Apparently, one of the commonest dreams is that of being naked, and not in an erotic way. You’re at the office or in a supermarket and suddenly realise you’ve not wearing a stitch. The feeling is one of embarrassment or even shame, and the dream is supposed to symbolise the fear of being found out.
Even very successful people will claim they know nothing, and that one day people will realise and denounce them as charlatans. This isn’t false modesty: it’s a genuine anxiety that their credibility is wafer-thin. Despite being esteemed very highly, they personally feel low self-esteem. Whether they dream of being naked or not, the same emotion applies.
So what’s behind the fear? It’s a question of conscience. So long as you’re getting away with it, all seems fine: you’ve fled to Spain with the dosh, say, and no one’s coming after you. It looks like you’ve got away scot free. Except every now and then, an unpleasant feeling stirs within. The medievals called it the ‘agenbite of inwit’, or what gets translated as the prick of conscience. Something inside you knows you’ve done wrong. Even if no one else has, you’ve found out yourself. This is the stirring of conscience, the reminder of guilt within you that won’t be muzzled.
But thanks to German philosopher and therapist, Bert Hellinger, conscience has another interpretation. It has nothing to do with guilt in the moral sense. Conscience, for Hellinger, is the measure of belonging, such that the fear of being found out is actually the fear of being excluded. Exclusion is a worse fate than being condemned as guilty because it means forfeiting all relationships and with them the chance of redemption. There are ways back from guilt - you serve your time or make an act of contrition and then win back your rights. But being banished from your belonging-group leads to an isolation more radical. When your conscience flares up, it’s alerting you to the fact that you might be about to be sent into an exile remoter than having to live out your live in Marbella.
The same goes for the nakedness dreams. Yes, they produce shame, but what’s worse is the horror of rejection. The fear of being found out is the fear that you don’t belong.
Robert Rowland Smith’s Breakfast with Socrates is now out in paperback (Profile, £8.99).
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