I am sitting with my dream group. It’s Mary’s turn to share a dream. Before she reads her dream, she says that this dream has been very powerful for her. It has explained the root of her challenges and difficult relationships. She says that she knows what the dream means, and it has brought her peace. I feel a tightening in my throat. I also feel a stabbing pain in my belly. It’s a familiar sensation that visits me often in the dream groups that I facilitate. Dreamers come armed with excitement because they have reflected on their dreams, and they know what it means. They feel a renewed sense of vitality and they feel that something inside of them has healed.
I wonder, should I let Mary believe the story she’s told herself? Should I affirm her understanding of her dream? After all, it’s her dream not mine. Who am I to tell her what it means? There is a part of me that agrees. My throat relaxes a little bit but the pain in my belly persists which lets me know that I can’t do that. I know why but sometimes I wish I didn’t.
The challenge here is that dreams are in service of the soul not in service of life and my job is to care for the soul of the dreamer. I summon Hermes (guide of souls into the Underworld) to help me. I have to be the bearer of bad news. I have to remind her of the first rule of dreamwork which is: “If you already know what the dream seems to be saying, then you’ve missed its meaning” (Hall). Robert Bosnak has explained the reason behind this: “Dreams seem incomprehensible by nature, nonsensical, an insult to ‘common sense.’ If I immediately know precisely what the dream is all about-then I usually presume I’m caught in resistance, trying to make the dream harmless by understanding it right away.”
Then I remind Mary of the second rule of dreamwork which is: “Meaning of a dream is never exhausted” (Hall) Why? Because dreams are eternal.
I also remember that James Hillman said: “The ambiguity of the dream lies in the essential nature of the imagination, that like a flowing river, must move. A dream to remain a dream (and not a sign or a message or a prophecy), can therefore have no one interpretation, one meaning, one value. The ambiguity of dreams lies in their multiplicity of meanings, their inner polytheism, the fact that they have in each scene, figure, image, ‘an inherent tension of opposites’. It is the tension of multiple likenesses, endless possibilities, for the dream is soul itself and soul is endless.”
So here’s what I can do. I can let her believe what she wants to believe but I can also encourage her to consider other possibilities. It doesn’t have to be either/or, it can be both/and. That’s easier. I’ll do this. I feel another stabbing pain in my belly. I know what it is. I hear Hillman’s voice in my head: “When you wrong the dream, you wrong the soul.” I give in. I have to tell her. I have to care for her soul and the souls of other dreamers who are present in the room. Why? Because dream-work is soul-work.
So I decide to come clean. I gently remind her that first, dreams are concerned with the soul and soul is eternal. So, we can’t ever come to a fixed meaning of a dream. Secondly, there is a deep connection between the symbolic life of our dreams and the longings of the soul. She nods but I can tell she doesn’t want to go there. I close my eyes and ask Hillman for help.
He says: “The psyche uses many languages for describing itself. We see these best in dreams because they are the best model for the actual structure of the psyche. Dreams tell the soul’s tales and persons, and they also use the language of animals and landscapes much as the gods told of their different archetypal qualities through persons, animals and landscapes. The soul may speak of itself as a desert, an island, an airport. It may be a cow or a tiger. Dreams also use parts of the body as parts of dream speech in which feet and teeth and heart do not refer to actual body parts. And dreams use a family as a mode of symbolic speech, where brother and father and son, convey emotional messages beyond the actual family members. In addition to these modes, dreams speak with psychopathological imagery: the idiot, child, the boy with infantile paralysis, the figure with queer psychotic eyes. Here we need the same symbolic understanding that has taught us that dream modes of a speech do not refer to actual geographies, and animals, to actual body parts and family members. The psyche is using a particular metaphorical language system, which is very detailed and concrete, and seems to accomplish a specific end.”
Now she looks confused. I try to explain that dreams are a portal into the imaginal, into the deep imagination. This means that the dream images come from a place far beyond the ego (conscious part of our personality). The ego might have a relationship to them, but they don’t come from the ego. The ego tends to project onto the image because ego likes a solid foundation. It likes to know what something means and how to use it. The ego doesn’t feel comfortable with uncertainty and doesn’t trust the eternal quality of the dream images. In this way and through complexes and projections, the ego gets in the way of understanding the images as metaphors. The ego wants to confront the images in daylight consciousness and with rationality and reason. “The heroic-ego literalize the imaginal because it lacks the metaphorical understanding that comes with image-work” (Hillman).
