On Dreams

lonelydreamscape

Last night I dreamed that I was teaching again, or rather, expected to teach. I was trying to pull myself together somehow, hiding on the other side of a big grassy field that was already noisy and colorful with children. There were pennants strung above and flapping in the breeze, someone shouting into a megaphone, and a sense of anticipation and excitement that only translated into panic and anxiety for me. I had no lesson plan and no idea what I would say to the kids who would be expectantly awaiting my wisdom. I felt completely unprepared and unqualified, and it was a relief to wake up.

I’ve been having dreams like this, or variations, for as long as I can remember. There are courses to teach for which I have no knowledge, tests to take for which I have not studied, a speeding car I don’t know how to brake. I look down and see I forgot to put on clothes, or I need to find my way home but have no sense of where I am. There are recurring dreams of falling, or of frantically trying to dial a number, unable to get through. There are nightmares about cats clawing and clinging to me, and I'm unable to shake them, and the sad dreams about going back to my childhood home or trying to find and talk to dearly loved people, soon followed by the realization that they are gone.

I’ve been thinking about dreams lately, reading a few thoughts by Carl Jung about how much they reveal. “No amount of skepticism and criticism,” he wrote, “has allowed me to regard dreams as negligible occurrences. Often enough they appear senseless but it is obviously we who lack the sense and ingenuity to read the enigmatic message from the nocturnal realm of the psyche.”

I don't think any of the dreams I've just listed are that difficult to decipher.  What I am particularly interested in after my admittedly superficial perusals of Carl Jung, are big dreams, archetypal dreams, dreams that reflect a greater sense of destiny and awareness of self, maybe more along the lines of the way people in primitive cultures view dreams

:"[Primitive man] attributes an extraordinary importance to [dreams], so that it often seems as though he were unable to distinguish between them and reality. To the civilized man dreams as a rule appear valueless, though there are some people who attach great significance to certain dreams on account of their weird and impressive character. This peculiarity lends plausibility to the view that dreams are inspirations."

Here's a dream I had a few years ago that was imbued with the aura of myth and seemed like a big one to me. It involved an encounter with creatures who were half men and half lions, and a facing and overcoming of fear. That was a memorable and unique dream, and it bestowed courage upon me. It seemed as significant as a real world event. I've had a few others like that, such as the dream in which I swim. Because of that particular dream, I think I know what actual swimming feels like.

And then there was the victory dream of June 6, 1982, recorded in a dream journal I was keeping then but would have never forgotten anyway, in which I was being chased but for the first time did not freeze in terror. Instead: "I was clear-thinking and able to function. I was running fast, wearing a blue silk garment that trailed in the wind. My running turning into flying, but I am in control, I can navigate and see and land when I want to."

I was beginning to change my life at that time, but I don't know if the dream was prompted by reality or caused the reality, reinforced what was happening or inspired it.  In any case, I was never quite the same afterwards.

A few more words from Carl Jung:

"The dream is a little hidden door in the innermost and most secret recesses of the soul, opening into that cosmic night which was psyche long before there was any ego consciousness, and which will remain psyche no matter how far our ego-consciousness extends... All consciousness separates; but in dreams we put on the likeness of that more universal, truer, more eternal man dwelling in the darkness of primordial night. There he is still the whole, and the whole is in him, indistinguishable from nature and bare of all ego-hood. It is from these all-uniting depths that the dream arises..."

I'm taking note.