Of Butterflies and Mothers: The Numinous Dream

A month ago, I lost my almost 95-year-old mother. I felt that I’d been losing her incrementally, one small stroke at a time as she descended deeper into dementia for the last five years. At the end she was content, docile and sweet, though we had had some rough times in the years before when she was in the early stages.

As she lost her balance, she could no longer walk; as she lost her vocabulary, she would no longer talk. It was a heart-breaking experience for those who loved her and knew her as a strong, independent, beautiful woman for most of her long life. Eventually she stopped eating and drinking and in the last week of her life she was bedridden, her eyes closed to the world. For five days we watched her breath become shallower, her vital signs weakening daily. On the last day of her life she opened her eyes and struggled with her breath for several hours, made a little more comfortable with morphine.

Two nights before she died I had a very short but numinous dream. I am with a group of people outside somewhere and a flock of bright yellow butterflies swoops down upon us and then spirals off in synch above our heads. I think there is a sound of “ooo”ing and “ah”ing amongst us and the sense is that something quite magical has touched us, maybe even blessed us.

According to Wikepedia, the word “numinous” comes from the Classical Latin “numen” which infers the presence or power of the divine. In the early twentieth century Rudolf Otto popularized the word in his classic book The Idea of the Holy. Otto names two characteristics to a numinous experience, a reaction of fear and trembling, or a fascinating attraction. He also suggests there is a very personal response, as if one had had a sacred visitation from the transcendent world. The word sometimes implies a supernatural occurrence.

Many people begin their spiritual journey with a numinous dream. The magical quality of the images and the interaction between the dreamer and something deemed divine leave the dreamer with a lingering sense of having been “touched by an angel.” These are what C.G. Jung referred to as “Big Dreams.”  Even since I began listening to my own as well as other people’s dreams, I have run into this experience only rarely. But these are the dreams people remember forever, even if they do not follow, record and think about their dreams on a regular basis.

I’ve had a handful of these dreams in my life and in some cases they were initiations into deeper searching. In Jung’s terminology, the “Self” is divine. When we put ourselves consciously on a path to “individuation,” Jung’s term for becoming whole, becoming our best selves, fulfilling our purpose, we are moving toward expressions of the Self. Self with a capital S, contains and transcends “ego.” And in Jungian psychology we are intent on going beyond what the Ego knows, suppressing Ego in terms of self-aggrandizement, i.e. anti-egotistical. Usually in our dreams we are observing and experiencing the venture in terms of the ego’s point of view.

But there are often other figures, objects and landscapes that have their own existence, apart from ego, and in dream work we try to make these other ego-alien points of view more conscious so we can know what parts of us are unconsciously expressing themselves. These are aspects of our “shadow.”  But shadow is not necessarily negative. We can have a positive shadow, even a “numinous” shadow where knowledge or understanding seems to come from outside of ourselves.

In many cultures the butterfly is a symbol of the soul. In Greek it is “psyche” which also is a homonym for “soul.”  The overall atmosphere in my dream was infused with a rush of awe. I had the sense that we’d all looked up at the same time, that as the butterflies swooped, our heads raised up to meet them and for a brief moment we were all entrained together.

When I awoke, I immediately thought of my mother with wonder. She had stopped eating but she had done that before and begun again. This time I felt her soul was already in movement toward the other side. Often at the end of praying aloud for her, I had encouraged her, if she saw the light, to go toward it. Though she’d been a fervent Catholic, she looked at me as though she did not understand what I was saying. But I believe the day of my dream was the day she began to surrender.

Dreams that leave us in wonder and move us emotionally into awe, as if we’ve been graced with a transcendent presence, fall into the category of the “numinous.”  Sometimes these dreams may be actual visitations of the deceased, sometimes they are given messages from the unconscious, from other dimensions to which we are briefly given access. These dreams evoke beatific longings and a connection to superconsciousness.

Mine was a healing dream, if only for me. I felt reassured that she had begun her journey. Later I realized the etymology of her name “Stacia” is from “Anastasia” which means “Resurrection” in Greek.

