Emily & Isabel; Literary Heroines In Dreams

Emily and Isabel : Literary Heroines in Dreams

Dreaming or awake, we perceive only events that have meaning to us.

— Jane Roberts

Emily

Many women writers I know, and not just those of my generation, still struggle with giving themselves permission to write, which is tantamount to permission to believe in themselves.  It’s true those of us who came of age in the sixties and seventies with all the motifs of liberation, still looked for men to complete them, And we wondered if we could really speak our truth. Since I was fascinated by my dreams and knew that I found it intimidating to compete with men, I hoped to gain more confidence and courage through Jungian psychotherapy. One dream I had during my analysis astonished me with its sad but sacred beauty. It showed me how I strove to believe I had talent to write poetry but unconsciously identified myself with sacrifice, even martyrdom.

At the time of the dream I had been reading Judith Farr’s biography of Emily Dickinson. Emily had an overbearing father whom she referred to as “Vesuvius at Home,” yet despite him, she wanted to present her work to the world. However, well before the end of her life as most of us know, Dickinson was virtually a recluse.  She retired to her room garbed in her white dresses, writing her poetry, as poetry is often written, in solitude. She stopped trying to get the attention of editors and stopped sending her work to her mentor at The Atlantic Monthly.

I believe by then she had a sense of her own genius and eventually reconciled herself with the circumstances that kept her from making her mark on her Victorian world. Perhaps she knew how far ahead of her time she was. After she died and her 1789 poems were discovered so beautifully packaged, and perhaps deliberately prepared for publication, of course, she was appropriately, if posthumously, admired, studied and praised. Her enigmatic inner life has been a subject for scholars ever since.

Earlier in her life Emily had submitted poems to Samuel Bowles, the editor of The Springfield Republic. Not only did he reject them but Bowles discouraged her from writing poetry at all.  She also corresponded with T.W. Higgison, the editor of The Atlantic in Boston, who became a kind of friend to her.  Higgison was totally befuddled, if intrigued, by her writing. Captivated, but suspicious of her innovations, her slant rhymes, her unconventional punctuation, he cautiously began a correspondence with her.  Her letters were especially coy and displayed her curious originality.  Higgison and others who did have an opportunity to meet her socially have all attested to the insufferable intensity of her personality.

It is evident that Emily had been wounded emotionally by someone with whom she had fallen in love, possibly on a trip to visit family friends in Philadelphia or a visitor to her home where her father, a state senator, often entertained various dignitaries.  It seems she corresponded with this man, and there are several spellbinding letters where she addresses him as “Master” and tells him of her feelings often in muted jokes and coy posturing:  “I’ve got a tomahawk in my side but that don’t hurt much.”   Teaching her work and reading her letters undoubtedly provoked my dream.  Whoever “Master” really was, and whatever projections he invited, it was Emily’s coquettish, half-plaintive, self-deprecation that was the right hook for my unconscious. And I had issues with my own bigger-than-life father as well.

I was in an art museum in my dream and turned a corner into a room where there was a huge, gorgeous, “alabaster” (one of Emily’s words) statue of Emily Dickinson crucified on a cross. She was partially alive but also a statue, i.e. to say, “frozen” in stone.  In the dream I take her down from the cross and hold her in my arms with great compassion and love.

In awe of the image in my dream, I dropped by a local Catholic church to look at the Stations of the Cross. I was aware that the dream adopted the posture of Michelangelo’s Pieta and that one of the stations reflects that image. Interestingly, it is the thirteenth station where Christ is taken down and held in the arms of his mother, which corresponded with the image in my dream.  The dream had come during the period in my therapy when my analyst Noni, had been asking me about the numbers thirteen and fourteen that continued to show up in my dreams. My own family trauma occurred when I was thirteen and fourteen and my father had a breakdown. Adolescence is a challenging time for most of us and I recall overwhelming emotional turmoil in response to my father’s emotional turmoil.  A few years later my father died suddenly and a psychological complex, my complicated relationship to the opoosite sex, was born at that time.

After having the dream, I wrote a poem using some of Emily’s language from her letters to “Master.” Certain poems were addressed to Master as well. His specific identity has never been known with certainty, although most critics name the married Reverend Charles Wadsworth. Emily’s three famous letters to Master include phrases broken with dashes. As in her poems, the style is beyond her era, almost contemporary, her method obtuse, and her meanings oblique. Yet we can recognize from the excerpt below the voice of someone who is suffering from repudiated expressions of love:

God made me—Master-— didn’t be—myself.  I don’t know how

it was done.   He built the heart in me—Bye and bye it outgrew me–

and like the little mother–with the big child I got tired holding him.

I heard of a thing called “Redemption”—which rested men and

women. You remember I asked you for it—you gave me something else.

I forgot the Redemption and was tired–no more— am older—tonight,                                     Master—but the love is the same—so are the moon and the crescent             . . .   (Farr 204)

Have you the Heart in your breast—Sir—is it set like mine—a little to

the left–has it the misgiving—if it wake in the night-perchance-itself

to it-a timbrel is it—itself to it a tune?  (Farr 212)

Like many of her readers, I found the letters puzzling, beautiful, disturbing and heartbreaking. And I was in awe of the image in my dream of the smooth white structure, its austere beauty.  Moreover,  the dramatic statement of a “crucified woman” poet stunned me to the core.  My dream seemed to conflate Dickinson with Jesus Christ.  The dream gave me a deep respect for the ingenious way that the human unconscious will draw together the combinations of assorted data and arrange suggestive symbols.  I realized the unconscious often exaggerates to get our attention, but I never doubted that my unconscious knew so much more than I did and that it had much to teach me.

