The Strange Case of Me and Not Me

I’ve loved public libraries since I was 15 when I worked in one after school; recently, I've taken to frequenting my neighborhood library again. I’ve especially enjoyed access to a great selection of literature on audio CD. I can listen to wonderful stories while I’m making jewelry, driving or cooking. Sometimes I listen to contemporary works, other times I select a classic. Often, I'm delighted by the energizing synchronicity of finding myself listening to the exact inspiration I need at the time.

I just finished Robert Louis Stevenson's classic, "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde", wonderfully narrated by Scott Brick. I was mesmerized by the story of a brilliant man who experiments with splitting himself from his Shadow and consequently reaps the tragic results. Stevenson wrote the story prior to any publication of Jung's famous work on the Shadow and what's even better, the story was based on his dreams.

In a recent post from Robert Moss's Dreamgates blog, Robert includes these great quotes about the story from Stevenson and from his wife.

'“For two days I went about racking my brains for a plot of any sort; and on the second night I dreamed the scene at the window, and a scene afterward split in two, in which Hyde, pursued for some crime, took the powder and underwent the change in the presence of his pursuers.”

His wife related picturesquely how one night Louis cried out horror-stricken, how she woke him up and he protested, “Why did you waken me? I was dreaming a fine bogy-tale!” She also related how he appeared the next morning excitedly exclaiming, “I have got my schilling-shocker — I have got my schilling-shocker!”'

You can read the rest of Robert's post here:

Stevenson entertained a vibrant dialogue with his dreams and believed his very livelihood depended on it. An active dream dialogue is key to unlocking many of life's essential mysteries, not the least of which is how to achieve balance within our imperfect humanity.

According to Carl Jung, the characters we reject or that repulse us in our dreams, especially when they are the same gender as us, are our Shadow parts. These are the aspects of our personalities that we don’t want to own, aspects that we deem undesirable or socially unacceptable. Sometimes, we also reject our "bright Shadow," admirable characteristics or qualities which our low self-esteem won't let us claim as our own.

The thing about the Shadow Archetype is that in waking life, we often project on to others what we reject and fear in ourselves. When we're hyper-critical and condemning of others, we may be animated by our unconscious Shadow blindness. But when we're actively in dialogue with our dreams, we have an opportunity to interact with Shadow aspects of our personality in ultimately rewarding ways.

Case in point is my Jeze-bella, whom I've renamed after getting to know her a bit.  When she appeared in my dream, I saw her as opposite to me, the Whore to my Madonna. But it was that gut feeling of rejection that led me to seek more interaction with her in a dream re-entry. When I met her in my night dream I was indifferent to her; I was willing to let her take my risks and suffer my dangers without so much as a thought for her well-being. Then I re-entered my dream and really met her, talked to her and came to understand her life strategy. Maybe she's down and dirty, but she’s a survivor, with a survivor’s stealth and wile. I’m learning a lot from her. Now, I love getting together with her for continued extended adventures in the in-between spaces of dream re-entry.

Dreams teach us introspection. They put us in dialogue with dimensions of ourselves that we've unconsciously rejected but that our dreams show us we must consciously integrate. Jung believed that the Shadow Archetype is critically important to our personal development and saw it as the first gateway to individuation. He also posited that integrating aspects of our Shadow selves is the secret to unlocking our true creativity. Creativity is the goddess/god given faculty of living life with imagination, a sense of humor and an accurate compass to where our bliss lies.

Each time I react negatively to a dream, especially to a female character, each time dreams leave me with feelings that are icky, scary or embarrassing, my dream radar says, “Darling, do you think this may have some valuable teaching from your Shadow?” Owning the "not me" parts of myself allows me to navigate my waking life more consciously and responsibly, with fewer blind spots to trip me up.

Now, what do you think Michele Bachmann or Rick Perry would say about their inner Jezebels or Mr. Hydes? In the same sense that we project our evil and taboos on to others individually, we collude with other one-dimensional personalities and project as a group on to other groups all our denied short-comings, fear and doubt. This was characteristic of the Nazi fervor in WWII, absolute Black and White; we’re Good, God is on our side; they’re Evil, Satan on earth. If you think this is a past phenomenon, just look at what, besides money-greed, is fueling our scary world conflicts today.

