WELCOME TO Module 12

 

This Jungian Life @ www.thisjungianlife.com

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 12: Bringing It All Together

THIS JUNGIAN LIFE DREAM SCHOOL EDITED TRANSCRIPT

 

Lisa: Welcome to the final module of This Jungian Life Dream School. We’re going to take a look at a dream today using all the lenses and skills we’ve covered in the course. We’re going to try to go through it one piece at a time. Working with dreams is an organic and non-linear activity, so we may not do things in a perfectly methodical way. We’ll try to bring in as much as possible of what we’ve previously talked about so that you can see how it all comes together. And at the end, hopefully, we’ll arrive at an interpretation. So let’s get started.

Deb: This is a dream from a forty-two-year-old woman who works as an artisan: I’m in a subterranean space filled with ancient, dusty things. I’m with a man. I don’t know him but I’m okay with him being there. We find a baby girl all swaddled up. I pick her up in the darkness and hold her to my chest. We head for the tunnel to get out. The man I’m with raises his torch and illuminates the ceiling of the cavern. He points out that the ceiling has been burned saying, “You can’t trust a man whose ceiling has been burnt.” I see movement in the darkness–something is following us. He emerges from the darkness. He is so inky black it is as if he is made of the darkness. He is tall, well-muscled and covered in what looks like black rubber or body armor. His hair looks like dreadlocks or maybe tentacles, or maybe it isn’t hair but a helmet or headdress, but his eyes are human and deep blue. His face is finely carved. He is arresting. I wonder if he was an ancient God or an alien. He moves toward me saying, “Give her to me. I’m here to protect her.” I gasp and back away from him, clutching the baby tighter to my chest. The man I am with pulls me into the tunnel and away from the dark man. We run. The man lights his tunnel on fire, pouring kerosene and tossing his torch into the mouth of the cave after exiting. We walk away into the night. I look back and see the dark man’s movement in the flames. Suddenly, the man, the child and I are in an antique store. It is crowded and dusty. It hasn’t been open to the public in years. The man says, “The shop was my father’s.” The child is larger now. Her legs are wrapped around my waist as I hold her. The man asks me, “Where do you think the dark man is? Will he find us?” As he asks this, I feel the dark man’s hard chest muscles press against my back. Suddenly there is chaos, fire, and the breaking of glass. Parts of the roof are collapsing and raining down upon us but the dark man is shielding us from the torrent. Suddenly, we are in the alley behind the shop. The child has grown again. She’s an adolescent and is holding my hand. The dark man is standing a few feet away, blending into the darkness. I don’t know where the other man is. The girl squeezes my hand. “You don’t need to protect me from him,” she says to me. I look at him as he steps closer, reaching his hand out toward her. She looks at him and smiles as she takes his hand, still holding me with her other hand. “He and I are the same,” she says. “We are the dogs of war.” This blockbuster of a dream is like a fairytale. It’s a great dream to look at through all the dream interpretation lenses we have provided.

Lisa: It’s a huge and beautiful dream. I’m not sure what to make of it but it has filled me with awe.

Deb: Feeling is one of our lenses. Right at the outset, it’s the one we immediately apply: our own affective reaction to the dream.

Joseph: As we enter a dream, we can notice how our bodies respond. I felt, in hearing this dream, taken over by it. Whether it’s our own dream or someone else’s, our nervous system provides information immediately. Right away, I noticed a bit of tension in my lower abdomen and a heightened sensory awareness. I also felt a tension inside me around the image of the numinous god-like man, and a quality of cunning rising up in my psyche. That suggests to me that the figure cannot be dealt with innocently—there is something very complicated about him.

Lisa: Let’s take it from the top using our different lenses. The first one would be the subjective versus objective stance toward the dream. I think we can address this fairly easily. For context, the dreamer tells us that after a few very difficult years, she is contemplating a big life change, moving, changing careers, possibly going to grad school. She is also thinking about dating again after healing from an abusive relationship. We have several figures in the dream: a man, a baby, and a dark man. She doesn’t tell us that any of these people are figures in her actual waking life. So we can assume that most everything in this dream is going to be interpreted on the subjective level, as images of her psychic situation.

Deb: The feeling tone of the dream helps us with this as well. It feels like a fairytale. The setting is kind of magical and the people are not from her personal world. These are clues that this dream comes from her inner world.

Joseph: When we adopt the subjective lens, it imposes a certain discipline in the interpretation of the dream. Our natural tendency is to concretize images, but to embrace the subjective lens, we approach each image as a symbol. This allows us more latitude in discovering the meaning.

Lisa: We’ve decided to interpret this dream using the subjective rather than the objective lens, so let’s move on to the dramatic structure of the dream.

Deb: The first thing to consider is the setting, which represents the dreamer’s current psychic situation–what the dream maker is interested in ‘discussing.’ She is in a subterranean space filled with dusty things. She’s with a man and they find a baby girl swaddled up. The subterranean space suggests the unconscious, and we might assume that ancient, dusty things relate to the past.

Joseph: I find myself wondering how to imagine this as a psychological metaphor since we’re in a subjective realm. What might it mean in terms of the soul for a setting to be dark, dusty and ancient?

Lisa: If we found such a space, we would conclude that it must have been inhabited a long time ago but no one has been there for a long time. This may be a place where consciousness once was, but has been absent for some time. We might wonder if this is a place in the unconscious where something has been forgotten. Another possible way to understand this part of the dream could be inspired by one of Jung’s famous dreams. He had a dream about a house and he went down into deeper and deeper levels that he understood represented deeper layers of the psyche. The subterranean space in this dream might be an image of a very ancient part of the psyche.

Joseph: This leans into a controversial idea of Jung’s: that although each of us has a personal life and we retain images of our early history, there is also a dimension of each of us below any lived experience we could have had. There is an ancient, shared level in all of us that Jung called the collective unconscious, home to the archetypes. So we’re dropping down to something beyond the lived personality of the dreamer.

Lisa: So the setting is a subterranean space; there’s also a man and a baby, our cast of characters. The initial action is finding a baby girl all swaddled up.

Deb: This is the development of the plot, the story. I imagined what it would be like to stand in a subterranean space. What kind of ancient dusty things are there? There’s a man and a baby—and then what? She picks up the baby and they head to the tunnel to get out. The man raises his flashlight and illuminates the ceiling of the cavern, pointing out that the ceiling has been burned. He says, you can’t trust a man whose ceiling has been burnt.

Joseph: Yes, the cast of characters is on stage: the dream ego, an inner man and a baby. The atmosphere is mysterious. The space is unknown, the man is unknown, the baby is unknown. It feels like an encounter with newness and it carries a challenge to the dreamer. How will she relate to these emergent factors in her psyche? I’m curious about what’s next. If I think of this as a movie that’s unfolding, I couldn’t predict how the heroine would respond. As it unfolds, it will give us new information about how she functions in her inner her world.

