In the last post I proposed a category for those dreams in which elements of a person’s “destiny” can be discerned. I defined destiny as an irrational pattern of multiple images and meanings, all of which impart a particular shape and implicit purpose to one’s life. In this essay I would like to consider some common characteristics of destiny dreams.
Large Scale. I used to think that destiny was discernible only in big dreams -- archetypal behemoths that dwarf the dream ego with their sheer magnitude and power. But the more I ponder the mystery of destiny the more it seems that many smaller dreams also belong in this category, and it becomes more difficult to draw the line. Still, large scale itself can be an indicator that inklings of destiny may be close at hand. When we are prompted to say, “I had a big dream last night,” we usually mean that something about the scale of the dream took us beyond our personal, day-to-day concerns into regions of greater depth, where personal elements are either displaced altogether or subsumed in the larger context of the problems and potentials of humanity itself. The awareness of our position in the larger context of humanity or the cosmos imposes a kind of responsibility.
In tribal societies, it was understood that big dreams were matters of concern to the whole tribe. It was the dreamer’s responsibility to report the dream to fellow tribal members. This ancient pattern expresses a deep insight more or less lost to our modern mass culture. Today, we are no longer able collectively to follow the deeper movements of the psyche -- and widespread disorientation is the result. Nevertheless, many people are still having big dreams. This means that those few individuals who bother to record and remember them bear a heightened responsibility to pay close attention to the formative images rising up from below. This in itself comes close to what I call destiny.
Small Scale. As Jung pointed out, any psychological statement can be stood on its head, which can be very aggravating to the ego. No sooner do we make a grand pronouncement than the very opposite also turns out to be true. This annoying fact is well expressed in the French aphorism “Les extrêmes se touchent.” (The opposites touch one another.)
Thus, I must quickly add that aspects of destiny can be expressed not only in terms of large scale, but in terms of small scale as well. This is dramatically apparent in dreams where a baby appears. The very qualities of smallness and fragility seem to magnify its importance, especially if the figure is in danger, which it often is (“I discover that the new-born baby has been lost. I am terrified and must find it.”) Something has barely come within reach of consciousness and is already in danger of being lost. Extra care must be given to it, and its diminutive size and innocent freshness prefigure a long period of development extending well into the future. To take such a dream figure seriously will have a profound effect on the dreamer. For daily life, which normally proceeds according to the will and discretion of the ego, now finds itself subject to a greater will, for whose realization the ego is responsible. The ego finds itself contained within a larger life expressed by the apparent evanescence of dream.
Occasionally a dream may feature, not a baby, but a tiny, fully-formed human, which the alchemists referred to as a “homunculus.” In this case, smallness of scale is joined to impossibility, imparting an uncanny specialness to the image. Something so small is easily overlooked. And yet it is already fully developed. It is small, like a baby, yet mature at the same -- paradoxical qualities which enhance its uncanny importance. As a “complexio oppositorum,” the homunculus resonates with the qualities of the Self, and the dream context in which it appears may contain signposts that point the way to those deeper levels of authentic being out of which destiny arises.
These small, fragile dream figures -- baby and homunculus -- by evoking from us a caring response, involve us in something larger than ourselves. We cannot simply follow the desires and needs of the ego, pretending that we have done any justice to the psyche.
Dream-plus-dreamer thus comprise a greater whole than dreamer alone. Their fates are interwoven and the dream has once again made a fair claim on the destiny of the individual. Because of this, and because it happens so often, it may not be going too far to say that our well-being depends on the well-being of the figures in our dreams.
3. The Task. It should be apparent by now that I believe dreams in general, and destiny dreams in particular, place ethical demands upon the dreamer to whom they appear. They saddle us with tasks, which may be one reason why so many people choose to ignore or dismiss their dreams, finding them not only mystifying but also irritating, due to the onerous burden of increased consciousness the dreams implicitly impose.
But if we’re not looking for meaningful burdens to place alongside the busywork and trivial distractions that so encumber our modern lives, we probably shouldn’t involve ourselves with dreams. As I said in the last issue, to seek one’s destiny in dreams is not for the faint of heart.
In my view, then, the tasks with which dreams challenge us are best gratefully accepted, for they give us access to deeper levels of psychic substance and meaning, the lack of which is cause for much suffering in the world.
4. Scale and Task Together. Here is an example of a destiny dream in which “scale” and “task” are interwoven. A man dreamed that he was in a deep cavern, shaped almost like a theater. At one end of the cavern was an enormous window onto space. The planet Jupiter dominated the entire view. Somehow he knew that Jupiter was going to explode, and within seconds it did. The giant planet erupted in a tremendous fireball, and as the explosion subsided the man saw fixed stars falling from their places in the heavens -- in a flash, what had once seemed permanent and eternal was falling away before his eyes. With a feeling of great urgency he ran out of the cavern, onto the sidewalks of a busy city. He felt he had to tell people what had just happened, but nobody seemed interested. People hurried about their business, too preoccupied with mundane concerns to pay any attention. [End of dream.]
The explosion of Jupiter and the falling of stars from the sky is an image of cosmic scale -- a transpersonal event of archetypal magnitude, affecting all of humanity. The dream showed that a major shift in “heaven” -- i.e., the archetypal dominants on which our lives are based -- is taking place. The gift of the dream was to engage the man as a witness to the event. The task imposed upon him was that he had to take action on the basis of that vision, incorporating it into his life by telling the world what he had seen. The “kicker” at the end of the dream guaranteed that it would be no easy task -- the man rushed out to alert the world at large, but no one showed any interest.
An important feature of this dream is that it isolates the dreamer from the collective -- he is isolated by his knowledge, which people in general don’t want to be bothered with, even though it affects them in fundamental ways. He has become, if he wasn’t already, what Melville referred to as one of the “isolatoes.”
Paradoxically, even as it isolates him, the dream simultaneously relates the man to the collective, because it is to the world-at-large and to his fellow humans that he owes his service for having witnessed the cosmic vision. His task -- and I would say his destiny -- is to find some way to express to others what seems so gigantically difficult to express.
