I was visiting a girlfriend’s mother for the first time. She was a bad tempered old bat and the evening got even frostier over dinner. I was sat at the head of a long narrow table, the women either side of me facing one another. At the end of a tortuously slow meal full of awkward silences mother leaned forward and asked her daughter in a loud whisper, ‘does he want any more?’
She could just as easily have saved her voice by prodding me in the gut to see if it was full.
I’m right here.
Ask me.
Its laughable, but we often do the same with the figures of our inner worlds when we ask what they mean or try to interpret.
As soon as we ask someone else, ‘what does it mean?, we do two things. Firstly we give away our inner authority. Jung noticed the consistency with which persons would defer an insight into the significance of a dream but when asked what they thought Jung might make of the dream they would be full of ideas.
More importantly we alienate ourselves still further from Dream itself by treating it as though it were a specemin in a petri dish to be intellectually dissected, rather than an ‘inner’ Other with whom to have a living relationship.
Mostly we feel that whatever meaning there might be in dreams has to be extracted by an expert. From the Psyche’s point of veiw this is like bussing in assistance on your wedding night…
and this is not even the bold cry of ‘your interpretation is the best’, because by becoming the ‘authority’ all you’ve done is snatch the scalpel yourself.
Put the scalpel down.
play nicely.
or..
maybe just nod politely from a safe distance.
Irrespective of its content the main aspect of Dream is relatedness, between one another, self and world, and the crazy gang in your neo-cortex all wanting air time and talking at once.
With the demise of Relatedness not only do we disconnect from one another and the world, but also from the Unconscious as a thing-in-itself.
Yes, its a bit disorienting. Something Unknown is doing I don’t know what.
And it is not inside me.
I am inside it.
I knew a woman who was regularly terrorized by a dream figure that would not leave her in peace. Night after night he would invade her sleep, jolting her awake in a cold and fearful sweat. Eventually she exclaimed in a rather peeved voice, ‘but why? He’s only some part of me..’
‘Perhaps that’s the attitude he’s trying to shock you out of….’
The idea that aspects of a dream are all mere parts of oneself is a pleasing fancy promulgated by folk who regard the Unconscious as as the dustbin of the mind rather than the source of Consciousness itself.
Dream figures may not be part of you at all.
they have there own purpose and push for expression…
nascent potentialities..
birthing awareness…
stuff you were born with, inherited from ancient time, springing whole from the Psyche like Athena, fully armed, from Zeus’ thigh.
The problem with this is that it can make you feel very small. And whatever Dream brings is going to be difficult to digest. By its very nature it presents contrary perspectives that insist on us adjusting our world view.
We resist the deflating encounter with the Emissary of the Deep, not so much by a shooting of the messenger but by failing to bring Her in from the cold.
‘Wanting to know the meaning’ can be a kind of defense against experience. We want Dream to be an object of consciousness rather than something else in the room we have to reckon with.
So there’s a meta-level at back of all the creative ideas you can bring to bear on dream work, its one of simply allowing yourself to be awed by the fact that there is an Other..
not self
that knows self intimately..
and tends self ceaselessly.
If you liked this article and want to explore my books, you can type the titles ‘Abundant Delicious’ or ‘Going Mad to Stay Sane’ into the search bar for descriptions and sales.
