Tosia H Zraikat

Working with a Dream image

I've been watching heavy rainfall all morning, reading Jung and listening - again-  to Dr Edinger speak on 'the New Myth of Meaning', a talk that I find deeply moving and inspiring, so although outer-world tasks require my attention, I want to write about a dream, and what I have drawn out of it. It gives an idea of  how, as a devoted Jungian, I work with dreams. 

The dream July 26 2024

 A woman in dark clothes with black hair is very antagonistic towards me. She resembles me very much (I have black hair and dark clothes in the dream), and wants to get into me and replace me because she thinks I am not living my life as I should, sort of just inhabiting my life and not being fully myself in it. She is shooting at me with a thing that fires laser beams that don't hurt, but weaken me. I shoot back with the same kind of weapon. Then another woman is there, with long wild blonde hair and wearing a long white dress. She more or less takes over the dream.

 

This woman in white also fires laser beams at me, but with more hostile intent, a kind of viciousness that the other woman does not have, and I fire back. This one also wants to take over my life, but she wants to kill me. She wants my destruction; there is something savage, cruel about her. Though I fire on her and strike her, the strikes only slow her down. Then she puts a small bright red ball in her mouth, which if she bites down on it, will release poison that she wants to spurt out in my direction without harming her. She keeps coming closer, though I shoot, and I know that she wants to get close enough to release the poison into my mouth...sort of with a kiss. The other woman who resembles me is now  standing by, hardly visible, watching. I am the one being targeted. Somehow, I feel through all this that we are all related.

 

Active imagination 

(This is a method Jung taught for exploring dream or other images from the psyche. Robert Johnson tells that one will “go into [one's] fantasy or vision, participate consciously in it, and make it into an active exchange between the conscious and unconscious energy systems," (Inner Work). 

Very brief conversation with the woman in white:

 

"What do you want from me?

You are not worthy of your life. I want it.

"What do you want me to do?"

Get out. I want you out.

"What do you want to do with my life?"

 

I feel a powerful surge of her desire, a kind of primal desire that feels selfish, cruel, insatiable. However she has a sweet face. She frightens me so I do not continue. Later, it occurs to me that she probably represents boundless or unmodified instinct without the ameliorating influence of love, relationship, or containment, which Jung said can be dangerous. She is, I think, the compensatory and exaggerated opposite of my own fear and distrust of feeling and desire. After this, I did some reading on instinct in books mostly by Marie-Louise Von Franz.

 

Amplification

(Amplification of a dream symbol means "doing research on the meaning of the symbol," exploring associations with "myths, fairytales, or folklore" to "gain a deeper understanding of their meaning." (nathanbrandon.com).

I found it difficult to associate the character of the woman in white with stories or myths other than stories associated with death: the spirit of the dead, or that appears to warn of death or to be death, which doesn't feel right to me. I don't get that impression from her. On the contrary, she seems to me to represent repressed instincts and drives demanding expression: sexuality, desire, stifled creativity, anger, the power drive, primal energy etc. But during this exercise, I realised that she comes with such vehemence, such venom because the repression was to her like death, and she burst into my dream demanding life - my life - that I had denied her. In that dream, where I was all in black with black hair, I was her shadow as I thought she might was mine. 

Visualising the red ball in her mouth through which she wanted to spit poison at me, I was reminded of a serpent, and also, paradoxically, of something beautiful, a glowing ruby that had appeared in another dream some time ago associated with my wolf guide, a jewel associated with fire, energy and the warrior, which to me signifies the energy of life, libido, passion. So her poison might have been intended to kill but like a homeopathic medicine, it can restore balance and heal. Here I see the play of opposites - life and death, killing and healing, destruction and revivification. 

Unexpectedly, this took me into remembered recent dreams. A lion carries me, unconscious, on its back from darkness into light. A tiger comes at me and instead of harming, takes my whole face into its mouth gently, so that I breathe its breath, taste its saliva, become almost one with it. And a pack of wild wolves runs around me, pushing me forward. Now here, the woman seeks to spit poison into my mouth that I now feel is like medicine.

I am being brought to life. I am being helped to see that in repressing/denying parts of me through shame, guilt, fear, I lost, maybe killed, parts of my soul that I can now to some degree recover....wounded but alive. I had thought I was only being told to reclaim my instincts but it is much more than that. My psyche is also showing me that I am cared for, that I have an inner tribe of friends that care for me and love me. I cannot say how much that means to me.

