4 big dreams

1. The mandala (feeling)

I have been reading the works of Carl Jung and he uses useful shorthand for identifying types of people. He categorizes people in terms of whether they are thinking or feeling, extraverted or introverted, etc. I have decided to choose four different dreams and then to relate to different areas of my experience. This first dream is chosen to represent the feeling component of my psyche. In this dream I am trying to grab a goat by the horns as it aggressively moves about on an apartment hardwood floor.

As I was trying to stop the goat I mused on the phrase ‘grabbing the bull by the horns’. I manage to hold the goat for a while but he gets loose and smashes a square chess board set within a circle. It breaks into four pieces and I am told explicitly that each of the four parts represent a different part of myself. The smallest piece -a mere shard or fragment is me, (in the truest sense), - and the three larger pieces represent my mother, my father and my younger brother.

Analysis

The first thing that attracts my attention here is the symbol of the quaternity within in the circle. The idea of squaring the circle could be taken as the archetype of wholeness. When Jung entered a difficult period in his life when he withdrew from his teaching position and painted lots of mandalas because he found they relaxed him.

He realized that all of the designs he drew despite their wandering paths always worked there way back to the centre or to individuation. The chess symbolism in my dream adds another element to the mandala symbolism. The chess board corresponds to the ‘classical’ type of Vastu-mandala, a diagram that makes up the basic layout of a temple or a city.

It is curious that my brain would choose a chess board to represent the square within the circle. It is almost as though I could have picked no better symbolism. The chess board is laden with cyclical symbolism. One website discusses the symbolism as follows: -

The cyclical symbolism of the chess-board resides in the fact the it expresses the unfolding of space according to the quaternary and octonary of the of the principal directions (4 x 4 x 4 =8 x 8), and that it synthesizes, in crystalline form, the two great complementary cycles of sun and moon: the duodenary of the zodiac and the 28 lunar mansions; furthermore, the number 64, the sum of the squares of the chess board, is a submultiple of the fundamental cyclic number 25920, which measures the precession of the equinoxes. We have seen that each phase of a cycle, ‘fixed’ in the scheme of 8 x 8 squares, is ruled by a heavenly body and at the same time symbolizes a divine aspect, personified by a deva. It is thus that this mandala symbolizes at one and the same time the visible cosmos, the world of the spirit and the Divinity in its multiple aspects.

Granted I have been reading a lot about Jung’s mandalas but I am really quite pleased at this inspired selection of the chess board. The chess board imagery is what I have chosen to represent myself in my quest for individuation. It represents for me the curious interplay between fate and free will/choice that plays out in people’s lives. There is choice and freedom in terms of where one can move. The further the game progresses, however, the narrower the range of choices becomes.

The second image in this dream that attracts my attention is the goat that smashes my chessboard mandala apart. When I googled the symbolism of the goat I discovered something that interested me - goats are not actually indiscriminate eaters. What is viewed as over consumption is actually a form of sensory perception. The goat tries a little bit of everything and then decides what it likes. This makes it a very interesting as a dream image. It seems to suggest to me that a varied psychological taste testing actually produces more refined psychology.

The goat also symbolizes the notion of curiosity and independence. The mixture of the bull imagery with the goat imagery puts two contradictory images together. The bull which is quick to anger is set against the patient goat. This can be seen carried over into the birth signs. The Capricorn is the organized and systematic planner whereas the Taurus is fiery and passionate.

When I allowed myself to freely associate around the imagery of the goat I made a very interesting connection. I remembered playing a role playing game. One in which there were many sided dice and we created our own universe. I remembered that I had set myself up in the game as the leader of a goatherd mafia/ social movement agitating for reform in somewhere resembling Greece. It occurred to me that my friend had chosen as his character a goat. This goat didn’t talk but rather bit my thigh when it disapproved of what I was doing. This goat, Babaloo, saw fit to act as my conscience and constantly bothered me when I was trying to carry out necessary ruthless decisions.

This phrase ‘grabbing the bull by the horns’ encapsulates a different idea. In my case it deals with the notion of confronting a problem head on. It raises (for me) the idea of nipping something in the bud within a group situation. It is interesting because for me it places the idea of guilt and the rightness of action (the goat) close to the idea handling a group’s perceptions by quickly dealing with group disapproval rather than ignoring it (the bull). This might suggest that the rightness of an action is conflated, in my mind, with whatever the prevailing currents in the group at that particular point in time.

The recrudescence (Thanks for the word Krishna!) of the image of the goat in my dream could suggest that this sense of misguided guilt and constant examination of behaviour involves a breaking down of the self. The heavy moralistic introspection may bring me further from individuation. Another possible way of reading the dream is that this idiosyncratic (and largely unnecessary) process of moral reasoning could be the thing that frees the shard of myself (that is the most me part of me) from the whole.

The last element of this dream that I will examine here is the song ‘tainted love’ by Soft Cell. As one would imagine from the title the song deals with love that is in some way ‘tainted’. It talks about the abnegation of the self and the personality in the lyric – ‘And I’ve lost my light for I toss and turn – I can’t sleep at night.’ It talks of when love transforms into something altogether different and attraction turns into repulsion. ‘Once I ran to you, now I’ll run from you…’ I can readily understand the imagery evoked by these lyrics and how it relates to me.

  I find it interesting that I am recently drawn to another song which seems to evoke opposing imagery; the Radiohead song ‘Fitter Happier’. Rather than utter trauma the lyrics speak instead of a growing numbness and poignancy. A robotic voice hits us with line after line. At the same time we hear sad piano chords and the voices and activity of another room. It is as though we are lost within ourselves as we hear the following fragments: - ‘Happier, more productive, not drinking to much...’‘sleeping well, no bad dreams, no paranoia’, ‘Will frequently check credit – moral, bank, hole in wall’, ‘favours for favours, fond but not in love’, ‘pragmatism not idealism’, ‘will not cry in public’, ‘still kisses with saliva’, and ‘no longer empty and frantic’. Yes, the song speaks of goals achieved but at what cost. The inability to feel or experience life.