Reworking the images in the intuitive act of writing the poem helped me feel them consciously.  I could have compassion for those feelings and then move away from the martyrdom with which I unconsciously identified. After having the dream, my own poem came on its own easily and afforded me relief and satisfaction. It became a made thing outside of me, rather than ill feelings festering within.

Consciously, I would never have thought of grafting myself onto Emily Dickinson.  She has been a difficult poet for me always; I felt her poems were often over my head.  What this dream did was choose to suggest the size of my ambition and show me how I really felt about my relationship with my father and the other men in my life.  Writing the poem helped me release these victimized judgments.  I wanted her own language in my poem and readers familiar with her work will recognize the snatches from her letters and some vocabulary from her poems:

I Dream The Passion of Emily

after the Master Letters

In the museum

under a great basilica—

the crucifixion of Emily Dickinson.

I lift her off

her alabaster cross,

an image of the Church’s 13th station.

Holding the small-boned wren

of her body in my arms,

we form a pale Pieta.

Through a hole

in her white dress

where the evidence of the spear would be,

my fingers find the wound

of Master’s tomahawk.

And I know white sustenance, know

what was sacrificed

for the poems tied

in fascicles, disinterred

from the father’s house.

I lift her fallen hand,

read the palm,

infinity’s pencil,

promise of circumference

yet to come. Loose

beneath her bridal veil,

the sherry-colored hair

overruns the crown

of buttercups and daisies.

Her heart is set

to the lower left

just like she said—

a full moon

folding to a crescent.

But the love is the same.

Emily’s poetry is cosmic, concerned with higher consciousness, death and transcendence. In a puritanical era, she eschewed institutionalized religion openly and yet her sensibility is entirely spiritual.  I believe that by the end of her life she understood that she was ahead of her time.  Many readers are spellbound by her baffling words and I can’t claim to fully understand many of her poems. Yet it’s as if the language and form together create something beyond words and we are drawn to reread the poems over and over.  Several poems lead me to suspect she had commerce with other dimensions and sensory access to the spirit world.

I had identified with Emily unconsciously. Though we lived in different centuries, our role as women inhibited us. Emily was infinitely more brilliant, talented and mysterious than I am. But my unconscious chose some of her posturing as a self-reflection. I was honored to have been gifted with this dream, honored by its stunning visual, and the fact that I know that all the images in the dream are aspects of myself, my unconscious projections as well as my ego self, remains. That I was the crucified one was a concept I understood. But there was also the message that I was tending to my own dying self, holding her in my arms, so-to-speak, which may have been a statement about seeking therapy and honoring my unconscious calling.

Isabel Archer

Both in and out of analysis, I have had prescient dreams. One of these dreams took three years to prove relevant.  It boggled my intelligence and threw my left brain for a loop to fathom just how my unconscious registered the significance of this dream when real life circumstances had not yet played it out. Furthermore, it seems entirely by accident that I discovered the dream’s revelation.  I have my analyst to thank for her advice. Here is the dream:

I’m working behind the counter at my bookstore.  A customer

has requested that I get down a big art book that’s on display

on one of the higher shelves.  I stand on the stool and lift the

book down. It weights a ton—is heavy and huge, about two feet square.

When I lay it on the counter I see it is “The Portrait of a Lady” by

Henry James.  It has a picture on its cover that I recognize from the Penguin

Edition paperback, which is a beautiful painting of a woman by

John Singer Sargent. The customer wants to buy it. I notice the book

costs $14.00.

I thought the dream was simply day residue because I had unpacked a box of penguin clasics the day before.  As I was shelving them, I admired the many classical and modern paintings which the series’ editors have chosen to replicate on their covers. My analyst, Noni, explained to me that even “day residue,” or the quotidian hum-drum banality of our daily lives which later shows up in our dreams, is selected specifically by the unconscious, not because of it’s recent occurrence but for its symbolic content.

We were not surprised to see that the book cost $14 as the numbers thirteen and fourteen had been showing up in my dreams for a while now and connected with the age I was during my adolescent trauma.  The price tag of the book in the dream was not logical, as a big art book is usually a lot more than $14.00. (This was years before I was familiar with Barnes & Noble’s remainders.) Noni asked if I had read James’ novel, The Portrait of a Lady. I had not. Our session time was up; I stood to leave. As she walked me to the door, very quietly and casually, she suggested I read the book.

The next day I took it home. All five hundred something small print pages with the gorgeously serpentine, Jamesian sentences that went on and one, clause after clause like intricate vines containing an English manor house.  It took me about a month to read and I did love story about Isabel Archer, a young—if naive—wealthy American woman who comes to Europe to see her relatives and eventually marries an Italian man without any money to back up his aristocratic title. Isabel discovers at the end of the story that her husband and the woman who has become Isabel’s best friend had an intimate relationship and have hoodwinked her into supporting their child. Isabel is both pensive and adventurous. She takes a risk marrying this morally questionable man and ends up quite unhappy.  Once she realizes she has been manipulated, she must decide how to react.  She maintains her dignity and one assumes in the end, although she understands her mistake in choosing this unfortunate marriage, she reconciles herself to her fate, or in other words, in her time and place, behaves like a respectable “lady.”