Lisa: There are a couple of additional things that I would like to point out. One is that this baby girl successively ages so there’s a sense of development as the dream progresses. There are also themes that repeat. The ancient, dusty things in the beginning are doubled in the antique store which is also filled with ancient things. There’s the burnt ceiling in the first paragraph and later the ceiling is on fire.

Deb: It starts with the torch, which is what flashlights are called in the UK. Literal torches provide both fire and light. So it goes from there to lighting the tunnel on fire to the antique store, where there’s fire and glass-breaking. I’m aware of a little puzzler. The man says you can’t trust someone whose ceiling has been burnt. If this were a detective story, that’s a clue. What does it mean? We don’t know yet.

Joseph: If I stay close to the language, it’s like the beginning of a mystery novel. The man suggests that the burned ceiling is or was the property of a man, and this implies she’s in an unfamiliar aspect of the psyche. The baby girl is being cared for by someone else and the dream ego decides she’s going to pick her up. There’s something transgressive about grabbing a baby and running away with it. I feel very ambivalent about that, although, to apply the lens of amplification, it reminds me of Prometheus, whose transgressive theft of fire from the gods benefited man.

Lisa: They’re trying to get out of a subterranean tunnel, so we might imagine something is moving toward consciousness.

Joseph: The dream ego is retrieving something from an ancient, underground part of the psyche. Very creative people will go into the depths of the unconscious and connect with something valuable, creative and numinous. The next impulse is to share it in the waking world which the unconscious often resists. There’s a cost to be paid when something is abducted from the subterranean realm.

Lisa: Some part of the psyche does seem to be resisting her taking the baby, the part that is imaged by the dark man.

Joseph: It’s reminiscent of Hades. Maybe the unconscious is ambivalent about her running off with the baby. Returning to the myth of Prometheus, humanity is greatly helped by his stealing fire, but the gods punished him severely. Perhaps, like Prometheus, the hero and heroine in this dream will have to pay a price, as do many innovative people.

Lisa: Let’s get back to the dramatic structure, though we’ll come back to amplification a little later. I want to point out one of the wonderful things about this dream: it has such a clear lysis. The puzzle that was presented in the beginning with the appearance of the baby girl is solved definitively at the end, although we’re not sure what that means. When she’s adolescent, she says, you don’t need to protect me from him. Then they join hands and say a very enigmatic thing: We are the dogs of war.

Joseph: I find myself drifting back to the exposition–the setting and the characters–and I find myself wondering what the rising action is.

Deb: I would say it’s the appearance of the dark man. The description of him is rather mystical and the action leaps to a new level of intensity.

Joseph: In classic Greek dramatic structure, there is always a climax and a turning point. In this dream, the tension rises with the dark man’s appearance, and flips as he approaches the dream ego and says give her to me. I’m here to protect her. Then the dream ego clutches the baby and takes off. The tension is about who is in charge of the baby. She could have given it to the dark man, but she claims it. That’s a turning point into the next level of action, running to the opening of the tunnel. Is the drama moving towards the falling action now?

Lisa: As I suggested before, the dream almost doubles up on itself. The dreamer is again with the man and the child—this time in an antique store. It almost recapitulates the opening setting but at a different octave, let’s say. Once again, the dark man appears and there’s fire.

Joseph: We see this in movies. There’s a crisis, then a false denouement, and suddenly a switch to the future or the past. Here, the flip is into the antique store with the man and the child. It’s interesting that the man says, the shop was my father’s. In the beginning, a man’s place had a burned ceiling, indicating distrust. We now have a new possibility with the father’s place.

Lisa: The ending action of the first scene is the dark man moving in the flames. The ending action of the second scene is the dark man shielding the others from the flames as the ceiling collapses.

Deb: It’s a cliff hanger. We also notice that the child has grown rapidly. When the dream ego, baby and companion man arrive at the antique store, the child has grown and the dark man is back.

Joseph: There’s rising action. The dark man appears, fire and breaking glass rain down. There are huge tumults occurring in the dramatic structure.

Deb: This time the dark man is portrayed in a positive aspect. Whereas before he seemed threatening and they ran away, this time he is shielding them from fire, breaking glass and the roof collapsing.

Joseph: It’s like a second turning point in the dramatic structure. The chaotic explosion leads to an unexpected twist: the dark man has become a shield instead of an antagonist, which makes me wonder if he really was an antagonist in the beginning.

Deb: What we know is that if all this happens, the dream figures are out in the alley behind the shop and the child has become an adolescent. Time jumps ahead as each scene closes: leaving the cave and leaving the antique store.

Lisa: And now the other man is gone. We’ve had the subtraction of a character, as if he has played his role and doesn’t need to be there anymore. Now we have the dreamer, the dark man, and the girl.

Joseph: We’re in the lysis of the dream–the conclusion–and it happens rather elegantly. The baby, now an adolescent, has a voice, and in the surprise ending, she and the dark man hold hands. There’s a revelation.

Deb: The girl is in the middle, connecting the dream ego and the dark man, saying that they are the same and there is no need for protection. Then she says an astonishing thing: we are the dogs of war. I can practically hear the band striking up and playing a dramatic final chorus. The lysis has a resolution. The dark man is clearly a safe and helpful figure and although the statement about dogs of war is enigmatic, it’s clearly a pronouncement.

Lisa: I think that covers us for the dramatic structure. Let’s move on and look at association and amplification. We don’t have a lot of associations from this dreamer, but we can certainly work through many of the elements here and discuss them symbolically.

Deb: When we have a dream with a lot of mythical images and symbolic content, amplifications are meaningful because there’s so much that’s universally human. Even without the dreamer’s personal associations, we have a lot of ground to stand on in this dream.

Lisa: We’ve already talked a bit about the subterranean space and ancient, dusty things. She’s with a man and there’s a baby. What might we understand about the baby on a symbolic level?

Joseph: I first want to differentiate between associations and amplifications. Associations are in the personal sphere, such as dreaming of your next door neighbor or your childhood home. If you dream of a baby, that also might be related to personal experience and evoke a positive or negative association: I like babies or don’t like babies, depending on what is associated with personal experience. But amplifications have to do with universals often found in myths or fairytales. They’re collective human experiences and images. In the context of this dream, we would look at myths or fairytales about finding a baby to find some amplifications.

Deb: Moses in the bullrushes comes up. As an infant, Moses was set in a basket in the reeds of the Nile so that pharaoh’s daughter would see him and adopt him. And there are other mythological and religious stories about a special baby that arrives in an unexpected way—Jesus, of course.

Lisa: Babies and children in dreams often represent some new content, a new attitude or a new channel through which psychic energy can flow. They represent a beginning, and using the lens of amplification, we might think of the archetype of the divine child. A sense of futurity and potential comes with babies. A baby is fragile and needs protection and care, and when we have a new attitude in the psyche, there is something tender and precious about it, like the baby Moses, the Christ child, or baby Krishna, who was immediately attacked by demons. Mythologically, this is very consistent. The divine child has potential powers but is also incredibly vulnerable.