Instead of buying our own ego hype and living in a rigid Persona, we come to realize through dream-play that we’re capable of many personalities, some good, some bad (in our own judgments anyway), some we see as "me" and some we insist are "not me". Establishing a dialogue and living consciously with our rejected parts guards us from the lure of polemic ideologies; we become rooted in our own spirituality. Without this insight, we sit in judgment of people whom we believe are opposite to us; we list the faults of others and criticize their choices. But when we have experience meeting and dialoguing with our own Shadow through dreaming, we recognize the complexity of the other person's existence, and though we may still not agree with them, we don't need to villanize or exterminate them.

I think that the more of us get chummy with our personal Shadows, the more of us will recognize the Shadows looming behind the ideologues that seek to rule us. We can point and say, “I’d like you to turn around and answer to that Shadow behind you, and when you’ve found your humility and compassion, you can speak to me of your god, your right and wrong, and your vision for our country.

Dreaming My LIfe

This is a picture of the statue of Kwan Yin, Asian Great Mother of Compassion, that Jim gave me for Christmas many years ago and of roses from my garden just now.

In a comment on my previous post, "Howling Mary" my dear friend and former student, Lisa, took me to task for doubting myself.

When a young woman from a generation before says, Hail, it's all Grace, let's keep it going, and tells me it was I who inspired her, then who am I to give up?

I wrote about that dream with such pleasure. That dream is 40 years old! Yet, it's so fresh, vibrant and guiding now that I have to howl with pleasure.

Those of you who are veteran teachers, as am I, can appreciate the joy of hearing from a former student that we continue to make sense to them.

I think we're all on to something and if we collectively dream the future we want, we may get it.

I look to Mary. What would Mary do?

Howling Mary

I’m excited to tell you my Howling Mary dream from May, I think, 1971. It was the end of my Senior year at University of Rochester. I only wished that at that time I was recording my dreams in journals. I didn’t really start till 1976 with another BIG DREAM.

What’s a BIG DREAM? Oh, it’s like the diving horn on a submarine or like the in your face divine apparition.

Howling Mary was the middle dream of what I call a triptych dream - three dreams in a row that transition from one setting, etc to the next – tied together by the fact that they all happen in succession.

I don’t remember the first and have vague image recollections of the third, but even though I didn’t write and draw HM till 1982, eleven years after the dream, she was as vivid then as she is to me now. ‘

The telling of this dream and the image I created for your pleasure of it are both the contemporary versions.

I’m inside the small Catholic church I knew as a teenager, “Our Lady of Good Counsel” (The picture above of the statue outside this little church was taken on a family visit back a couple of years ago.)

I walk in and instead of going up the center aisle towards the altar, I turn and go up the left side aisle, by the stained glass windows and the Stations of the Cross. Mass is in process. I’m probably the 21-year-old self I am while I’m dreaming this, dressed as I would be usually, entering the church by some compulsion.

I take to the left side, drawn by an overwhelming pull, something calling to me inside my heart. Ignoring the worshipers following their lines, I quietly make my way up to the statue of Mary that is to the left of the altar, if you’re facing that direction.

She is Mother Mary of Mercy who in her compassion steps on the head of the snake so we don’t have to worry about it so much anymore.

As I approach her, the statue animates, like in Fantasia; she looms 10 times her size above me and howls. I rush to the foot of her howling form and place my hand at her feet and bow my head in reverence and awe. I know she is howling from outrage and pain, I just don’t know what that outrage and pain is.

However, when I look to my right, the priest has finished consecrating the Host and is about to commence the giving of communion to the congregation. I know I must intervene. I rush to where he is poised in front of the first communicant and snatch the chalice from his hand.

Looking in, I’m horrified to see that there are worms in the chalice, but as I take one out it becomes a rubber band, which I hand to each person to take away with them.

My dream ends. After the third dream I wake up in my room at college and marvel at the images and complexity of the dreams. It was Howling Mary, though, that I remember in detail, the way you do with a Big Dream.