I was comforted by the dream. I wanted her to go; she already seemed to have gone though she’d left her body behind for several years. Yet no one is prepared to lose a mother. It is a primal loss, one that, according to the French writer Marcel Proust, we never recover from. Still, I am so grateful for that numinous dream, the force of, not one, but a whole fleet of winged creatures taking flight, lofting upward to only God knows where mothers receive all the love they’ve given.

The Utopian Dream: The Sixties’ Hippies & The New Age

Last night I watched a special on the  Biography channel about the Hippies of the Sixties. The documentary followed the Hippie movement from Timothy Leary’s discovery of LSD and its Haight Ashbury beginnings, to its psychedelic pinnacle with the Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper Masterpiece and Broadways’ Box Office Block Buster, “Hair”, to the sexual freedom within the Back-To-The Land communes, to the flood of Eastern philosophy and spirituality into the mainstream, to the tragedies of the King and Kennedy assassinations, to the darkness of Charlie Manson’s “family,” and the violent clashes of protesters and police outside the Democratic Convention in Chicago in sixty-eight, to the phenomenon of Woodstock Nation and the Rolling Stones’ Altamount Concert  debacle, to the inauguration of Richard Nixon and the CIA’s subsequent secret war on political dissidents, to the protests which finally led to  the end of the Viet Nam War.  Quite the decade.

Of those of us Boomers who came of age during that tumultuous era, many became “Yuppies,” upwardly mobile members of society by the time of the mid to late seventies. But against those who say the Sixties era of Love and Flower Children was ultimately a failure, there are just as many who believe the sixties prepared the culture for the inexorable changes that we are now facing.

It was no accident that the Age of Aquarius celebrated in “Hair” occurred some forty years before “Jupiter aligned with Mars,” but we have only now reached the end of the Piscean Age astrologically. The “vibration” in the zeitgeist was not an artificial trend but rather the first blasting wave of a higher frequency to which the planet was, and is still now, attuning. The new energies rushing in undoubtedly threw people off balance, and the discovery of mind-expanding drugs began to show what these new energies could cultivate on their own. Today we drink more water to keep in balance, today we exercise routinely. Today we meditate without drugs.

Casualties happened as they do in any revolution. Young people became infused with these fevers provoked by certain injustices and hypocrisies they saw in the society, many of which have not yet been eliminated. But the pursuit of equality for Afro-Americans and women, and for that inalienable right, happiness, the goals of anti-war and environmental awareness movements–all displaying a deep longing for a more just, simpler, earth-friendly way of life– were seeded at that time.

Like any passionate historic movement, the era of Hippiedom, went to extremes, lost its power, and faded away. Yet the utopian dream it set up, though it failed from misguided-thinking, immaturity, and poor planning, is slowly coming to fruition in the committed human potential and consciousness movements in this new century– Despite the government’s recession, despite the war on terrorism, despite the near collapses of our most basic systems.

Conservatives can and will holler and may pray , crying for a return to the society of the immediate post-world war era when America led the world in manufacturing, gender roles were circumscribed and the population was naive. But this society will not be returning to that epoch. What lies ahead is the transformation of the West to a society of Service, the distribution of world wealth to a global balance, and a completely new way of living with less waste, zero tolerance for  political corruption, innovations of clean cars and green products and preventative health supplements aligned with a melding model of medical/alternative healing.

The planet Pluto, (healing through symbolic death and resurrection) which moves so slowly it defines each generation, has moved into Capricorn who rules institutions, churches, corporations, banks, schools, government. Pluto will transit through Capricorn for, roughly, the next 16 years. During the passage, the ailing dinosaurs of these institutions will be undergoing drastic renovation. And as they are renovated, we will be a good deal closer to a green and sober version of the utopian dream of the Hippies.

Steve Jobs of Apple Computers was a hippie, and hundreds of other ex-hippie  visionaries  have created companies that are renovating  the traditional work places. The old multi-marketing Amway model has given way to dozens of new companies creating their own residual incomes and separate economies through sharing, consensus and team cooperation, (an Aquarian quality), creating leverage in the marketplace and more free time for individuals to work creatively  in their pajamas over the internet. Technology (yet another Aquarian province) has exploded out of the innovations of the sixties’ generation. The collapse of real estate ownership and the recession we are experiencing is just a symptom of an era whose time is up. Shared property, less extravagant and more ecology- oriented life styles are already on the cutting edge.