Bosnak explains it in a similar way: “A dream is not at home in our daytime consciousness. Like Mercury (A.K.A. Hermes), the god of thieves, we have stolen the dream from its nocturnal domain. Every dream requires a switchover into a dreamlike consciousness that can follow the dreamworld. This switchover into dream consciousness is a shock. Daytime consciousness stumbles when confronted with a kind of logic that is essentially alien to it.”
A dream needs to be met in its own natural habitat, the imaginal. It needs to be spoken to in its own language, the metaphorical. As Murray Stein has said, “metaphorical language contains the expanded spaces of indefiniteness that imagination can fill.” I stress to the group that, “Images in dreams are not images ‘of’ animals, figures, mountains, rivers, etc. They are images ‘as’ animals, figures, mountains, etc. Images are demonic forces. Every bit of the dream including the dream-‘I’, is a metaphorical image” (Hillman).
Now I feel the need to stress that figures in dreams are not who they are in the daylight consciousness. I let Hillman explain: “Dreams are made by persons in them, the personified complexes within each of us; these persons come out most freely in the night.” He adds that, “The persons we engage with in dreams are neither representations of their living selves nor parts of us. They are shadow images that fill archetypal roles; they are personae, masks in the hollow of which is a numen (the spirit or divine power presiding over a thing or place)” “In dreams all persons including myself, are dead to their lives, shadows of what they are elsewhere” (Hillman). Mary says she sort of understands but doesn’t understand why this is so.
I explain that the figures come in dreams as people that we know but they are behaving differently. There is something odd and bizarre about them. Mary agrees. I let Hillman explain further: “Why do archetypal figures come in dreams as my friends and family? They are necessary for the work of seeing through, for de-literalizing. They are neither human nor divine, neither subjective nor objective, neither personal nor archetypal – but both. They are from the in between world of soul. They are subjective but impersonal.”
Hillman believed that, “Every translation of dream into bread-and-butter issues of real flesh and blood is a materialism.” He said that, “We must reverse our usual procedure of translating the dream into ego-language and instead translate the ego into dream-language” … “In dreams nothing may be taken naturally, nothing may be referred back above, there’s no return upward” … “If only we could remember the affinity of sleep with death, we might not try to recall each dream to life and apply it there.”
He further explains that, “Our heroic ego is uninitiated and that our nightly descent into dreaming is a mode of initiation. The dream is not a compensation but initiation. It does not complete ego-consciousness but voids it. The initiation of the heroic-ego is learning the metaphorical understanding of the dream.”
Moreover, long ago Freud discovered long ago that children are born with an inherent knowledge of the symbol. “It is naturally a very striking phenomenon that symbolism should already play a part in the dream of a child but this is the rule rather than the exception. One may say that the dreamer has command of symbolism from the very first.” This means that we were born with symbols already embedded in our imagination.
So how should we proceed? As Hillman said, “The job becomes one of subjecting the ego to the dream, dissolving it in the dream by showing that everything done and felt and said by the ego is wholly imaginal. By learning how to dream, it becomes imaginal ego. The first move to teach the ego how to dream is to teach it about itself, that it too is an image. Then it is able to reflect its deed metaphorically. Ego-behavior in the dream reflects the pattern of the image and the relations within the image, rather than the patterns and relations of the dayworld. The dream ego is not mine but the psyche’s and the dream ego merely plays one of the roles in the theater subjected to what others want, subject to the necessities staged by the dream.”
“Just as the dream releases the shade of my brother and father from their actual embodiments, so it releases the dream-ego from having to embody the waking-ego and act in its name. Again, in dreams all persons including myself, are dead to their lives, shadows of what they are elsewhere” (Hillman).
He goes on … “In the dream the dayworld seem to go through a process that transfers events out of life and educates the dreamer into death. There is an operation which we call dreaming, that makes the heroic ego a more subtle body enabling it to become a free soul. The dream is that most near and regular place where we can experience the subtle play between kinds of souls” (Hillman).
