This week has been eye-opening and extremely gratifying for me with respect to my longtime efforts to, as I put it in my self-talk, “become fluent in the symbolic language of dreams.”
Over the years, I’ve had a number of revelations through dreams, but they’ve been sporadic. This week enabled me to feel more of an affinity with what the Jungian analysts on the “This Jungian Life” podcasts say about dreams, quoting Dr. Carl Jung: “The dream is a little hidden door in the innermost and most secret recesses of the soul” and “The general function of dreams is to restore our psychological balance.”
Dream One: A sobering look at myself
Note: I will narrate all three dreams in the present tense, which I feel is a more direct and powerful way to present them. The actual dream events are in italics as well.
Early this week, I had this dream:
At a party, I’m trying to win people’s attention and companionship by manipulation. I threaten to leave a “spiritual/social event” that I’ve come to, thinking that if I use that “poor me” strategy, people will reach out and befriend me.
At this social event, a party in a spiritual companion’s ample yard, the people don’t go out of their way to be friendly in response to my threat to leave. They don’t let themselves be manipulated in that way. They just let me leave. They follow me to the exit but do not enable me.
I was devastated upon waking and remembering this dream! I recognized the behaviour as one that I have employed, if sometimes in a slightly more subtle manner. My Unconscious, the “Dream Maker” was being very direct with me! I was horrified! I recognized the strategy of the dream-ego in that dream as utterly doomed to failure … and, as I’ve said, that it is one I’ve often employed.
I spent a couple of days in deep despair. Kind of “hit bottom,” because things can’t get much worse than being inured to using a totally counterproductive life strategy! The dream seemed to be saying “This is your whole life!”
Nevertheless, I felt I had to let in this Message. That it was ultimately from the SELF—the centre of the psyche, beyond the ego’s awareness or conscious understanding, that is identical with what many of us think of as and call God—and that it was true!
I talked to my wife about what I might do. For one thing, I scheduled a Zoom session with a friend who is a professional psychologist and whose services I use from time to time. That was definitely “taking a step,” I felt. I also wrote many pages to my Higher Power in my notebook about the situation.
I don’t remember everything else I might’ve done. I did try to carry on with my life, my job and such.
Dream Two: Visiting Roger (but scarcely seeing him)
A couple of days later, I had another dream that gave me a picture of my world that was still “problematic,” but much much more positive! It depicted me as a normal person with normal social relations, though there was a “problem.”
I’ve come to visit my old college apartment-mate, who was an extremely outstanding person and a campus leader.
However, on this visit, I only glimpse him for a minute as he walks into the side door of a movie theatre. Instead, I’m a guest at a banquet given by his mother. At this event, I’m seated next to two handicapped persons. One of them has a face that is “out of focus” or blurry, somehow. I don’t have a clear picture of the other person’s handicap. He may be in a wheelchair.
I sit with these two young men and do my best to make conversation in a friendly and brotherly way.
In this dream, I’m presented as a functional person. That is a step up from the previous dream! Could it be that by accepting what my Unconscious was showing me about myself in the first one, I earned the right to another one that reflected the progress that my yielding, sincere attitude brought me?
The first two dreams definitely seemed “sequential.” And the next night, I had a third. This one was clearly remarkable, in a very positive way!
Dream Three: The intuitive feminine—an anima dream
In this third dream, my wife and I are invited to a small dinner party. The building we drive to for it is on a boulevard lined on both sides with large rectangular residential buildings of four or five storeys. Each of these buildings is a different brilliant colour. One is a kind of deep magenta; another, forest green; and so on. And each building has in “Oriental-style” English-language letters with the name of a city or region somewhere in Asia, such as “Kurdistan,” or “Turkey.” Some of the names are cities or regions in India, too. (Note: I still haven’t “figured out” this part of the dream, but it remains fascinating to me.)
Barbara and I park and walk into one of these buildings, and proceed to one of the units there. Once we’re let into the apartment, we encounter something strange! We find ourselves in a big living room, lit with a too-bright overhead bulb whose effect is rather garish. In the room are a number of late-adolescent or early-adulthood boys. They’re rather boorish and loud—nothing like people Barbara and I would normally be friends with. But there we are. So strange!
Here’s the payoff, after that setup: Our attention is now drawn to a young woman we notice lying on her back in a relaxed way, upon the step-up brick hearth surface directly in front of a fireplace. In the fireplace, a bright flame is burning behind glass doors.
We’re so drawn to the woman and the atmosphere emanating from her that the big, garishly lit room with the boys totally disappears from our consciousness and we are, for the remainder of the dream, just with this young woman. I think of a name for her: “Malabar.” (The name wasn’t actually in the dream, but I feel it “works”, and might as well be. It also could be the name on one of the buildings on the aforementioned boulevard.)
She is a very soft, gentle presence. So relaxed and natural. She begins talking to Barbara and me, Her voice comes from deep within, near the centre of all things. Its quiet, positive force floods us both with its intimacy and wisdom. Incidentally, it seems to connect us more deeply with one another as well.
I have the impression that she’s the daughter of a very intuitive female “seer” I knew, who passed away in the mid-1980s (though that person, in the literal sense, never married or had children). She’s almost like the voice of the inner Self. I believe Dr. Jung would call her an anima figure: a personification of the inner Feminine.
According to an essay I read recently, the anima is composed partly of qualities of one’s own inner gender/opposite sex that are repressed because they don’t go with the sex of the body in this lifetime. And it’s partly composed of energy arising from the Self—which, as an inner figure deep in the psyche, it resides closer to.
Final words on the inner life
This week has encompassed such a journey! It’s the closest I’ve come to realizing my goal of feeling “fluent in the symbolic language” and living in the revelations that I’ve conjectured are available to any of us who pay attention to the features of our inner life; in other words, as Jung described it, to those of us who “present a friendly face to the Unconscious.”
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image 1: Wikimedia Commons; image 2: Max Reif; image 3: Max Reif; image 4: Max Reif