2. Festival (Sensation)

The second dream I have chosen is taken to represent the sensation part of my experience. My dream journal records the dream as follows:-

I have the recurring train trope that I get on a train and it his dark and I am alone. The train is both going the wrong direction and I am missing stops. Then I get off and there is a massive black jeep with tinted windows and huge tires and rims and another set of tires in the boot waiting to take me to whatever destination and drive across all of continental Europe for/ with me. I am at a festival. Everything is purple and green. People are morphing. I am on cobble locked streets. There is a robot person being sawed in half and given a radio for a head. I am in a court room. I am seeing faces in a crowd. I am hearing a loud noise that accompanies time slips. People are being hanged from a forklift that is wedged in a tower. I see a crèche. There is a giant apple that is rotting in a box. I see purple snails on a bicycle, etc.

I have dealt with the imagery of public transport and apples and have discussed that symbolism elsewhere. I will not rehash it in detail here. Suffice to say that the apple can be taken to represent sex, knowledge, things that are forbidden and original sin. The public transport imagery can represent a person’s life path, the idea of the path/ or track of life, the idea of missing life’s opportunities or of letting life pass you by. The train for me can also be taken to represent a sort of force of nature. You can be on the train, your can miss the train or you can get in the way of the train.

The jeep that subverts the public transport trope is from the HBO show ‘the wire’. The jeep I associate with Avon Barksdale driving around and playing Franti’s ‘rock the nation’ while showing up all of the cops who are tailing him. It is an image that I take to represent aggression and hyper masculinity. It represents the ultimate in control when placed against the image of the train going both of the wrong ways at the same time. Another friend joked that the jeep represented the death drive and then added that his friend took everything to represent the death drive. There could be something to that death drive idea as it does seems that a lot of my metaphors end in death or failure.

It is as though I compulsively include ‘the fall’ within every image that I select. When I choose the ‘one ring to rule them all’ I conveniently forget that the ring was destroyed in Mount Doom. In choosing am image of a strong Gustavo Fring from the television show breaking bad I omit the fact that his face his blown off at the end of he fourth series.

If we return to the dream there is the image of a snail on a bicycle. The snail is purple in keeping with the trippy nature of the dream. In the symbolism of Christianity the snail is a lazy or sinful person. The snail also represents self-sufficiency because it carries its house with it. The snail is the perfect inclusion in a dream selected for sensation.

The entire body of the snail is a sensory apparatus too’. One website makes the further point that this is ‘symbolic of experiencing reality via uncommon sensory perception.’ It is very interesting because the snail, being the epitome of the exploratory creature, suggests that there are different ways of perceiving and sensing the world. There is a comparison to be made between the goat and the snail as both being sensory and exploratory beings. Another element of the snail imagery that I am drawn to, for the purposes of this dream, would be the snail’s ability to hide itself within its shell or to reveal itself.

The imagery of the tower and the forklift from which people are being hanged is one of the more disturbing images presented in this dream. If we follow the imagery of hanging to the tarot deck we find the hanging man. He represents the suspension of action and the willing victim. He represents somebody who has given up something to achieve something greater. The willing martyr is a sense of the meaning of this card. The word for ‘matryr’ comes from a Greek word meaning witness. It suggests (for me) the false idea that the person who is suffering is the person who is somehow the best witness. It suggests to me that their version is in some way the most objective version.

 The tower imagery in the dream then can similarly be brought back to the tarot deck in the form of ‘The tower’. I have said before that the death card is the tower for pussies. The tower card represents the whole destruction of the framework of the ego. The personality comes crashing down and all illusions are displaced with explosive force. This dream tower creates other associations. The dream tower seems to be like a religious tower or some sort of bell tower. In fact it reminds me of the tower on the island of Poveglia near/in Venice. Poveglia is now closed to locals and tourists but it contained plague fields where plague victims and bodies were left and buried. It also at one point contained a mental institution.  The old bell tower on the island was converted into a lighthouse after the destruction of the old church of San Vitale.

In terms of the tower imagery it goes even further with another legend that surrounds the island. A building was built in 1922 and the legend goes that it was used as a mental hospital and a doctor tortured and butchered many of the patients before going ‘mad’ and jumping to his death from the bell tower. Another version has the doctor as surviving the fall but being strangled to death by a mist that came up from the ground.

All of this imagery and the connection to the island also causes me to draw an association between my dream and the plague doctor masks worn by some ghost television show people who visited the island. The television programme was laughable and at the time I watched it I joked that one of the crew knocking over camera equipment in his own excitement was taken as evidence of paranormal activity. The important thing for our purposes here though is the plague mask which for some reason arrests my attention. Perhaps because it is fucking terrifying.

The bird mask with the beak was worn by plague doctors along with a heavy coat. The mask contained lavender and other things that were burnt but I was also curious what the bird mask was all about.

Thoth carries with it some fascinating symbolism in our extended exercise of following associations. Thoth has many roles which include maintaining the balance between good and evil and of healing Gods when they come off worse in a fight with another God. He is involved in making sure that neither good nor evil wins and decisive victory and he is involved in judging the dead. The associations that tend to be made a lot in my dreams seem to relate to the moral and this is no exception.

The forklift is another powerful connection for me to an episode of accused which is a Jimmy McGovern show. In that show the son of two parents starts temping in a local factory. The son dies in a forklift accident. The factory initially comes across as very helpful and considerate but then tries to cover things up and deny responsibility. The mother sets the factory on fire and is arrested for arson. The mother is found not guilty by the jury even though it is clear that she set fire to the contract. I suppose it is an example of the law being tempered by compassion and appreciation of humanity beyond the legalese.

3. Lucid neighbourhood (Extraversion)

The third dream I have chosen I have identified as being connected to my levels of extraversion and introversion. This dream or dream series is part of a lucid dream series and starts of with my house and eventually involves venturing up a neighbour’s driveway. In the first of these dreams I am too uncomfortable with the reality of the dream and change my mind half way up the neighbour’s drive and return to the street. In this first dream I judge that it s socially unacceptable to walk up this driveway and this dream could actually be real life in which case it would be highly unusual for me to walk up my neighbour’s drive for no apparent reason.

In a second lucid dream I realize that I have dealt with this type of scenario before and I just go into my neighbour’s house. This decision to make my way up the drive because I am only in a dream gives me a lease of life and extraversion that carried over into my waking life. This is why I relate these dreams to my extraversion or introversion.

 When I enter this house I am faced with a mirror in one of the front rooms and I see myself waving like the air ripples above a flame. I have an orange aura. I venture up the stairs in the house and there is my sleeping neighbour in a room that looks as though it is at the top of a throne room. There are more mirrors along the walls. Suddenly I am transported into a barn and I ask my brain to provide some symbolism for me. In response the dream creates the sounds of a bell that should be present but isn’t. I look around and see a pot with a sunflower in it.