Deb: It’s also significant that in this dream the baby is a girl. Our dreamer is a woman so this relates to her shadow, because the baby is the same sex as the dreamer and the dream ego. Here’s a new attitude, a new beginning that is fragile. And what does she do with it? She picks the baby up and holds her close to her chest, which is what pharaoh’s daughter does. Babies usually elicit a protective response in us.

Lisa: Let’s move on to tackle the image of the ceiling. That seems to be what’s next.

Deb: I’m a little mystified by the importance of this, so I start with what a ceiling is, using the lens of explanation. It’s like a roof over your head, a protective element, and this ceiling has been burned or mistreated in some way. The protective element of the ceiling, according to the man, is not trustworthy.

Joseph: I find myself setting aside the man’s comment and thinking about a cave ceiling being burned in general. I would venture that any ancient cave that had been inhabited by humans was likely to have involved fire, and soot would naturally accumulate on the ceiling of the cave. The only inhabited cave without soot would be one that’s never had warmth or fire in it.

Deb: Then again, there are all those caves with ancient paintings in them and they had pristine ceilings. It’s really a mystery how they did artwork in addition to inhabiting those caves. In this dream, there’s yet another man off-stage, so to speak. And the man she’s with says you can’t trust a man whose ceiling has been burned.

Lisa: We don’t know whom to believe.

Deb: Going back to your idea, Joseph, fires in caves for warmth and cooking means there had to have been ventilation. But I think your point, Lisa, is also right. We really don’t know except that there seems to be an attitude toward fire.

Lisa: There is a lot of fire in this dream and that’s important. Metaphorically, a ceiling is a limit that we hit.

Joseph: A cave with a burned ceiling could imply that all the fire has been contained with no way for it to vent. It would be a sealed container, almost like a gestating volcano. Everything keeps heating and building pressure.

Deb: I like the idea of the ceiling as the limit. People get angry and say, I hit the ceiling. Then there’s the glass ceiling for women. So there’s something about an upper limit and this one has been burned. Now I’m wondering about what being burned means, such as I’ve been burned, meaning hurt or dealt with wrongly. The ceiling has a protective function but it can sometimes be a barrier. What we know is that the man in the dream perceives it as bad, which adds more impetus to getting out of there.

Lisa: Let’s move on to the image of the dark man. We can bring in all kinds of myths to amplify this figure.

Joseph: I’ll start with Hades again, the Greek God of the underworld, the first-born son of Cronus and Rhea. The three brothers, Zeus, Poseidon and Hades, divided the three realms among them. Zeus ruled the land and the sky, Poseidon ruled the oceans and Hades ruled the underworld. Hades is an ancient and powerful god-image associated with terrifying subterranean forces. Although humans could access land, sea and sky, the underworld was not accessible. So Hades was an inscrutable figure. Even in astrology, Pluto, another name for Hades, is often associated with unexpected violent eruption of massive power and force.

Deb: The allusion to Hades is certainly relevant. And he’s covered in black rubber or body armor. I thought of the ancient god / monster in the movie, The Shape of Water and his cinematic predecessor in The Creature from the Black Lagoon. These are more aquatic images but this creature seems more ambiguous than Hades, with his dreadlocks and deep blue eyes.

Lisa: And tentacles. But he is a subterranean god. By the way, he has a baby girl. New life often starts in the dark. And aren’t we assuming it’s the dark man’s cavern? It’s his place. As Joseph said, this child has been tended to. She’s swaddled. He goes after her and later we find out they are the same. We know at the end that there is some identification between the child and the dark man.

Deb: He’s a protector of the baby girl. I’m thinking about tales of babies like Oedipus, who was left on a hillside to die, but was rescued by shepherds and adopted. This girl has been deposited in the cave, as if for safe keeping, and the dark man cares for her and is protective.

Lisa: There’s a relationship between them, a secret identity.

Joseph: They may be distinct expressions of a complex archetypal force. In the same way that Athena sprang from Zeus’ head, she may be a feminine derivation of the archetype of Zeus.

Lisa: What do we think about this from a mythological perspective? Hades is one example of a chthonic masculine God, but what about others?

Joseph: There is a long list of underworld gods and goddesses. Hermes is sometimes associated with the underworld because as the guide of souls, he can navigate in the dark and is intimately connected with leading people through darkness. That makes me wonder if the man who’s helping her could be a psychopomp or a hermetic figure, although he seems rather human. Hades was said to have two children, Melinoë and Macaria, known as the goddess of the blessed death. That would imply a peaceful death rather than a violent one. And she escorted the souls of the blessed to the Elysium, a divine field where one could relax after death in a kind of bliss. Melinoë was related to the moon and in the Orphic hymns, brings terror to mortals at night by taking strange forms that could drive mortals insane.

Lisa: It seems that whatever links the dark man might have with mythology are also dark and perhaps dangerous. He says, give her to me. I’m here to protect her, but the dream ego does not respond well to that. She gasps, backs away from him, clutches the baby tighter. Then they head off quickly out of the tunnel, lighting kerosene behind them to kill the dark man, or at least prevent him from following them. The ego is very resistant to this content from the depths.

Joseph: If the dark man is a god of the underworld, is the dream ego coming down and attempting to rescue something from the world of the dead? This would be a world of inertia where everything is asleep and inactive, not unlike a swaddled child in a cocoon, a kind of stasis.

Deb: I think that works. Lifting the baby up and wanting to bring her out of the cave of darkness is a rescue from the ego’s point of view. But after they leave the cave, they walk away into the night, so there’s more darkness, which we associate with the realm of the unconscious. Once they’re up on earth, but still in the realm of the dark and the unconscious, they see the dark man moving in the flames.

Lisa: I suspect that this unconscious content represented by the baby is safe down there with a dark man, but taking her up to the earth, making her conscious, will allow her to grow, which is what happens. So now let’s talk about the flames.

Deb: In the alchemical operation of calcinatio, old content is burned and reduced to ash. Even if it’s painful to the ego, it’s a process of transformation.

Lisa: When you burn something, you alter its chemical composition. It’s an image of complete transformation.

Deb: The flames were supposed to destroy of the dark man, but as they leave the tunnel, he is moving in the flames. Like Daniel in the Old Testament, the dark man is not consumed by the flames. And to jump ahead a little bit, when they get to the antique store, there’s more fire and breaking glass. There, things are utterly burned and destroyed.

Joseph: The first man pours kerosene into the tunnel and lights it—he takes an aggressive stance toward the dark man. He has a limited perception of the archetypal energy the dark man represents, and the dark man is unaffected by the material flame. It says something about his supernatural strength in the face of destructive hostility. When the dark man later presses his muscles against the back of the dream ego, there is chaos, fire and breaking glass. We still don’t have a sense of causality…

Lisa: …but when this content surfaces, the old structure comes apart.

Deb: The specifics are important. When there is finally contact with the dark man, and the dream ego feels the dark man’s chest muscles press against her back, then there’s chaos. The contact is from the back, like coming in the back door…

Lisa: …through the unconscious. That it’s his hard chest muscles against her back has a sexual quality. He doesn’t grab her but stands right behind her in a sensual way.