I’ve had lots of time to see this dream manifest.

First, I was on my way to graduate school in English Literature and had no idea I’d end up so involved in the Women’s Ordination Movement of the Roman Catholic Church in the mid 70’s and 80’s that I pursued my Masters in Scriptural Studies and Pastoral Counseling from Colgate Rochester Divinity School instead.

And I certainly didn’t anticipate discovering that my beloved patriarchal Christian paradigm had such serious flaws that it really wasn’t worth bolstering with my efforts. Especially when Mary shape-shifted thanks to Erich Neumann’s “The Great Mother”, Mary Daly’s “Beyond God the Father” and Merlin Stone’s “When God Was a Woman” to name but a few paradigm-blowing master works.

Who knew? Apparently, Howling Mary did.

I was only 21 when that dream created a Divine Theater for me of things to come. As a great Mother archetype, I can’t imagine any finer. She is pissed off; she is aching. She howls like a wolf calling the troops that will hear her, come to her and run with her. In the last two years, I've had many wolf dream visits; She’s back. Howling for justice; howling for compassion and for innovative, loving and creative ways to fix this mess, She is my direct connection to the Divine. She can be Mother Mary, Kwan Yin, Isis, Demeter, Yemaya or so many of the Mother Archetype manifestations that have graced our humanity since the beginning of time.

It occurs to me that the job of a rubber band is to hold something together by first stretching to contain it. It stretches and contracts according to the need. What a beautiful symbol for the life-giving sacrament of communion. Expanding to nourish us and give us what we need to hold it together and continue to grow until we finally get it and Mary doesn’t have to feel so frustrated any more.

Latinas always have their patron Mary. Mexicans love Guadalupe and La Caridad del Cobre is the beautiful Ochun of Cuba. My Mary is Howling Mary. I don’t need to keep her to myself, but she is the Archetype who first announced to me a mission She hopes I’ll lend a hand in while on the planet. Don’t know if I’ve done much yet; but, as long as there is breath in my body, I will honor her and do what I think she wants me to do.

Archetypes

The word archetype derives from the Greek, archetupon. meaning something like, first-molded. It combines arche, the beginning and tupos, a pattern, model or type. (My source is Wikipedia.)

According to one on-line dictionary I used, it’s come to mean:

1. the original pattern or model from which all things of the same kind are copied or on which they are based; a model or first form; prototype.

2. (in Jungian psychology) a collectively inherited unconscious idea, pattern of thought, image, etc., universally present in individual psyches.

I bring this concept up because my husband, Jim, and I have a favorite "discussion"; "What is an archetype?" We often lapse into it lying in bed, waiting for sleep; I love when the room is dark and we talk. If I bring up our archetype discussion he’s likely to pose the question; "If there were no people, would archetypes exist?"

I think he believes that "archetypes" are human constructs. For instance, he'll say, "our pre-historic ancestors are out in a terrifying storm, the lightning blazing and the thunder booming so loud their teeth chatter. For that ineffable power they’ve experienced, they create an archetype, the God/Goddess of Thunder or Storm, the ultimate source of all this power.

Well, it makes sense. The purpose of it, I suppose, is to interact with this power in some approachable form in order to see if you can get IT to go easy on your neighborhood.

No people, no archetypes seems to be his thinking, but maybe it’s no people, less pressure on the Archetypes to make it better. Here's how I see it:

Archetypes are Energies that have been intuited by humans from the dawn of our habitation here on earth. They are energies experienced universally by woman and man of any race, in any culture, at any time in history. I don't think we create the Energies, although I think we create the forms they take in our personal or elected cultural mythology. These Energies can shape shift into many forms and can be recognized in stories, myths, religions and now, the mind-bending science of contemporary physics.

Because the Archetypes are actually Energies not subject to one permanent form, I think it's a waste of time and an invitation to trouble to fix the Energy, say of Divine Love, into one immutable aspect of itself. Especially when that concrete image excludes other aspects of that same energy vital for it to flow and do its job. For instance, God the Father definitely suffers from a lack of God the Mother.

