DESTINY AND DREAMS -- Part III

As I reflect on destiny and dreams, I think about how often matters of importance turn on points so small as to pass virtually unnoticed. I recall, for example, the first time I experienced the truth of Jung’s profound insight that the psyche has an objective reality quite independent of the conscious personality. He calls this the “reality of the objective psyche.”

I had been studying Jung and dreams for about a year, when one night I dreamed: I am looking across a corridor at an unknown man who is peering around a corner, looking directly back at me. End of dream. Period. The dream was so truncated, so minimal, that I was tempted not to bother writing it down. I had plenty of other images to record and ponder. And yet there was something uncanny and fascinating about this bizarre wisp of a dream, and it kept pulling me back into its curious “space.” What was it? Finally I realized what the strange effect was: The man really was looking at me. I was just as much an object of his perception as he was of mine. In a word, he was aware of me.

This was a bit of a shock, since I had naïvely assumed that the dreams I was so assiduously recording, and the figures that populated them, were always the objects of my perceptual awareness, but never the reverse. Suddenly I had to admit that I was not the only witness in the dream: I too was being observed.

This insight, repeated on other occasions, came to inform my outlook on dreams. I was forced to give new respect, greater credence and autonomy to the people and creatures, situations and dilemmas, of the mysterious world I entered every night as I slept. Dreams -- so readily dismissed as ephemeral nonsense -- were taking on substance, acquiring a strange kind of reality.

Over the decades this experience has so affected my world-view that I find myself squarely at odds with much of what my culture holds to be “real” and “unreal.” I might have come to the same conclusion in any case, without that dream, yet the fact remains that the dream -- small as it was -- inaugurated a new point of view, like opening a window onto the cosmos. And that dream still reverberates for me to this day.

How can we possibly discern the patterns of destiny in our dreams, if we have not had some convincing experience of the “reality of the objective psyche”? For without such a premise, and the experience on which it is based, we are like a dog chasing its tail. Recognizing no autonomous “Other” in ourselves, we are left with only the ego to account for dreams, which are reduced to a by-product of consciousness, as in Freud’s theory of dreams as a “rubbish bin” of repression. We may as well just ask ourselves what our destiny is, take the answer at face value, and get on with it. Many are content to live like this: the ego leading the ego ad infinitum, ad nauseam.

But to experience the Otherness of the objective psyche -- provided we can stoop low enough to admit it -- opens up possibilities for deepened insight. When we recognize the ego for the small island that it is, we may discover some of the profound hints that wash up on the beaches of our sleep every morning, in the note-stuffed bottles of dreams.

“Other” is a deliberately neutral term. But we could just as easily say “God,” “Fate,” the “Great Spirit,” “the Goddess,” “Wisdom” or any number of terms for that which exceeds our understanding and stands for the creative principle of the universe and of life. But “Other” has the virtue of modesty, humility and accuracy. With it we acknowledge our ignorance before this great mystery.

The autonomous psyche is an ancient, universal experience. Only recently have we stripped the world of its soul and its spirits, consigning what is left of the soul to the constricted chambers of our heads or bodies, where it undergoes its final reduction into mere brain chemistry or -- the new panacea -- “DNA.”

Yet the ancient truths still percolate as merrily as ever in the cauldron of the soul: the dreaming psyche. There we can still find what is so painfully and tragically lacking in our machine-world today: a sense of inborn purpose and meaning -- a destiny -- given with our nature and implicit in the realization of who we truly are, not who society tells us we should be.

A friend of mine recently told me a dream: She is walking along a path through the woods. Two large snakes overtake her on the same path, moving past her with a curious, un-serpentine motion. When they are both well ahead of her they stop, raise their heads, turn around and look directly at her. It is as if they are saying to her: “Well, are you going to follow us or not?” End of dream.

Seeking the course of destiny requires, as Jung put it, that we “follow the deeper currents of libido” -- autonomous psychic forces that reveal themselves in dreams, much like the two snakes above. The dreamer happens to be a Doctor of Oriental Medicine. Could the two snakes waiting for her have anything to do with the ancient symbol of the Caduceus, the staff of Hermes, emblem of the healing professions? Possibly. The two intertwined snakes of the Caduceus certainly resonate with the healing tradition of Kundalini, whose serpent energy runs up and down the two spinal pathways, activating the chakras. But even if there is a correspondence between those traditions and her dream snakes, it is not as an ancient symbol but as living energies in her psyche and body that they tacitly speak to her. They invite her to follow their lead, calling her perhaps even beyond her profession.

If she can overcome the fear they naturally evoke, and follow them, then she may become a “healer” in the deepest possible sense: not just as one who skillfully practices an ancient tradition of medicine -- she has already accomplished that brilliantly -- but as one who has attained the far more difficult goal of becoming a whole person. We should keep reminding ourselves that the words “heal,” “health” and “whole” all derive from the same etymological root.

One at a time, then, and aggregated over the years, dream images ultimately show us who we are, who we have always been, and the paths we must follow if we are to approach the transcendent mystery of the Self. Fortunately, the various dream-guides who appear from time to time -- no matter how frightening or strange they may seem to us -- form part of our larger nature. We may gather hints from other people, or try to imitate them, but in the final analysis we ourselves contain the pattern and embody the mystery of the greater Whole.

And I believe that as we arrive at this deeper self-knowledge, we thereby reflect back to the originating cosmos a significant piece of its own essence. In the process we not only validate our own existence, we also validate the cosmos itself, and its fifteen-billion-year quest for conscious life.