Later- I found further confirmation of my interpretation just this morning. I came across Marie-Louise von Franz's comment on white - that though it can be "either positive or negative depending upon the situation," it can indicate the instinctual impulse's "natural direction towards consciousness', a force which "tends to bring things up into consciousness." (in Shadow and Evil in Fairytales, p. 303). Now I understand why the white dress felt so important to me. I feel that there is still more to this dream, and that it will continue to enlighten me, but already, I feel enriched, expanded. 

What I take from this so far is a newly certain awareness of the Self, an intelligence within me that is not mine, a force much greater than my small personality, something wiser that extends beyond me, and that I am seen, valued and driven by that greater being into the process of individuation. My task then is to accept and interpret what it is given through instinct, feeling and reason, and use my ego's decision-making capacity to apply it appropriately in my everyday life, for in so doing, Jung says, I become more conscious and contribute to the consciousness of the world.

Surrounded by Wolves

I am surrounded by wolves. I feel them running around me, pushing me forward, their bodies hard and breath hot on my skin. I am not frightened, because one of my animal guides, Lobo, runs with them, close by.

Lobo is a wolf who entered my dream a couple years ago and has helped me to recognise unpleasant and difficult aspects of myself. Though he is now dear to me, a companion, Lobo is not the sweet-faced, metaphysical symbol of femininity, or peace and love that one finds all over the internet. He is like the  “growling wolf within, the iron grim” described so well by C.G. Jung's colleague, Marie-Louise Von Franz. I wrote about that in my chapter of the book, Psychological and Philosophical Studies of Jung's Teleology: The Future-Orientation of Mind, edited by Garth Admunson, from which the following passages are taken.

" “The wolf … often represents a capacity which is very closely connected with people who have a wolf problem, namely, a general, all-devouring greed ….. the wolf is always the victim of his hungry stomach. When that gets the better of him, he loses all intelligence ….. In his paper on the transference  …[Jung] says the very often such a terrific greed awakes in people that they want to eat everybody and everything - for example, to eat their analyst completely. It is not even on the level of a sexual transference, but on an even more primitive level, for it is to “have” the other: to have everything…… This great desire to eat everything is very often the result of great frustration in childhood, which had built up a kind of bitter resentment on one side, combined with the greedy desire to have and eat everything. The “grim” then is a kind of sulky resentment because one can’t have the thing. …. They get caught in a kind of vicious circle of cold resentment and greed, which is often fittingly symbolised by the wolf” (von Franz, 1990, pp. 202-203)."

She was describing an aspect of me, that part of the inner child who still felt that  resentment and insatiable longing. Continuing:

".....Wolf is also an "initiating animal; he has this significance in Canto I of Dante's Inferno" (1970b, P.39, p. 141). In his mid-life and a 'dark night of the soul,' Dante finds himself in a dark forest looking for "the straightforward pathway," and thinks to take a mountain path that seemed to lead up to the light. But "almost where the ascent began," he finds his way blocked by a panther, then a lion, then "a she-wolf, that with all her hungerings Seemed to be laden in her meagreness… brought upon me so much heaviness…Which, coming on me by degrees Thrust me thither where the sun is silent.""

                   (art: Antonello Vinditti)

 

"The shade of the poet Virgil appears, full of harsh words about the wolf that blocks the way upward and offers to guide Dante along another road down through hell (Dante, The Inferno, Canto 1). Only by going into the dark place of the unconscious where he will encounter the shadow side of humanity and himself can Dante climb to the light.

"At first we cannot see beyond the path that leads downward to dark and hateful things," writes Jung ".. but no light or beauty will ever come from the man who cannot bear this sight" (Jung, 1955, p. 215). So must we all who want to redeem our lost souls go into the dark shadow, not voluntarily but pushed onto that road by fear or heaviness of spirit or desperation.

"Virgil reviled the she-wolf that blocked the mountain path, but she was a helper, forcing Dante onto the path he had to go, as Lobo pushed me to where I would rather not go." 

and here I am, being pushed again in this inner life, towards I know not what.

How deep is deep enough?

"Man as a spiritual being is made human by essence (hsing). The individual man possesses it. but it extends far beyond the limits of the individual" (Jung, The Secret of the Golden Flower).

 

Something has been weighing on me these past few days, and this morning, in an effort to understand what it is, I did an Active Imagination on a recent dream that involved rescuing two children. Active Imagination is a technique used in Jungian therapy to 'drop into' one's unconscious. I have used it before to gain deep insights into a particular image or experience.

This time, however, I was met with darkness, a deep, impenetrable darkness and a terrible smell of my early childhood, the complex mix of flesh, blood and other things that usually accompanies early childhood memories. Looming on the edge of the darkness was the ominous outline of a square tower. 

