WELCOME TO Module 1

THIS JUNGIAN LIFE DREAM SCHOOL

Lisa Marchiano, Jungian Analyst, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Joseph Lee, Jungian Analyst, Virginia Beach, Virginia Deborah Stewart, Jungian Analyst, Cape Cod, Massachusetts

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Module 1: Dreamwork Can Change Your life

EDITED TRANSCRIPT

Joseph: All three of us have personal, lived, proof that working with our dreams and those of others changes lives. Long before any of us were analysts, we were working with our own inner material, bringing it to our analysts and discovering guidance that could inspire us in moving forward. Dreams protected us and warned us when we were off the path. They were and are a self-correcting and befriending mechanism inside each of us. That is the gold and treasure of working with dreams.

Lisa: I didn’t work with my dreams simply because they were fascinating and beautiful. I was drawn to work with my dreams because there was a problem in my life I hadn’t been able to solve in any other way. I had tried all kinds of practical, ego-oriented ways to solve the problem, and it was still there. This led me to turn inward to my dreams–I thought, what the heck, what have I got to lose? Who knows? Maybe there’s something in my inner world that can help.

Deb: That was my experience, too. I was at a low point in my life–midlife, of course, the exact time Jung was especially interested in, though I didn’t know that at the time. I decided to try therapy in addition to everything else, such as visiting friends, starting an exercise program, and more. My analyst suggested that we work with dreams and although I thought that sounded a bit far out, at least one of us had a game plan. I found in working with dreams over time that I developed a relationship with them and with myself in ways that I truly had not known existed. Jung says that we don’t solve our problems, we outgrow them–I got bigger and my problems got proportionally smaller. Working with dreams expands us into parts of ourselves that we just can’t meet in waking life.

Lisa: Working with dreams opens a whole new register.

Deb: Yes, dreams open a whole new domain, a big part of us that often has a very different perspective and sees things very differently from the way that consciousness perceives them. Dream work is also

readily accessible–we dream several times every night, so each of us has a ready path to expansion, depth, and more wholeness.

Joseph: Just as you said, Deb, the dream maker sees things differently. The waking personality naturally has a kind of resistance to the “medicine” of the dream, and that can interfere with engaging our dreams. An integral part of dream work is facing things we have not seen about ourselves.

Lisa: Our renowned colleague, Jim Hollis, says a primary reason we work with dreams is because they don’t come from the ego. I think that touches into exactly what you were saying, Joseph: dreams provide us with the perspective of the unconscious. That is not necessarily better than the conscious perspective, but it is different, and our egos can be averse to it–but if we’re not tending to dreams, we’re missing this whole realm and a totally different perspective on our problems. Although it is completely alien to the conscious way of viewing our lives, it adds information and offers an attitude our conscious mind just doesn’t have. That’s why, despite having tried so many things, I couldn’t solve my life problem with ego-oriented tools. The richness of dreams is available to any of us at any time. If we work with dreams we discover what “the rest of us” has to say about our problems, triumphs, or questions. Why not find out?

Deb: Yes, and picking up on Joseph’s point about our resistance, dreams are often commentary about our ego attitude toward life, toward work, or how things “should” be. My dreams back then were saying, “that’s not how I see it, lady,” and I was resistant to that. I was having a hard enough time as it was and I didn’t want extra challenges. Besides, some of the images and implications of my dreams were interesting, but puzzling and far from helpful in any practical way. My first dream was of being in the nave of a Catholic church. I had only been in a Catholic church once, and I had no conscious idea what a nave even was. So, although the imagery was intriguing, I couldn’t experience the dream in a way that felt real, let alone related to my career and life crisis. On the other hand, I felt oddly hopeful and interested–the utterly unexpected image in that dream was undeniable evidence of life outside consciousness and in me even if I didn’t understand it—yet. Our dreams don’t usually come and hit us over the head, but they do open something up that adds to consciousness and waking life. And by the way, a full understanding of that supposedly weird dream, when it later arrived, was amazing.