This brings us to the third rule of dreamwork or what Hillman calls “the golden rule in touching any dream” which is “to keep it alive.” “Dream work is conservation. We have to set aside what we naturally and usually do. Projecting the dream into the future, reducing the dream to the past, extracting from the dream a message. Conservation implies holding on to what is and even assuming what is, is right. This suggests that everything in the dream is right, except the ego. Everything in the dream is doing what it must following psychic necessity along the wandering course of its purposes except the ego. Only the ego’s behavior comes under suspicion. It tends to do the wrong thing because it has just come from somewhere else and cannot see in the dark. The waking ego must learn to familiarize itself with the underworld by learning how to dream and learning how to die. What we see when asleep is sleep? we do not see the waking world in sleep; we see Hypnos. Dreaming is the mode by which the ego learns to ‘see sleep’. The first task of interpretation is to protect that sleep where protection means seeing the sleep, waking the dream-ego within its dream” (Hillman).
Thus, in order to dialogue with the dream, one must temporarily shed the ego and wander naked into the unknown, into the mystery. One must cast aside even the most dearly held beliefs and enter the darkness of the dream empty and unarmed. Only then, the dream will reveal itself.
I feel that it’s important to help my dreamers understand that “Although the dream itself is unconcerned with waking life, the dream work as a satisfaction of instinct will have its effects on waking life, even if indirectly and without benefit of connections to life made by ego-counseling based on dreams. Changes take place without direct interpretive intervention. It is not what is said about the dream after the dream, but the experience of the dream after the dream. A dream compared with a mystery suggests that the dream is effective as long as it remains alive as an enigmatic image” (Hillman).
This is why “Naming with images and metaphors has an advantage over naming with the concepts, for personified namings, never become mere dead tools. Images and metaphors present themselves always as a living, psychic subjects with which I am obliged to be in relation” (Hillman).
I emphasize that “The dreamwork and the work on dreams returns work to the invisible earth, from literal reality to imagination reality. Through dreamwork we shift perspective from the heroic basis of consciousness to the poetic basis of consciousness recognizing that every reality of whatever sort is first of all a fantasy image of the psyche. We work on dreams not to strengthen the ego but to make psychic reality, to make life matter through death, to make soul by coagulating and intensifying the imagination” (Hillman).
Hillman has explained why this is important: “The emphasis upon the underworld and the insistence upon maintaining the dream as an underworld phenomenon is to keep the depth of the dream intact. What we take out of dreams, what we get to use from dreams, what we bring up from dreams, is all to the surface. Depth is the invisible connection.”
Soul is that part of us which resides in the underworld. In my experience, the quickest way to get to our soul is to identify the moments when we’re attracted to darkness. We are attracted to all sorts of darkness. We are attracted to the color black, to vampires and monsters, to books and movies and art about dark subjects, when we fall for a bad-boy or seductress and something deep inside of us moves. That’s the soul expanding in the underworld. Soul is that part of us that lives with and in Hades. It’s Pesephone who’s married to Hades and has eaten the fruit of the underworld. It’s expansive and fluid. It’s moist but not wet. Darkness is the way to Hades. Soul can be found there.
This is why “We have to meet the dream on its side of the bridge in its own country. If we follow it into the nightworld, our consciousness will be vesperal, a consciousness going into night, it’s terror and it’s balm, or a consciousness of Persephone, the excitement of pursuing images into their depths and mating there with the intelligence of Hades. Dreams are children of night. There will always be a going downward first with feelings of hopelessness then as the mind’s eye dilates in the dark, with increasing surprise and joy. The helpless feeling indicates the underworld is already present, begins right in the moment of looking at a dream. There is a darkening of consciousness that makes the dream seem so utterly foreign and incomprehensible” (Hillman).
I believe that dreams keep us connected to the depths where soul resides. That’s why they are needed more than ever now, in the age of internet, social media, and systemic superficiality. It’s also perhaps why we, the humans, are dreaming more than we have in the past. It’s how the psyche takes care of us by constantly pulling us down every night, into the depths.
References:
Bosnak, R. (1998). A little course in dreams. Shambhala.
Hall, J. (1983). Jungian dream interpretation: A handbook of theory and practice. Inner City Books.
Hillman, J. (1975). Re-visioning psychology. Harper.
Hillman, J. (1979). The dream and the underworld. HarperCollins Publishers.
Stein, M. (1983). In midlife. Chiron Publications.
Image Credit: Unknown