5. Paradox. The sense of paradox is another common characteristic of destiny dreams. Insofar as they challenge and engage the whole person, and therefore encompass the opposites, the dreamer can neither stand completely apart from the world nor feign disappearance in the crowd. In the case of our dream of Jupiter exploding, the individual task of the man is emphasized, not his collectivity, because it is as an individual that he has to respond to and come to terms with the dream. But if his only response is to reject the task and remain safely ensconced within collective forms, he will avoid an onerous burden, to be sure, but he will also most likely fail his destiny.
From my perspective, the man is not absolved of responsibility just because the dream came to an end, or because it was “just a dream.” It ended in a state of profound irresolution. An archetypal shift in the world has taken place -- indeed, it is ongoing -- and the lack of interest on the part of the public is one of the “problematics” of the dream. It is up to the dreamer to find words, images and actions adequate to convey to an oblivious public the changes bearing down upon one and all.
Tuesday, June 2, 2009
DESTINY IN DREAMS -- Part II
Thirty-five years ago I started recording my dreams. It seemed like the right thing to do: to follow the path of curiosity down into the labyrinth of images, find out what was there and get to the bottom of things -- if there was a bottom. Over the years, however, a strange thing began to happen: I realized that whatever “truth” I was pursuing through those tunnels was also, in a manner of speaking, pursuing me.
When I say “pursue,” I don’t mean it was out to get me. Rather, it
seemed that some living factor -- sometimes a figure within a dream, sometimes the entire dream itself or even something larger than the dream --was seeking to engage me in a process that required my conscious participation, as if for the purpose of bringing forth certain potentials. Occasionally a dream would come along that seemed to sweep my entire life into a basket and hold it there, as if I consisted of a jumble of contents -- energies, qualities, experiences, aptitudes, dimensions -- that were somehow contained and expressed in a few mystifying images. A hand held the basket and shook it now and then, tumbling me and all of my “contents” into a new configuration. The process was often disconcerting, to be sure, but it also gave me a greater sense of solidity.
All I could do was hang on, pay attention, try to remember what I had witnessed and, by any means possible, do my best to participate -- actively -- in the weaving together, the realization, of some mysterious pattern. Increasingly, the source of that pattern seemed to lie beyond the dreams themselves even as it gave form to them.
In short, I had to find ways to live my life in accord with the deeper images that constituted the fundamental determinants of my being. Another way of saying this is that I had discovered a living, mythic intelligence woven through a long series of dreams, which in turn were connected to crucial events of my life.
I gradually realized that this patterning force was shaping and directing the course of my life. It did this partly by imposing life-tasks, in dreams. The trick, of course, was to discern the tasks implicit in the dreams, and the destiny implicit in the tasks. As if that were not difficult enough, I then had to find the courage to carry out the tasks and live the destiny. Easier said than done.
Destiny -- a word so often misused in our over-marketed culture, where carelessness toward language is epidemic. [For a fascinating study of words and their relation to psyche see Russell Lockhart’s
book Words As Eggs.] When I speak of destiny, I do not mean “where we end up” (the destination of a trip), or “where we start” (our given lot in life). Nor am I referring to the fortune teller’s use of the term to predict events along the way: destiny as predetermination.
I think of destiny as an overarching pattern, a mosaic of multiple meanings, irrational in its deepest essence, that gives shape and coherence to one’s life and personality. When one catches a glimpse of this pattern in dreams, it is like a revelation of the goal or purpose for which one was created. Meister Eckhart came close to this definition in the fourteenth century when he said that “Every creature is a word of God.” Jung implied much the same thing when he said: “Become the person you have always been.”
Although solitary experience brought me to this sense of the destiny in dreams, the years during which I actively practiced as a Jungian Therapist only strengthened my conviction: Dreams in general, but destiny dreams in particular, reveal the existence of an active, organizing intelligence -- a cosmic intelligence, for all I can tell, since I surely do not know where it begins or ends. It seems as manifestly pervasive in the depths of the psyche as in the depths of the cosmos. I only know that my life unfolds within the grip of something greater than I, which has the power to sustain or put an end to my life, and that my well-being is highly contingent upon its well-being.
For this reason I take the actions that I do in the world, for better or for worse, within the limited scope of my abilities or the extent of my influence. And at the end of my life, the question of whether I have satisfied the expectations of others will ultimately pale beside the question of whether I have fulfilled the pattern demanded of me by my dreams.
THE GORILLA DREAM
When I was a child I had a chronic dream about a gorilla chasing me through underground tunnels. The dream closely resembled a corny television series I had seen about explorers in pith helmets and jodphurs and little black pistol holsters, roaming through the ruins of a lost city. Occasionally they would encounter a “gorilla” (actually, a man in a gorilla costume) skulking through simulated underground corridors on a TV stage set. Each episode ended with a “cliff-hanger” -- for example, someone dangling by a shrub or a root attached to the sheer walls of a deep canyon. The next episode began with a re-play of the crucial moment, followed by rescues and escapes which always left the explorers safe and sound.
My dream was different. I could see the tunnels from a distance, in cross-section, like an ant colony in a terrarium (even at a young age dreams can give us a perspective on our lives). And the network of tunnels shuttled back and forth, not through the contrived materials of a sound stage, but through a solid bed of black coal. From my perspective in the dream I could see the gorilla chasing me through the dark labyrinth, hot on my heels. But strangely, for all his superior power, he never caught me and he never hurt me. Even so, I regarded the dream as a nightmare simply because it scared me. (It never occurred to me at the time to wonder how it could be that “I” was watching “myself.” Were there two of me -- one that acted and another that observed?)
