The Teaching Babe Dream

For many years it has been apparent to me that certain dreams deserve to be called “teaching dreams.”

Though a teaching dream makes itself available to one dreamer at a time, the aim of such a dream seems more ambitious: In addressing one, it speaks to all. This experience probably underlies the ancient tribal tradition of the “big dream,” in which anyone who had a big dream was expected to tell it to the tribe as a whole.

Today the Earth’s teeming population approaches seven billion souls, a far cry from the intimate conditions of our tribal past. Meanwhile such tribes as do persist are under tremendous pressure to “assimilate” -- and so the dream circle, along with every other vestige of our traditional past, struggles to hold its own against the technocratic tide.

Yet despite these unfavorable conditions, dreams -- ever resurgent and abundant -- continue making themselves available to individual psyches, tribal or not. And to those intrepid few who bother to pay attention, some of those dreams come laden with lessons to teach, which we are always well-advised to learn.

I have had many teaching dreams, but one in particular comes to mind. Years ago I conducted a dream class at a local community college. Two weeks prior to the first meeting, I had a dream which seemed geared to my anticipatory state -- How many would sign up? Who would they be? How would they respond to the topic of dreams?

When I woke up with the dream I assumed that it had to do with the class. This, in retrospect, may have been inaccurate, for after so many years the only thing I remember about that class is the dream. The ironic conclusion I draw today is this: I didn’t have the dream in order to teach the class; I taught the class in order to have the dream.

The dream was short:

I am about to begin the first dream-class meeting. An unknown woman approaches me, thanking me for having “helped” her in the past. I neither recognize her nor recall how I might have helped her. Without hesitation I reply: “Oh? Who was the teaching babe?” [End of dream.]

In my dreaming mind the expression “teaching babe” was accompanied by the image of a cherub or putto, a fat baby with wings, one of the traditional images of an angel. It was clearly the punch line of the dream. But why should such a simple image be so charged with significance that I still remember and puzzle over it decades later?

Well, for one thing it offers valuable lessons about relationships in general -- including relationships in therapy and the transference. On this count alone, the Teaching Babe qualifies as a teaching dream.

Without presuming to encompass the dream, what are some of the things it can teach us?

First, it challenges our standard, cause-and-effect assumptions about influence between persons, as if influence were a mechanical thing found only on the horizontal level, like billiard balls on a pool table: I teach, therefore you learn.

Instead, the dream proposes the existence of a third, invisible factor, the Teaching Babe, an “angel” operating on a higher level. It flies back and forth between two individuals, and as a result of its subtle shuttling action a connective field is created between the two, and it is within and because of this field that teaching, and therefore learning, can occur. What is being evoked is a level of psycho-spiritual connectedness transcending the normal bounds of consciousness.

The second lesson derives from the first. By placing the third, vertical element on a higher level than the horizontal pair, the dream implicitly questions the modern fallacy that seeks and finds value only in the horizontal productions of the ego. It should be evident by now that conventional modernity has little use for what it cannot by itself generate, measure, see, predict or control. And one thing is for certain: the Teaching Babe is autonomous, beyond the control of the two egos below. It follows its own tendencies and inspirations, like the divine spirit-wind in the Bible, which bloweth where it listeth.

The third lesson, again, flows from the preceding one: As the angel connects the two below with one another, it simultaneously connects what is below with what is above. The angel thus mediates not only between person and person, but also between the personal and the archetypal or, as we used to say, between “terrestrial” and “heavenly” levels of being.

In centuries past we used to speak freely of “heaven” or “God,” but the demand for scientific proof has placed new limits on our discourse. The modern spiritual crisis is to no small extent a crisis in language, and much confusion results from our literalizing, materialistic bias. We think we have criticized ideas like angels, heaven or God, for example, because when we peered into deep space with our telescopes we found no “evidence” for their existence. Carl Sagan once criticized astrology because the gravitational influence of Jupiter is “about as strong as that of a fly.” Under the onslaught of this attitude, traditional religious language has come to be widely regarded as a colorful relic, but not to be taken seriously as a category of thought.