Joseph: My initiation into the power of dream work started when I had a disturbing, recurring dream. I had just moved to Virginia Beach, and was living alone, which I hadn’t done for a long time. I began to have dreams that someone had broken into the ground floor of my townhouse and was walking up the stairs. I heard them, and when they got to the top of the stairs, I reached into a bed stand, retrieved a pistol, and shot them. This dream was unlike any dream I’d ever had. Like any number of dreams, I might have dismissed it or not paid much attention to it, but this dream started repeating, night after night. Then, even more disturbingly, I began to daydream about the event–even when I was stopped

at a red light. It occurred to me to mention this to one of my new friends, who was part of the local Jung society. I was just starting out on my psychological journey, and this person suggested that I go back into the dream and speak to the intruder. I had been meditating for quite a while but it had never occurred to me to re-enter a dream and work that way. So, after putting myself in a meditative state, I replayed the dream, and when the intruder came to the top of the stairs, I asked him what he was here to teach me. He took me on a long walk and gave me frank, life-changing advice about things I just hadn’t been paying attention to. After that—a process I later learned is called active imagination–I never had the dream again. My career and personal life improved over the next several months in a way that was directly related to the information my supposed intruder provided.

Lisa: That is so dramatic and compelling. I imagine that you were sold at that point on the power of dream work. We’ve all had powerful experiences working with our own dreams, and we’ve certainly seen the value of working with dreams with clients.

Joseph: Another example of the power that a single dream can have is from an early period in my practice, when I was working with younger people. I was counselling a girl who was about 14 years old with a complaint about intense performance anxiety. Understandably, there was a lot of pressure, but she began to experience extended periods of crippling insomnia. She had tried all kinds of ways to improve sleep, and was even considering medication, but nothing was changing. After we had been working together for several weeks, I suspected there was something more going on in her life, and she told me she dreamed of walking into a room where her mom and dad were watching TV. She sat down to join them and experienced volcanic anger erupting. She faced her mom and really let loose and lambasted her. She told her mom everything she was angry about and let fly all the criticisms she didn’t have the courage to say in waking life. When she was finally exhausted, the dream mother was understanding, compassionate, and heart-centered–very different from how this girl had been experiencing her mother in waking life. We were then able to talk more directly about what was getting under her skin, and once she was able to vent some of her anger, she could access positive feelings about her mom. Most importantly, the months of agonizing insomnia immediately resolved: that night she went home and slept like a baby. Her anger toward her mother had been so dangerous to her conscious attitude that it had been buried. The dream maker finally manufactured a volcano of feeling she couldn’t ignore, and once that anger was expressed and accepted, her body was able to relax and she could sleep. With the benefit of sleeping normally, her anxiety went down, her physical coordination improved, and her performance in competitions got better with less anxiety. We couldn’t have anticipated all these things, and they emanated from a dream.

Deb: That really illustrates how dreams connect us with feelings. They give us scenes, people and emotion, including experiences of wonder and befriending. It might be a deer that comes up on the back porch and wants to be touched, or a snowy owl sitting on a branch in the moonlight. Or it might

be a kind of magical feeling of being in a foreign country, walking on cobblestone streets, and looking in charming shops and an old cathedral. One person who was going through a particularly painful time heard a voice in a dream say “you are loved.” The unconscious is our companion, and comes toward us in many ways. It can release emotion, just like it did for the teenage girl, it can open new worlds and experiences, it can reassure us, and it can fill us with profound new awareness, like your dream of the intruder. I believe that no matter what the feeling is, we wake up having experienced something we need to know.

Lisa: I have an analogy: for most of my life, I wasn’t really interested in birdsong, but about 10 years ago, I started noticing it and getting curious about which bird was making which sound. As I learned more and paid more attention, I realized there was a wealth of information outside on any given day; it had been around me all the time, but I’d never really noticed. Once I started noticing it was rich, beautiful, and fascinating. The chickadee call, for example, is a warning. They’re transmitting information to one another about the size and nature of a threat. When you walk outside and you hear “chicadeedee,” they’re probably talking about you, although you’re not a big threat because you’re slow moving and on the ground. But if there’s a hawk in the neighborhood, they increase the “deedeedee” at the end of their note, so you can suddenly understand the intensity of the threat, including whether they’re talking about you. You can hear the house wren making quite a mighty noise for a small bird—it’s advertising its nesting place to a potential mate. There’s abundant information right outside that you walk past every day. Noticing birdsong is very much like realizing the rich information in your dreams, taking an interest, and beginning to understand it.

