream, as in many dreams, is multi-layered. On the one hand, death always carries the idea of profound transformation and change. When death shows up in a dream, there’s always a level at which I’m changing, and if I cause the death, there’s a certain level of self-awareness and choice in that change (as opposed to a dream in which someone else kills or I die accidentally). In that sense, I’d want to examine what southeast Asia means for me and how what that represents within me has changed. For me personally, I can’t help but think of Vietnam and the war that defined my childhood. My understanding of that war has certainly changed since I was a child, but perhaps too some part of my personality that was shaped by having the Vietnam War as a backdrop no longer serves my life’s purpose, and has to be transformed in order for me to continue to grow.

The death is also, however, an act of silencing the minority opinion being voiced by the character of the man from southeast Asia. (The graffiti also feels like minority opinion to me.) The man thinks my elderly aspects deserve to be yelled at and abused, and rather than trying to reason with the man, I silence him. This allows me to continue in the path I’ve been on, and those parts of me that prefer inaction to action are complicit in this silencing. They are, however, also complicit in the transformation. This is one of those moments in dream work that appears paradoxical, both changing and not changing, but in my experience, both sides of the paradox apply.