In our dreams, the archetypes show up in many forms and communicate a lot of useful information. Jung identified some common ones as: the Self, the complete person, integrated in her or his many aspects, body, mind and soul; the Animus/Anima, the opposite gender aspect of each person’s psyche, one we’re likely to project on to the person with whom we “fall in love.” In dreams, this archetype can be tracked in the opposite gender characters peopling our night adventures; the Shadow, which contains the disavowed aspects of ourselves we commonly project on to others, shows up in characters we dislike, envy or of whom we are in awe, usually the same sex as the dreamer; and the Persona, is the mask to meet the faces that we meet, the one Ego dons to face the public. Sometimes when we dream of ourselves naked in public, it may have to do with how we think we’re perceived or how we desire to be seen.

There are many Archetypes; the Major Arcana of the Tarot is a gallery of universal archetypes preserved through centuries in a pack of playing cards. The greater the Archetypal figure in our psyche, the stronger the energy that accompanies its appearance. How I feel about a figure in my dream is often the first clue to who I’m really dealing with.

In my next post, I’ll tell you my Howling Mary dream. This is a Big Dream in my life story, a visit from the Mother Archetype. It came some forty years ago, before I had any idea what its message was, but to this day, it’s my moral compass and spiritual paradigm.

Although we may name the Archetypes, we don’t invent them and we certainly don’t control them. In my opinion, religion tries to bottle these archetypes and sell them under their brand name. I see no point in denying that the Archetypal Energy manifests in a myriad of metaphors and shape shifts according to each persons needs. That is normal. What's not normal is trying to claim absolute TRUTH status for one manifestation.

Being in tune with personal revelations in our dreams can save us from believing the projections of those whose intentions may be to manipulate us where we are most vulnerable, our imaginations. Dream work helps us claim our imaginations for our own ends, making us far less vulnerable to the myths of others.

What are “archetypes” is a popular conversation with many people, in and out of bed. The wonderful astrologer, Caroline Casey, suggests that we consider “composting” the word; her Trickster Redeemer is a wonderful manifestation of her composting work with archetypes. I’m grateful for my own on-going dialogue with such a wit as is Jim; and now, I’m opening the discussion to you. Your comments are most welcome.

Video courtesy of Jim and Chango.

Expect An Answer

Dream "incubation" means that the dreamer went to sleep focused in an open hearted way on a question or a request to the Dream Source. In both the ancient cultures of Egypt and of Greece, dream incubation was a sacred practice that anyone who needed spiritual help and physical healing could access by going to the temples as a pilgrim in search of a dream cure. Gods and goddesses spoke to the dreamer and intervened on her or his behalf through dreams.

So if you need the answer to a problem or a question; just ask. But expect an answer. Not always that night and very often not the answer you might have anticipated. The pact I make with my dream guides is that no matter what comes through, icky or not, I'll write it down.

This has proved over and over again to me that my dream guides love me and have a superb sense of ironic humor. On the surface, the dream may seem distasteful, irrelevant or embarrassing; but when I sit down with a dear dream friend and play with it, light bulbs go off. I love the sheepish joy I feel; "Oh, I get it." That "aha" always floods me with gratitude for the unconditional, loving guidance of dreams.

I love telling my friend my dream as dramatically as possible. The theater of it, speaking the dream out loud, begins to release some of the emotional charges of particular images and characters in a first wave of enlightenment.

I also love to hear my friend describe to me her experience of my dream; whether it applies to me, or to her, I gain insight. She emphasizes different things; I hear another perspective. She uses only the personal pronoun, shares with me her feelings, associations and intuitions and opens wonderful new vistas in my dream for me to explore.

Re-entering the dream through my imagination in a dream journey, alone or in the good company of a dream friend, is my favorite form of dream exploration.

In a dream I recently explored, re-entering allowed me to find a close, unexpected ally in a Shadow figure (in the Jungian sense) whom I referred to in my dream as "the buxom blonde" but after an exciting re-entry conversation, she became my dear friend, Jezebelle.