Deb: That’s a vivid image, and now I’m more persuaded, Joseph, about associating the dark man with Hades, god of the underworld. You’d have to have some mighty chest muscles for that to be perceptible. Although chaos then ensues, the dark man protects them. There is a macho kind of sexuality here, just as with Hades roaring up from the underworld to abduct Kore, Demeter’s maiden daughter. When Kore later emerged from the underworld, she had become Persephone, queen of the underworld. The sesual element comes in from the back, or up from the depths–the unconscious.

Joseph: I find myself thinking about the effects of archetypal images in the psyches of individuals. Jung found it inspiring that these ancient forces were very much alive in the modern psyche, but as he deepened his observations, it seemed that when these archetypal forces activated, there was an unpredictable, tumultuous, and potentially healing effect. It’s not surprising that when a god-like image of archetypal energy appears and leans into the dream ego, explosive energy follows. If we translate this into a psychological model, our egos normally need animus or anima to mediate archetypal forces. So in the beginning of the dream, she has a male animus companion. He mediates between the dream ego and the overwhelming dark male figure. Later in the dream, the dream ego is right up against all the psychic power without help.

Lisa: We might say that the ego needs to be very strong and hearty to engage directly with archetypal material. So there is chaos but she and the child are shielded from it. What about we are the dogs of war? That invites associations and amplifications. It’s from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. The line is, cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war.

Deb: You’ve just demonstrated the usefulness of symbol dictionaries, Wikipedia, and other sources to help understand references to literary and historic material.

Lisa: The scene in the play is Mark Antony alone with Julius Caesar’s body shortly after his assassination. He’s trying to incite the crowd at Caesar’s funeral to rise up against the assassins. It is a cry for vengeance.

Joseph: In the ancient world, dogs were trained to go to war to attack enemies, to protect, to aggress. So for the dark man and the girl to say that they are dogs of war, reveals something substantial and sobering.

Deb: It’s a powerful image for aggression and fighting spirit. There is a lot of empowerment and protest here: I will not stand for it.

Lisa: In the context the dreamer provided, we know she’s healing from an abusive relationship. To be able to have this kind of relationship with your own aggression would be a tremendous psychological achievement after an experience like that.

Deb: The dark lord, the growing girl and the dream ego are all connected. As awful as war can be, it’s also highly activating. There’s pomp and ceremony with bands playing and instinctual excitement. It’s an archetypal image that has a positive aspect to it as well as a negative aspect.

Lisa: Another amplification is a theme in the dream that reminds me of a fairytale, Princess Moonbeam. In this fairytale, a bamboo cutter finds a baby in a thicket. The baby has been sent by the moon for the couple to raise. When she grows up, she has to return to her moon mother. There is a mythic theme of being the protector or foster parent of a transpersonal content that has to return—transformed–to its source, or proper realm. There’s an echo of that in this dream.

Joseph: That feels right. As another kind of amplification, I’m thinking about people who are so desperate to be parents that they kidnap children. That has happened both in antiquity and in modern times. The compelling drumbeat to have a child possesses some people.

Lisa: I think we’ve had a good look through the lens of association and amplification. Let’s see if we can identify complexes in the dream.

Deb: That’s important, for Jung says that the complex is the architect of the dream.

Lisa: We might first wonder about the man. Joseph, you suggested that he’s a kind of animus figure, but he could also be an image of another kind of complex.

Deb: There is the man with the dream ego in the cave and then the dark man. We have two men here. The first man seems like a shadow figure allied with the dream ego, versus the dark man. The complex seems to lie in the attitude of the first man and the dreamer: they are repelled by the dark man and wish to destroy him. The dark man is immediately seen as alarmingly negative and dangerous. The kerosene is thrown down, lit on fire, and they get out. The dream ego has to come around to realizing the dark man’s protective and empowering nature. There’s a complex around men and the context she provides supports that.

Lisa: I want to lift up something Joseph alluded to in the context of complexes: the antique shop. The man says the shop was his father’s, and I wonder about the nature of the father complex in this dreamer. The father could be related to the first man, who seems to have a limited view of what’s right for the dream ego, and he is defended against the deeper potential carried by the dark man.

Deb: The first man is the one who takes her away, only to wind up in an antique shop–back in the past with dusty things. We might wonder about that man as an extension of the dream ego.

Joseph: There are a couple of threads I’m curious about. As I ponder the significance of antiques, I wonder about multi-generational trauma. There’s a story of rescuing a child, protecting it, running away with it and trying to keep it safe from something powerful and frightening before finally returning it to its natural place. There’s something to do with stealing, and there’s a lot about fear, reactivity and power. Because it all seems so distant to the dreamer, she has to reach into antiquity—the past–in this drama. Is there some kind of trauma tumbling through the father’s family? There are also vague, thematic pressures infused with an intensity that I find myself wondering about.

Lisa: As we look through the lens of complexes, Joseph, you are wondering about the nature of the father complex and how it might have ancestral roots.

Joseph: We do ‘inherit’ complexes from our parents and grandparents. Friends whose grandparents escaped the Holocaust, or forbears who suffered other traumas speak powerfully about how tragedies continue to move through a family’s psyche generation after generation.

Deb: We’re starting to wonder about a trauma complex.

Lisa: I think that’s right. But continuing with our list of lenses, what do we think about shadow?

Joseph: The shadow can consist of anything the ego doesn’t know about or things the ego disassociates from because they’re intolerable. There’s a mysterious tension in the dream that seems like shadow material that is newly encountered via the dream.

Deb: There is also a distinction between personal, generational and mythological shadow. Jung says that everything that’s not ego is all part of shadow, whether it’s personal or collective. So, all these dream figures, the references to fire, and references to antiques are all aspects of shadow.

Lisa: Shadow is usually imaged by a same-sex figure in a dream, which would be the adolescent girl at the end. She is shadowy in saying she’s the same as the dark man, who has been a mysterious, ambiguous, and somewhat destructive force throughout the dream. When she says, we are the dogs of war, the shadow content seems related to an archetypal capacity for aggression.

Joseph: The dreamer’s capacity to be aggressive may have been repressed, perhaps disowned, by her conscious mind. The dream ego goes into the underworld and recovers a baby, a dog of war, and then runs out of the underworld, like stealing a treasure from a temple. She had many years of tending her inner dog of war until puberty, when the dog of war can fully own its nature. The final image of the child holding hands with the dream ego and the dark man reminds me of a piece of copper wire conducting energy between the archetypal world and the ego. If we stay with the idea of a generational complex, perhaps something of the father complex is passed down to her, a ‘dog-of-war’ energy that is bred to fight.

Lisa: Now let’s look at animus in the dream. We’ve already touched on this—illustrating how the various lenses overlap–but I’m sure there’s more to say.