Eventually I stopped having that dream. Years later, when I finally began my intensive study of Jung and dreams, the gorilla came back to mind for good, more vital than ever. I saw him in a new light because I realized that, since he lived in those coal tunnels, he therefore knew his way around. If only I could stop being frightened and make friends with him, he could actually guide me through the underworld: A knowledgeable, animal-spirit guide through the unconscious realm of transformative energies and images -- the stored sunlight and fire implicit in “coal.”
The more time I spent recording and musing on dreams, the more evident it became that I was naturally suited to the process. The gorilla dream loomed in importance, and I realized that, by its chronic insistence during childhood, it was telling me that “I could run but I couldn’t hide,” that is, sooner or later I would have to descend into those tunnels, only consciously this time. Some prescience was manifest in my child’s psyche, a knowing in advance, showing me the possibility of a certain direction in life, and then insisting on it again and again. All I could to at the time was to wake up groaning, “Oh, no, not the gorilla dream again.” Little did I know what a gift that dream was, and how it would eventually lead me deeper and teach me more than I ever could have learned by simply following the herd.
I do not mean to imply that the path of destiny is not fraught with peril. To take up the challenge of one’s individuality -- which is ultimately the essence of destiny, and the basis of all genuine “activism” -- is not for the faint of heart. Sooner or later one will encounter deep conflicts that challenge the whole person. Amazingly, the imaginative genius of dreams seems to encompass every possible situation, every possible conflict and every possible solution. It creates thousands upon thousands of images and parades them before us every night, as if to say, “This shall be your task: To find yourself among these images, then to place your whole personality in the balance, in the realization that you too are an off-spring of the stars, a living spark of the universe, darkness itself come to light.”
When I say “pursue,” I don’t mean it was out to get me. Rather, it
seemed that some living factor -- sometimes a figure within a dream, sometimes the entire dream itself or even something larger than the dream --was seeking to engage me in a process that required my conscious participation, as if for the purpose of bringing forth certain potentials. Occasionally a dream would come along that seemed to sweep my entire life into a basket and hold it there, as if I consisted of a jumble of contents -- energies, qualities, experiences, aptitudes, dimensions -- that were somehow contained and expressed in a few mystifying images. A hand held the basket and shook it now and then, tumbling me and all of my “contents” into a new configuration. The process was often disconcerting, to be sure, but it also gave me a greater sense of solidity.
All I could do was hang on, pay attention, try to remember what I had witnessed and, by any means possible, do my best to participate -- actively -- in the weaving together, the realization, of some mysterious pattern. Increasingly, the source of that pattern seemed to lie beyond the dreams themselves even as it gave form to them.
In short, I had to find ways to live my life in accord with the deeper images that constituted the fundamental determinants of my being. Another way of saying this is that I had discovered a living, mythic intelligence woven through a long series of dreams, which in turn were connected to crucial events of my life.
I gradually realized that this patterning force was shaping and directing the course of my life. It did this partly by imposing life-tasks, in dreams. The trick, of course, was to discern the tasks implicit in the dreams, and the destiny implicit in the tasks. As if that were not difficult enough, I then had to find the courage to carry out the tasks and live the destiny. Easier said than done.
Destiny -- a word so often misused in our over-marketed culture, where carelessness toward language is epidemic. [For a fascinating study of words and their relation to psyche see Russell Lockhart’s
book Words As Eggs.] When I speak of destiny, I do not mean “where we end up” (the destination of a trip), or “where we start” (our given lot in life). Nor am I referring to the fortune teller’s use of the term to predict events along the way: destiny as predetermination.
I think of destiny as an overarching pattern, a mosaic of multiple meanings, irrational in its deepest essence, that gives shape and coherence to one’s life and personality. When one catches a glimpse of this pattern in dreams, it is like a revelation of the goal or purpose for which one was created. Meister Eckhart came close to this definition in the fourteenth century when he said that “Every creature is a word of God.” Jung implied much the same thing when he said: “Become the person you have always been.”
Although solitary experience brought me to this sense of the destiny in dreams, the years during which I actively practiced as a Jungian Therapist only strengthened my conviction: Dreams in general, but destiny dreams in particular, reveal the existence of an active, organizing intelligence -- a cosmic intelligence, for all I can tell, since I surely do not know where it begins or ends. It seems as manifestly pervasive in the depths of the psyche as in the depths of the cosmos. I only know that my life unfolds within the grip of something greater than I, which has the power to sustain or put an end to my life, and that my well-being is highly contingent upon its well-being.
For this reason I take the actions that I do in the world, for better or for worse, within the limited scope of my abilities or the extent of my influence. And at the end of my life, the question of whether I have satisfied the expectations of others will ultimately pale beside the question of whether I have fulfilled the pattern demanded of me by my dreams.
THE GORILLA DREAM
When I was a child I had a chronic dream about a gorilla chasing me through underground tunnels. The dream closely resembled a corny television series I had seen about explorers in pith helmets and jodphurs and little black pistol holsters, roaming through the ruins of a lost city. Occasionally they would encounter a “gorilla” (actually, a man in a gorilla costume) skulking through simulated underground corridors on a TV stage set. Each episode ended with a “cliff-hanger” -- for example, someone dangling by a shrub or a root attached to the sheer walls of a deep canyon. The next episode began with a re-play of the crucial moment, followed by rescues and escapes which always left the explorers safe and sound.
My dream was different. I could see the tunnels from a distance, in cross-section, like an ant colony in a terrarium (even at a young age dreams can give us a perspective on our lives). And the network of tunnels shuttled back and forth, not through the contrived materials of a sound stage, but through a solid bed of black coal. From my perspective in the dream I could see the gorilla chasing me through the dark labyrinth, hot on my heels. But strangely, for all his superior power, he never caught me and he never hurt me. Even so, I regarded the dream as a nightmare simply because it scared me. (It never occurred to me at the time to wonder how it could be that “I” was watching “myself.” Were there two of me -- one that acted and another that observed?)