The answer to the dream questions we incubate may appear in many unexpected ways. Perhaps a waking feeling, perhaps a synchronicity. They'll appear in an unlikely dream that I faithfully wrote and pursued, and continue over a series of subsequent dreams until I get it.

I'm fond of Jung's point of view that dreams don't come to tell us what we already know. They don't call it the unconscious for nothing. So when someone prefaces their dream narrative with, I know what this is about, I always keep an open mind and suggest a little further play.

You asked, an answer will come. Focused intention and attention to dream material regardless of seeming insignificance pays off big time in dream exploration. Do you knock on a door, knowing your friend is home, and not expect her to open it for you?

A Fleeting Glimpse

Talking to a friend yesterday, she described an image she woke with, the only remnant of a dream. The image is of a friend of hers laughing, a very pleasant image.

It made me think of a dream I had recently, also just a fleeting image of a friend that carried wonderful energy for me.

Just one image can unlock an amazing dream narrative. One image can animate when I re-enter a dream and accompany me through expanded adventures of active imagination. One image can give me a portal into a dream moment and continue to provide real pleasure and enjoyment in my waking day.

If my friend's dream were my dream, maybe I'll hold the image of this person laughing in my mind's eye when I speak to my friend; or maybe I'll just share the image with her, painting the picture of her I saw and sharing the wonderful feelings it evoked for me. In this way, the dream image becomes a gift for us both, a gift which may deepen our friendship.

The language of dreams is imagery. In her wonderful book, "The Dream Game," psychologist Ann Faraday speculates that imagery was our prehistoric ancestors’ first language, and very likely our initial language when we're born. Our first vocabulary in other words, (pun intended) would require a pictionary, not a dictionary, to decipher. Imagery is a powerful psychic language; it impacts the mind, body and emotions.

A picture’s worth a thousand words; why is that? Perhaps because imagery is the language we can understand instinctively, innately and universally. The phrase, “dream interpretation” may be a misnomer. Instead of asking the cognitive question, “What does my dream mean?” perhaps it’s better to ask, “What is my dream depicting? Do I get the picture?”

This is especially true when all we can remember is a single fleeting image from a night of dreaming. I encourage you not to dismiss that little picture fragment. Make a note of it in your journal; carry it around with you in contemplation. Make a drawing of it or write a poem. It might prove a valuable cipher to a previous or future dream. It may provide the key to unlocking an inner psychological struggle; perhaps it will shed light on a difficult waking life situation.

Get the picture?

Thanksgiving in July

Today is the 23rd anniversary of the day my husband got "Rolfed by a Buick," as he puts it. We celebrate the fact that despite getting hit as a pedestrian while standing on the sidewalk outside the train station and spending six weeks in the hospital, he is pretty much unscathed today.

What also comes to mind is the power of dreams to give us a heads up, as well as, the reality of psychic resources that become available when the manure really hits the fan.

Jim didn't keep track of his dreams back then, but he was well aware of how important they are to me. That morning, as I dropped him off to catch his train into the city, he turned as he was getting out of the car and said, "I had the weirdest dream last night." "Oh," I said, "what was it?" He replied; "I don't remember much, I just know I'm supposed to stop and smell the flowers."

I can't help but wonder what warnings that dream may have contained, and whether, if we'd had the whole dream memory that morning, it may have given us some kind of clue to help avert this less than happy event.

Still, with the consolation of hindsight, many good things did come of it. One was the certainty that help is available from sources beyond ordinary reality. Jim recounts how when he saw the car barreling towards him at a speed he knew made it impossible to evade it, he told himself, "I don't want to be here for this." He witnessed the rest of the gruesome happenings outside of his body. He also told himself to get his weight off his feet, and that saved his life.

In the hospital, from ER to ICU, he relates how a voice, not his own, in fact one that from the timbre and accent sounded like that of an African American male, kept up a continuous narrative of everything that was happening to him and around him, making him feel much calmer. It would explain medical procedures being performed for him or tell him who was outside the room waiting to see him.

Every July 25th since that day in 1988 has been a day we both feel especially grateful and glad to be alive. It's also a day where I give extra special thanks for guides and teachers and dreams.