Go no further! Stop here! 

It was as clear as if spoken, but it was a feeling, a presentiment, a warning in my body, so compelling that I obeyed. 

Since then, I have been asking myself how far one must go into one's past, or into one's own unconscious to know oneself. Is there a limit to how far one can go without being sucked into the unconscious as into a whirlpool or lost there? In the quest to know oneself, must one choose between Scylla or Charybdis?

Has Jungian therapy taken me as deep into the shadows of my childhood as I need to go? Should the children I seek to rescue in dreams sometimes be left in the past? Are they sometimes murdered potentialities that cannot be rescued?

Or might they only sometimes be aspects of my childhood still able to be released from their darkness and allowed to develop in new directions?

Is there a limit to what we must know, or even seek to know? How deep is deep enough?

 

 

 

 

The circus of our times

I have recalled few dreams of late, but seen a waking nightmare of crowds adoring a man and moved to passion by his wound as though it were the bleeding wound of the Christ on the cross.
Such colour, such noise, such songs of praise and worshipful hands and faces.

 

Beside it, I recall a black and white image of another time when adoring masses desperate for a saviour worshipped a different man who also promised to make his country great again, and led it and much of the world to disaster. Our modern man sometimes even uses the language of that earlier one, "referring to his political opponents as 'vermin' and saying illegal immigrants are 'poisoning the blood of our country' (abcnews.go.com).

 

I see all this outside of me, in the world, yet it resonates powerfully within me like the deep ring of a great bell. My moods have been dark of late, rising and falling. They feel full of portent. I want to cry for the world.

 

What, I have to ask, fills me with dread, outrage and at the same time, almost unbearable sadness? The archetype of mindless masses is upon us again. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Silence

Recently, I watched an Irish movie called The Quiet Girl about a girl in a rather dysfunctional family who goes for a time to live with a kindly older couple.  In one scene, where, typically, she does not respond to the older man's question, he says, "You don't have to say anything. Always remember that. Many's the person missed the opportunity to say nothing, and lost much because of it."

I kept returning to that moment again and again, for his words spoke of the right to be silent, and the value of being silent, something I was often as a child criticised for. I have always longed to simply be, without feeling any need to satisfy someone else's desire for conversation, or the social expectations I put upon myself.

A solitary, generally quiet and unsocial child, I nevertheless eventually learned to speak up, speak out and become thoroughly socialised, for that is what the world and later, my family, expected of me. Becoming more outwardly verbal, however, disconnected me from the inner voices, the intuitions that arose to guide me. So many misjudgement, wrong decisions, so many errors that might have been avoided.

I am weary of that, and now in my later years, I am quiet again. It disturbs people sometimes, especially family, who expect me to help fight their battles, have strong opinions, to be amusing, clever or whatever else I used to be, but I am weary of being an extrovert.

The real me finds silence, withdrawal, introspection so much easier, so much less of a strain on my energies, more liberating. The more I breathe into each moment, sink into myself, the more spacious my inner world - the whole world, in fact - becomes for me. And in that spaciousness, my long-ignored intuitive self can be heard. And I listen. More and more, I listen to it, rather than to the ego chatter of shoulds and opinions, and as much as I love them, to the expectations of those around me.

Sometimes, I do go too far. It is a secret indulgence

Voyager 1 still alive!

(Image credit: NASA)

After some problems in Nov 2023, "NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft is fully operational once more, with all four science instruments returning usable data to Earth" (by Stefanie Waldek at Space.com).

Launched in 1977, this plucky little machine has gone far beyond NASA's expectations. I was so excited when she entered deep space in 2013 (see my post at https://mythologos.typepad.com/blog/2013/03/our-place-among-the-stars.html), and now, she is in the constellation of Ophiucus, 24,357,977,715 kilometers from Earth, and still sending information. I am in awe!!

 

Animal guides

I am fortunate to have been guided (literally) and taught lessons by animals - mostly birds, and my shamanic companion, dear Friend Rat. Now, I have two main animal guides, each working with me in a different way, and I love and honour them both.

One is a wolf, not the idealised wolf that is so popular with 'spiritual' people, but a lean, gaunt, lone wolf  who can flare with resentment or anger because he is continually hungry, the dangerous wolf of fairy tales who has revealed to me aspects of myself to which I was blind, and also reminds me of my own deep craving for nurturance.

This is the wolf described by Marie-Louise von Franz as a “growling wolf within, the iron grim” …"very often the result of great frustration in childhood, which had built up a kind of bitter resentment on one side, combined with the greedy desire to have and eat everything" (in Individuation in fairytales). Yes. Even now, I have a great longing to be held, to be nurtured.

