Dr. Carl Jung wrote of the concept of the “big dream,” which can provide symbols that outline the rest of a person’s life and his or her past, as well as comment on the underlying and sometimes unconscious themes of the society into which the dreamer has been born.
I had my single most vivid and detailed “big dream” when I was 21 years old. It happened—I didn’t know it at the time, of course, but I found out in short order—to be the very night before I had the spiritual experience that has set me and kept me on the Path I’ve travelled for more than half a century now.
a high, rickety bridge into a dark abyss.
The dream took place on a cold night in Chicago, Illinois, in January of 1971. I was visiting friends at Northwestern, the university I’d attended for my first two years of undergraduate studies, before transferring away in the fall of 1968. Though at the time of the dream I was on strong antidepressant medication, I don’t feel that the pills played a major role in the powerful symbolism of the dream itself.
As I wrote in the headline, this “big dream” was much more real and vivid than my waking life had ever been. I’d had no idea at all that such things could even happen. But there I was, in this totally believable “reality”—meaning that, as usual in a dream, I totally accepted what I was experiencing as the “dream ego”—traumatic though it was.
Dr. Robert Johnson’s “big dream,” interpreted by Jung himself
in his last years told him to write with his colleagues to make their ideas more intelligible to the general public. He expounds on dreams here, including “big dreams.”
I was inspired to write this article after reading of a big dream Dr. Robert A. Johnson had when he was a young man studying at the Jung Institute. He shared it with his analyst, Dr. Emma Jung, Carl’s wife. The next day he was surprised to receive a phone call from Carl himself, who said, “I want you to come to my home tomorrow and I will ‘talk at you’ about this dream.”
Dr. Johnson later described how Jung (this turned out to be his only live meeting with this mentor) gave him guidelines about how he needed to live the rest of his life. Johnson eventually followed all of Jung’s suggestions, and as we know, had a long life that was a true service to humanity. You can read about Dr. Johnson’s dream and his comments on the session with Jung hier zu finden..
My “big dream”
I’m in the locker room of my high school, sitting on one of the blonde wooden benches adjacent to the row of lockers that are just inside the door that leads to and from the big gymnasium.
I hear a commotion coming from that gym. The dream then shows what’s going on in there. The athletic lettermen of the high school (of which I actually am one) are in there doing some kind of a ritual snake dance. I recognize it as some variation of a “danse macabre,” a phrase I’ve read or heard; it means, of course, a dance of death.
It’s very dark in the gym. There are fires at the centre of the concentric circles of dancers. My friends in conscious life seem to be under a spell, acting all of this out unconsciously! They seem like automatons. I think there are drums, as well, beating in rhythm.
As I continue to sit on my bench, the “snake” part of the group of dancers begins to unwind from the circles and move, step by step, towards the door that leads into the locker room where I’m sitting. One of the dancers pushes the door open and they begin to enter. They dance, again step by step, over to where I’m sitting. Once there, surrounding me, they disperse from their formation and begin hitting me. More and more of them come into the locker room, converge around me, and join in hitting me. Finally, as what’s happening becomes a blur, I lapse into unconsciousness.
When I wake up, I’m lying on the concrete floor of the locker room. The dancers are gone and It’s totally quiet. I feel pain in every square inch of my body, where the dancer-lettermen have pounded and pounded me! I pull myself to a sitting position, from which I can now see that the far wall of the locker room is gone. It’s been removed. The room fronts directly onto the grassy, parklike area that’s just beyond the top tier of seats of the high school football stadium.
There is a sidewalk between the grass and the building. A friend of mine comes walking by at a leisurely pace. He, too, is a letterman, but seems here to be oblivious of that. He’s displaying his usual mild conscious personality, not his “ritual snake-dancer” one, and most likely has no memory of having been a “snake-dancer.”
I pull myself over to the edge of the locker room, where it borders this outdoor area. It’s a beautiful day out there. The sun is shining, the birds are chirping in the trees and the temperature is perfect.
I open my mouth to try to tell my friend who’s walking by what has just happened to me. But nothing comes out. I’m as yet unable to speak.
What happened next
I wake from the dream with a clear memory of all that has taken place in it, as well as the awareness of just how much more “real” it’s been than my waking life. Not long after, I go back to sleep. The next time I’m awakened, it’s by one of the women I’m staying with telling me I have a phone call. It’s from the one friend from Northwestern whom I’ve been avoiding the past two weeks because he seems to have changed so much, is involved in a mystical path, etc.