I could find nothing in the situation of the story to relate to myself except for certain characteristics in Isabel’s personality, her Pollyanna attitude of trust in others and the scope of her psychological self-probing.  She is devastated by her double betrayal, but her will and some deep, residual confidence, helps her keep going.

Noni and I could go nowhere with the dream.  Yet strangely enough, three years later, a confession from my best friend suggested strange parallels to the novel. I too, had been deceived, but preferred to look forward rather than back. I was no longer in therapy though I called Noni to tell her. I was already divorced and on my own, and seeing that I was not trapped in the nineteenth century like Isabel, I had escaped the situation which had betrayed me. I was angry however, that once again, like discovering the true circumstances behind my father’s premature death, I learned the truth about something concerning me that was purposely kept from me by the two people with whom I was closest at the time. When my anger evaporated, as for me anger inevitably does, I suppose you could say I remained a “lady” by forgiving my betrayers. Yet this incident energized me and motivated my decision to move out of the small town atmosphere of Maine to Boston.

There is a long scene in James’ novel where Isabel is sitting alone by the fire and thinking through her predicament. Years earlier I had underlined this passage in my book:

. . .  she should some day be happy again. It couldn’t be

she was to live only to suffer; To live only to suffer – only to feel the

injury of life repeated and enlarged – it seemed to her she was too

valuable, too capable, for that.

—Henry James

I doubt if I was consciously relating Isabel and myself at the time I marked that text, although it’s possible I was attracted to the idea of psychologically moving on from a position of injury. What I found most truly bizarre then—was that my unconscious mind managed to deliver up the information it had stored quite subtly long before the facts became clear. Nowadays I don’t find the idea at all odd. I just continue to be impressed by the impersonal, unconscious psyche and its wikepediac specificity.

It appears that the unconscious extends beyond our concept of linear time. Jung himself even defined the dream as “athe small hidden door in the deepest and most intimate sanctum of the soul, which opens to that primeval cosmic night that was soul log before there was conscious ego and will be soul far beyond what a conscious ego could ever reach.” This quote confirms for me what I had already suspected, that with the right induction, our conscious intuition could have access to information outside our usual boundaries. My fascination with the unconscious knowledge we possess continued to grow.  In joining a training dream group, I discovered methods that would facilitate that access.

********

I find dreams and poems to be similar in that they both utilize unconscious material. We are often confused as to why we would dream a certain dream, yet as we feel our repressed emotional knowledge, we can deepen our understanding of the unconscious.

When we write poetry, we put ourselves into a theta brain state where the unconscious arises and helps us “hear” the words. Often we don’t know where we are going and are surprised by what we say. After several drafts, we can then work the material with our left brain, finding the right form for the poem so it yields its message in a manner that seems to evade paraphrase. Poems speak so that particular words and their nuances rub against one another in order for feeling to arise in the reader. Literary dreams offer a whole other body of meaning to contend with. I couldn’t have willed either one of these dreams. But by their references alone, they brought me deeper connections to myself.

References:

Farr, Judith, The Passion of Emily Dickinson. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992.

James, Henry, The Portrait of a Lady. New York: Modern Library Paperback Edition, 2002.

The Eagle & The Vulture; Two Archetypal Bird Dreams

When a person is too deeply embedded in the collective, outer reality of everyday life, the discovery in his or her own dreams of  universal, archetypal images … can be a freeing experience. (Jungian Dream Interpretation Hall, 114)

In the world of archetypal symbolism birds in our dreams often indicate a spiritual endeavor. After all, they fly above us, closer to the heavens than we normally find ourselves. Their freedom looks exhilarating. In the body of a jet where we might find ourselves flying faster and higher than birds, we still lack open air, the wind in our hair so-to-speak, and we’re confined in mostly small seats amongst other people, who rather than lifting their arms entrained in synch with ours, are coughing, eating, sleeping, working, or looking more concerned than carefree. Therefore when we observe our fine feathered friends in dreams, we consider the context of course, but often think of the heights and liberation of the spirit.

Of a very large species, unless we are ornithologist, we mostly categorize the birds we see in dreams generally. Two important dreams I had at a time of spiritual initiation in my life delivered messages about two divergent paths due to the differences in the winged creatures and the situations in which they appeared. Yet both dreams appeared to promise worthwhile journeys.

*

I had been steeped in sorrow when a dream lifted me out of my depression almost immediately. At the time of the dream I had not been a student of dream work, but even in my relative ignorance, I could feel that the dream was a blessing. As background information, let me state again that I had lost my father in adolescence. When I was thirteen he suffered a nervous breakdown and when I was fifteen he died of a self-administered overdose of drugs. He was a doctor, so I often wondered if he had intentionally ended his life. Another pertinent fact relating to this period in my young life was that my mother told my siblings and I that he died of a heart attack. In her own shock and pain, she soldiered on, never visibly mourning, so that we did not express our grief either.

I grew up with a certain suspicion about my father’s death but I kept it to myself and repressed what emotions I had about those two difficult years. I was just becoming a woman and my advent into womanhood was affected by what I had witnessed, a kind of quiet and sometimes not-so-quiet desperation in my father. I began to pick boyfriends and later, men friends, who would abandon me and I often reacted with some hysterical end-of-the-world responses to the termination of these relationships.

By the time that my bird dreams occurred, I intellectually understood that my reactions to the loss of a partner were irrational and at times, out of proportion to the seriousness or lack thereof, of the relationship. I “knew” that my unarticulated grief for my father surfaced and further exacerbated my sense of loss.