He is also helpful. Like the wolf in Russian fairytales, if treated with respect, accepted for what he is, he takes me where I must go; he is stern, and will not let me shirk my responsibility to myself. I call him Lobo, and he is always close. 

The other 'wolf' has only come into my life in the past few months, the maned wolf who is really not a wolf but a beautiful shy creature who first came in a dream, and now appears often. In one dream, he invited me to come out of the forest onto the savannah with him. I decline, saying that I feel safe in the forest, and protected. 'You will be safe here," he says, but I am afraid to go where I will be more exposed.

I know that he is urging me to stop hiding, to venture into the open with its different opportunities, but I admit that although I know he is right, and though I am being called in many ways to step out into the wider world, I hesitate. Lobo guará, as he is called in Brazilian, waits and the invitation is still open. 

"There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so." (Hamlet)

Last month after hip-replacement surgery, just moved into my new unit, and maybe because for the first time in almost two years I live alone, I became uncharacteristically anxious. The physiotherapist made it all sound easy, and he had obviously expected me to progress faster, but I was overwhelmed.

Unpacked boxes of books and house stuff everywhere, flaring arthritis on top of the post-surgery pain, and night after night of broken, bad sleep. It felt so bad that I had to laugh at myself, and often did, especially on my first attempt to go outside. The physio was very patient and encouraging, but my imagination was running wild, making everything seem sooo difficult.

Like the way to wholeness and inner harmony, the road to wellness begins in the mind. 

Using Psychedelics for "self-discovery" - This Jungian Life

Comments on the discussion. See link below*

Jung was clear that he did not consider 'tripping' an adequate avenue to individuation, and I must agree. Though drug experiences can wake a person to the existence of other kinds of reality and the reality of their own unconscious, it is fragmentary, partial, and can trigger inflation - the psychological experience that one is somehow superior or more enlightened to others.

Overall, the rituals used in ancient times were not seen as a way that anyone can acheive unlimited knowing, but as valuable experiences from which one learned that reality is far deeper, richer and mysterious than the one we ordinarily live in, and that those who are committed and strictly trained to work with those realms can engage with them. 

Let me say that I am not against the use of psychedelics per se, and would experiment with psilocybin if I could do it safely, but not as the magic road to wisdom, as perhaps  a window into the greater unknown reality of my soul. Our world bristles now with people who have "discovered", "been awakened to" the greater reality through psychedelics, and consider themselves enlightened beings, transcended masters, gurus or whatever, but so much that is simply inflation, the ego's profoundly mistaken overestimation of itself . 

Jung did not want to be anyone's guru. What he learned and shared with us, he gained through persistent, compassionate, hard work with patients and analysands, enormous commitment to understanding the psyche the depths, and courageous exploration of his own psyche. And he encouraged others to along that path.

 I see an enormous difference between knowledge that has been earned, that is based on a deep ethic and sense of responsibility and repeated experience with the human psyche, as exhibited by Jung, ML von Franz, Edward Edinger, James Hollis and others. If one is faced with an easy path to 'enlightenment' and the difficult path to authenticity  and experience of one's own multidimensionality ,  I  believe that the true seeker chooses the hard road.

Perhaps our western preference for short cuts will mature over time, and we will learn to use drugs - if we choose to use them - wisely, humbly, with discipline, as aids to the lifelong work of self-knowing and individuation. I am optimistic. And of course, psychedelics can help alleviate distress or support people through transitions - from life to death, for instance -  though there again, I advise caution.

Image from https://daily.jstor.org/the-colonization-of-the-ayahuasca-experience/

 

*Discussion on This Jungian Life at:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fpa2UHznSWc

Art as Compensation

Recently, I did the little exercise of finding something in random lines, and came up with these. Both began with lines drawn with shut eyes, letting my hand move without intention. You may have done this activity too.

I was surprised at what I found there.

What surprised me was how gentle, how feminine these drawings were, for I was going through a rough patch psychologically, full of dark chaotic thoughts about my cultural identity and femininity. Drawing and colouring these figures, I found myself smiling. Anxiety and confusion just slipped away.  I felt serene. 

On reflection, I realised that I had experienced for myself, directly, the compensatory role of art, its capacity for restoring balance to a troubled psyche.

Compensation is a psychic process that C.G. Jung identified in the dreams of his patients, a self-regulation process to bring the psyche into greater harmony. Compensation is one of the processes that give art its enormous healing potential.

 

More on compensation at https://frithluton.com/articles/compensation/