Deb: I really like that analogy, Lisa. It’s so apt, and it also points to the difference between how Jung and Freud saw dreams. Freud thought that dreams were a disguise, protecting sleep by wrapping illicit sexual urges into less disturbing images. The implication was that dreams were essentially negative, so the dreamer had to be protected from raw, unconscious material—but Jung realized that dreams aren’t a disguise. Dreams simply use an archaic language of image and symbol—a different kind of information, like birdsong. Today, as modern people, we’ve all but forgotten this language, so much of Jung’s work was how to translate dreams into consciousness and meaning. Fairy tales do this too. Sometimes they image archaic aspects of the psyche as animals, the wise old woman in the woods, a sorcerer, or other familiar types of characters. Fairy tales are the dreams of the human collective, and they lift up the wisdom of the unconscious in the surprising events that they depict. This Jungian Life Dream School is essentially about learning the language of the unconscious, and we use fairy tales as well as dreams and mythology–all are forms of the ancient, original language of psyche.

Lisa: Speaking of fairy tales and learning another language, there’s a Brothers Grimm tale about learning the language of the animals, which we could think about as the voice of the unconscious. The story, The White Snake, provides a metaphor for what it’s like to work with dreams. Every day at noon,

a covered dish was placed on the king’s table. The king would eat alone from this dish, and nobody in the entire realm knew what kind of food was in it. One of the servants became curious and wanted to know what the dish contained. One day after the king ordered him to take the dish away, the servant took the dish to his room and uncovered it. As he lifted the cover, he found a white snake lying inside, and he felt a great desire to taste it, so he cut off a piece and began eating it. As soon as his tongue touched the flesh of the snake, he understood the language of the animals and heard the birds on the windowsill speaking to each other. That day, the queen lost one of her most beautiful rings and suspicion fell on him. The king said that if the servant was not able to find the thief by morning, he would be punished as the guilty one.

The servant became sad and went to the courtyard where some ducks were resting in the water, and he heard one of them say, “there’s something heavy in my stomach. I have a ring that the queen lost.” The servant took the duck and carried it to the cook, saying, “kill this one. It’s fat enough.” The cook cut the duck’s neck, and when he began cleaning it, found the queen’s ring lying in its stomach. The servant brought it to the king who was astonished and happy. Since he was sorry that he had treated the servant unjustly, the king said, “Demand whatever reward you would like or any position of royal honor you desire.” The servant declined, for his heart was sad and he didn’t want to remain in court any longer. He asked only for a horse and money to travel and see the world. He was provided with everything and rode off the next morning.

He came to a pond with three fish trapped in the reeds, wailing that they would die if they couldn’t get back into open water. He dismounted, freed them from the reeds and released them into the water. The fish cried out, “We will remember you, and we will one day repay you.” He rode on, and a while later he heard an ant king crying up, “get away from us. Your enormous beast is trampling us with his large hooves.” The young man looked down and saw that his horse had stepped on an anthill, so he turned his horse away. The ant king called out, “We will remember you and will one day repay you.” Soon the servant entered a forest where two ravens were throwing their young ones out of their nests. They said their fledglings were big enough to feed themselves. The little birds lay on the ground, lamenting that they would die from starvation because they couldn’t yet fly in search of food. The young man dismounted, killed his horse with a sword, and offered it to the young ravens. They hopped over to the horse, ate their fill, and said, “We will remember this and will one day repay you.”