Knowing however, didn’t help the feelings to subside. So when in my mid thirties, I was suffering from the betrayal of a man I had been very happy with, I didn’t seek out traditional therapy, having gone through five years of that a few years back after a  divorce. One day a friend suggested I see her astrologer who lived on an island in Casco Bay, outside of Portland, Maine where I was living. I liked the idea of crossing the water, an archetypal theme in itself, to find some answers as to why my grief was inconsolable.

I sat on the ferry at ten in the morning, smoking a cigarette. In those days I’d lost my appetite for meals and I lived on cigarettes and spring water. The clear October landscape hurt me with its gorgeous auburn leaves and cerulean sky and the bright contrasting colors stabbed at my eyes like an insult, the whole landscape somehow provocative of my lost happiness. A day for lovers, I thought.

Whatever the weather, during that difficult time, I seemed to turn each day into another reason to mourn.  The beautiful vista of churning dark blue water wrapped around the speckled islands of the bay only made me feel my loneliness more intensely.  In my self-contained universe, every song on the radio seemed designed to bring back the image of my lover, our romantic ritual of dancing in his living room. I wallowed in memories.  Images played through my mind like some dopey refrain of the country music he’d introduced me to and yet, quite the wailing country diva myself, I kept bringing them back in order to ask myself why it hurt so much. Was it just the stock cliché, betrayal, jealousy, anger and humiliation I felt, or was it truly losing the essence of this wonderful man from my life that caused me this irrepressible grief? I was convinced of the latter. Some things you just know.

As I debarked from the boat and turned on foot up one of the unpaved roads of the island, my anger was gone but the grief puddled up in my body so that only the consistent rhythm of my sighs, like the whitecaps, one after another washing against the boat, could convince me I was still living. As clueless as the gaping gulls who waddled toward me in search of a hand-out, I had crossed the water to find an answer. Once on the island, I followed the twists in the dirt road according to a scribbled map, my gaze drawn from the street signs to the wild flower gardens, the slatted fences and yards littered with tricycles and lawn chairs even this late in the season. The weeds which had begun to overtake the gardens seemed to smell of decay.

I entered Mary Alice’s screened-in porch and rang the bell. Though I doubted I would find any solace in the reading, I was curious as to what she could say without knowing me or my situation at all. Yet within my two hour meeting this lovely and talented astrologer, a wise woman and mistress of metaphor, was able to give me explanations about the fragile state of my psyche that made more sense than the reasoning I’d worked through in my therapy.

Her first image of me was that my hands were stuck in a Chinese puzzle. The more I tried to wiggle them out, the more I found them locked up. Without getting too technical, I’ll just say that she showed me how two very intense planetary transits were at work affecting my moon or emotions, and Venus, my relationship life. She advised me to simply surrender, to sit in my rocking chair by the fire, drinking tea with my favorite blanket around my shoulders, playing my saddest country arias allowing myself to descend into the divine abyss of loss— (the key word here is divine) “Until you are lifted out,” she said. “And you will be lifted out.” She peered at me seriously; “And when you are, you will become someone entirely new.”

On the collective level, Pluto, the planet of ruination and riches, had just entered the sign of Scorpio where it would remain for the next twelve years. She explained that in addition to my personal plight, the universe was making an energetic shift itself and that as we came closer to the millennium, many individuals were tapping into an awakening. Humanity itself was gearing up for a major evolutionary leap, one which would take many years to become apparent. Oh yeah, the harmonious Age of Aquarius, I thought, remembering the sixties musical Hair.  So how come I’m miserable? She said my soul had chosen this particular impact and would be opening to a new purpose but first, thanks to Pluto’s renovation technique, it needed to be stripped of emotional dependencies, so that I would learn the true nature of love, which was unconditional. She explained that I had three planets in the eighth house, the natural home for Pluto. Later, reading about Pluto I came across this quote by the eminent Jungian-Astrologer Liz Greene: “If there are many planets in the eighth, the the individual must learn to look darkness in the face (85).

I didn’t really understand much astrology then, but I did know that  I had a loaded eighth house and that mythically, the descent is often the way into transformation and I thought of the poet Dante in his dark woods, the mythical story of Persephone’s abduction, Odysseus’ trip to Hades and the many literary figures and writers who went to the underworld before returning with new knowledge to deliver to the upper world.

I was also aware of the many poets who never rose from their descent: Plath, Sexton, Berryman, Crane, and so many of the French writers I’d studied in college, as well as my own father. Mary Alice’s astrological explanation for my crisis clicked intuitively in a way I couldn’t explain. As psycho-babbly as these astrological terms (“Pluto square, Saturn transit”) sounded to me at the time, I sensed there was something more profound at work. My sense of loss was almost disproportional to the reality of the event. Among other things I learned about my chart that day was the fact that I had been born to lose my father and with each new loss, the original feeling of loss was triggered.

My stricken mother had simply gone on when my father died. With her four children in tow, she never allowed herself or us to collectively grieve. It was a different era back in 1963. President Kennedy death preceded by father’s by three weeks and in a way we were already grieving. My mother did what she thought was the right thing. Put one foot in front of the other and move forward. But I thought I had worked through the themes of the lost father in my therapy during the years of my divorce. To my surprise I found out that Saturn, the Patriarchal Father, was the ruler of my particular astrological chart and both my Pluto and my Saturn, as well as Mars, the planet of war and will, were located in the eighth house, the native house of Scorpio, the most intense and emotional sign.