He invites me to stop by his advertising office downtown (he’s a former radical campus activist) just to say “hi” before I leave Chicago. His voice is friendly and disarming. The next day I do go down there on the El train. In his office I have the experience that changes my life 180 degrees and sets it on the course it’s still on more than 50 years later. (That’s another story. I’ve put a link to it at the bottom of this article, for anyone interested.).
My understanding of the “big dream”
As I wrote above, a “big dream” conveys themes and symbols that can be used as a kind of guide in the life to come of the dreamer. Dr. Jung observed that a “big dream” usually contains symbols from what he called the collective unconscious, whereas many dreams deal mostly with the personal unconscious.
My immediate thoughts about the dream were essentially the ones I still subscribe to, for the most part. I feel that the behaviour of the “lettermen” (in those days, our teams at our high school were called the Indians, and the letterman’s organization was The Tribe) represented the trance, for lack of a better word, that the upbringing of American youths in the 1950s and early-to-mid-‘60s left each of us in. It’s important to note that the dream does not depict the conscious personality of the athletes, but rather, symbolically dramatizes a deeper, unconscious stratum of the American psyche.
Our lives were outwardly full of camaraderie, and I have many of the warmest memories of my high school years and companions. By the time I had this dream, however, our country had been through Vietnam, assassinations, riots and the hippie revolution. A deep and chaotic vein in the American psyche had been exposed (as is occurring in another form in our present-day collective life).
Such psychological shocks to a society do not just happen suddenly, but surely are the result of long-term factors that all but the most intuitive are too close-up to see. I feel my “big dream” dramatically and symbolically reveals some of the darker aspects of the world my compatriots and I grew up in.
My upbringing, the dream says, packed my cells with pain. This was mich dream, but it does, I feel, expose something of the collective unconscious—if you will, the nightmare of competition, trauma and violence underneath the bright, sunny American dream. I’m recalling now a poem I wrote around 2005 about our high school years, which brought out some of the dark side, as well as the way that darkness and a certain beauty seemed to be curled around one another. I can remember that for the most part (as the poem says), darkness was the portal to my experiences of subjective freedom and release. My “daytime life,” while having some perks and joys, was often taken up with people-pleasing (parents and teachers) and anxiety about things so deep inside me that I would not even become fully aware of until several years later.
The athletic letter “U” on the jackets of the boys in the drawing stands for “U. City,” short for University City, Missouri, where I grew up. As I penciled it in recently, I realized with a chuckle that in the dream, it could just as well stand for “Unconscious.”
Deeper philosophical underpinnings of all this, and the way forward
The end result of my experience growing up when and where I did in America was a high degree of alienation. Not, by any means, were the school or my conscious high school friendships and activities entirely responsible for it. There was a dark side to the family, as well, that vessel in which so many positive and negative things unknown to others take place for each of us. Family emotional life is also partly a legacy of the countless generations on each side of the parents’ marriage, thus reaching far back in history with one foot, so to speak. “Inter-generational trauma” from the Holocaust and before that the pogroms of Russia and Eastern Europe were relatively recent history for many families in my hometown. Each of my companions brought his own blend of family experience to our high school society, and later, society at large.
My life has been devoted to undoing this state of alienation. It has been my total preoccupation. I feel somewhat proud to be able to say that the effort has borne some success.
As readers of my previous writings in The Mindful Word will know, however, I don’t see the structure of my (and our) “stuff,” such as separateness, as due to the experience of a single life. Rather, it’s a karmic predicament that is the result of many, many lifetimes. The work goes on, life after life, once one has become aware of the predicament.
In the dream, I try to tell a friend “what has happened.” I don’t succeed in the dream, but as my life has worked out, I’ve spent the past decades “telling my story.” At times, I’ve attempted to tell “our story,” meaning that of my generation, in words and sometimes in paint, melody and song. And, when I’m truly inspired, I am able to speak on occasion simply as one specimen of the human condition and the continuing effort to liberate oneself from its bondage.
Immediately upon waking from this dream, I inarticulately felt nearly all of what I’m saying here in this section of the article. To a large extent, in the many years since the dream, my continued spiritual effort and the vast amount of help I’ve been given by great and good souls, whether Sages, Teachers or friends, has enabled me to find the voice with which I could and can speak about life—my own life and the collective milieu in which I came of age and have continued to live all these years.
If you want to find out what happened the next day, visit KOMMEN ZU BABA: Meine 43-jährige Romanze mit Meher Baba"
Visit the final part of the saga that begins with this article. It took place five years after the one linked just above: HAPPY RE-BIRTHDAY TO ME: a personal essay»
image 1: Max Reif; image 2: Max Reif; image 5: Fiona Gardner