The barn is dark but the sunflower, as with the sun, is a symbol of vitality and the enjoyment and appreciation of life. I associate the barn with barn in 12 high noon where the final shoot out takes place. That film was a damning indictment of the people of a town who were really good at rationalising there way out of having to do the courageous and in some senses foolhardy thing. At the end of that film Gary Cooper throws his sheriff badge in the street in disgust at the town. As far as he is concerned there is nobody in the town fit to wear the badge. At the start of the film Gary Cooper’s character married Grace Kelly’s character and he was no longer the sheriff but he risked his marriage and his life to adhere to his code. Even though he was no longer the sheriff and it could be easily argued that it was no longer his problem.

When I was hearing the sounds of the bell I was running the phrase and book title ‘For whom the bell tolls’ through my mind. I looked up the book ‘For whom the bell tolls’ and it seems to be full of the imagery of sacrifice. Perhaps the absence of the bell indicates the lack of sacrifice. Bells are also used to call people to prayer and to signify important ceremonies or events. There also seems to be a connection here between the imagery of bell tower in the imagery of the Poveglia tower in the earlier dream.

Bells are also interesting because they announce rights of passage in people’s life. They also can be used on ships and boats to indicate one’s position through thick fog. The use of a bell in my dream without its actual physical presence could indicate the coming of a rite of passage or a change without the outward appearance of change. Also if the bell is used to warn of other vessels but it does not actually exist here again we have contradictory images. The bell is to warn others of danger but at the same time it does not warn because it does not exist.

In the first lucid dream of this type I am exploring my house and I go out into the back garden and am faced with a cliff overlooking a sheer drop into the sea. One website discusses the edge of the cliff where the earth meets both sea and sky as being the meeting of the unconscious/ femininity (in the form of the sea) and consciousness/ masculinity (in the form of the sky). The same website suggests that what this might symbolize is a critical point in my life where it is time to make a decision. It further suggests that the decision may be one concerning the polarity of masculine or feminine components of my psyche. Another interpretation suggested on the web site is that the cliff may signify the ‘end of the road’ meaning that I have come as far as I can in a particular endeavour or lifestyle.

Interestingly the site also suggests the idea that what might be required at such an impasse is a leap of faith. It is interesting because in that same first dream when I tried to leave the house through the front the visual component of the dream disappeared and I was in darkness. I had to follow the aural component of the dream in order to cause the visual to return. Here again I see the walk by faith and not by sight alone. When the visual component did return I wandered the streets and saw big orthodox churches or red brick churches. I am not too up on my orthodox Christianity. The interest I have an Orthodox Christianity seems to involve the making of icons. The feature of icons that interest me is that they are images of the divine but they are only images, symbols or icons they are not what they are actually representing.

Returning to the dream, however, we return to the church/ churches. I googled the symbolism of churches and was excited to see that it was suggested that the symbolism of churches was actually quite easy to understand. It says that churches:-

 link to some moment the day before when you totally believed something which was later proved wrong. But at the time you absolutely ‘believed’ this. But churches can also link to your sense of commitment and belief regarding important issues and parts of your life.

This image seems particularly apposite for me because people have accused me of having a new philosophy or ideology every week and I actually agree with them. Perhaps the difference is that I don’t think of this as necessarily being a bad thing. I like to think of myself as being ‘consistently inconsistent’ and I like to think of there being a logic that underpins the irrationality. I would also like to coin the phrase ‘irrational inquiry’ if it has not already been coined which I suspect it has. Everything good has already been invented. In any event I draw your attention to the meandering paths on Jung’s mandala and the goat that eats around to decide what to eat. They always work there way back to the centre.

As I said to my friend my method is unashamedly crazy and there is another mode of experiencing the world that is not open to his brand of rigorous examination.

4. Coffins (Thinking)

 The fourth dream I have selected I have chosen to relate to the thinking part of myself. It is a dream that involves a videogame world inhabited by the undead. The picture above relates to one of my associations to the coffin which is featuring more and more in my dreams. The picture is an after and before depiction of the Chase family vault in Barbados but more of that later. First of all I would like to describe this dreamscape in more detail. The dreamscape is redolent of the classic videogames for the PS1 – Medievil.

 I googled this game which I had played in my youth but I don’t know if I knew the whole plot. The plot starts with a flashback to the 13^th Century to the fictional English Kingdom of Gallowmere. You play as the reanimated skeleton of Sir Daniel Fortesque. (He has my name and also a youtube clip mentions the name of my brother –Tim –as ‘canny Tim’. He is the hero of Gallowmere. He died fighting the evil Zarok but his side won the battle. It turns out his reputation was built on a lie though he actually took an arrow to the eye and died at the start of the battle. It seems that the idea of appearances or reputations being deceiving is something my brain wants to connect with this dream.

The appearance of a coffin in this dream and in another dream suggests the idea of death and thoughts of death obviously. However, it also suggests the womb and protection. In German the word for box is a vulgar word for a woman’s private parts and so there is a further connection there. The coffin could also be taken to represent the death of some material in my life or burying certain materials. Though the second coffin contains some sort of undead creature which I am anxious might rise up and break the coffin. In the first coffin dream the coffin was atop supports in the middle of a street with people sleeping in chairs during siesta. The having or a Siesta in the street in the middle of the day and generally living more outdoors is something I associate with sleeping and vitality. Sleeping, however, is closer to death and could be taken to represent death. Perhaps I want to draw the connection between life and death here. In that same dream I come across sand dunes which I read as relating to protection from the wind and protection generally. I might be drawing a connection between life and danger and death and comfortable living.

The coffin I also associate, as I mentioned earlier, with the chase family vault. The vault was supposed to have been sealed with the coffins arranged in a very ordered fashion. When it was opened again the coffins were in disarray. I remember reading about this in a book about the supernatural and mysteries at about age 11 when I was in holiday in Spain. I was terrified by that book but I had to keep reading. There was another account of how when a photo was taken of a dead woman in a parlour (being prepared for funeral?) her eyes were open in the photograph despite being closed in reality. At that time in Spain I was with a childhood friend with whom I have since fallen out of contact. Actually we have met up since but as with many of my childhood friends we seem to be on completely different pages. It is at the centre of an unusual web of complex images that we find ourselves. The image of people coming back to life is presented on the one hand (the eyes open in the photograph, the coffins disturbed in the vault). On the other hand I tie it in my mind to a friendship that has died and the more blatant death imagery of coffins and undead creatures.

