You are currently browsing the tag archive for the ‘C. G. Jung analytical psychology’ tag.
At 3 A.M., I awoke to this surprising dream:
It is night. Ellen Sheire, my former Jungian analyst, invited me to join a conference in a foreign city, attended by the most evolved individuals in the world. Dialogue, not discussion, would be the manner of discourse to address seemingly insoluble problems.
In the dream, the night suggests the waning of time and opportunity for change, an apt stricture that surrounds me as I move through each twenty-four hours, homebound. Yet, fresh learning continues seeping through my dreams, my prayer and meditation, and dialogue with my CPA sponsor.
I do not see Ellen Sheire, my former Jungian analyst, in reality, a Zurich-trained practitioner in Vienna, Austria, and in St. Louis, Missouri, now retired, but her invitation in the dream intrigues me. During my work with her in the 1990s, she had urged me to join Jungian tours to prehistoric Sacred places in Europe and to delve onto their mythologies. In this morning’s dream, there’s another such invitation and I’m eager to participate.
The foreign city suggests a place of unfamiliarity with the history and terrain, strangeness of customs, confusion of languages; its advanced technology replete with untried paradigms.
I am alone as I listen to the expertise of the conferees surrounding me. From within fruitful silence emerges fresh ways of considering what it means to be a person in relationship.
Despite the novelty of expression, the primacy of love remains critical.
I still have much to learn, and my inner teachers are enthusiastic for my new willingness. It is still night—No signs of dawn and cessation.
At 7:05 A.M., I awoke with this unsettling dream, unusual because of a long period of no recall:
It is Sunday. Night darkens the conference complex where a large number of mixed adolescents have been spending the weekend. Because they’ve had no exposure to sexuality in textbooks or experience, teachers inform them. As days pass, the adolescents have become unruly: seamy jokes, scurrilous laughter, and throwing food. Any display of authority is met with snickers. I’m concerned if there will be sufficient time to clean up the complex before the scheduled arrival of another group.
In the dream, I work in maintenance, strong and healthy in my uniform. Both night and Sunday suggest endings: of the day and of the weekend; their implications, though, speak to my end-time of eighty-six years, a long time to live.
The conference complex suggests the setting in my psyche, designated for learning that poses daily challenges. In the dream, though, it’s besmirched by the adolescents up-ended by the presentations. Many want to experiment, in full view of all. Such displays the inner turmoil in my unconscious, roused, perhaps, by yesterday’s felt terror of my death. Even that moment was too much.
The dream concludes with stress roused by the Herculean task of restoring the conference complex in a few days for another group. I feel similarly with the task still lurking in my psyche. On the surface, all appears in order, but this is not so.
This is where Precious God comes in …
At 5 A. M., I awoke with this strong dream:
A bitter controversy rages between my young parents and me about my right to dress my child. Dad speaks in a barely audible tone of voice. I refuse to listen. Later, Mother barges into the room, carrying a folded satin blue outfit and demands I put it on my child. Again, I refuse. She threatens to cut me out of my inheritance if I persist. I take the child and leave.
This strong dream thrilled me with its new developments in my individuation. True, Twelve-Step recovery has afforded me with voice, expressed uniquely in speech and writing. True, I’ve owned my sinfulness, weighted with guilt and shame, but little lightness has resulted. Also true, I’m loathed to express differing opinions, but remain mute when a response is indicated.
The bitter controversy in the dream attests to this change, especially arguing with the young parents, Mother and Dad as I remembered them; symbolically, they represent authority figures responsible for developing the personas of their offspring, or in Jungian terms, clothing them. That Mother intends to force my dressing my child in a blue outfit infuriates me, given the color blue associated with the masculine and my actual mother’s penchant toward this gender; she never actualized her own. And the fabric satin suggests entitlement, another face of pride, in which I grew up.
And leaving behind my inheritance speaks of my resolve to detach even further from the crusted residual in my psyche. There is another way, its dynamics similar to the Twelve Steps but with a light-some outcome: Martha Moloney’s Inner Child Meditations, available through Generation Mindful, a conglomerate of on-line therapists, devoted to Reparenting the Inner Child. It works, like nothing I’ve ever tried.
Heart Whisperings 