I remembered clearly the night my father died.  A detective had come to the door with his hat and coat. My mother stood at the railing on the stairs and told us our father had had an accident and died of a heart attack. I remembered distinctly three words surfacing in my head: “he’s killed himself.”  Even at fifteen, my own unconscious intuited the truth I didn’t actually discover until I was twenty-nine.

On the trip back to the mainland, I felt for the first time since the breakup as if my emotional and mental state might now make some sense. Somehow believing in a spiritual rescue and recovery was the most heartening idea I had heard in many months and I had learned the effect of the “Pluto square” was to clear away what was not “serving” my “higher purpose.” I was, quite simply, in hell. Incarcerated by the classical God Hades, deep in the realm of  depression and loss.

Another name for the ruler of subterranean spaces was “Plutus” which means “riches.” Treasures and resurrections were also associated with Pluto. What I didn’t know at that time was how very long the journey would take to yield these treasures. But shortly thereafter, in earnest, I was lifted out by a major archetypal dream. I recognized it as important by the numinosity of the images and the level of emotional intensity it left me with.

I am walking on the beach with a adolescent girl who is in my care. She is cranky and nagging me. I find her to be a real pain in the neck . At some point she steps on a twig and gets a splinter in her foot. I try to  get the splinter out, and as I do, it flies from my hands, boomeranging out and  then back into her forehead, hitting her right between her eyes. Now I am truly concerned about her because the splinter has become a wedge as big as a meat cleaver.  I go to pull it out again but when I release it from her head, her head splits open in clean very surreal planes and out flies a huge bird. The two very cubically neat halves of her head fold back into place as the eagle flaps its enormous wings and flies above and around us. We hold each other squealing and laughing in awe of the bird’s power, acting like giddy young girls and I feel a deep love  this girl.

This dream was a tremendous release. I wasn’t sure of all the implications but I knew the girl I didn’t want any part of was me at thirteen or fourteen, that it spoke of an adolescent wound, most likely my father’s death, and that out of this girl’s pain had come a huge bird. It seemed to me the wound of  abandoning boyfriend and the wound of the father were overlaid and had thrown me back to the girl who had never healed, who lived with this issue now right between the eyes. Depending on the genus, birds are often associated with the spiritual world, the heavens, although some like the owl, albatross or raven are associated with more negative augury.  But this bird was a huge eagle with an enormous wingspan and what I felt from the image of it flapping its wings was the sheer physical power of its body. It was the joy of witnessing that huge, muscular body  and feeling the strength of its wings that delighted me and the young dream girl. It is difficult to convey the fascination and pleasure we felt in watching the enormity of that bird take off.

The American and Native American symbol of the eagle is related to celestial omnipotence. Furthermore, the eagle is associated with the sun’s power. It is Zeus’s companion in Greek myths, and to the Christian mystics, is a symbol of Christ’s ascension, “ .  .  .  also an attribute of John the Evangelist .  .  . Jung regards the eagle as a father symbol.” (Imagine my surprise!!!) (The Herder Symbol Dictionary  63)  I found even more synchronistic meaning in J.C. Cooper’s Illustrated Encyclopedia of Traditional Symbols: “ .  .  . release from bondage .  .  . Alchemic: The soaring eagle is the liberated part of the prima materia .  . . resurrection and the new life in baptism: the soul renewed by grace “ (italics mine).

In the dream there was a transformation and the head wound was instantaneously healed. It was only later that I realized in Freudian psychology that the foot wound is a sexual wound, the Oedipal wound from the father. In the story of Oedipus, the baby boy is shackled to a rock with a pin through his foot, left to die from exposure. Freud associated Oedipus’ foot with the phallus, as his crime later in life is to unconsciously commit incest and beget children with his mother/wife.  His father had wounded his foot and after Oedipus escapes and is adopted, he grows up and unknowingly kills his real father.

The young girl’s splinter or foot wound becomes a wound in her head, an unconscious complex. When the wounding object is released, the spiritual power flies out in the form of the eagle. The alchemical gold of transformation is in the lead of depression, as the bird is in the whining adolescent’s head.

I felt so clear and relieved that I actually thought my trauma was now over. I felt I had arrived on the new level. Was this the “lifting out” Mary Alice had predicted?  You will be someone new. This is not to say there weren’t recurring relapses into sorrow and more pining, but I felt I had a leg up from the abysmal pit of depression I’d lived in for so long.

A few days after the dream I picked up a poem by the Hungarian poet Miraslav Holub and read the lines You ask the answer, it is but one word-Again. As I read these words I realized I wanted to go back into therapy.

Driving to a small seacoast town an hour away, I began going twice a week for two hour and a half sessions with Winona, a petite woman who grew up in New England and had just returned after spending twenty or so years in Belgium and Switzerland where she trained at the C.G. Jung Institute in Kusnacht, outside Zurich. By this time my ex and I had sold and split the proceeds of our house. I bought the beach condo and used some of the money for analysis. Due to the intensity of three analytic hours a week, during this round of therapy, my dreams both descended from the heavens and rose like steam from the underworld and I could not record them fast enough. Nor could I stop writing poems. It was a tremendously introspective but fruitful time.

2

It’s said that the early dreams in an analysis set the themes for the entire analysis and so it was in my own experience. Here is my first dream (with another bird) where I believe I found a new view of myself and the work I had to do.