In the second dream with the undead dreamscape I am also searching for a hammer in a wooden box. It is perhaps a murder weapon but I am not sure. The hammer symbolizes blunt and brute force decisions. It is a symbol of force and dominance. That I am looking for a hammer in my dream might suggest that in terms of my thinking I am looking for a set of more crude or direct approaches to situations but am unable or find it difficult to find them.

There is also a supernatural giant spider that has a bloated white main body. It rises from the ground but it reminds me of the giant pop and fresh man in the film Ghost Busters. It rises up from the ground as though it is spawning or resurrecting. One website looks at the imagery of the spider as follows:-

Just as the spider weaves a web, so too must we weave our own lives. The spider symbol meaning here serves as a reminder that our choices construct our lives. When the spider appears to us, it is a message to be mindful of the choices we are making – How are my choices affecting my life? , How can my choices improve my life? And how are my choices affecting others in my life? Not only do Spiders and their webs draw attention to our life choices, they also give us an overview of how we can manipulate our thinking in order to construct the life we wish to live.

Psychic reality

 

 What is real?

The dream offers one the opportunity to see what a life without fear can be like. A friend once told me ,(in response to my concerns about violence and aggression), that in "Adultland" if somebody hits you it's assault and the police can be called. I found that very interesting because he was right. The fear has an irrational component. In fact, so much of what we fear  exists only in the world of our imagination. This in turn leads me to the notion that one's imagination to a large extent determines one's own reality.


The interesting thing about dreams, following this train of thought, is that dreams are treated (at least in Jungian analysis) as being psychic facts.  Jung spoke of someone who imagined that they visited the moon as having had the psychic reality of having visited the moon.

 After a series of false awakenings in dreams one can begin to see that there really is not too much difference between the dreaming and waking states at times. Indeed, the model that we use as we go about in the world is laden with projection, introjection and can be very like a dream. On the other hand dreams can be like real life. I have had lucid dreams in which I have felt it socially unacceptable to proceed up my neighbour's driveway and other dreams in which I push on through that barrier and walk into a neighbour's house because I know it is a dream. When one asks what separates dreams and imagination from reality one has to answer not a lot.

 The people that we carry on our relationships with in our everyday waking life can be just as imaginary as if they were created by our sleeping mind. Our imagination then can provide all the ammunition needed to empower or cripple us. We have all the tools to succeed or sabotage ourselves. A nice illustration from my dreams helps to illustrate the point. In one of my dreams I am climbing about in the dense tree canopy and tangle of vine along a jungle path and I want to get down to the jungle floor. Unfortunately I cannot get down because I am too afraid to do so because  of the roaring of a tiger down below. Upon encouragement from a guide I climb down only to discover that the tiger was only a tiger cub. There was nothing to fear because the mind had created the other tiger; the one I was actually afraid of.

Some more real life examples should serve to demonstrate the powerful grip imaginings can have on people.

In and around the chapter entitled '1914: Artic Sex Comedy' Joseph Stalin's exploits in exile are detailed. He was sent to the Siberian region of Turukhansk. He was later moved to Kureika.

This place was an even more desolate and hellish place where he lived amongst Tungus tribesmen. He would forever remain a lone hunter in his politics. This little village of eight huts and three families was to enter Stalin's imagination and remain there for the rest of his life. He maintained the nocturnal hours that he kept in Siberia, he continued to eat fish nuggets and depicted his imagined political enemies as  howling and circling wolves. What is important here is that this brief and lonely period of exile when Stalin shacked up with a thirteen year old mistress and did a bit of hunting was to shape the way in which he viewed the rest of his life and political career.


Our reality is in large part shaped by the products of our imagination. Abraham Lincoln provides another example of how some ideas can steer the course of a man's entire life of actions. Lincoln was obsessed with the Shakespeare play Macbeth and with its theme of perverse ambition. It was through this lens of moral imagination that he viewed his political career. Again and again his mind would return to the nature of ambition as posited in Macbeth. He was willing to admit that he was an ambitious man but he was very defensive about the nature of that ambition. It seems though that through Macbeth and his relationship with that play that he was able to examine the darker side of his character. 

Lincoln had tried to suggest that the civil war was foisted upon him and that his 'paramount object' had been the preservation of the union. This, however, does not seem to reflect the reality. It seems to have been that Lincoln had an opportunity to avoid civil war in the form of a committee of thirteen Senators headed by Senator Crittenden of Kentucky. Lincoln was in large part responsible for the ending of this committee's negotiations at a time when they were likely to succeed. Lincoln, however, did not have as his paramount object the preservation of the union but to prevent the extension of slavery into the Western territories. Now although this was an eminently moral decision the rhetorical sleight of hand and disingenuity it entailed was connected to his expression of Macbeth-ian qualities.  After a visit to the army  headquarters at city point Virginia in 1865  Lincoln returned to Washington on the River Queen steamer and read aloud from Macbeth. Lincoln's whole moral imagination and meditations on the nature of ambition was inspired by this work of fiction.

What is the self?

Our imagination then can shape our lives in the most drastic of ways but there is more to this world of the unconscious/ states other than normal consciousness. If the imagination can alter our course in the world can it also change the shape of our self. In the Jungian conception of the self, (represented by the mandala or some notion of squaring the circle), the idea of a centre of the self more core than the ego as a  centre is discussed. The notion of compensation is discussed and it is suggested that the unconscious attitude and the unconscious attitude operate in equilibrium. It is interesting to think in this expanded way about the self and it makes me wonder just how broad this notion of the self can stretch.

Winston Churchill had an interesting feature to his governance during the war. He instructed that his orders only be followed if they were written down and also especially built his apparatus of power to protect against his decision making. I think that with leaders such as this it is arguable that there extended apparatus of power represents a manifestation of their extended selves.

Self-Control

It is interesting to see the way in which the symbolism of cars in dreams. Cars seem to represent the self but in a more physical way like the actual actions of a person. In certain of my car dreams in the past either I was driving under the direction of my brother or he was driving. He was being used by my unconscious to represent the sensible. In another dream I had  a person who is quick to anger and lacking in emotional self-control at the wheel. In that instance the car was put into reverse, banged off a car in the drive way and then crashed into another car on the other side of the street.