We owe much to that crazy decade. It was rich with light, deep with darkness and an incredible, evolutionary passage. It was an introduction to a new 2000 year epoch and the beginning of the end of Piscean energy, which is characterized by the concept of “duality” and “opposites,” “competition” and “winners” and “losers”.

The world being created now is still in its infancy. But the permanent changes that came out of the movements of the sixties and seeped into western culture at large when the pendulum swung back from its extremes to sobriety and moderation–these are the very changes that will allow the new culture to come forth.

Liberty. Equality, Fraternity was the cry of the French Revolutionaries as the blood from the guillotines filled the streets of Paris and several republics rose and fell before an exhausted country settled down again to a nouveau regieme. Every dramatic change of power has its mistakes, its back-slide and its backlash. This new movement will be global and, because of technology and power struggles, it will also be fraught with misinformation.

Some of us can feel with our new senses, heightened intuition, and new visions, recognizing each other and locating through the internet the thousands of organizations and millions of people working for peace, healing, and a more equitable, and yes, peaceful/loving world.

Don’t look back. Only those who are clinging to the collapse will be left behind. Yes, all the darkness and destruction, the strange, traumatic weather, the wars, the dives on Wall Street, are birth pangs for this new world. We are awakening from one dream into another more hopeful and spiritual dream.

Have you noticed the karma is such that all corruption is becoming transparent and exposed?  Stay tuned and stay awake on the narrow path to the New Earth by practicing the laws of reciprocity, forgiveness, and attraction. Pay it forward.

We were given imaginations so as to dream. Surround yourself with upbeat, like-minded people for we are coming into our power to create through thought and visualization. You are what you think. The journey away from paradise has been a long one. Hold out for its return. Unplug from the spinmeisters, the pharmaceutical ads, the politicians owned by lobbyists, and any clergy that believes in a punishing God.

Earth has consciousness and she is evolving. Love your mother. And hang on with confidence,    because, like the sixties, it may be a bumpy ride.

Inception; A Course in the Miraculous

there’s a hell of a good universe next door; let’s go —e.e. cummings

The new movie “Inception” is brilliant in several ways. First, the cinematography is gorgeous, the special effects, highly impressive and the plot line, the plot line is wild—a lucid dream within a lucid dream within . . . well, to the 3^rd

degree—so that poor Mal, (Marion Cotillard), Cobb’s, (Leonardo DiCaprio) wife— or rather the projection of his deceased wife, doesn’t know anymore which reality is true, and believes an encounter with death will wake her up.  Cobb has a only a slightly stronger  grip on which dream they’re in and for how long, and the cast of characters who elect to participate in the shared dreaming do it splendidly as we admire their acuity to stay on mission. Of course, this seems all too fantabulous to believe, and though the film is breathtaking to watch, and an action fan, I am not . . .

I will yield to a “magical” premise, and this film delivers play for the imagination hook, line and sinker in all that is magical about our minds, our intentions, our wills.  Still, that’s not why it engaged me so intensely. I kept having this vibey thrill that writer/director Christopher Nolan may have downloaded from the collective unconscious of contemporary humanity in this day and age, time and place, the challenge that we’re all facing, that is, to understand that so-called “reality” is indeed not real. That we create it and can change it.

As A Course in Miracles fan-addict (no pun intended), I subscribe to the daily task of looking straight into the face of television, into the tragedies that spread and leak and draw us into instinctual empathy, rage and hand-wringing all over the planet, and remind myself that all this is a shared dream. Yes, even the physical pain may just be a phantom limb. I know, I know . . . I feel it believe me . . . but  . . .

If we are to believe the Course, (and I do) we are still in Eden only we see through the glass darkly. We have put on blinders and loped into the desert thinking ourselves cast out. And lo, that is what we experience, what we see around us. Our collective doom-trained minds heavy with a free-floating guilt we can’t name—do what any non-lucid dreamer does—create from projection.  We see the events of the world as if they were outside of our personal egos, when creating something better is all a matter of a shift in perspective. And for many of us longtime seekers who have found our answers in alchemy and ancient texts, obscure poetry, (Rumi, Lao-Tzu, Blake, Gibran ) as well as occult secrets and quantum science, that shift is occurring.