Eventually I stopped having that dream. Years later, when I finally began my intensive study of Jung and dreams, the gorilla came back to mind for good, more vital than ever. I saw him in a new light because I realized that, since he lived in those coal tunnels, he therefore knew his way around. If only I could stop being frightened and make friends with him, he could actually guide me through the underworld: A knowledgeable, animal-spirit guide through the unconscious realm of transformative energies and images -- the stored sunlight and fire implicit in “coal.”
The more time I spent recording and musing on dreams, the more evident it became that I was naturally suited to the process. The gorilla dream loomed in importance, and I realized that, by its chronic insistence during childhood, it was telling me that “I could run but I couldn’t hide,” that is, sooner or later I would have to descend into those tunnels, only consciously this time. Some prescience was manifest in my child’s psyche, a knowing in advance, showing me the possibility of a certain direction in life, and then insisting on it again and again. All I could to at the time was to wake up groaning, “Oh, no, not the gorilla dream again.” Little did I know what a gift that dream was, and how it would eventually lead me deeper and teach me more than I ever could have learned by simply following the herd.
I do not mean to imply that the path of destiny is not fraught with peril. To take up the challenge of one’s individuality -- which is ultimately the essence of destiny, and the basis of all genuine “activism” -- is not for the faint of heart. Sooner or later one will encounter deep conflicts that challenge the whole person. Amazingly, the imaginative genius of dreams seems to encompass every possible situation, every possible conflict and every possible solution. It creates thousands upon thousands of images and parades them before us every night, as if to say, “This shall be your task: To find yourself among these images, then to place your whole personality in the balance, in the realization that you too are an off-spring of the stars, a living spark of the universe, darkness itself come to light.”
Animals in Dreams
As far as anyone can tell, we humans have been dreaming for as long as we have been walking on two legs -- a million years at least, maybe two, maybe three. Even when our knuckles were still dragging on the ground, we were probably dreaming.
The entire course of human development has been thoroughly interspersed with dreams. For all of us, waking life emerges -- every day -- out of the prior background of dreams, just as the sun rises from nocturnal depths to create the world anew. This is the primordial experience, the basic fact of life on our spinning planet: out of our darkest animal origins comes a divine stirring, a creative movement toward the light.
As if to underscore the point, the Indo-European, Greek and Latin words for “day” are etymologically related to the word for “God” -- theos, deus, dios, día. The root idea is sun, sky, brilliance, shining. When baboons on the plains of Africa stop their chattering and gamboling to gather at daybreak and watch the sunrise, we know that something of primal importance is happening.
The human psyche differentiated itself slowly, and only partially, from its animal antecedents. We never really left the animals behind. At every level we bear physical and behavioral traces of our animal ancestors. Even our brains are built around a reptilian core.
For countless millenia we have lived in the presence of animals, to the extent that life on earth is inconceivable without them: We eat them, live with them, sleep with them, work with them, seek them as companions. We study them, breed them, train them, run from them, hunt them, wage war against them. We sacrifice them in religious and cultural rituals. We mourn and weep for them when they die. We mount their heads and hides on our walls as trophies, wear their skins and furs for warmth and elegance, fashion their teeth into jewelry, imitate their mating dances and calls, borrow their power. We name football teams after them (the Cougars, Lions, and Tigers) and invoke them to sell cars (the Impala, Jaguar and Mustang).
No wonder we all dream of animals.
The Garden of Eden
One way to think about their function and value in our dreams is to look at the Garden of Eden myth. Adam and Eve were cast out of the Garden for having developed conscious knowledge of the difference between good and evil, which shattered their state of oneness with God. In other words, consciousness -- the original human sin -- gave us God-like potentials, but it also broke our primordial state of fusion with the divine impulse. In that sense we resemble “fallen angels.”
The animals, however, never were cast out of Eden. Even today, they live on in their original state, in the unbroken circle of oneness with God. Human consciousness made us aware of our separateness from the animals and from God, but the presence and ubiquity of the animals reminds us not to stray too far from the divine roots of our being, not to get too strung out on our hubris. The animals are living reminders -- if only we pay attention -- that the cosmos does not belong to us, we belong to the cosmos.
Animals come to us in our dreams, then, carrying something of our lost, divine origins. At the evolutionary, biological level, we designate those animal origins as instinctual and physical. But on another level, those same animals, out of whom we originate, are spiritual beings who connect us to the creative mystery of all life, what we call “the Divine.”
Animals as Angels
In order to enlarge the language with which we discuss our dreams, and extend the range of our imagining in the process, I propose an unconventional way of regarding animals in dreams.
Try thinking of them as angels.
This is not so far-fetched as it might first seem. After all, the traditional way of representing an angel is to take a human figure and attach animal wings to it. Wings give an extra dimension to the human, suggesting an ability to transcend normal human limits -- to fly to heaven, as it were. In short, wings symbolize the power of the spirit.
The fusion of human and animal attributes in angel imagery suggests that, in some mysterious way, the two realms of being are actually one. For thousands of years this kind of symbolism has gone unquestioned: If you want to represent something spiritual, put wings on it. Or, to put it differently, if you want to show the transcendent potentials of the human spirit, then re-connect the human with its animal foundation, since they spring from one and the same mysterious source.
The animal belongs to that part of us that never was separated from the Divine. As such, it can be taken -- at least occasionally -- as a symbol of the state of Wholeness, or the potential for it. In that respect the dream-animal can serve as an index of your relationship to God or, in Jungian terms, your relationship to the Self.
From this perspective, it would be a matter of no small importance how the animal is disposed toward you, and especially you toward it. In any event, if an animal approaches you in your dream, you can assume it is trying get your attention. And if you stumble upon the animal in its own dream precincts, there is a good chance you are out of your normal depth, and a habitual ego response to the animal will probably prove inadequate.
We should not forget that, even if a dream-animal seems to oppose or threaten us in some way, it may still be bringing a “message” from the greater Self. This is what angels do -- they communicate between the greater and the lesser, between the divine and the human, as necessary links between the parts of a whole. In a way, the animal itself is the message. By its very presence it says, “Beware. You are close to something greater than yourself. If you follow me, you will be close to the Source.” Perhaps this is what Jesus meant when he said “He who is near unto me is near unto the fire.”