My interpretation of this dream leads me to believe that there is a part of myself like this person I know. In another dream I am saving this person from a rioting crowd. It seems to me that what I am saying to myself that if I let that side of me do the driving I am liable to crash and it is a side that if exposed will need protection from mobs of people. Other dreams seem to present a different, slightly broader idea, of embracing that emotional/ wild side. In one dream in which I am presented with a giant hat as the symbol of my authority and I am in a restaurant. In that restaurant which is in a sort of open almost Grecian ruin type backdrop I learn that this is a site of some historical importance. It is also a location where extremists of all shapes and sizes are allowed to be extremist but only at certain special times of the year.

In the process of looking at ourselves we are liable to label some of what is within us as 'not me' and some of the forces tend to produce their opposites. I also had a dream in which it is with a mixture of terror and delight that I roll balls down a hill onto a promenade where they could potentially do damage. It is interesting to speculate as to where the me begins and ends. In the new TV Show boss the unscrupulous mayor of Chicago Tom Kane has a degenerative illness that causes myriad effects including hallucinations and disturbances of cognition and judgement. Some of the effects prove extremely useful for the Mayor in retaining his grip on power and so the question presents itself. Where does the person end and the illness begin?

Mixed symbols

Babies

The theme of this blog post would have to be the mixed imagery of dreams. It seems to me that when one really starts to get serious about the imagery and symbolism in dreams and indeed in everyday life there tends to be a lot of symbols that contain conflicting ideas and opposites. It is as though at the level of the symbol or the antecedent level before we come to language (as we know it) enantiodromia is alive in the very make up the language of symbols. The imagery of babies from me is a very good example of this. They are depicted in my dreams as these good, fragile and delicate things. Furthermore they are depicted as needing to be protected constantly from death. On the other hand the dead baby is a most grotesque and disturbing image. It exists as a corruption of nature a million miles away from the naturalness and innocence of the living baby. I am reminded of the death of the baby in the film trainspotting. The drug addicts in this film neglect their baby and it dies.



This image is particularly haunting for me and it is something that most definitely features in my dreams. There is something primeval and really back brain amygdalic about the death of a baby. It is a form of pure terror that seems to remind me of Waite's description of the crayfish on the moon tarot card. The crayfish represents those things deeper down that appear in dreams only as faceless demons.

The baby then for me is a mixed image. Indeed, a baby does not even have to be dead to represent this alien, grotesque image. A baby develops very much like a parasite in its mother and they sometimes appear in dreams as future dictators and malefic monsters. It does not seem accidental that in Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov a baby is included in the following proposition put to the  readers.


"Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end... but that it was essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature ... And to found that edifice on its unavenged tears: would you consent to be the architect on those conditions? Tell me, and tell me the truth!"

What is striking about this passage for me when looking at it in this context is the juxtaposition of the imagery. The case for utilitarianism is set against this great innocent but at the same time the baby is described as a 'creature'. The arranging of these contradictory elements though ends up producing an image that is actually more arresting and satisfying.

Lambs and Lions

My dreams also feature mixed imagery in the form of lions and lambs. I had a dream in which I was responsible for a lion eating lambs. This is an interesting reversal of the phrase lions for lambs. The normal phrase lions for lambs usually indicates that the brave are dying for the cowardly higher ups and this dream reverses that image.The interesting thing about the image of the lamb is that it is associated with innocence.

The lamb of God takes away the sins of the world in one hymn. The lamb in the other image represents the distant and cowardly political leader. This is strange that innocent lambs are also taken to represent the very worst and the most cowardly types of people. As if that wasn't enough of an imagery milkshake the lion and the lamb also reside in the same image at the same time. Augustine talked about a lion-like lamb that rises up to deliver victory after being slain. In 375  he discussed the lion/ lamb imagery as follows: -


 "Why a lamb in his passion? Because he underwent death without being guilty of any iniquity. Why a lion in his passion? Because in being slain, he slew death. Why a lamb in his resurrection? Because his innocence is everlasting. Why a lion in his resurrection? Because everlasting also is his might."


Further mixed images can be traced when we follow the baby imagery in terms of the name I have given a dream baby  before. In one dream I decided to call a baby something biblical. I muse at my own name. Daniel. This name means God is my judge or judged by God. In the dream I reach around my brain for a name and snatch Samuel as a name. Upon waking I wonder whether Samael is a feature of my picking of this name. I look up Samuel and I find the meaning of it as being either 'name of God' or 'god has heard'. I think to myself now that despite not knowing the root of the name either that calling a baby 'name of god' after trying to think of a biblical name is my brain's idea of a joke. Perhaps it is allowing the associative faculty to run wild on something that is already the product of hyper association. 


In any event the connection between babies and the other mixed image is contained within the name if it is taken as 'Samael'. Samael is an archangel in Talmudic lore. Wikipedia says that he is a figure who acts as an important figure who is an accuser, a seducer and a destroyer and has been regarded as both good and evil. Samael is depicted as being the angel of death and he is very close to both the flaming skeleton and cosmic intelligence skeletons of my dreams as well as the tarot card of Death.

Skeletons

The skeleton seems to represent a number of opposing ideas. It represents death and life. It represents degeneration and resurrection.


Shamans the world over try various techniques to see their skeletons and some remove skin to expose the bone. The death card in the Tarot also carried the symbol a white flower representing on a flag representing rebirth. It seems trite to say it but the death card symbolizes the death of an old way of living and the beginning of a new way of life.


There is another link between resurrection and bones that can be seen in the Christian image of one of the most famous resurrections. Jesus Christ is crucified on Golgotha, which means skull in Aramaic.  Interestingly if we look further at Christian language it talks about getting away from the sins of the flesh. The idea of bones represents the truth as bones are the only thing that remains after death. Again there is the flesh of illusion beside the bones of truth. Opposing images placed together to create an altogether richer image. 


Mark C Taylor points out the link between resurrection and skeletons and truth and skeletons in his Cabinet article 'Sacred Bones'. He discusses the scapulomancy that is practiced by the Montagnais-Naskapi on the North American Labradorean peninsula. They use bones for divination and some bones such as the shoulderblade of a caribou is held to be especially 'truthful'.