The young man walked on and came to a large city where he heard a proclamation that whoever wanted to marry the king’s daughter could do so by carrying out a task set by her, but if the would-be suitor failed, he would forfeit his life. Many princes had already tried and lost their lives, so the opportunity to seek the princess’ hand was now open to anyone. The servant thought about it and decided to declare himself a suitor. He was led out to sea, a ring was thrown into the water and his task was to fetch it. If he failed to retrieve the ring, he’d be taken into the deeps to drown. As he stood on the shore, the three fish he had saved from the reeds swam toward him. One of the fish held a shell in its mouth. The fish set it down to the suitor’s feet, and in the shell was the ring. Full of joy, he brought the ring to the king and demanded the princess as his wife.

However, when the princess heard that he wasn’t a prince, she refused to accept him. She then scattered 10 sacks of millet seeds in the grass and ordered the unknown man to pick them all up before sunrise. Every single grain was to be gathered or he would lose his life. As he stood there, the ant king arrived with all the ants the young man had saved. They gathered the millet seeds during the night, put them into sacks, and by morning, the task was finished. When the princess saw that the sacks had been filled, she was astonished, and asked that the young man be brought before her. Since he was handsome, she liked him, but she demanded that he perform a third task. He was now to fetch an apple from the tree of life. Once again, he stood there wondering how to accomplish the task, and one of the ravens he had fed arrived with the apple in its beak. The princess now found the young man worthy of becoming her husband, and when her father died, he became king.

The animals in the story represent the wisdom of seemingly lowly life—like a simple-seeming dream–and the need for humility and receptivity as the prerequisite for later empowerment. Working with dreams also restores our ability to hear the subtle voice of instinctual wisdom. We all have access to it, and the fairy tale is a wonderful metaphor for the gifts the unconscious can offer us if we learn how to listen to our dreams. What’s important about the servant on his adventure is that he listens to a tiny ant, and this stands him in very good stead as he seeks his fortune. Killing his horse to feed the ravens is much more difficult, and represents sacrificing his ego-oriented attitude in service to the unconscious. In return, a raven eventually brings him an apple from the tree of life, something of transcendent value. The tale is a wonderful metaphor for why we work with dreams. It brings about a change in attitude, a reorientation to life that goes beyond ego. Our life quest, like that of the servant in the tale, is to gain what Jung called “the treasure hard to attain”–the wholeness that can come only through a relationship with the unconscious. We created This Jungian Life Dream School to teach people the secret language of our inner animals, those parts of ourselves we haven’t been able to hear or understand.

Joseph: Just like the hero in the fairy tale, we can all learn to hear our inner fish, notice the tiny ants working industriously below, and a cheeky raven poking around our inner landscape. Unfamiliar parts of us speak every night, and the language of animals is like body language. A dream that changed someone’s life came through her body. I was working with a middle-aged woman who was successful and respected. She was a wise woman in the community and had come mostly out of curiosity. She told me a dream fragment in which she was walking in her childhood home, crossing the balcony above the living room. She noticed that everyone was very quiet, and initially just accepted it. She repeated crossing the balcony a few times and then she woke up. That’s the kind of dream that doesn’t sound at all extraordinary, but something tapped on my intuition. Before I was the therapist, I was an Alexander Technique teacher, so it occurred to me to ask her to demonstrate walking on the balcony. She walked back and forth across my office a few times, and I noticed that she was walking on the balls of her feet like a ballerina, stepping forward, touching her toes, and rolling back to her heel in a very stylized manner. I said, “It looks like you’re walking so you don’t make any noise,” and her body began to quiver with an upwelling of feeling. She sat on the floor and wept. When her body calmed down, she

recalled that when she was a teen, her father became obsessed with the sound of her walking and would shout that she was like a horse. It created so much anxiety that she began teaching herself how to walk carefully and softly so she could not be heard. As young people, if we find ourselves in a difficult situation, our instincts tell us how to accommodate to stay safe, and sometimes that anxiety can get stored in an aspect of the unconscious that reaches into the body. This was finally a time to grieve that. After we discussed this a few times, her gait changed and we noticed that she was walking more naturally and less self-consciously, doing a normal heel strike and rolling through her feet. There was rhythm and cadence in her body that also relieved chronic hip pain. So the language of birds and the body—and dreams–often speaks in small ways that can let us in on important secrets.