Deb: Certainly, the dark man is a powerful animus figure infused with mythic properties. The ‘companion’ man is also an animus figure, one that is more closely aligned with the dream ego, almost like a brother who says, light the torch and let’s get out of here. He’s much closer to the dream ego’s perception of animus in its positive aspect.

Lisa: It’s almost like that man is the version of masculine energy that can be tolerated by the ego at the outset of the dream. By the end, the dreamer doesn’t need that anymore because she can be in direct contact with the more archetypal image of darker animus energy. The first man may be an image of a provisional adaptation. Because the archetypal content of the dark man is so hot—literally, given the fires–the dream ego can’t be in direct contact with it right away. I imagine that this dream shows psychic development over a long period of time, since the dream says the girl grows up. It could represent the culmination of 15-20 years of incubating in this dreamer’s psyche. Perhaps her ego had to get stronger before she could have a relationship with a more archetypal version of her animus, the dark man.

Deb: Animus and anima figures make a bridge from the personal to the collective unconscious, or function like that copper wire you just mentioned, Joseph. Something has happened for her that this dream portrays as taking place over time: her ability to humanize, accept, and befriend archetypal content that represents power and aggression. This is content that has been far from the ego, but now the ego can have a relationship with it.

Joseph: I feel more hesitant about thinking of the dark man as an animus figure versus an archetypal figure. To me, although the first man companions her, he also douses the tunnel with kerosene and lights it on fire, so he is also a dog of war. It’s a ruthless annihilating behavior that is stunning, though it seems easy for him. He’s not ambivalent about making war on the dark man. The dream ego has some relationship to the initial animus, and he is certainly a partner in crime—he aids and abets stealing the baby, gets them out of the tunnel, and connects her to the antique shop of the father. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of conflict between her and him. The dream ego says she does not know him, so she seems unacquainted with the masculine part of her own spirit, although it is very active. The dream seems to be introducing that to her, first through the animus figure whose violence seems justified to the dream ego and then to the fiercer animus energy represented by the dark man.

Deb: Let me clarify what I mean by an animus figure in the context of the dark man. When we get down into the deeper layer of the psyche, it has one foot in the collective unconscious–our connection to archetypes—and one foot in personal experience. We’ve been talking about him as if he’s a god-like image, possibly a representation of Hades. So, he may also be an image of the Self. The dividing line between animus, mythological and divine images is not at all clear-cut. He is certainly much more than human, unlike the man at the beginning of the dream, and animus figures do carry archetypal energy. The dark man, carries a great deal of archetypal energy but that doesn’t disqualify him as carrying animus energy.

Lisa: That leads into the last topic for us to cover, the Self. Deb, what you’re saying is that these categories—animus/anima, myth and spirit—overlap. I think this dream illustrates that. You can’t categorize these concepts too rigidly, because we also follow the flow of a dream somewhat intuitively, with ‘soft eyes,’ so to speak. There is something of the Self in the dark man.

Joseph: When the ego comes up against something so powerful and spiritual, the ego usually has a very ambivalent relationship to it. In popular culture, an encounter with the Self or the divine is often imaged as a glorious rapture into love and light. Jung acknowledged that but he also examined the history and phenomenology of other kinds of encounters. It seems that more often than not, encountering the Self, Jung’s term for the divine, could be very ambivalent, unpredictable, and painful.

Deb: Absolutely. In Greek mythology, humans were incinerated if they saw the gods in their full power and form.

Lisa: Hera, Zeus’s wife, was outraged by his affair with Semele, a mortal. Hera sabotaged Semele by prompting her to ask Zeus to show himself to her. When he did, she went up in flames. Mortals can’t directly encounter the Self.

Deb: When Job finally encounters Yahweh, it is a terrifying though transformative experience. We’re underscoring the point that an encounter with the divine is more awe-full than sweetness and light—and it’s transformative.

Lisa: How can we further deepen the idea of the dark man as the image of the Self? My answer is that his numinous quality indicates the presence of the Self.

Joseph: The dreamer says he has been made from darkness itself. He can also walk through conflagrations of burning kerosene, apparently unharmed, and can find and protect her from catastrophic explosions. He’s like Superman. But she was quite frightened or threatened by all these superhuman capabilities in the beginning. As she continues to encounter this energy of the Self, it becomes more balanced and grounded. She no longer needs to steal or throw molotov cocktails at him, but can be present and behold him. I also want to include the concept of archetypal defenses here. This epic dream story seems to span the period of birth to adolescence. I’m imagining some part of the dreamer, an archetypal divine child, was driven into the unconscious. That part was sequestered for fourteen years, and in a pivotal moment, the dream ego rescues this child and then realizes she must return her to her divine archetypal family. I find myself wondering how that might have been a compensatory function in her life.

Deb: The baby in the cave, carefully swaddled, is in stasis and unable to develop. That is an image of an archetypal defense. The cave is a part of the dreamer’s psyche, underground, thus unconscious. I wonder about a non-human defense that was needed. In trauma, the inviolable human soul will be sequestered and protected by the Self if necessary. This relates to your idea, Joseph, of transgenerational trauma.

Lisa: We’re now in the territory of Jungian analyst, Donald Kalsched and his book, The Inner World of Trauma. In his theory of trauma from a Jungian perspective, the dark man would be the persecutor-protector who keeps the baby—the innocent soul–in stasis. He keeps it from harm, but in so doing, also forecloses development. Then there’s a tussle with the dream ego, who now wants to bring the sequestered part into consciousness and allow it to grow. What’s beautiful in this dream is that although the dark man initially appears threatening in service to the baby remaining in the underworld, rather than being claimed for life, he becomes a benevolent figure by the end. He can stand in the light of consciousness and join hands with the child. Some protective capacity has become available to the dream ego.

Joseph: That applies Kalsched’s model of trauma and resolution beautifully. I find myself thinking about this woman needing to see herself as a protector and rescuer, a role that may have been necessary. Then something woke up in her, an image of her inner child saying, you don’t need to protect me anymore or be forced into the role of the mother. Perhaps she’s been treating everyone as a child she has to protect. Now she realizes I’m also a powerful dog of war. It reminds me of people who think they’ve found a lost puppy, take it home, and it turns out to be a wolf.

Lisa: I’m applying what you’re saying to inner experience. If you’re always having to clutch your inner baby to your chest, you’re living in a very defended, anxious way. This dream is saying you don’t need those defenses anymore.

Deb: It’s also necessary to confront the protector who has become persecutory. All the dark man part of the psyche knows is that safety means the baby must stay in the cave. The dream ego shows a lot of spunk and aggression. She grabs the baby and takes her out. The dark man can then become a more useful protector, shielding them from the debris falling in the fire and joining hands with them. It’s a beautiful image of a relationship that has become copacetic instead of conflicted.

Lisa: I feel like we’re naturally sliding into our last task here, an interpretation of this dream. We’ve been circling around, and now let’s see if we can articulate its essential message.

Joseph: This is always challenging without the dreamer. Knowledge of the dreamer’s outer and inner life helps us configure a place for the dream to live that links with a person’s history and consciousness. So, I suddenly find myself shy about speculating.