I am on a beautiful beach. It is the shape of my neighborhood beach but much more tropical more like the beach in New Zealand which I recently saw on the postcard I received from a dear friend. I am walking with my son and we see in the distance, walking towards us, an old woman wearing a  babushka and flying a kite. My eight year old son is excited to hold the kite.  As the old woman approaches us, she looks me straight in the eye and holdsout her arm to hand me  the kite string. My son is jumping up and down, trying to grab it. As I look up at the kite itself, I notice it is not an inanimate object but a live vulture that the old woman is flying on a leash. I back away from her, shaking my head No . . .  No, I don’t want anything to do with a  vulture. But my young son jumps up and down saying “Take it Mom,Please take it.” I keep shaking my head and backing away, pulling him away until I catch the eye of the old woman again and she nods at me as if to say, “Honey, you’d better take this vulture. It’s yours. It belongs to you.”

Most of us identify and recognize the vulture as the bird who feeds on the dead. But what I didn’t see at the time was the significance of the vulture as a symbol of  underworld wisdom. It was sacred to the Egyptians as a guardian of the threshold between life and death. In a Jungian sense, the image came from the collective unconscious, a heavy archetypal image, universally comprehended as an association with the dead.  Again, the symbol dictionaries emphasized interpretations synchronistic to my particular experience. “Since it eats carrion and transforms it into vital energy, the vulture . . . knows the secret of the transformation of worthless material into gold.” (Herder, 211)  And “Ambivalent as maternal solicitude, protection and shelter, and as death-dealing destruction and voracity.  All vultures were thought to be female and symbolized the feminine principle with the hawk as male (italics mine) . . . As a scavenger the vulture represented purification, a worker of good. In Egypt it represented the Mother Goddess, maternity and love, Isis having assumed the form of a vulture” (Cooper).

I had had two bird dreams, one with the father’s wound which transforms to a powerful inner male figure and one with a crone, a wise inner feminine associated with the Egyptian Mother Goddess, Isis.  Consciously, in my quotidian life, I had no reason for having dreamt these symbols. I was familiar with neither at the time of the dreams. These were “big dreams,” with collective symbols which came at a time of crisis.

With the help of my analyst, I took the vulture dream in two ways. I was perhaps lifted out of my black hole but by no means had I put my depression  behind me. It was time to mine this underworld and come to grips with its contents. As the realm of the dead, it also constituted the world of my father. I knew I must go back and look at how I had integrated the negative side of my father.

My young son’s reaction in the dream, his excitement and enthusiasm to take on the vulture, to let it fly as his own pet, showed in Jung’s terms, my young animus or my newly reborn creative male side, eager and capable of handling this material. I must follow the vulture. And the old lady, whom I associated to my Polish grandmother, a pious and spiritually wise immigrant with an abiding faith in the supernatural-she was the archetypal Wise Old Woman. What had become of the hag, the dark side of the Great Mother?  Foolishly, I thought she was gone for good. I didn’t realize then that in times of new emotional setbacks  which carried repressed anger or fear, she would reappear again, often in the form of a bag lady.  But for now, I was thrilled to have an older woman as an inner mentor, a crone.

I also had her in Winona, who was far from crone-looking but older and wiser than I in the world of dreams.  But this old woman in the dream was also a potential part of me, the part that was wiser than my ego, who I thought I was, what I thought I needed, that narrow range to which we limit ourselves from our unique egoic perception.  I learned not to trust the ego’s position in the dream. The conscious self did not want the vulture; the unconscious animus, my son, was raring to take it on!  With Winona’s help, I could see from the wise woman’s perspective that she knew better than my ego did. The dream clicked in the specific direction of my new “path.” Dream work seemed a best friend to poetry, my chosen field. I’ve been immersed in the imagery of both ever since.

References

Cooper, An Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Traditional Symbols. London: Thames and Hudson, Ltd., 1978

Hall, James, Dream Interpretation, Toronto: Inner City Books, 1983

Banal Dreams, Beneficent Messages: . . . Or Don’t Delete Your Day Residue . .

An Essay on Dream Image Work

As I see it, the real function of the arts is to permeate

the environment of the world with a metaphysical

reality so that man is not alone with the ego.

–Cecil Collins

(Or “woman,” I might add, in the case of this story . . . )

So often we wake from a dream thinking, Oh I just dreamt that because that’s what I did yesterday–what a dumb dream! And we forget it in a moment. But even those banal dreams can have beneficent messages. Messages that sometimes may make a difference in a decision or choice our conscious mind is considering. Consider this essay as a significant example.

Twenty-two years ago, on the eve of what astrologers were calling “The Harmonic Convergence,” five other women and I drove out to Cynthia’s mom’s house on Little Sebago Lake in Maine to hang out and relax over the weekend. It was a gorgeous day and we hurried into our bathing suits and climbed into these wonderful lake lounges, our books in dry, protective pockets inside the waterproof chaises. Then we paddled our way out to the free-floating dock. Climbing out, we set ourselves up with towels and drinks and talked quietly or read our books under the perfect warmth of the August sun. There were the usual disturbances of other boats and voices calling from the shore, but the scene was primarily peaceful.

We were talking about a phenomenon sweeping the local feminist community of southern Maine called, vaguely and innocuously enough, “The Artists’ Workshop.” This particular Artists’ Workshop was designed to help “struggling feminist writers and artists.” We had just attended a meeting that had never really specified what was meant by “help” or what skills were to be actualized during the session.  Lynn, an old friend of mine with whom I had worked at my bookstore was the woman who had initially invited me to join.