When Freud spoke of the “navel of the dream,” he was referring to a point in dreams where the trail of interpretable associations disappears, giving way to the unknown depths. Animals could often be said to produce a similar “navel” effect. If you dream that a bear stands on the path you are traveling, and you stop in your tracks because your fear of it blocks your progress, the bear is still your connection, the navel, that leads to whatever lies deeper in the dream, beyond the bear, on the other side of your fear: the end of the path, the goal.
It is not surprising that so many dreamers report animals that are chasing after them, since the dream-ego habitually flees, trying to stay ahead of the animal, leaving it no recourse but to follow behind, to pursue. The tendency to put oneself first, always ahead of the Other, is one of the ways the ego obstructs itself on the path to its own integration, its own taste of Wholeness. Jung said it well: “There is a greater person in yourself to whom you bar the way.”
The Angel’s Demands
A woman in her forties, a practicing artist, had a long-standing fascination with bears. She was talented but self-effacing, with a natural humility approaching saintliness. Bear motifs haunted her work, as if the bear was insisting on something, through its own representation in her work.
One night she dreamed that she was sitting at a small table. Across from her sat a large bear, on a chair. The bear wore eye-glasses, and had a stack of papers on the table in front of him. He was reading to her from the papers, reciting a list of demands. Among them were “money, fame, and beautiful women.” (End of dream.)
I am well aware that various interpretations could be applied to this dream and to the image of the bear. But let’s follow my suggestion and provisionally regard the bear as an “angel.” What do we notice? What can we learn?
First point. Notice that the bear wants something from her. She doesn’t present a list of demands to the bear, the bear presents a list of demands to her. This establishes a gradient wherein the demand conveyed by the animal/spiritual presence within -- the “angel” -- impinges upon the human ego. The implication is that we live our lives, not for the satisfaction of the ego and its desires, but to fulfill the larger, prior need of the angel. This, of course, violates our modern conceit that everything exists for the ego’s pleasure.
French Islamic scholar Henri Corbin (1) provides a valuable clue when he says: “The angel’s individuation comes first, then ours.” If our angel cannot individuate because of the way we are living our lives, then how can we ourselves possibly expect to individuate? Jung gives voice to nearly the same insight when he says: “Become the person you have always been.” In both cases, something eternal longs for fulfillment in time.
In other words, the angel pertains to the eternal features of our soul, which hunger for embodiment and expression. If we dither our life away without taking the angel’s demands into account, can we really hope to reach anything approaching wholeness? If we remain trapped in our fragmentary egos, how can we approximate the Self? The angel seeks us out, presents us with its demands, and challenges us to become who we are, in the deepest sense. It practically begs us to breach the defensive walls of the ego and extend ourselves further into our own depths, where we are out of our league. But that is precisely where the animal will be in a position to serve us as tutor and guide.
This usually terrifies the ego, of course, because our culture has lost sight of these truths. And so we run from the bear. What can it do but pursue us?
Second point. Notice that the bear is wearing spectacles, sits in a chair, can read, and speaks English. The spectacles draw attention to the the bear’s ability to see us and to read the situation. The whole ensemble -- spectacles, chair, papers, speech -- tells us that the “angel” is capable of reaching consciousness, and therefore that it can serve as a bridge between the ego and the deeper regions of the soul.
Because we can -- potentially -- perceive the angel as an object of our waking consciousness, we can also imagine establishing a communicative rapport with it, if only we are willing. Corbin refers to this indispensible willingness in a description of the moment when the angel stands ready and available to lead the seeker to “heaven.” At that crucial, culminating point, the angel says: “If thou wilt, follow me.”
Corbin also points out that to connect with the angel requires a certain solitude, a stripping away of collective attitudes, which are personified in the form of two “companions” that accompany the seeker, dogging him wherever he goes. These constant companions are identified as the “irascible and concupiscent appetites.” In other words, to prepare oneself for a fruitful encounter with an angel, one must first give the companions the slip, by letting go of the cultural baggage that creates so much inertia in the soul. Turn away from your quarrelsomeness and anger, your insatiable desires. Empty yourself, open your soul and make yourself available to the angel. Then it may appear.
If, on the other hand, you dream that you are hurriedly trying to catch a taxi, get to an airport, or get to a final exam in time, you will probably not have the presence of mind to follow the animal within, the spirit-guide who nevertheless stands ready to lead you deeper, like Corbin’s angel, if only you will follow it.
Third point. Notice that the bear’s demands call for a development of precisely those qualities which the dreamer, in her innocence, does not identify with consciously. She herself is modest, shy, frugal and unassuming. The bear is calling for a range of qualities opposed to her ego stance. In effect, the bear is calling upon her to reach into her shadow and find some way to pull up the instinctual vitality trapped there. Only then can the bear individuate, and she, as a result, be whole.
The Door of the Shadow
Psychologically speaking, the angel approaches the ego by way of the shadow. This, of course, is the neglected area to which the animal portion of our personality is usually banished. And it means that if we wish to encounter the angel we must be willing to turn around, face our own shadow and somehow come to terms with the animal energies within us. No one who wishes to experience the objective reality of the Self, the ultimate exponent of Wholeness, can escape this narrow passage.
The study of dreams, if it is to be more than an ego-trip, will demand great moral courage on the part of the explorer. Sooner or later the dreams will bring to the surface a conflict between the conscious values of the outwardly adapted ego and the unrealized aims of the deeper personality. Any confrontation with the rejected portions of our personalities, including the angel, requires a great personal sacrifice if it is to be carried out without resorting to violence against oneself.
This task is one of the main obstacles we must surmount if we are to re-vitalize ourselves in depth, both individually and collectively, in our spiritually devastated age. Why else would the hungering angel need to make its demands? But the potential value is worth the cost.