Deb: Well, let me leap into a very succinct—perhaps simplistic–interpretation. This dreamer’s father and trauma complex have become much better integrated into conscious awareness.

Lisa: That’s a good place to start. Joseph, what do you think?

Joseph: I have a feeling that this woman has lost something significant, perhaps even literally lost her child. In some deep compensatory way, she went into the soul and found something that felt like what she had lost–a child image. She claimed it and stole it from the archetypal world so that she could experience herself as a protective, rescuing mother and that has now served its purpose. What she claimed from the depths to salve this loss now has its own voice and is saying, it’s time to let me go. It’s time for you to see that I’m a of a different order of being than you imagined and your role and attitude as the protective mother can now be released. You can be something more and different.

Lisa: I’m going with the assumption that there’s a trauma history here, perhaps intergenerational, and this dreamer’s ability to relate to her own aggressive capacity is something that had to be secreted away. Over the course of time, she has been able to protect and engage with that psychic content. It started off small, frail, and weak, but she was able to nurture it until she no longer needed to live defensively. She now has good access to her aggression and she’s very much in touch with that capacity through the image of the child who’s grown up. I tend toward placing that in the context of an abusive relationship. When there’s an abusive relationship, oftentimes you do have to leave the house and take only the most essential things, your documents or spare cash. So she grabbed that child, she ran and she left with a little germ of ability to relate with appropriate aggression. And now, it has grown into a fuller, more fully felt and integrated capacity.

Deb: Something has been transformed here. I think we’re all saying that from different perspectives, especially the ending in which the child has become an adolescent and tells the dream ego that she and the dark man are the same. Something that had been split off has now been integrated into consciousness. I would add that this kind of dream is an experience. The dreamer knows something has happened to her. She and her attitude to life have been changed. This is a big dream that we selected for our last module, and I think we have also illustrated that the process of interpretation is convoluted, even as we applied the various lenses of preceding modules to this dream. Translating a dream into consciousness is both a practice and an art—and one that deserves our utmost respect.

 © This Jungian Life 2021 all rights reserved throughout the universe in perpetuity, in any and all media now known or hereinafter devised.

 

 

by Lisa Marchiano

A complete interpretation of a dream often eludes us, but if we apply the perspectives offered in This Jungian Life Dream School, we may be able to decipher the dream’s essential message. We will demonstrate working through a dream using the interpretive tools provided in This Jungian Life Dream School. (This dream is shared with the dreamer’s permission.)

 Although each interpretive perspective will be presented sequentially to illustrate the interpretive process, the unconscious (as we know) does not conform to the organizational schemas of consciousness. Like a visit to the ophthalmologist to determine an eyeglass prescription, trial lenses overlap to progressively sharpen vision–and sometimes one or two lenses are sufficient to reveal the essence of a dream’s meaning.

 Case Study

A woman in late midlife sought help when her she realized–somewhat to her surprise–that her 20-year marriage was in crisis. She was smoldering with anger at her husband for constant slights and pervasive disregard throughout their 20-year marriage. A few weeks after beginning analysis, she had the following dream: I’m in the car with my husband. He is driving. We are going to a restaurant out in the suburbs. He is driving fast, the way he usually does. At first, I feel nervous but then I remind myself that he is a good driver and I can relax. We arrive at the restaurant and are eating. It is a large open space. There are not many other couples there. We are talking about a band of marauders that has been terrorizing the community, breaking into people’s houses and killing them. In the dream, I understand this band of marauders to be like John Brown’s army as portrayed in the TV show, The Good Lord Bird. As we are discussing this, we hear gunfire in the distance. I look at my husband and tell him I think we should leave right away. I feel bad for leaving the bill unpaid, but I tell myself that I will call the restaurant the next day and give them my credit card number. We go outside into the parking lot and for a moment I feel relieved that we are getting away. Then I look up the hill and see the band of marauders emerging from the tree line, streaming toward us. They are close now. I know we won’t make it to the car. I briefly wonder if we should go back inside but I think it is too late for that. The conflict is unavoidable. The leader of the band is a woman, full of fury.

 The dreamer was shaken by the final scene. Dream interpretation is difficult, and interpreting our own dreams is harder still, because dreams depict what our conscious personality does not know and often does not wish to know. There is therefore always some resistance on the part of the conscious personality to the message of the dream, and we often tend to seek confirmation of our conscious attitude. Consequently, the dreamer’s initial impulse was to read the dream as showing the impending end of her marriage.

 This was not, however, the dream maker’s view of her situation. “In each of us there is another,” wrote Jung. “He speaks to us in dreams and tells us how differently he sees us from the way we see ourselves.” It is precisely because this inner other sees us so differently that it can be difficult to decipher the meaning of a dream.

 Association & Amplification

We usually enter a dream by asking about the dreamer’s associations to the dream. This is a natural place to begin—we need to know what the dream figures and elements of the setting mean to the dreamer. Jung says, “…no interpretation can be undertaken without the dreamer. The words composing a dream-narrative have not just one meaning, but many meanings. If, for instance, someone dreams of a table, we are still far from knowing what the ‘table’ of the dreamer signifies, although the world ‘table’ sounds unambiguous enough. For the thing we do not know is that this ‘table’ is the very one at which his father sat when he refused the dreamer all further financial help and threw him out of the house as a good-for-nothing. The polished surface of this table stares at him as a symbol of his lamentable worthlessness in his daytime consciousness as well as in his dreams at night. This is what our dreamer understands by ‘table.’ Therefore, we need the dreamer’s help in order to limit the multiple meanings of words to those that are essential and convincing.”

 Associations lead us into feeling and symbol—and begin to unlock the meaning of the dream. Taking our case study dream “from the top,” we would ask about the dreamer’s husband and driving, the current psychic situation: I’m in the car with my husband. He is driving. We are going to a restaurant out in the suburbs. He is driving fast, the way he usually does. At first, I feel nervous but then I remind myself that he is a good driver and I can relax. The dreamer reported that she her husband rarely fought; she strove to preserve marital harmony despite her husband’s moods, desires, and complaints. In other words, the dreamer had let her husband drive their marriage as she sat in the passenger seat, ignoring the potholes and bumps in the road. She had gone along for the ride, stifling resentments and papering over disappointments and hurts with stoicism and humor. Now the marital vehicle was running out of gas. (Playing with metaphor can help to magnify the psychic situation.)

 Outwardly, however, everything seemed as equable as dining in a suburban restaurant, which the dreamer associated with her affluent suburban upbringing. A patina of propriety and wealth characterized her family of origin. Risks were discouraged and conformity was valued. Since the dreamer stated that she seldom went to suburban restaurants as an adult, the setting suggests her immature self—versus, for example, a neighborhood restaurant where the dreamer is a “regular.”

