Dreaming of Re-Birth

There is a Latin saying I’ve always enjoyed: Canis panem somniat, piscator pisces. A dog dreams of bread, a fisherman, fish. The idea is that one’s dreams follow the lines of one’s waking pursuits. Thus we imagine cats in their dreams searching for mice and warm places, or dogs chasing after cats and sticks. And because of my long years’ experience as a bronzecaster I still occasionally dream of kilns and molds, crucibles and furnaces.

But dreams will not be limited by clever Latin riffs, or any other attempt we make to encompass them. On the contrary, they encompass us, subsume us, just as our breath is subsumed by the atmosphere through which we move, which nevertheless forms part of our most intimate substance.

In taking up the vast question of re-birth in dreams, then, I am aware that the subject is way over my head. Yet because re-birth dreams have occasionally visited me, thereby forcing me to think about the question, I therefore feel justified in my audacity. I may seem like an ant trying to scale the Matterhorn, but so be it.

Two dreams in particular dropped the question of re-birth into my lap. Spaced a couple of years apart, they both took the form of verbal equations, as if I was dreaming an algebra of the soul. The dreams resonate closely with one another, the way paired strings vibrate sympathetically on a musical instrument. I’ll recount them separately, but hopefully some of their resonant tonalities will be audible.

Re-Bath

The first dream depicted a woman in a bathtub and carried the caption: Re-birth = re-bath.

Short and sweet. The image of the woman in the bathtub seemed like a visual portrayal of the formula’s solution: “re-bath.” At the same time, paradoxically, it was as if the “real image” of the dream was the formula itself and the picture of the woman in the tub was the explanatory caption -- a fox-and-hound relationship between the verbal and visual elements, like a fugue.

But for me the crucial point, the axis on which the dream turned, lay in the little prefix “re” -- again. All the thoughts and associations that have accrued to this dream gather around that simple part of speech. It suggests to me that the cleansing, re-ordering process -- the bath -- is repeatable, and therefore can happen at any moment: an ever-present potential. When Dylan Thomas referred to “the moon that is always rising,” he simultaneously evoked “the sun born over and over.”

This is good news. After all, if we were only allotted one re-birth per lifetime, we would all most likely end up in a pitiful heap. Periodic renewal is necessary for physical and psychological health and vitality, just as the body continuously sloughs off dead cells as it creates new ones. One could probably say that we all live in a constant state of actual and potential re-birth, if only we knew it.

The woman in the dream was an unknown figure. As such, she qualifies as an image of the soul -- in Jungian terms an “anima figure.” But the impersonal character of the dream tempts me to elevate her beyond the level of my personal anima. She seemed more like a general principle or an over-riding presence, along the lines of the Anima Mundi of centuries past. The fact that she was depicted not as a marble statue or elegant engraving -- the naked-yet-modest goddess standing atop the globe -- but simply as a woman in a bathtub, suggests to me that the grandeur of the Anima Mundi is to be found, not just in philosophy, but in our everyday lives: the transpersonal and transcendent vision glimmering right before our eyes.

The ramifications of this dream extend well beyond these brief observations, but this, at least, is a start.

A New Logos

The second dream was more complex: “Re-birth = re-interpretation in the light of a new Logos.”

This far-reaching statement is enough to set the teeth of philosophers and theologians on edge for centuries. In effect it calls for a new religious dispensation. And considering the amount of blood spilled as a result of the last “dispensation,” it might well give one pause to raise a banner in the name of yet another one. But I didn’t ask for the dream, it came to me. Therefore I must raise the banner.

What I would call the “old,” or the current, dispensation can be summed up in the New Testament words of John 1:1: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

This enigmatic statement derives from classical Greek philosophy and has provided the grist for many contending mills. It holds that the principle of the Logos -- divine mind or reason, the creative word, the “Word of God” -- is to be regarded as the fountain from which human life proceeds, from “the beginning.” It is a First Principle on the basis of which all else is based. Christian theologians were quick to seize on this concept and apply it to the Christ and, by extension, to Jesus. And so we have had a tradition which saw Jesus as the Christ, and Christ as the Living Word of God.

So far so good.

The problem is that this formulation, handed down from antiquity, has been overtaken by events and ideas of the past few centuries. The result is that few people today really understand, or even care, what it means.

At this point I am reminded of Edward Edinger’s profound statement: “The Jewish dispensation was based on law. The Christian dispensation was based on faith. The new dispensation is based on experience.”

If Edinger was correct, and I believe he was; and if my dream is relevant to our contemporary dilemma, and I believe it is; then we can say that any significant re-birth of a personal or a cultural nature will be based on the experience of a new Logos, a new story or telling, a new outpouring of the Creative Word. It will amount to a new way of imagining the world and our relation to it, requiring the gathering of untold numbers of perceptions, ideas, intuitions and insights, imaginative visions, creative renderings and understandings.

The “new Logos” will manifest the operations of the Creative Word as whispered and heard in the silence of millions of individual souls. Jung said that the Great Dream “consists of many small dreams, and many acts of humilitity and submission to their hints.” Russ Lockhart evokes the Aquarian image of many individuals pouring the waters of their experience into the common pool. And Edinger referred to the “Christification of the Many” and the “Coming of the Self” to all.

Thus the new Logos will manifest itself in as many ways as there are individual souls to witness its advent and lend their efforts to its articulation and expression.

This, of course, is a great task of untold duration, suffered by all but consciously borne by relatively few. How much more important, then, will those individual efforts and sacrifices be in the years to come? For there is no guarantee that the re-birth implicit in my dream will come to pass in this time of crisis and trial.

It may ultimately prove to be my folly, but I nevertheless continue to find hope for renewal in the births and re-births announced in our dreams.