Imagine that you went off in search of a glimpse of the Divine Fire -- the supreme value that the whole world seemingly had lost. Even the merest trace would justify all your efforts. You looked inside yourself, found your dreams and befriended an animal who led you to the central ground of your deepest being. It was there you found a divine spark, your portion of the Original Flame.
Wouldn’t that be worth it?
The entire course of human development has been thoroughly interspersed with dreams. For all of us, waking life emerges -- every day -- out of the prior background of dreams, just as the sun rises from nocturnal depths to create the world anew. This is the primordial experience, the basic fact of life on our spinning planet: out of our darkest animal origins comes a divine stirring, a creative movement toward the light.
As if to underscore the point, the Indo-European, Greek and Latin words for “day” are etymologically related to the word for “God” -- theos, deus, dios, día. The root idea is sun, sky, brilliance, shining. When baboons on the plains of Africa stop their chattering and gamboling to gather at daybreak and watch the sunrise, we know that something of primal importance is happening.
The human psyche differentiated itself slowly, and only partially, from its animal antecedents. We never really left the animals behind. At every level we bear physical and behavioral traces of our animal ancestors. Even our brains are built around a reptilian core.
For countless millenia we have lived in the presence of animals, to the extent that life on earth is inconceivable without them: We eat them, live with them, sleep with them, work with them, seek them as companions. We study them, breed them, train them, run from them, hunt them, wage war against them. We sacrifice them in religious and cultural rituals. We mourn and weep for them when they die. We mount their heads and hides on our walls as trophies, wear their skins and furs for warmth and elegance, fashion their teeth into jewelry, imitate their mating dances and calls, borrow their power. We name football teams after them (the Cougars, Lions, and Tigers) and invoke them to sell cars (the Impala, Jaguar and Mustang).
No wonder we all dream of animals.
The Garden of Eden
One way to think about their function and value in our dreams is to look at the Garden of Eden myth. Adam and Eve were cast out of the Garden for having developed conscious knowledge of the difference between good and evil, which shattered their state of oneness with God. In other words, consciousness -- the original human sin -- gave us God-like potentials, but it also broke our primordial state of fusion with the divine impulse. In that sense we resemble “fallen angels.”
The animals, however, never were cast out of Eden. Even today, they live on in their original state, in the unbroken circle of oneness with God. Human consciousness made us aware of our separateness from the animals and from God, but the presence and ubiquity of the animals reminds us not to stray too far from the divine roots of our being, not to get too strung out on our hubris. The animals are living reminders -- if only we pay attention -- that the cosmos does not belong to us, we belong to the cosmos.
Animals come to us in our dreams, then, carrying something of our lost, divine origins. At the evolutionary, biological level, we designate those animal origins as instinctual and physical. But on another level, those same animals, out of whom we originate, are spiritual beings who connect us to the creative mystery of all life, what we call “the Divine.”
Animals as Angels
In order to enlarge the language with which we discuss our dreams, and extend the range of our imagining in the process, I propose an unconventional way of regarding animals in dreams.
Try thinking of them as angels.
This is not so far-fetched as it might first seem. After all, the traditional way of representing an angel is to take a human figure and attach animal wings to it. Wings give an extra dimension to the human, suggesting an ability to transcend normal human limits -- to fly to heaven, as it were. In short, wings symbolize the power of the spirit.
The fusion of human and animal attributes in angel imagery suggests that, in some mysterious way, the two realms of being are actually one. For thousands of years this kind of symbolism has gone unquestioned: If you want to represent something spiritual, put wings on it. Or, to put it differently, if you want to show the transcendent potentials of the human spirit, then re-connect the human with its animal foundation, since they spring from one and the same mysterious source.
The animal belongs to that part of us that never was separated from the Divine. As such, it can be taken -- at least occasionally -- as a symbol of the state of Wholeness, or the potential for it. In that respect the dream-animal can serve as an index of your relationship to God or, in Jungian terms, your relationship to the Self.
From this perspective, it would be a matter of no small importance how the animal is disposed toward you, and especially you toward it. In any event, if an animal approaches you in your dream, you can assume it is trying get your attention. And if you stumble upon the animal in its own dream precincts, there is a good chance you are out of your normal depth, and a habitual ego response to the animal will probably prove inadequate.
We should not forget that, even if a dream-animal seems to oppose or threaten us in some way, it may still be bringing a “message” from the greater Self. This is what angels do -- they communicate between the greater and the lesser, between the divine and the human, as necessary links between the parts of a whole. In a way, the animal itself is the message. By its very presence it says, “Beware. You are close to something greater than yourself. If you follow me, you will be close to the Source.” Perhaps this is what Jesus meant when he said “He who is near unto me is near unto the fire.”
When Freud spoke of the “navel of the dream,” he was referring to a point in dreams where the trail of interpretable associations disappears, giving way to the unknown depths. Animals could often be said to produce a similar “navel” effect. If you dream that a bear stands on the path you are traveling, and you stop in your tracks because your fear of it blocks your progress, the bear is still your connection, the navel, that leads to whatever lies deeper in the dream, beyond the bear, on the other side of your fear: the end of the path, the goal.
It is not surprising that so many dreamers report animals that are chasing after them, since the dream-ego habitually flees, trying to stay ahead of the animal, leaving it no recourse but to follow behind, to pursue. The tendency to put oneself first, always ahead of the Other, is one of the ways the ego obstructs itself on the path to its own integration, its own taste of Wholeness. Jung said it well: “There is a greater person in yourself to whom you bar the way.”
The Angel’s Demands
A woman in her forties, a practicing artist, had a long-standing fascination with bears. She was talented but self-effacing, with a natural humility approaching saintliness. Bear motifs haunted her work, as if the bear was insisting on something, through its own representation in her work.
One night she dreamed that she was sitting at a small table. Across from her sat a large bear, on a chair. The bear wore eye-glasses, and had a stack of papers on the table in front of him. He was reading to her from the papers, reciting a list of demands. Among them were “money, fame, and beautiful women.” (End of dream.)