Morality and dreams

Morality is a theme that I seem to visit again and again in my dreaming life. It is only when I examine my dreams that I see just how many of my dreams concern themselves with complicated moral dilemmas or profound feelings of guilt.

 Romantic relationships and morality

There are various different types of morality dream. One connecting feature between the strands is that of the linkage of responsibility and romantic relationships with women. There seems to be a connection between the notion of relationships and transgression.  In one dream I am involved with a lady friend when somebody is murdered in my immediate proximity with a revolver. I was too distracted, however, and not only was I unable to act as a witness but I  also become the prime suspect in the murder. 

In another dream there is a rather moving segment in which while experiencing time slips I use my magical powers to hold the pieces of a broken vase together in mid air and manipulate the pieces till the vase is fixed. I am in a diner when this is going on and the waitress/ a random attractive girl starts to touch my arm in response to whatever energy it took to repair the vase. As she is leaving the table I hold her hand. She looks back with a smile on her face while holding my hand. In the next segment I learn that she has been shot off screen and I am being quizzed by a girl I knew in college as to what this waitress girl looked like. In another segment children are re-upping/ re-supplying flats with drugs. This is like the show the wire. This dream segment is particularly interesting because the magical power that I used to fix the vase is the same magic power that causes the woman to be attracted to me and also the same power that I ultimately know leads to her off screen dream death. The immediate transition to the grim world of the involvement of children in drug dealing in Baltimore is disheartening and serves as another linkage between the concept of romance and the grim everyday world of immorality.


It seems that on some level I have drawn a false dichotomy between the good and the interesting. In my ordinary waking experience I see people pursuing relationships in an overly cynical or degrading way and it seems as though those concepts have fused in someway in my mind. Perhaps all that is needed is for the dream to present an image of romantic relationships that is both good or natural and interesting.

Living by the sword and dying by the sword

The phrase 'hoisted by one's own petard' is a phrase that really captures morality concept that features heavily in my dreams. It particularly appeals to me because of the imagery it evokes. The petard was a small bomb which was used to blow up gates and walls when breaching fortifications and so the phrase implies that one could be lifted or blown upward by their own bomb.To put it another way the notion is that of living by the sword and dying by the sword. It is the sort of idea that plays out in my ordinary waking life too. I feel that whatever that whenever one uses a certain type of tactics to engage others they are opening themselves up to exactly the same sort of tactics being used the same way. 


In one of my dreams a night time gunfight is taking place across the back gardens of my estate. I pick up someone else's gun and fire one shot in the rough direction of the sounds of gunfire. The threatening area is briefly illuminated before I drop the gun. There is an understanding that if I become a person who fires guns I will be killed by a gun. In a later dream I am involved in some sort of military plan. There two units of soldiers on my side surrounding a vast enemy encampment on a vast snowy plane. In spite of all of my cleverness in the formulation of an encirclement strategy I actually do not want to engage the enemy at all. I begin to hear gunshots across this mountainous plane and I suspect that hostilities have begun. The scene begins to shift and I am faced with a bridge over water. 




Atop the bridge is our culprit; the source of the sound of the shots. The man it appears is hunting ducks under the bridge with his rifle. A man passes him on the bridge perhaps a friend or an acquaintance. The hunter fires a shot in direction of this friend or acquaintance. I am disgusted by this and begin to hurl abuse at the hunter on the bridge. He begins to fire in my direction at first in a manner both intimidatory and reckless and then much more focused on actually killing me. One of the shots rebounds off my foot and lands on the bridge near the hunter. I am struck either then or now in my waking state that the bullet ricocheted off of my shoe. I entreaty the hunter and suggest that it is unfair to kill me without giving me a chance to fight back. He tosses down a revolver that he had begun firing with and he anticipates that since he has fired a number of rounds from the revolver that I will not be able to master the mechanism and will fire on an empty chamber. 


I quickly master the revolver, I pull back the hammer and decide not to aim for his head but for the larger target of his torso. I fire and he drops from the bridge. He is now beneath and archway that supports the bridge and I fire the remaining two shots into him. Shooting him at least once in the head. A friend asks me what I want done with the body and I suggest that it be left because it is evidence and it would not be proper to disturb the evidence. In moral terms I am going over what I perceive as a complicated situation. I envisage my arguments of self-defence for when the law arrive and I think to myself that the law can never capture adrenaline fuelled nature of real self-defence. When you are really fighting a threat you will empty all of your rounds into it and that is the force that you think necessary at the time. The detached language of hindsight does not seem appropriate in this context. Another, opposing line of thought occurs to me either now as I meditate on this dream or during the course of this dream. I think that there is a definite feel of murder off of this shooting and that perhaps morality is not meant to be easy that the sway of passions of the movements of other people and forces are not something that really significantly reduces our responsibility for violent or immoral acts.  


In terms of what I can take from this dream there is quite a lot. It would appear that on one analysis I have become like that which I have defeated and maybe it is necessary to become the evil that you defeat. Now if I am being truly honest with myself the hunter that I killed on that bridge could also be taken to represent the sexual hunter. The gun could also represent the phallus. The immediate connections that I form with this altercation with the hunter on the bridge are first of all Sophie's father in Peep Show (a friend helpfully pointed out that he is a cuckold) and the murder of Jimmy in Boardwalk Empire by Nucky Thompson. Now there are all sorts of elements of betrayal captured in these associations. The link to boardwalk empire is significant for a number of reasons. 





First of all the shooting of Jimmy by Nucky is in a sense unequivocally murder. Jimmy is unarmed and outnumbered and shot at close range by Nucky. Jimmy had absolutely no chance. In another sense Jimmy had ordered a hit on Nucky and in the broader political sense it was Nucky or Jimmy and in that broader sense it is a form of self defence.