 At the restaurant, the dream ego and her husband discuss a band of marauders that has been terrorizing the community, breaking into people’s houses and killing them. In the dream itself, as if psyche is saying get this, the dream ego associates them with John Brown’s army as portrayed in The Good Lord Bird. This invites a quick step into explanation: John Brown was an abolitionist zealot who believed the ideal of freedom justified violent means. He killed several settlers in front of their families, and was a relentless man of action until he was captured, tried and hanged.

 Since there are no bands of marauders in suburbia, much less any headed by a woman full of fury, the last scene in the dream moves the interpretive process from association to amplification, the realm of mythic images. The woman full of fury first calls up the Amazons, unwed women warriors. The woman leader is also an image of archetypal female rage memorably depicted in Greek mythology as the Erinyes, or Furies. Known as “the angry ones,” they are goddesses of retribution and vengeance sent underground unless needed. The three best known are Alecto (endless anger), Tisiphone (vengeful destruction), and Megaera (jealous rage).

 The image of the woman warrior adds significant detail to the image of John Brown: long-exiled and rageful feminine energy has come storming in at midlife, demanding its way. The dreamer believed the frightening feminine fury of the leader portended the end of her marriage—but archetypal images are bivalent, so they cannot be reduced to a one-sided ego perspective.

 Objective & Subjective

 According to a subjective interpretation, we would see the dream as commenting on something going on in the inner world. Was the dream reflecting back to her an image of her waking attitude? Ego consciousness found the rising feminine fury frightening. The assumption was that this new energy sweeping onto the scene would be bloodthirsty and destructive. From the ego standpoint, the feared confrontation with this liberatory fury threatens annihilation – as the dream ends, she feels fairly certain that she and her husband will be murdered in some violent fashion.

 This might be only how these impulses appear from the standpoint of the ego.  The dreamer is afraid of her own anger and aggression. Indeed, she reported to me that she and her husband had rarely fought, and that she had been oriented to preserving harmony throughout the marriage. When any content has been disallowed from consciousness, it gets banished to the forest of the unconscious and appears dangerous to the conscious personality. It likely isn’t dangerous in an absolute sense, although it may pose a threat to an outdated or overly one-sided ego attitude. In fact, the content may be healthy, life-giving, and energizing, but it won’t appear that way to the ego. Hence, it takes on a frightening aspect in the dream.

 In this dreamer’s case, she admitted that for years she had been stifling anger and annoyance at things in her marriage, papering over disappointments and hurts with stoic good humor. Her fury had been banished to the wilderness, as it were. She associated the band of rogues to the abolitionist John Brown, who, with his band, killed several settlers with broadswords in front of their families in the Kansas territory in response to the pro-slavery attacks. The dreamer’s own fury, then, was coming out of exile to strike a blow against her emotional enslavement to the requirement that she be “nice.” Would her anger once loosed be as destructive as she feared? It likely would be destructive to the placid veneer she had been carefully cultivating. The dream shows, at a minimum, that the dreamer fears her fury will be destructive to her husband, but it isn’t clear at all that this would actually be the case.

 Put another way, this content is only dangerous (or appears dangerous) because it has been disallowed – because the ego assumes it is dangerous. “We know that the mask of the unconscious is not rigid – it reflects the face we turn toward it. Hostility lends it a threatening aspect, friendliness softens its features.” (CW 12, para 29) If the dreamer were able to welcome her fury with friendliness, she might appear less destructive.

 Even in the dreamer’s associations to this image, we hear its ambivalence. John Brown was a complex character, a zealot who believed that the end justified the means. However, he was also fiercely committed to the ideals of freedom and equality. He was unafraid to risk his own life in service to the goal of emancipation of the slaves and he arguably contributed much to that cause. So even while the ego fears her fury and considers it destructive, there is a hint that her ultimate purpose is forward facing. She comes to strike a blow for freedom.

 In addition to reflecting back to the ego its own attitude, could the dream also be revealing something objectively true in the dynamics of the situation? According to an objective interpretation, we would see the dream as commenting on a situation in the outer world. What is the dream saying about dynamics in her relationship with her husband? The dreamer admitted that she had been letting her husband “drive” the relationship in many respects. She had been happy to be in the passenger seat. The dream is alerting her that she had been secretly comfortable in this role in her marriage. The dream accurately shows that a heretofore “outlaw” attitude comes sweeping into consciousness with tremendous energy and potency, threatening to overturn the comfortable but overly rigid conscious stance. The dreamer’s impulse to escape the conflict and avoid “paying the bill” was also an accurate reflection of the outer situation. This was indeed how the dreamer had handled conflict in the marriage.

 The dream is putting the dreamer on notice that the marital relationship as it had been constituted so far will likely not survive in its current form. The fury does not care about the needs of the small personality we know as the ego. She is an expression of the deep Self, and her concern is with the call to greater consciousness that is asked of all us. This raw force of nature does not care about the potential collateral damage of a few outgrown attitudes. It is more than happy to sweep these away in an effort to promote the fulfillment of the dreamer’s individuation agenda. It might be that the dreamer’s life as she knows it needs to end.

 As we can see, the inner situation mirrors the outer, and it is difficult to draw a bright line between one and the other. This dream works on both an objective and subjective level. It is both about dynamics in the actual, outer marriage, as well as the dreamer’s relationship with herself and her own aggression.

 Dramatic Structure

This dream has a clear dramatic structure. It occurred the night after a significant argument with the dreamer’s husband, in which she voiced her sexual dissatisfaction for the first time. The initial setting of the dream, with the dreamer and her husband in a car, is one of movement, indicating there has already been some change out of stasis.

 When the two main “actors,” the dream ego and her husband, arrive at the restaurant, the plot develops: they talk about the band of marauders. The peripeteia, or climax, is reached with the marauders’ imminent arrival. The dream ego and her husband are trapped in the parking lot. This is the dramatic moment of suspense: will they be killed?

 But the dream maker leaves us hanging. Like a TV serial, the message feels akin to “tune in next week.” There is no lysis–no resolution to the crisis is depicted–although it’s hard to imagine anything other than a violent and frightening denouement. This also represents the psychic situation of the dreamer: conflict is looming. An old relational pattern is imperiled and it feels inescapable and catastrophic.

 Shadow

The shadow in this dream literally jumps out at the dream ego: the woman leader of the marauders is a vivid image of the anger and aggression that was banished from conscious life. Persona and shadow are always in a compensatory relationship; the dreamer’s persona is so avoidant and compliant that her shadow must attack in order to balance the psychic scales.

 When any psychic content is denied consciousness, it is banished to the wilderness of the unconscious. Out in the wild, exiled aspects of ourselves remain untamed, and appear dangerous to the ego. Although feelings like anger and aggression may pose a threat to an overly one-sided ego attitude, they are not likely actually to be dangerous. The woman warrior points to what can restore vitality to the dreamer’s psyche: the potent, rousing feminine force banished to her psychic wilderness. The dreamer feared her anger would be destructive to her marriage, but what was really at risk was its potentially destructive effect on her well-cultivated persona.

