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
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.