One of the primary lessons of A Course in Miracles instructs us “There is no world.”  Just as Cobb and Mal experience reality in the deep netherworlds of their subconscious minds, we are alarmed at each turn by our own projections. “Inception” is the nifty trick of implanting an idea in an unconscious dreamer’s mind that the dreamer will carry into reality. In the film the dream-schemers are all well aware that if they don’t lucidly perform the steps of their preconceived agenda, they will be stalked and pummeled by the images their fear and anger have evoked. Indeed Cobb’s shadowy figure, his Jungian dark anima, Mal, seeks to down him in her own black hole and she works as any clever, ego-alien shadow worth her salt, to manipulate him to believe what she believes is real.

So here we are, Don Quixotes all, swaying with our swords out ready to strike at the false extensions of our own repressed emotion. Welcome to the dream world. We have journeyed far from our source, forgotten that life is a game, and have, with our own source-power made this video so real we need an ingenious glitch in the matrix to shake us free.

Yet like The Force Himself or Herself, (most likely Itself) we are geniuses all. We are all different aspects of God. Fallen, deluded, confused, no doubt, but our true Source isn’t concerned that we blame him. We made this messy world when we chose to step out of Eden. Adam fell asleep, it says in Genesis. It doesn’t say he woke up.

Yet.

Our job is to accept it all, stop judging, stop spinning the projections, and reset the Course (pun intended) aright. I believe we will. It’s time for a contagion of mutual inception—up and down the halls of time—let’s collectively wake up!  Whoever can see through fear will always be safe –Tao Te Ching. The kingdom of God is within you–Jesus.

COOKIE’S DOVES; ON BIRTHING THE FEMININE

What your unconscious wants you to know is not often discovered from the perspective of the personal ego. The entire dream is our creation but often we don’t relate to the “bad guy” or the “monster” or the “beautiful tree” from deep inside these figures. Through a slowly evoked visualization, I lead dreamers into discovering an “Ah Ha!” moment, which has not been available to their conscious mind.

Some people write their dreams in shorthand, think about them for a time, look up references in symbol dictionaries and make uncertain guesses about meaning. This can be a valuable method but it works intellectually rather than intuitively. Since dreams come from the unconscious, we need to use the right side of the brain, where reverie and dreams occur. With Image Work, we access the unconscious easily in a Theta brain state. By closing our eyes and moving gradually, we revisit the dream imaginatively, embody and explore the feelings of the other people, strange objects, varying emotional atmospheres and landscapes. This process takes the better part of an hour.

It’s important to move slowly and make conscious all the emotions that the ego has projected onto the other figures.  We are multi-dimensional creatures and have many subjective selves our ego doesn’t make available for us to know. As we move in the imaginative action, memories surface and associations may come in. Often the dreamer will want to tell his or her “story” and as a guide, I have to carefully move them out of their heads deeper into the image.

The ego naturally resists losing control but by climbing out of the ego and into the figures that the ego finds alien, the whole point of view shifts. In a question and answer format, the dream becomes a conversation that allows the meaning to unravel in a non-intellectual, non-analytical manner through the ego-alien aspects of the unconscious images.

Often we are able to recognize, own and integrate the image that a moment before was totally other. This allows us to release the energy that was trapped in the complex of that projection.

Whether it is a negative or positive image, these designations are subjective—dreams just are what they are—and we’re better off not judging them. We have dreams where our power, our hidden talents, our numinous potential are all projected onto other figures and objects. When we realize they are part of us, we can move in and claim them, make them conscious elements of our lives and make choices and changes for the better. More often we have dreams that show the sadder, less empowered, unsavory sides of ourselves because we easily repress these. Yet by making these conscious, we release the stuck energy that is holding us back.

Taking several different points of view in several directions we find deeper layers of meaning. We need only one fragment of a memory of a dream and yet that may be the repressed piece our consciousness has been missing.

Although I haven’t seen her in over 30 years, recently I dreamt of a high school friend nick-named Cookie. She was a magnanimous soul, always generous, loving and giving. In the dream it was her wedding day, and we were preparing for the wedding. I stood next to her in a bedroom as she tried on various hats and veils. The funny thing was each of the headpieces was topped with a live dove!  We laughed and chattered together as we fitted them on her.