This was 1987 and at the time, I had never heard of a  pyramid scheme, such as that one that recently helped bring down the world economy. Guised in New Age language, set up to make money for those who get in early enough, The Artist’s Workshop was said to be a brilliant new way to support independent women. Those who don’t literally do the math could be perfectly charmed by the energy and lured in by the enthusiasm of the group. Although I didn’t really believe Lynn, or any of her friends, thought they were perpetuating a losing proposition, one that would hurt others in the end, I was immediately suspicious.

Usually I was a Pollyanna when it came to trust, but there was something that didn’t make sense to me. Math is not my strong point; it’s one of my right-brain challenges in fact. But I did know some logical left-brained people and consulted them. A pyramid scam essentially grows exponentially at such a quickly multiplying rate that inevitably at some point it has to collapse. This one was to work with an airplane metaphor.

For $1500 you could buy a seat on the plane. You then sold eight other seats and were promoted to a “co-pilot.” Those eight people gave you $1500 a piece and lo and behold, before you knew it, you had $12,000 in cash. Lynn was using this leverage to make a long desired geographical move cross country. And she did move and it served her well. As for the women who gave her their money—they took a gamble but didn’t fare as well. Some of those women were the women on the dock with me that day.

I tried to tell them the probable risks. But everyone in our small city was discussing this thing and in those days I could be so passionately judgmental I’m sure my negativity was a turnoff to others with stars (or dollar signs) in their eyes. The scheme had probably already gotten past the point of any returns. But in entrepreneurial Maine, there were so many young holistically-minded-women trying to break out into their own practice—massage therapists, nutritionists, specialists in herbal flower remedies, what have you—everyone wanted to quit their day job. I had just sold my store and the idea of chance at a secure financial start on a new venture was very seductive.

In our small city people in their mid thirties took risks and you could “do your dream” here more easily than in a larger, more populated area where real estate prices were off the charts. The fact was that, at this point, those who were promoting the Artists’ Workshop show had already invested and were convinced that there were enough people in the world that this thing could keep moving and liberate anyone from the tedium of meaningless job. We found out later it had already been exhausted in Boston and the airplane was flying north to more provincial places with smaller populations and people with less cash to burn.

So I had been considering doing the workshop. I was tempted and I had the cash on hand. I had even confronted Lynn with the ethical problem behind what she was promoting. “What if the women who give you their money with their own good will are left in the lurch when they can’t find anyone else to board the plane?” I asked.  “Well, maybe that’s their karma,” she answered.

Her reply didn’t sit right with me in that it misused the spiritual belief system, almost as the Hindu caste system does when it rationalizes that the low-lying “untouchables” have been born to their lowly state as a result of karmic payback, therefore people of higher castes are justified in looking down at them. Despite any reasoning about the cause and effect of karmic balancing, I believed that someone who follows a spiritual path does not knowingly put others at a disadvantage. Then again, we were grown-ups, and Lynn maintained that everyone knew the risks. I claimed that ultimately someone down the line would lose out while I would have benefited from her money. That, I maintained, might be bad karma. Perhaps I was overly self-righteous but I didn’t think, in good conscience I could ask someone to give me money selling her on the idea they’d get it back when I couldn’t guarantee anything of the sort.

We vehemently discussed the pros and cons that sunny afternoon on the dock to the humming motors of outboard boats. The scene was totally peaceful until out of nowhere this whaler full of twenty-something boys came whipping by, throwing its wake like a tsunami over our sacred space. We all stood up, our books falling into the lake, drinks tipping over while towels were soaked. We scolded and hollered, cursing and shaking our fists at the boys, and to our great surprise, they looped around, came back, jumped out of their boat, swam toward us, climbed onto our dock and began throwing us in the water!

This was so outrageous that in between the screaming, we couldn’t help but laugh and fight back. Everyone was either climbing onto the dock or throwing someone else off. Here we were, domestic goddesses in our thirties, and these younger boys were aggressively attacking us. One stayed in the boat of course, and we could see the empty beer cans scattered on its floor.

At one point the dock was full of wrestling women and young men listing one way then the other. Our feet sliding, everyone was grappling and screaming, grunting and laughing as the four corners of the square dock alternately dipped beneath the surface of the lake. Then, as suddenly as they had come, the boys began to swim back toward their boat. We held onto one of them and pummeled him with our fists as he lay on his stomach, reaching with the upper half of his body towards the water. Finally we threw him overboard. They whipped away in their whaler leaving us hysterical. It was a very strange interlude and in the quiet left behind, we turned to each other and howled like schoolgirls.

Later that night we cooked dinner outside and saluted the planetary alignment. I found out the next day that after I had gone to bed, two of the women went skinny-dipping and that the lake had been full of revelry into the wee hours of the morning.  Back home a day or so later, my dream took its imagery from the crazy incident at the lake. It was one of those plebeian dreams, a literal playback of the tape of our lake incident a few days before.

But this dream was not only a warning not to dismiss the imagery of the unconscious even when it seems solely connected to “day residue;”  the dream turned out to be a response to my query about “The Artist’s Workshop.”  Here’s the dream:

I’m with my women friends on the dock at the lake, Suddenly a boat full of young men comes by and sprays us. The boys get out of the boat and swim to the dock, attacking us,throwing us in the water, trying to take over the dock.We fight back and there is a huge scramble of bodies lurching and falling, pushing, pulling and piling onto one another. It seems as though there are more and more people on the dock and the emotional atmosphere in the scene turns scary. Suddenly I notice one corner sinking completely underwater and I am struck with the thought: This Dock Will Sink. Then I awake.