It did not occur to us that we might have been looking in the wrong place, using the wrong instruments, working from the wrong assumptions and applying the wrong criteria. In the tug-of-war between religion and science, we forgot that there is a third realm, common to both, that joins and encompasses the two: the human psyche.

We should not forget that the same psyche which produces dreams also produces religion and science. And apparently the dream-generating psyche cares little for the restrictions imposed by hard-minded rationalists. Dreams merrily continue, unabated, in their amazing inventivenss, and the deep impulse that produced every inflection of religious culture since the earliest Paleolithic times, continues in our day to produce new variations on ancient themes.

Mircea Eliade, a historian of religion, was well aware of how categories of religious experience persist even when lost or discredited in daily life:

“What is above, the high, continues to reveal the transcendent in every religious complex . . . no world is possible without verticality, and that dimension alone is enough to evoke transcendence . . . [Though] driven from religious life in the strict sense, the celestial sacred remains active through symbolism. A religious symbol conveys its message even if it is no longer consciously understood in every part. For a symbol speaks to the whole human being and not only to the intelligence.”

With these thoughts Eliade brings us to the crux of the dream. Its central image -- the mediating angel -- is in fact a living symbol speaking both to and for the whole human being. When I say “living symbol,” I mean that the angel is a living psychic presence, a dynamic, autonomous, transcendent agency. It is in us, of us, above us and around us; in short, the angel is greater than we are. We are subsumed by it. Think of it as the archetype of individuality and a manifestation of the deeper Self, the Whole of which we are a Part. In a sense the angel is our guide and exemplar, presenting us with our own potentials, as if it has come to lead us out of our smallness into some greater life to which we always belonged. When Jung said, “There is a greater person in yourself to whom you bar the way,” I believe he referred, in part, to the potentials that are implied by the angel.

Incidentally, the dream’s focus on the angel’s role in relationship raises the question of whether individuation can take place in the absence of relationship. I seriously doubt it.

At this point our dream reflections lead us in many different directions, as if the angels had stopped their dancing and scattered, flying off the head of the pin altogether. Within the limits of this essay, I can only hint at three of those possibilities:

1. The shamanic element in the human personality. This forms as much a part of the underlying psyche today as it did 50,000 years ago, even though mainstream medicine and culture are no longer based on shamanic practices. But the shamanic element is not only present, it is the prototype for all forms of “psi,” “non-ordinary” or “non-local” experience. Over millennia, the shaman’s powers of flight, healing and familiarity with the spirit-world, most likely shaded imperceptibly into the spirits, daimons and angels of the Neolithic, classical and Biblical periods, into the Middle Ages. Throughout history, psychic experiences in abundance -- prophecies, oracles, augurs, visions, out-of-body events, clairvoyance, ESP, telepathy, premonitions, ghosts, visitations, intuitions and so forth -- have been firmly interwoven into the tapestry of culture. If these reports have yet to be finally expunged from the human record by the de-bunking aspect of science, it shows more than just how tenaciously people cling to darkness. The fact that such experiences just don’t go away says as much about the innate potentials of the psyche as it does about the superstitious credulity of ages past and present.

2. The mystery of relationship. A magnum mysterium indeed, and fertile ground for many studies on the psychology of Eros. Among others, Russell Lockhart’s work in particular (Psyche Speaks and Words As Eggs) is loaded with insight into this phenomenon.

Today the dynamics of Eros, long charted by poets, philosophers and psychologists, have begun to blur and overlap with cutting-edge research and theory in the physics of quantum fields. It seems more and more plausible that everything that exists is intimately connected with everything else that exists.

3. The wholeness of the personality. This vast topic evokes Jung’s work on the phenomenology of the Self. It also touches on the mystery of psyche-world interactions in synchronistic events. For ultimately, when one penetrates the depths of the personality one comes face to face with the ancient paradox: Self and World are not discontinuous fragments after all, but form one integral reality.

To a casual onlooker, the Teaching Babe might appear to be a small dream, limited to the personal realm. But looks can be deceiving, especially with dreams. Once given the respect it deserves, and cherished over time, it reveals itself to be a “teaching dream” indeed, affording perspectives onto the vastness of psyche and cosmos.

That in itself is a lesson worth learning.