I called a colleague who also trained with me in Dream Image Work and asked her to lead me through the dream in the question/answer format. Though she is 1000 miles away, we are able to work by phone. I lay down and shut my eyes, breathing slowly into relaxation. I knew by describing Cookie’s personality that inside myself was an internalized Cookie, a person capable of her best characteristics. This is what Jungian psychologists call a positive shadow.

When I embodied Cookie and focused on my heart, I could feel the depth of her love. It so happens I am in a living situation with an ill mother and there are days I feel guilty that I am not doing enough for her. When I embodied Cookie, I could make the association and recognized the place in my life where I am truly giving my best. I hadn’t acknowledged that consciously before, always beating myself up a little in a helpless situation. During the process, I felt an expansion in my heart almost literally. It bathed my whole body in warmth.

When we began fitting the hairpieces, I felt how much I am juggling and changing roles in my present life. I am marketing my book, writing another book, growing my small business and rather passively looking for a life partner. Switching hats feels a lot like choices I have to make each day and hair and head often have to do with intellect and the thinking process. As a writer I can easily go bodiless, living entirely in my head.  When I moved to my head, I actually felt my hair growing, which in turn felt like thinking.  Hair has been associated with power as in the story of Samson and Delilah. But too many choices, too many roles to fill out leaves me feeling uncertain and insecure as I think myself around in circles.

My head felt confused and my thoughts, scattered. I needed to make this feeling conscious so that I could accept it and forgive myself for self-judging. I am doing a lot and so now I can consciously slow myself down when I am overwhelmed.

Finally, I embodied the doves, feeling their comfortable postures, their fluttering wings, their utter whiteness against the backdrop of a very blue sky, a sky I hadn’t even seen in the dream where we were indoors.  But during the dream work the sky was now glowing numinously behind the doves.  Suddenly I was able to feel reassured of my connections to Spirit. I felt my way into roundness, wholesomeness and the wholeness of these lovely birds.

This dream was what Jung might have called a “compensating” dream because outwardly, ego-wise, I had been feeling disconnected and alone. Doves do come in pairs and are symbolic of a loving process, a marriage, as well as Spirit writ large, as in The Holy Spirit of my Catholic upbringing. In A Course in Miracles, of which I am a fan and follower, The Holy Spirit is the messenger of miracles and it is to that spirit that we are instructed to appeal for help in changing our mind from the way we have been educated to believe in dark powers and a punishing godhead. Moreover, the Holy Spirit is feminine in the Gnostic tradition, and in several recent novels she has been portrayed that way. It is by the feminine powers of intuition that we are invited at this time in history to restore balance to the last 2000 years of our over-patriarchal culture. The 21^st century is known to astrologers to be the beginning of a millennium of the feminine way of knowing. Predictions indicate that men will grow into balance with their feminine side and the feminine principle will be at work in the powers ruling the world. These changes will come slowly but like the Woman Clothed By The Sun in St. John’s Revelation, we are pregnant with the new earth and the new heaven on earth.

The idea that Cookie is about to wed could mean that I am closer to balancing my male and female energy and I felt the anticipation of a becoming worthy bride about to turn a corner in her life. The tangential meaning of being pregnant with myself is also relevant. (Moreover, the thought I might meet someone new was hopeful, sweet as a cookie is.) Dream images don’t just translate to one meaning. When we amplify them with associations and collective meaning we see the many levels of the dream.

By keeping my eyes closed and staying close to the images, locating them in my body, I inhabited all the layers of the dream. The indecisions of the hat/hair choices gave me pains in my head, but I could find self-forgiveness. I have been thinking too much. In contrast, the jovial conversation with Cookie, our laughing and joking, lightened up my head and moved my energy deeper down into my body, into my heart and belly. The bodies of the doves felt full and balanced, sure of themselves, their wings about to take flight. I felt a kind of promise, a potential for joy there and this had been a missing element in my life of late.

Dream Image Work can bring the repressed energies to the surface and release them. We can say good riddance to the negative self-doubts and welcome the new potentialities with enthusiasm.

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.