Now when Jimmy orders the murder of Nucky that is another interesting point and makes it all the more interesting. The killing of Nucky is encouraged by Nucky's brother Eli and Jimmy acquiesces in it to appear to be a decisive and effective leader. A man rather than a boy. He expresses his doubts to his mother who encourages him to act decisively and strongly. We are told there are orders and all the rest is just book keeping. So here we have a moment where Jimmy is supposed to be showing his strength in leadership but at the same time he is giving in to pressure from his mother and the rest of the group. Eli was the one who suggested that the group murder Nucky and he ends up being forgiven while Jimmy is murdered by Nucky. This string of Boardwalk Empire associations taps onto another theme. The greater the persons capacity for morality and self-assessment the higher the standard to which they are held. Jimmy has all sorts of misgivings over ordering the death of Nucky but it is Eli who is forgiven. In the Bible it often happens that Jesus says the prostitutes and thieves will get into heaven before the pious. It is this unusual facet of morality which both my dreaming and waking brain seize upon. We seem to admire minor positive change in those who perennially do bad things whereas we expect impossibly high things from those who know what is the right thing to do. This in turn reminds me of the Inquisitor in Red Dwarf because the person who judges is people is ultimately the person being judged themselves.



  The difference between the actual emotional and instinctive reactions of people that I discussed in relation to the self-defence/ murder shooting at the bridge again appears in the beginning of Cop Land. I really enjoyed the film but I found myself in two minds about the films opening. It starts with a young cop shooting two crack heads in a car in what he thinks is a situation where his life has been threatened. The crack heads bash into the side of his car at high speed and the cop chases them and shows his badge and demands that they pull over. One of the crack heads laughs and says no and points a bicycle lock at the young hero cop. The cop things that the lock is a gun and jams on the breaks at this point his tyre blows out which he takes to be a shot at him and he returns fire killing both of the crack heads. 


It is this situation that leads to a weapon being planted, a staged suicide and a number of murders or attempted murders to cover up this incident and everything flowing from it. So this is the incident from which the rest of the film flows and it is really enjoyable in terms of being a nice high octane, adrenaline fuelled bit of action. However, something about it didn't sit well with me. The shooting seems justifiable, from the subjective point of view of the cop, and surely an argument could have been made quite successfully in court to that effect. Another train of thought, however, arose as with the shooting in the 'bridge hunter dream'. I began to imagine that if I had been in the cop's place and had actually killed two people perhaps the standard would actually be as high as that and the moral opprobrium attaching to this would  have actually been much greater that I had at first anticipated.





If I am being truly honest the shooting imagery in both my dreams and the Tv and film references that flow from them there is a link to romantic relationships. The revolver recurs in Cop Land and in another clip that I mentioned to a friend when I jokingly speculated at how my party might progress at the weekend. I had not remembered when I shared this link with my friend that the line 'morals get in a way of a good dirty time' was used in it.

 
It seemed that beneath the threshold of my conscious I wanted to draw this connection between fun and sexy immorality versus boring goodness. I am reminded of what another friend told me about my choosing of tv references being more revealing of my inner thoughts than any of the dreams that I share and perhaps there is something to that. I shared the following clip from breaking bad which prompted that response and it again seems to deal with the themes of being lost and the tension between judgment and morality and acceptance.

 Acceptance is another theme that plays out in my thoughts about morality and there is a linkage between this and the live by the sword and die by the sword notion. Judgment cuts both ways if you are ungenerous in your assessments and characterizations you must judge yourself by the same uncharitable standards if you wish to be consistent/ sane. If you cannot accept you may end up being lost like Jesse but at the same time you cannot just accept everything there have to be limits and lines drawn at some point.

Guilt

Another feature of morality that occupies much of my waking and dreaming self is the notion of guilt. Guilt has been a driving force for a lot of my action and it has helped me achieve things that I might not have otherwise achieved but it also seriously debilitating. It is an area of much reflection for me and there is a distinction drawn or at least one that I draw between shame, guilt and responsibility. The way that I see it there is shame which seems very much to be the socially mandated need to appear like I am feeling bad aspect. Guilt then seems to be a little better but it is still a self indulgent emotion whereas responsibility for me  is at the top of this hierarchy. It does not allow for self-servicing feelings but accepts the consequences of actions and in a dispassionate and sort of matter of fact way takes itself forward. Guilt on the other hand can be just looking to confess and receive forgiveness from the other whereas responsibility seems to me to be more for the self. 

I have also been interested in the discussion of secondary sociopathy in one paper where it talks about this notion of free floating guilt that arises as a result of punishment in childhood for both pro-social and anti-social behaviour. This interests me because I have seen before the phenomenon of guilt as an imposition. In these cases guilt is not something felt for the transgressor themselves but just another thing that is forced upon them and another reason for them to get angry. This anger and externalization of guilt may actually lead to a sort of self-vindicating criminality which could actually cause some people to do horrible things.


My dreams dealing with guilt seem to use the imagery of crashed cars. In one dream I am in a landscape of endlessly crashed cars and I am responsible in some way for these accidents or perhaps they are not accidents. The skeletal and charred out remains of crushed up cars are on the roadside. I am with the simultaneity that only can occur in dreams both desperately fleeing the site of this crash and at the same time solemnly waiting for judgment and the arrival of the law. In another sequence of that dream I am in a jail cell where I am receiving therapy from Paul Weston the Tv show therapist. This ties in with another association I make between the need for one to bottom out or reach rock bottom before healing can begin. I am reminded of a photo of a man with his head in a urinal with something about hitting rock bottom in the caption and of course In Treatment where it seems that with Week 7 of every patient's therapy poignant piano music is played and everybody recognizes that they are damaged and trapped by patterns but somehow everything is now going to be ok. Paul might say in the dub-iest of accents to Gina that it's alright to be human. An acceptance of being flawed and an understanding of the slow process of healing seems to make people as healed as they could be just for the duration of the melancholic/ heal-y music.

The most interesting feature of these morality dreams for me would seem to be that my dreaming self is not only obsessed with morality but romantic relationships and morality. In every dream situation and under every heading that link is drawn in my mind. I am reminded of something a friend said to me in conversation and it helps me to formulate a message to myself so that the two halves of myself can understand one another. The moral boring part of myself would like to quote the following from Lincoln's first inaugural address to the sexy immoral side of me: -

We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

Dream animals

ANIMALS 

The animals in my dreams are very interesting - a lot more interesting than real life animals it seems sometimes. I remember one dream in particular where I was out in a field like an abandoned traveller caravan site. It was strewn with garbage and old cookers other things. Out of nowhere appeared a lion and a tiger coming from different directions. As they approached me I felt that these majestic creatures would not harm me unless I caused them want to harm me. As they got closer though it quickly became apparent that any of my notions of majesty and not killing-me-ness were misplaced. The tiger started to grip my arm in his mouth and began to apply pressure and pull on my arm. I thought I was done for in the dream but at that point a car came out of no where and smashed into the tiger which was holding my left arm. I puzzled over the brown Ford that had smashed into the tiger and caused a limb explosion but then it came to me. It was the car that had been driven by the aborigine in the Australian film Red Hill. The link with the film is interesting because the aborigine is starts out as a serial killer who comes back to devastate this rural outback community after his escape from prison. In this film the protagonist is a young cop who has moved to this community and is starting in the new police station. He is the butt of several jokes and is humiliated by being pressured to ride a horse while doing policing rather than driving a car. The sherriff of this community is depicted as a demagogic, no-nonsense sort of a character who immediately questions the motives of the young cop in applying for a transfer to his community. He suggests that only two motives exist either he is looking for a fast promotion or an easy ride.