Deb: This woman’s dream seemed so flat and ordinary–she was just walking back and forth across a balcony–yet working with the dream unlocked something important that the dream maker wanted her to access: the feeling that she couldn’t afford to have as a teen. It was still there, and by accessing it through her dream, she had more life, more energy in her stride, and less pain in her hip. Something traumatic was lifted off. I’m thinking along a similar line about a woman who had a memory that was not entirely obvious in her dream but had great meaning. This woman had a dream in which she was celebrating what seemed to be her 16th birthday. There was a cake and 16 candles, but she was all alone in the dream and felt very sad as she blew the out the candles. We talked about how blowing out birthday candles doesn’t usually create sadness, and that family events during her teens had been difficult. Shortly after this dream an uncle died, and this woman received a box of letters he had saved from family members. She discovered she had been separated from her mother for about eight weeks when she was 16 months old, and the dream maker had wanted to reconnect her with early absence and loneliness. People often dream about being a younger age, such as I was in high school, and dreams of a younger time in life can spark memories and feelings that we couldn’t fully experience then. Dreams like this provide meaning, relief, and healing.

Joseph: Deb, that speaks beautifully to the integrative function of dreams and the way they help us connect the life of the unconscious with the waking personality—and that quite literally makes us more whole. We can’t resist telling people about dreams that have had a dramatic effect on us, and I think most people can recall at least one dream that had a powerful impact on their lives. But I also want to give a shout-out to dreams that simply provide color, nuance, and commentary that’s useful– gentle course correction that’s applicable to our day-to-day lives. A dream that was not especially remarkable, but useful, featured me driving to my office, as I do every day. All the traffic lights on the road were red. Again, and again, I stopped and began to feel frustrated that a fast commute was taking more and more time. I was incredulous that I was hitting red light after red light. Something about the dream stuck with me as I was going through my work day, and I realized it was a gentle, needed message telling me to slow down, take a break–hit the brakes, sit for 30 seconds, listen to the radio and relax–something I was forgetting to do.

Deb: That’s an example of how a seemingly ordinary dream can have something important to tell us. Dreams like that are like the ants in the fairy tale—they seem hardly worthy of notice, except, of course, they are. This sparks a memory for me of a dream I had many years ago. When I awoke, I couldn’t believe that I had spent what seemed like hours in the dream doing housework. I was aghast that what I did during my waking life I was also doing at night. As the day went on, I found myself amused in an ironic kind of way, and had a chance to share the dream with a friend. Just as you said, we love to tell people our dreams, so I started telling her I was in the upstairs bathroom cleaning the shower and then I was vacuuming dust bunnies under this bed…I was dusting, putting away toys, doing the laundry and folding towels—and suddenly we both started laughing and she gasped, “Okay, enough, no more”! I said, “No, I didn’t get to the part where I was cleaning out the cutlery drawer.” I think the dream maker wanted me to lighten up!

Joseph: I love the homey way that this dream provided a trickster dynamic to balance an overly serious attitude. Dreams can jostle us around. My red-light dream and your housework dream fall into this category–and the dream maker is interested in the mundane aspects of our lives. It helps us all the time. I also remember that when I was rehabbing my new house, which needed a huge amount of work, I was thankful that I often dreamed about details I had overlooked. They were significant, and it gave me the feeling that the dream maker was supervising my effort to learn some basic carpentry. It felt like somebody was looking out for me and had my back.

Deb: This takes me to another way of imagining dream work: it’s like beachcombing. I live on Cape Cod and with beachcombing there’s a reverie–you never know what will have been washed up by the great unconscious called the ocean. When you’re beachcombing you’re in an in-between state: alert and scanning, but with quietude–not altogether an ego state. A man who was considering retirement dreamed that he was walking on the beach and saw something sticking up in the sand. He was curious so he stopped, lifted it up, and saw that it was a sea turtle’s shell. He rinsed the sand out and then noticed there was an image on the inside of the shell. He cleaned the interior of the shell with some sand, gently rubbing some of the detritus away, revealing a photographic image of a living room. It was a lovely image of wholeness, the man-made living room and the natural “living room” of a turtle. The beachcombing in his dream endorsed his readiness to be his own home.