I am well aware that various interpretations could be applied to this dream and to the image of the bear. But let’s follow my suggestion and provisionally regard the bear as an “angel.” What do we notice? What can we learn?
First point. Notice that the bear wants something from her. She doesn’t present a list of demands to the bear, the bear presents a list of demands to her. This establishes a gradient wherein the demand conveyed by the animal/spiritual presence within -- the “angel” -- impinges upon the human ego. The implication is that we live our lives, not for the satisfaction of the ego and its desires, but to fulfill the larger, prior need of the angel. This, of course, violates our modern conceit that everything exists for the ego’s pleasure.
French Islamic scholar Henri Corbin (1) provides a valuable clue when he says: “The angel’s individuation comes first, then ours.” If our angel cannot individuate because of the way we are living our lives, then how can we ourselves possibly expect to individuate? Jung gives voice to nearly the same insight when he says: “Become the person you have always been.” In both cases, something eternal longs for fulfillment in time.
In other words, the angel pertains to the eternal features of our soul, which hunger for embodiment and expression. If we dither our life away without taking the angel’s demands into account, can we really hope to reach anything approaching wholeness? If we remain trapped in our fragmentary egos, how can we approximate the Self? The angel seeks us out, presents us with its demands, and challenges us to become who we are, in the deepest sense. It practically begs us to breach the defensive walls of the ego and extend ourselves further into our own depths, where we are out of our league. But that is precisely where the animal will be in a position to serve us as tutor and guide.
This usually terrifies the ego, of course, because our culture has lost sight of these truths. And so we run from the bear. What can it do but pursue us?
Second point. Notice that the bear is wearing spectacles, sits in a chair, can read, and speaks English. The spectacles draw attention to the the bear’s ability to see us and to read the situation. The whole ensemble -- spectacles, chair, papers, speech -- tells us that the “angel” is capable of reaching consciousness, and therefore that it can serve as a bridge between the ego and the deeper regions of the soul.
Because we can -- potentially -- perceive the angel as an object of our waking consciousness, we can also imagine establishing a communicative rapport with it, if only we are willing. Corbin refers to this indispensible willingness in a description of the moment when the angel stands ready and available to lead the seeker to “heaven.” At that crucial, culminating point, the angel says: “If thou wilt, follow me.”
Corbin also points out that to connect with the angel requires a certain solitude, a stripping away of collective attitudes, which are personified in the form of two “companions” that accompany the seeker, dogging him wherever he goes. These constant companions are identified as the “irascible and concupiscent appetites.” In other words, to prepare oneself for a fruitful encounter with an angel, one must first give the companions the slip, by letting go of the cultural baggage that creates so much inertia in the soul. Turn away from your quarrelsomeness and anger, your insatiable desires. Empty yourself, open your soul and make yourself available to the angel. Then it may appear.
If, on the other hand, you dream that you are hurriedly trying to catch a taxi, get to an airport, or get to a final exam in time, you will probably not have the presence of mind to follow the animal within, the spirit-guide who nevertheless stands ready to lead you deeper, like Corbin’s angel, if only you will follow it.
Third point. Notice that the bear’s demands call for a development of precisely those qualities which the dreamer, in her innocence, does not identify with consciously. She herself is modest, shy, frugal and unassuming. The bear is calling for a range of qualities opposed to her ego stance. In effect, the bear is calling upon her to reach into her shadow and find some way to pull up the instinctual vitality trapped there. Only then can the bear individuate, and she, as a result, be whole.
The Door of the Shadow
Psychologically speaking, the angel approaches the ego by way of the shadow. This, of course, is the neglected area to which the animal portion of our personality is usually banished. And it means that if we wish to encounter the angel we must be willing to turn around, face our own shadow and somehow come to terms with the animal energies within us. No one who wishes to experience the objective reality of the Self, the ultimate exponent of Wholeness, can escape this narrow passage.
The study of dreams, if it is to be more than an ego-trip, will demand great moral courage on the part of the explorer. Sooner or later the dreams will bring to the surface a conflict between the conscious values of the outwardly adapted ego and the unrealized aims of the deeper personality. Any confrontation with the rejected portions of our personalities, including the angel, requires a great personal sacrifice if it is to be carried out without resorting to violence against oneself.
This task is one of the main obstacles we must surmount if we are to re-vitalize ourselves in depth, both individually and collectively, in our spiritually devastated age. Why else would the hungering angel need to make its demands? But the potential value is worth the cost.
Imagine that you went off in search of a glimpse of the Divine Fire -- the supreme value that the whole world seemingly had lost. Even the merest trace would justify all your efforts. You looked inside yourself, found your dreams and befriended an animal who led you to the central ground of your deepest being. It was there you found a divine spark, your portion of the Original Flame.
Wouldn’t that be worth it?
Friday, May 8, 2009
Dreaming Planet -- Dream Network Journal version
DREAMING PLANET
by
Paco Mitchell
CAN A PLANET DREAM?
We can answer this strange question with the help of modern cosmology plus a bit of imagination. Cosmology places us in the midst of an amazing celestial drama, a stunning display of pinwheel galaxies, exploding stars, light-years and planets. And whether one accentuates or dismisses the role of humans in the cosmic process, there is no denying that we are part of the whole story.
Consider this.
Several billion years ago, an immense cloud of primordial gas mingled with dust from exploding stars. The cloud condensed into a whirling mass, forming our sun and its planets, including the earth. As the earth cooled and solidified, an atmosphere formed, rain fell, oceans gathered and the land eroded.
The planet was probably not dreaming as yet.
Mud gathered in a chemical soup, shapeless but for the pockets and cracks into which it settled. Very slowly, however, the soup organized itself -- or was organized. It took shape over time and began to writhe. With more time it began to breathe, then to dance and sing and dream. At some late point during those uncounted aeons, long after the dancing, singing and dreaming had begun, we humans came onto the scene, like a flash of lightning.