I probably would have dismissed this dream as a nothing but my memory’s image of the exact events a few days previous had I not been a dream junky, training in dream work with a Jungian mentor. Furthermore, I had distinctly asked my unconscious for information about the Artists’ Workshop before I went to bed that night. I must admit, as adamant as I was with Lynn and as hard as I argued against it with my other friends, I too was tempted to try it.   The timing was perfect as I was “between” jobs and unsure of where I was going next.

Yet that morning when I thought about the dream, I was convinced I had the information I needed.  In the not-too-distant future, that airplane was doomed to crash and sink just like the exaggerated dock in the dream, and I, for one, decided I was not going to be on it.

Although I did tell my friends, several took the risk anyway and guess what? They lost their money. We were exactly one tier too late in the Airplane game.  My girl friends, though disappointed, seemed to be good natured about the loss later, admitting it was a gamble but still, none of us were well off and I was relieved not to be out $1500. Naturally this only increased my faith in communing with the unconscious.

* This whole incident brings up some issues about the New Age world of business as opposed to the true workings of spiritual consciousness in the universe. Over the years I have become more suspicious as I’ve consulted with many people and taken many courses and workshops in the so-called spiritual fields of healing and consciousness. What I’ve learned is that human weakness is rife and that in this field, perhaps more than others, one must be one’s own personal guide.

The issue of trust is just as shaky as it is in the traditional medical field where we have looked to Doctors as if they were gods. Our higher selves are our own best guides. There are guru-type charlatans in the New Age business just as there are in any other kind of business. People have unconscious shadows and when it comes to money, it’s easy to go unconscious. I knew from writing poetry and from meditation that an inner world of knowledge exists and that the practice of listening and stillness helps us arrive there.

Despite the mainstream media’s jokes about “The Moronic Convergence” I believed there was a new energy available for spiritual development after that planetary alignment. Many prophetic writings mention the “dispensation” for the human race that was destined to come at the close of the 20th century. As we see our outer reality challenge us more, turning inward to our own guidance may be all there is to rely on.

Our dreams will speak to us if we make the effort to ask. We can incubate a dream by holding a problem in mind as I did that night. Whatever dream comes, no matter how banal, or removed it may seem from our question, if we look carefully, we will find it is relevant.

References:

*quoted in

Harvey, Andrew  and Mark Matousek., Dialogues with a Modern Mystic,. Wheaton, IL: Quest, 1994.

Dreamwork Blog: Wheelchairs & Balloons

I had a very touching dream last night. I had been feeling a little down despite all my reasons to be grateful for the life I’m living, I was focusing on the sorry subject of money. I’ll admit, it is a subject fraught with complexes for me. I’ve always followed my heart . . . been a book store owner (favorite job), a book reviewer, radio reviewer, free lance writer, adjunct professor, undergrad and grad, and loved all those jobs. Still, they were always part-time and I was patching dollars and cents together. Now I’m an all out entrepreneur, teaching dream work and helping writers in a consultation business, and still, not Ms. Moneybags. So I’ve been taking a course with the wonderful master of money attraction, Ernest Chu, whose book, Soul Currency, says money comes from how you feel inside, which of course, I know . . .  intellectually . . . so why was I wasting my time feeling bad when I could choose to add up my spiritual assets and realize my true net worth?  Well, we forget. We are habit-bound creatures and must stay conscious and aware to make an intention manifest.

So, we had class last night and it was uplifting. Everyone learning to ride the tide of the moment and choose to feel wealthy. Challenging exercises, fun discussions where we realized we all share the same ingrained thought patterns that have tripped us up in money market. Money and Love were the subjects. What’s your strategy for getting love?  How does that tie in with your feelings about being abundant? Interesting psychology to get your mind around.

So  . . . and I’m starting every paragraph with so, because this is a step by step growing experience  . . . and so I had a dream last night.

I was in a hospital visiting someone and somehow got sidetracked by another patient who was in a wheelchair. I saw that he was crying. He was about twenty five and I had a motherly thing for him, so I went over and put my arms around him and I could feel a very intense closeness in the hug we gave each other. I began to ask him questions about himself and he didn’t talk but pulled out a pad of paper and began to draw and I saw that he was an artist. He was drawing a park on a lovely day. Then I noticed there were many, many balloons tied to his wheelchair, in all festive colors and I felt an enormous love for him.

So. My younger male side, the potential breadwinner that never materialized when I was twenty-five, is upset. Is crying. However, when push comes to shove and he’s questioned about it, he pulls out his artistry and draws a lovely picture. Probably what I should be visualizing instead of a baglady . . . . and then there’s the delight of the balloons, many and many colored, a sign of celebration!

Now true, my mother is in a wheelchair and I see her every day. And I love her. But  we often dismiss dreams due to what we dreamworkers call “everyday residue,” or what’s left over from the day.   But dreams mostly show us what we are unconscious of. I’m aware I love my mother and don’t need to dream about that. And true, I know of a few sick people right now, so hospitals are not too distant from my mind. So the dreaming mind will draw on the everyday associations. But I believe the dream is saying it is time now, to show myself the money!  To bless the energy (which is all money really is) of doing what I love. Writing, poetry and teaching about spirit and the spirit of dreams. Maybe in the next dream, the patient will just get up and walk.