Lisa: I like the image of beachcombing. It is a little bit like my birdsong analogy. In that note, if you’re not paying attention, you walk right past all kinds of treasures. If you’re walking on the beach with a friend and you’re talking or focused on getting your 10,000 steps in, you’re not in the right state of mind to notice. If you slow down and cast your eyes on the sand, you find treasures. I remember I once found a tiny bird’s egg that was perfectly intact in the sand. I love finding those wonderful egg casings for the little conch shells–if you hold them up to the light or break them open, there are thousands of

tiny shells inside. There are all manner of fascinating, surprising things on beaches. The treasures are there, and all it takes to see them is to shift your attitude. I think that’s what we’re encouraging in This Jungian Life Dream School: slow down and let your eyes and ears scan for the treasures that enrich you. There is wisdom in the unconscious, and listening to it will alter the course of your life, though not usually in a flashy, dramatic way. As you work with dreams you open a channel between the conscious personality and the guiding center that Jung referred to as the Self. The big idea that undergirds dreamwork is that it’s a way to commune with this wiser, larger part of you.

Joseph: There’s a quality of attention—memory, beachcombing, or birdsong. Sometimes it’s a haunting fairy tale theme. Over and over and again, change can come in tiny moments of noticing and relating. In the fairy tale, it’s like the young man is getting off his high horse. Whether it’s helping fish out of the weeds, stepping off an anthill, or the painful sacrifice of a horse, there is a substantive, reliable form of life in the psyche that sees and feeds potentials. There’s a recurring message to slow down, embrace a spirit of receptivity and humility, and befriend what is encountered, even if it seems small or requires sacrificing the ego attitude. The life of the psyche is often conveyed through ordinary images, and little by little, time after time, this connects us with the guiding Self, our true center.

Lisa: There is a kind of incremental quality to dream work. Most of our dreams can be compared to freeing the fish or sparing the ants. Once receptivity has been established, it’s as if the dream maker can then send bigger messages, like killing the ego’s “horse” for the sake of something larger. The following dream is an example of that. This man always had a rational, ego-oriented way of moving through the world. He worked in a profession that required him to have a scientific, objective focus. Midlife challenged him to get in touch with parts of himself that he had neglected, and he entered analysis and began working with his dreams. Then he had a big dream. He was hiking up a snowy mountain with younger people, saw that they had reached a plateau, and was scrambling up the snowy slope to reach it. He started to slip and then he fell. Below was a cliff, and far below that was an icy wasteland–nothing as far as the eye could see. When he began falling through the air he thought, I don’t know if I will survive this and even if I do, I don’t think I can be rescued. He fell to what he thought would be his death, and then woke up as a quadriplegic in hospital. A young, robust man was his physical therapist, and he gathered the dreamer lovingly in his arms and sat him beside a pool. They were talking and with the dreamer’s consent, the therapist put him in a special chair so the dreamer could sit in the water. Then the therapist tipped the chair over backwards into the water. The dreamer was plunged into the pool headfirst, sputtering and panicked, but he somehow made it to the side of the pool. Then he pulled himself out and was overjoyed, because he realized he would be able to learn to walk again. The dream told him that with some help, he would be able to restore feeling and come alive. The profound imagery in this dream had a very big effect on the dreamer.

Deb: This dream illustrates how the dream ego’s orientation, which often mirrors our waking life ego, is sometimes very wrong from the dream maker’s point of view. One might think struggling up a mountain is a positive endeavor, and that it would be awful to push a quadriplegic into a pool–yet that was exactly what the dreamer needed. He needed to wake up to the realization that what seemed disastrous was actually the medicine, and he woke up with a radical reorientation to life.