The brutal approach of the sheriff elicits too much information from the young cop who reveals that his wife had a miscarriage and slightly later on that he had shot a teenager with a gun. The sheriff here seems quite invasive and not at all sensitive to this new material. Later on in the film when the plot is well under way it is revealed that the aborigine was not a serial killer at all but he had made a discovery which prevent building in the area. The sherriff burned the aborigine's house and left him for dead and had a mob rape and murder his wife. The protagonist witnesses the guilty suicide of one of those who shares in the town's collective guilt. The film ends with the sherriff at his feet and the young cop at his side. Back up arrives and the young cop urges him not to shoot the sherriff and suggests that the sherriff will be taken into custody. The aborigine shoots the sheriff and is killed in a hail of bullets. As the aborigine is dying he reveals that his late wife was going to have a new baby like the young cop's wife is going to now. Earlier in the film he had not killed the young cop and had left him tied up outside the town with a baby names book that he had found on his person.

The idea that this person's car which he had taken from one of the posse set up to kill him is interesting to me. The unlikely hero has associations to another figure from film. That figure is that of the Dark Knight. The idea of the 'hero that Gotham deserves' or being 'whatever Gotham needs me to be' is an image that appeals to me. It also brings me on to another idea of someone having to hate the haters and the destructive force of fighting evil. It reminds me of the Nietzsche quote about fighting monsters for long enough that you become a monster. The Dark Knight puts it this way -you either die a hero or you live to see yourself become a villain. It also reminds me of the speech given in A few good men where Jack Nicholson's character suggests that Tom Cruise's character needs people like him guarding freedom on a wall and that in dark places Tom Cruise's character doesn't want to admit to he in fact wants people on this wall. Another association then would be Agent 47 from the Hitman videogame series. He is a force of nature that rights wrongs. It also reminds me of the story in the Koran of Moses and the Khidr or green one. The Khidr says to Moses that he will depart from Moses if he is not ready to embrace what he, the Khidr is doing. The Khidr kills and man and damages a fishing vessel. Moses is indignant at the Khidr's actions and so the Khidr has to depart from him. Before he departs thought the Khidr explains to Moses that he damaged the vessel so that it would not be seized by force and killed the man who was going to become a terrible criminal and thus saved his family from the disgrace. It is only too late that Moses understands the actions of the Khidr who must then depart as he said he would.

In my dream then a character of this sort who cannot be seen destroys the tiger on my left and with the shock of the force I am free. The animals seems to represent primal forces although there a number of other more particular associations with each which may or may not be of some note. First of all the tiger a lot of the time seems to represent feminine energy for me. There is a pencil drawing in my house of a tiger's head emanating from the crown of a dark haired beautiful woman and I have seen pictures of Shiva the destroyer as a female with pelts of Tiger fur. Women having tiger fur associated with them particularly the scary ones is an association of mine. The Lion makes me think of the Tarot card of strength. The Tarot cards, for the major arcana represent, a kabbalistic journey through consciousness strength is number 8 on this journey from the conscious into the conscious and back out again. The lion in the card strength represents the animal forces of the unconscious and they are being tamed or domesticated by a women who is holding the lion's jaw. The association then in the dream could be to simply the unbridled forces of the unconscious because there is no woman holding the lion's jaw in the dream.


In another dream there is a cheetah cub which I have on a plane and I am bringing it home to add to a menagerie of animals that includes a big lion. Another association the cats seem to create for me is one of sexuality and predation. The young Cheetah cub is probably the most interesting of these animals and the one I find the most amiable image of the big cat series of images that I have in my dream it is the easiest to handle even though I know it will grow up to be a big cheetah it seems as though it will be more inclined towards me having grown up with me.


Another set of dream animals that uses to feature a lot in my dreams were snakes and rats. They share some of there symbolism and in Singapore for example snakes take the place of rats in everyday life. The snake and the rat are interesting images because they have many meanings. I mean often it is a simple as being sneaky or slithery or being generally roguish and self-serving. The rat is associated with the informant on criminals and the snake is associated with the temptation of Eve to eat from the tree to knowledge in the story of Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden. 

The snake, however, gets a bad rap it forms the cadduceus with two snakes and is a symbol of healing and is associated with the trickster messenger God Hermes. In some gnostic versions of the Adam and Eve story the snake is the hero of the tale. The snake is associated with Kundalini energy and it also climbs the tree of life and is a symbol of intelligence and transcendence.

Nehushtan is a very interesting biblical snake in that Moses raises up this Bronze is raised up on a cross and become a thing of healing. This Mosaic serpent is then used by Jesus, possibly, to to refer to his own crucifixion. The snake and the cross then come to represent a spiritual healing from the curse of sin. In another dream I saw two snakes having sex and they produced a human baby. The snakes also then snapped at me when I was in the the corner. That image comes from seeing a pedestal/ statue with hermes on it and there was a phallus on one side. On side of the pedestal there were two conjoined snakes in a most unusual act of sexual congress. This image came from the man and his symbols book with an introduction from Carl Jung. The snake/ sexuality connection is another element that is of interest to me. Snakes employ internal fertilization and peculiar methods of sex and the way in which they have sex seems to very unusual.

The swan is another animal which has appeared in at least two of my dreams. It is another interesting image in that a swan once attacked my brother in a dream when I was annoyed at him. In another dream the swan was in a water feature. The swan is another dream image that is very interesting. The swans are monogamous creatures and they also feature in the story of the ugly duckling. They swan can also be very aggressive snap at times. The idea of unrealized beauty and faithful partnership is one that the swan evokes for me in dreams.