Astronomers have determined that the iron that makes our blood red was compounded in the heart of an exploding star. If you and I breathe, sing and dream today, then, it is only because the elemental bodies of stars were sundered long ago in a cosmic sacrifice of heavenly proportions.
It would thus be no exaggeration to say that we humans are direct, living descendants of that ancient, ardent stellar process. We are, as it turns out, dreaming stardust, perhaps the planet’s first means of awareness of itself and its stellar past. But no matter how limited we might feel as humans, the fact is that our capacity for conscious reflection makes us carriers of a cosmic destiny.
Does this overestimate our importance? I think not. Conversely, does this reduce us to insignificance? Again, I think not.
It does, however, present us with a responsibility, a gift, and a burden.
(1) The responsibility is that of exercising the full consciousness of which each of us is potentially capable -- to carry the evolutionary thrust forward, as it were, within our limits. Several billion years were required for life on earth to reach this point. And here we stand. This is our chance. Shall we squander it?
(2) The gift is that such awareness permits us to witness knowingly the awesome beauty of the cosmic mystery, both in its grand and its intimate manifestations, as well as our participation in it.
(3) Any gift is also a burden, for it is usually with great difficulty that any portion of it can be brought to fruition, not to mention the ever-present possibility of failing the gift.
WHY DREAMS?
Dreaming is a psychic function we share with our animal brethren. It thus constitutes part of our evolutionary inheritance -- what nature has bequeathed to us. And though many of us don’t realize it, dreams will also form a portion of our own bequest to the future -- what we leave behind for the benefit of generations to come, along with books and ideas, bank accounts and pollution.
Dreaming, then, is part of our total organic make-up, so necessary for our well-being that without dreams we get sick. We can no more do without dreams than we can do without metabolizing food. We don’t have to think about our dreams, of course, for they do their work in the dark, while we sleep, just as our digestive system does its work without our conscious awareness, in the darkness of the bowels.
But with all that we share in common with the animals -- bless their hearts -- they seem untroubled by the questions that bedevil us humans: Who are we? What is our place in the scheme of things? Why are we here? Where are we going?
These questions have occupied countless minds for millennia, and the various answers have given rise to great philosophies, religions and art. Surprisingly, dreams likewise occupy themselves with these ageless concerns, among others. It seems that anything of importance to humans will find expression in dreams. And one of the most startling discoveries to one who explores dreams is that they not only carry us back into our past, but they also carry us into our future, heralding trends of development that have not yet reached consciousness.
Perhaps this is one way that dreams participate in and further the mysterious process of evolution. I even wonder whether we would have reached the evolutionary stage of homo sapiens at all, without the benefit of dreams.
This is, of course, a minority view.
DO YOU DREAM?
Many people say “I never dream” and leave it at that. Others go further and say “Dreams are garbage.” Precious few take the time and trouble to give serious consideration to their own dreams, or the dreams of others. The widespread prejudice against dreams suggests that most people experience dreams as an insult to their preferred conscious attitudes. After all, dreaming is a special function of the unconscious psyche, and is therefore largely beyond the reach of conscious intention and will -- always an affront to the ego.
Dreaming also shares with the unconscious the distinction of having existed prior to consciousness, which is a later evolutionary development. But we don’t like to be reminded of our watery, animal past, and of our gradual differentiation from our furred, fanged and flippered brethren. We like to think of ourselves as special, bursting onto the planetary scene as a result of divine fiat.
No, it is better to locate our specialness within the slow march of the ages, to accept our place in line. We still bear traces of that agonizingly patient process in the reptilian core of our brains, or the vestigial gill slits and tails in our embryos. And we recapitulate that same gentle gradient when we move out of infancy into childhood, toward adulthood.
Needless to say, dreams carry traces of our origins. When we go to sleep at night, we slide back down into that prior, more complete, less differentiated state, and recover the larger context to which we belong. The dream is not only the background to our consciousness, it is also the foundation of our psychic being. It is in the dream that we resume the long view, where the evolutionary drive pulls us out of ourselves, toward something new.
THE SNAKE IN YOUR DREAMS
Snakes remind us of our most primitive instincts. We shiver when we see one, the animal hair and skin on our bodies rises autonomously, as if in deep recognition of something alien yet familiar. When they crawl out of the darkness in our dreams, we could say that their tails point us back to our own primordial past. Simultaneously and paradoxically, though, their mesmerizing heads and hypnotic eyes may just be guiding us toward the future, and our most exalted spiritual aspirations.
As one of the oldest recorded symbols, the snake has received many different associations and projections over the millennia. But one of the most enduring associations, taught by ancient myths at least as far back as Gilgamesh, is that snakes symbolize transformative potentials in the future, since they carry the secret of renewal. By shedding their old skin, they manifest the new.
It should be no surprise, then, that Kundalini symbolism places the serpent in a central role, as the transformative energy that winds its way up through the chakras toward the crown of the head, the fontanelle, ancient portal to heaven. Or that in their manuscripts medieval alchemists saw fit to place a gold crown on a serpent’s head.
THE WISDOM IN DREAMS
I know from experience that there is profound wisdom in dreams. Sometimes it even seems as though the specific energy of evolution itself, symbolized at times by the snake, were the driving force behind all the kaleidoscopic images in dreams, combining and recombining endlessly, in a dark, universal urge toward the light.
It is as if the potential for advanced consciousness had been somehow latent in the drifting cosmic cloud, then again in the percolating amino acids and macromolecules of the primordial soup, and was somehow cherished and hoarded through all the accidents and transformations along the slow evolutionary ladder.
Would it be too much to say, then, that the very stars themselves, with eternal patience and all the time that ever was, were somehow longing to give birth to visions of the divine, in man and in the world?
It would be my hope that, if enough of us pool the wisdom we sometimes encounter in our dreams, a new jolt of that evolutionary energy may work its way into consciousness, in time to help humanity shed its skin and manifest whatever is trying to be born.
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