Lisa: The dream was deeply reassuring, because I think he feared there was nothing other than striving to climb the icy mountains of life, fall into a wasteland, or be paralyzed. He didn’t know what else was in him. He hadn’t had a direct experience of that part of himself imaged by the physical therapist in the dream, who could be seen as this man’s actual outer analyst and his inner therapist.

Deb: Yes, what the dream ego thought was awful turned out to be liberating, and this new attitude is an epiphany, a surprising new possibility. That’s exactly what happens in fairy tales, which also emanate from the unconscious. In the fairy tale you read, Lisa, the first reaction to the hero killing his horse is horror, but the counter-intuitive event is what provides the opening to the apple from the tree of life. Fairy tales and dreams show that psyche is befriending us, but sometimes it does so in ways contradictory to ego attitudes. Jung’s famous saying is that a defeat for the ego is a victory for the Self, and in this dream being dumped into the pool—panic-inducing for the dream ego–assures the needed renewal from the guiding center.

Joseph: All this shows how vividly dreams can reconnect us in an experiential way to capacities of self that have been forgotten. We may hear about “green,” for example, but that doesn’t help us see it. Some psychological “receptor sites” may have become locked storehouses for painful feelings, but the dream maker considers them important aspects of our potential. Like in the dream you just related, Lisa, dreams can reintroduce us to life-giving values, attitudes, or ideas. All the examples we’ve provided illustrate the depth of feeling that can be returned to the dreamer, and this is often a critical factor in restoring the life narrative. This reminds me of a powerful experience of a middle-aged guy with a negative mother complex. This was a real burden and generated a lot of resentment that regularly spilled over into various aspects of his life. After some time in analysis he had this dream: he was a little boy, maybe four years old, at the beach with his family. His mother was resting under an umbrella. He went to the ocean, filled a little plastic pail with water, returned, and carefully poured it over his mother’s feet to cool them. As he did this, his mother scowled and shooed him away. When this man awakened, he felt the dream depicted the familiar experience of being dismissed and rejected by his mother. As we continued to talk, he realized that as he was pouring water over his mother’s feet, he felt tenderness and love for her, something he had not felt in decades. The dream returned his capacity to feel loving, and like a receptor site that had been clogged, something opened. The positive aspect of the mothering principle was re-experienced, and proved that abuse had not blighted his

capacity to offer love. That restoration changed his emotional trajectory, which is what Jung meant by a new attitude.

Lisa: Dreams affect our lives. All the examples we’ve shared tell us something fundamental about what it means to be human and feel more enlivened. This makes me think of another important aspect of dreams: both the dream I shared earlier about the man scrambling up the mountain and the dream that you just shared, Joseph, have a profound spiritual aspect. Sometimes I feel that dreams are my religion because they provide direct experiences of the transcendent. In biblical times, dreams were understood as a way God talked to people, and most cultures have honored dreams as the voice of the divine. Today, thanks especially to Jung, we also think of dreams as connecting us with what Jung referred to as the Self, a spiritual center long recognized as something that’s both within us and “other.” It knows the direction of our development and oversees the unfolding of our personality. It places us within a larger cosmic scheme. We all have dreams marked by a wondrous “more” that we did not create that is affirming and reassuring. Your guide is not an abstraction but a personal presence. This divinity is not a theological concept–it happens in your dreams.

Deb: Dreams are experiences. Dreams are not an idea or a thought or a concept. Dreams touch us every night and you, our new This Jungian Life Dream School student, can bring these experiences more and more into waking memory, conscious knowledge, and abiding companionship. We’ll end this introductory segment with an assignment: get a dream journal. Before you go online or race to the store, we ask that you invest this with ritual, the kind of dedication demonstrated by the hero of the fairy tale who got off his horse of ego and reason to free the fish, spare the ants, and feed the ravens. So, like him, undertake this task with your whole being. You can go to a very ordinary store, but your purpose is to choose exactly the right notebook. Pick some up to see which is the right size with the right color cover. Bring it home and have a moment of dedication as you put it on your bedside table with a pen or pencil for recording your dreams. As you get in bed, tell the dream maker, I’m ready to receive any dream you may send and will record it in this journal. Welcome to the inner adventure of dreams.