The Psychology of the Dream
I wake at 4:13 am, feeling I had been up for hours, still halfway, as usual, into a very difficult night. My vista is full of shadows that feel like a descent into the unconscious. I reflect in passing on my study of psychologist Carl Jung and whether my early morning, primitive notes in my dream journal will pass the smell test.
Even with a small light, the space seems dark, perhaps suggesting a descent into the unconscious that must have opened a multitude of doors, that seemed to mark an empty space that leads to nothing, including the humanity and civility that I was in desperate need of. The spotty shadows that seem to pass an open frame and catch my attention, feel like it was a projection of me, going in circles to the muddled music that sounded like irregular human gasps from an underground well, perhaps the same one my house and psychology was resting on.
At this point in the dream, I had no sense of movement, progress or even a meaningful stasis for concentration and revery. Nothing but fleeting shadows and obstacles, and then washed-up pieces of foreign debris similar to what knocked about my ship when I was in the US Navy in the Far East, where I seemed to be more concerned that the ammunition we carried — 2,000 lb. bombs — would blow up in my face. That martial period in the dream passed, as did the flying kites and weather balloons.
The dream narrative seemed to move through the vertical and horizontal lines that marked latitude and longitude markers, surely another prompt from my Navy days when I was truly “at sea.” My wandering seemed to take me through well-marked windows and doors that seemed to be holding back some pressure, perhaps the sea that seems to stay comfortably within both my conscious and unconscious self, that now present themselves as openings offering various levels of difficulty for the willing entrant.
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Reflecting on this task, this dream, as if searching for a movie reel, seems to project a whisper, then a line, then a full profile of a shadowy image of someone who might be a late-day Santa Claus, a snowman not fully assembled, and some apparently rich merchant, gold bars around his neck, who surely must spend time in high places.
For some reason the dream seems to focus on an image of a man with a very rich neck who somehow finds voice and tells me that he has a lot of experience rescuing businesses and countries that have lost their way and it has been his pleasure to show his pupils that “going under, digging up the dark stuff, finding life in the shadows” is the way forward. I might have heard in the dream the phrase “The darker the better,” but I’m not certain.
I wake to some confusion and uncertainty, not entirely surprised that the dream might have found its storyline in the front pages of a New York daily, taking on its own demeanor, dress, and message when coughing up fictional characters who walk the street of that fair city.
After this writing, the dream still seems much more complicated. Of course, it is easy to point fingers at contemporary figures who might have earned a place in this dream space. I will have to go deeper, finding what this narrative is revealing, if anything, in my personal, psychological arena.
At the end of the night and day, this is personal soul work, an invitation to understand the dream within my psychological space full of repression, projection, and other unfinished business. At my age I am quite certain this experience is not about gold bars and the like. It felt within the dream, that carries its own warning label, a softer invitation to take that other path that does not always find the headlines.
Either way, I have work to do.
