In The Womb

 

My first migraine occurred when I was still in my mother’s womb.

I know this because the memory of that terrible event was incorporated into a recurring nightmare that persisted throughout my youth. When I was twenty, I began to call this nightmare “the Migraine Nightmare,” because, when I had this nightmare, I would wake up with a migraine. (It was only when I was twenty that my migraine was diagnosed as such. Previously, it would be “a terrible headache,” “the flu” or “a sick tummy”).

 In fact, I was forty years old before the nightmare riddle was resolved. I was reading a book called “Surely you’re joking Mr Feynman,” by the Nobel Prize winner, Richard Feynman, which included his description of how he tried out Carl Jung’s dream-watching technique. I said I’d give that a go.

Jungian dream-watching is easy. Before you fall asleep, you tell yourself that you will keep part of your brain active so that you can watch your dreams. This is the same kind of thing as “sleeping one eye open” that the cowboys on trail employed to wake themselves up if any disturbance happened during the night. When the dream comes, you can then watch it as an observer, rather than experiencing it as a participant, and even ask questions of the “dream director.”

One night when I was engaged in dream-watching, my migraine nightmare occurred. The events of that nightmare were as follows:

I would be a small speck suspended from a very thin thread. Under me was a bottomless, black canyon. The two ends of the thread were attached to the top of the opposite canyon walls. I was terrified, because my position was very precarious; very little force would be required to shake me from the string and launch me into the bottomless pit. A great voice was thundering from one side of the canyon. I don’t know what language the voice was shouting or what the words were, but I “knew” that the import of the words were “I will rule the world,” and that the speaker was Hitler. (Hitler and Stalin were words that came to my childhood vocabulary as early as “daddy” and “mammy,” because my father used to read about the progress of the war, from the newspaper, at the dinner table). The great voice from the other cliff-top roared back, “No; I shall rule the world,” and this was Stalin.  The voices kept up this terrible dialogue, while the thread from which I hung shook with the vibration of their shouting.

Now, with Jungian dream-watching, I was able to “stand back” from the drama and observe from a detached viewpoint. The canyon was the Great Abyss. If I detached from the string, I would float off into black oblivion. Whose were the voices? Were they Hitler and Stalin? No! To my surprise, muffled though they were, they were recognisable as my father and mother. (Of course when the womb-incident occurred, I was not aware of “father and mother” but heard them as anonymous voices in the outside world). What were they actually saying? The words could not be made out, but what was clear is that they were having a disagreement.

Now, my parents very seldom had overt, verbalised, disagreements. The next one that came to my attention was in July 1946, when I was three and a half years’ old. We were on holiday down the country; the weather was promised fine, so daddy took the opportunity to give the family a day on the bog, where he had spent the happiest days of his youth. He harnessed uncle Rody’s horse to the cart, we all piled in and off we went to the bog. Dad showed us (just Roger, Jerry and me; Mary was a baby in the carry-cot) how to foot the turf. Then he stood on the top of the bank of turf and cut sods with the sleán, while we were supposed to foot the sods. The sun got hotter and hotter. The day had been promised fine, but it was becoming one of the hottest days of the century. We boys were sick of footing turf in a very short while. Indeed, it was too hot for my father as well. The ground was scorching under our feet; the sun was scorching from above and there was no shelter, except one shkock of a tree that had barely a shadow of shelter for the poor horse. The horse was distressed, so father poured the kettle and pot of water we had brought over him to cool him down. He said the horse could die if he was not cooled. The baby was also distressed, and mother said to father, “You care more about the horse than about your baby.” Father replied, “If I said shite, you’d say scutter.”

The day was not over yet. Mother and baby were to shelter under the horse’s cart, beset by flies, while father took the three boys to his childhood swimming place on the nearby river Brosna. However, when we reached the river, he found that the river had changed its course. The sandy shallows that had, when he was young, been on this side of the bend of the river had been swept away, to be replaced by deep water and a current. We were not allowed into the water. Instead, he bade us strip off and lie on the bank, and he poured water over us with the saucepan. When we were cooled down, he filled the saucepan and kettle from the river and we made our way back to the girls. Of course, being river water, it had to be boiled before it could be drunk.

In the cool of the evening, the horse was revived enough to take us home.

Of course, there were always many things on which there was an apparent difference of opinion between my parents, but these are the two times I witnessed a confrontation.

Every time we go to sleep, the subconscious sorts the experiences of the past day and files them away in the memory store – most such experiences never to be recalled, and usually to be quite forgotten pretty quickly. Sometimes, the subconscious is confronted with an emotional event it can’t understand. So it throws it back as a dream that wakes us up, to give the conscious mind another go at solving the riddle. This was the case with my Migraine Nightmare, and, now that I had interpreted it, it never occurred again.

It was not just the parental argument that was the cause of the migraine. When my migraine was diagnosed, my doctor read out to me a paragraph from a large book which said, “Every incident of migraine is a result of multiple causes, but usually a single trigger.”

I reckon from my experience of migraine down the years, that one causal element is bad posture, and my original migraine was partially caused by an inappropriate posture in the womb, including the crossing of my legs, which restricts the flow of energy through the body, and holding my chin up, which compresses the back of the neck and restricts the flow of blood to the brain. I have retained these two postural elements throughout my life, but now realise that I should regularly straighten out and bring my chin down.

When I was four months’ old, it was not to my father’s country home we went on holiday, but to my mother’s. There, I began continuous vomiting. Nobody could explain why, but my mother was advised to keep giving me bottles of boiled water. The vomiting continued for about four months, and I, obviously, survived.

When my migraine was eventually diagnosed at the age of twenty, I read that cyclical vomiting is the form that migraine most often takes in infancy.

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