 Shadow’s purpose is to bring attention to what we need for growth toward wholeness. Our disowned parts may be healthy, life-giving, and energizing, but because they don’t appear that way to the ego, they take on a frightening aspect. The dream maker insists on addressing the dreamer’s complicity in submitting to her husband, and now confronts it by awakening emotions the dreamer has long feared and denied. The woman warrior’s ultimate purpose is forward facing: she arrives to strike a blow for freedom and emancipate the dreamer from her enslavement to “niceness.”.

 “We know that the mask of the unconscious is not rigid–it reflects the face we turn toward it. Hostility lends it a threatening aspect, friendliness softens its features.” (CW 12, para. 29) If the dreamer could allow her fury a place in consciousness instead of relegating it to shadow, the unconscious would not have to portray it as primal and attacking.

 Complexes

The dreamer’s authority complex is indicated at the outset of the dream: her husband is driving to a restaurant in the suburbs. He is driving fast, the way he usually does. At first, I feel nervous but then I remind myself that he is a good driver and I can relax. The dreamer does not question her husband’s judgment or access to aggression—he has a right to drive as fast as he pleases.

 The dreamer grew up in an affluent suburb; a patina of propriety and privilege characterized her family of origin. Risks were discouraged, traditional gender roles were valued, and the price of belonging was conformity. As an adult, the dreamer seldom went to restaurants like the one in the dream, so the dream maker is indicating that she has acceded to a younger, compliant way of being in the world. The dreamer carried deference into her marriage, where her husband’s authority ruled—to the detriment of her authority to assert herself and claim respect, exercise choice, and live into her creative, vital self.

 Animus

The dreamer’s husband as an animus figure is indicated by his role as the driver. Although driving a car may at first seem innocuous, by doing so the husband secretly set in motion the consciousness-altering confrontation with the marauders. Although the dream husband doesn’t “know” marauders will attack at a restaurant, what matters is cause and effect: he drove to the site of the confrontation. In dream work, if something happens as a result of something else, intentionality is implicit.

 Jung spoke about the anima/animus as psychopomp, or soul guide, and here we see the “both/and” nature of dreams: the dream husband is both an image of the dynamic the dreamer has with her actual husband (she has been overly complacent and letting him “drive” the relationship); and he functions as psychopomp, leading the dreamer into a confrontation with her own depths. In the logic of the unconscious, both are true even if paradoxical or downright contradictory to the conscious mind. In waking life, the dreamer’s dawning awareness of subjugation in the marriage is leading her inward, compelling her to encounter parts of herself that have long been devalued or split off.

 Self

The element that particularly surprised the dream ego was that the marauders’ leader was a fierce female. A dream element like the woman warrior that seems unexpected, astonishing, or strangely at odds with the dream narrative may be related to the dream’s telos–that which points toward the future—and telos, in turn, carries the agenda of the transpersonal center of the psyche that Jung called the Self. It constitutes a radical call for a reorientation of the conscious attitude.

 The Self appears in this dream as a mythic Fury, a force that does not care about the needs of the smaller personality, the ego. The leader is an indication of the Self, whose inexorable force is the call to greater consciousness. Outgrown attitudes can be destroyed, if necessary, for the sake of the dreamer’s individuation. The dreamer has been put on notice that the Self requires her to confront and integrate powerful aspects of the archetypal feminine that have long been exiled from consciousness. It is important not to tame the images in our dreams; they are not the ego’s lapdogs and do not appear in our lives to do the bidding of consciousness. They come with their own agenda. It may be that the dreamer’s life as she has known it needs to end–including her marriage.

 In a letter written late in life, Jung said, “God is the name by which I designate all things which cross my path violently and recklessly, all things which upset my subjective views, plans and intentions, and change the course of my life for better or worse.” The Self, Jung’s term for the God-image, is that which overturns the ego’s perceived autonomy and illusion of control.

 Conclusion

The dream arrived the night after the dreamer had had a significant fight with her husband, one in which she voiced for the first time some of her pent-up resentment. The dream maker provides information about the history of the current conflict. The dreamer has colluded in creating this crisis through her desire to avoid conflict and defer reckoning, rooted in her family of origin’s mindset of suburban complacency. The dream also shows what is now upon her: coming to terms with feminine rage that has been denied for so long that it has acquired archetypal force. This force may indeed be dangerous–at least to the conscious ego–but its ultimate intent is liberating. Much may get swept away in the process of integrating this previously split-off energy, but it heralds the coming of a new, more expansive attitude.

Copyright © 2021 This Jungian Life.  All rights reserved in all domains.

 

The final assignment in This Jungian Life Dream School is for you to write down a thorough interpretation of one of your dreams. Pick a dream that is recent or at least one that still has a sense of energy and aliveness. Then, systematically work through the dream according to the following questions:

1.) Subjective vs Objective. Is the dream primarily objective or subjective? Is it possible to see it from both perspectives? Considering the dream from a subjective lens, try to imagine what parts of your psyche the different elements might be picturing.

2.) Dramatic Structure of the Dream. Note the setting of the dream as well as the cast of characters. Follow the dream plot. What are the nodal points of development? Is there a clear resolution or lysis? Remember that the dramatic structure of the dream helps us to follow the energetic arc. What is different at the end of the dream? What has been added or lost? What has been threatened or strengthened?

3.) Association and Amplification. Make a list of all of the key dream elements. Note any personal associations you have. You shouldn’t need more than a couple of sentences — no need to get bogged down with long stories.

Are any elements magical or full of numinous energy? Or perhaps elements to which you have no significant personal associations? Then it’s time to move onto amplification. Don’t be afraid to use a symbol dictionary or do some internet research. Do any dream elements bring to mind a myth or fairy tale?

4.) Shadow. Where is shadow in the dream? Remember that it may be something that the dream ego finds repulsive, frightening, or absurd. If there is a person of the same sex as yourself in the dream, consider whether that person might be a shadow figure. Spend some time writing about how that element holds shadow for you. How does it compensate your persona?

5.) Anima/Animus. Is there an opposite-sex person in the dream? Consider whether this might be an image of anima or animus. Does this figure exert a fascination? How does this dream figure help the dream ego relate to the rest of the inner world?

6.) Complexes. Are parental complexes active in the dream? How about other core complexes or life themes? Do these show up in the dream?

7.) The Self. Self images in dreams are often very powerful and numinous. They may be beautiful and frightening. Where is the Self showing up in your dream?

Once you have answered all of these questions, make an attempt to state an overall interpretation of the dream.

 

I dreamt I was standing near a river, a clear and calm mountain river. People were gathered close to the river and they were looking at something floating on it. When the object got close it was a vintage stuffed rabbit, floating straight, face up, arms and feet close to the body. I remember thinking or hearing that the rabbit was in fact alive but frozen in a state of shock. When it got closer to the shore it sat up, looking at us. Instead of eyes it had long screws, that came out on either side. It started talking and said it needed a safe place to hide.

Feelings in the dream: Confusion

Context and Associations: My boyfriend just left. We had more than 10 years of relationship. He found someone else and said our relationship was an idealization and not something real.