I was first introduced to Robert Bosnak’s dreamwork technique at the CG Jung Institute in Boston and then invited to a private dream group that gathered around a wood stove upstairs in his suburban barn. Boston. This group deeply explored the unconscious lives of the group members. Huddled in a small circle under the covers, we only knew each other by sharing our dreams. Here I learned more about archetypal symbolism. Universal symbols can contribute to the meaning of a dream, not always by translating them but by viewing the dream on the mythical level. Joseph Campbell once said in an interview that myths are the dreams of society.
Throughout all of known history, the archetypes recur, albeit in different forms. The archetypes are dynamic forces, identified, for example, as The Divine Child, The Old Man or the Wise Woman, The Female Devourer, The Hero, The Underworld, The Trickster, The Shadow, among others.
When we can look at our lives mythically, we can accept the most difficult passages as the continuity of inevitable change. The Dark Night of the Soul is equivalent to Nigredo in alchemy, descent into the depths, and whether of pain or trauma, this stage is universal for the hero or heroine of many myths. When we see our particular pain as a rite of passage rather than an ending, then we have the courage to confront the situation with the dragon or the witch (or the loss of the job or the lawyer), understanding and feeling what part of ourselves is affected. resist to grow.
In Bosnak’s private group we learned to put more pressure on the pot by questioning the dreamer; we enter into the discomfort of difficult images, observing the psyche autonomously in action. A discovery was to see how the dream expanded under this “heat” and in the two-hour sessions we also talked about personal stories. All members were able to enter twilight consciousness under the pressure of intensive interrogation.
Sometimes there were silences when everyone had fallen into the picture like it was a black hole. Sometimes active imagination caused new images to appear. Going back to earlier scenes after feeling an emotional release, we found that they had changed, and quite often the monster was what. Most of the detours a dreamer took turned out to be relevant, resonating in a new way. This exploration every week felt like a sacred ceremony. Even when we sat for a long time with a grotesque image, a serial killer, a river of worms, an explosive plane crash, sexual abuse, bloody wars, there was a deep sense of mystical participation in a ritual and the group bonded closely.
Sometimes synchronous phenomena accompanied the work and scared us unnervingly. Once, the dream of an airplane called up low-flying jets. An insect dream produced a large horsefly in the room. Or noises would occur at significant moments: the hum of the oven turning on, a neighborhood siren or dog barking, a coughing fit, a trio of sneezes occurring at precise moments when the pressure cooker contained related images.
There was also the contagion of laughter and tears, usually from the unimaginable pain that represses the human psyche. Dreams exaggerate, but the range of orphans, rag dolls, misshapen babies, tree stumps, vile reptiles, amputated limbs, earthquakes, and floods was not infrequently disconcerting, especially to the dreamer. From time to time the group dreams in sync, animal dreams, diving dreams, eroticism. I remember once when we traveled to space and hung there like the floating fetus in the movie “2001”. In the luxury of time spent on a single dream, all the nuances were followed.
We often walked out of these meetings in a daze, smiling sheepishly at each other when we finally opened our eyes. There was also a cautious respect for distance and the full understanding that the work was confidential. I felt privileged to be a part of this cult of dreams and I stayed with this group for four years and together with my son it became the most important thing in my life. We lead each other through questions about the atmosphere, time of day, colors, sounds, and sensory images. A dream I experienced there demonstrates the transformative aspects of the job. Here is the dream:
I am on a beach, the beach where I walk every day close to home. It’s night and I just left a party where there were many males bothering me as well as rejecting me. I go down to the beach in a bad mood when a huge German shepherd comes out of a rock and starts barking at me like he’s preparing to attack. I am terrified. I grab a stick and shoved it between his teeth, beginning to wrestle with him over the stick. I think if I get him involved in the game, he might see me as a friend. I throw the stick for him to search for, and as he chases after it, I lean against a rock. It seems that I can relax, because I have made friends with the wolf. As I lean back, the rock begins to move and I realize I’m lying straight up on a horse’s back, in the saddle. The horse is white and has wings; he scatters them and lifts me up with him as he ascends to heaven. I am amazed and amazed upon awakening.
The group spent a lot of time making me feel the instincts of the dog. The value of “archetypal amplification” here is shown when we realize that the dog is often a psychopomp guiding us through the underworld. Think Anubis, the Egyptian dog-headed god. He was still in the lower realms with my negative masculine complex, wrestling with my demons, so to speak, and yet all the freedom, the sky in which the horse flies, was significant to me. Some members of the group laughed at the strange fairy tale ending to this dream: riding a Pegasus to the stars!
When I amplified the archetypal meaning of Pegasus. I was surprised to learn that the winged horse was born from the blood that flowed from Medusa’s beheading. If Medusa is the witch, the dark side of the feminine, the devouring bitch, she nevertheless gives birth to the beautiful Pegasus who unknowingly represents my favorite art form, poetry!
Later I came across the essay “Winged Horses” by the poet Denise Levertov. Pegasus’s father is Poseidon, the god of the sea- “…undifferentiated energy…a source of life but also of terror” (Levertov 125).
Levertov also informs us that “…Medusa’s legends place her as a manifestation of the terrible and all-consuming aspects of Mother Earth…” (126). Furthermore, “The word Gorgon is related to gargling, gurgling, and gargoyle: Medusa is called ‘a personified squeak'” (127). Pegasus was born from the neck of Medusa, an intermediate place between mental and physical abilities. In fact “…it was not until the moment when Medusa’s blood, which flowed from her neck, touched the earth that it became manifest” (129). Levertov associates Medusa’s face with “… snakes and claws, wings and scales… gorgonian features that “correspond to the trembling magma of emotion” (133).
Emotion is often the catalyst for the poet’s creation. Levertov speaks of Pegasus as intuitive, as a metaphor for the poem rather than the poet” (134). I saw that my dream demonstrated how the material of the underworld could be transformed into something expressive. “To say that the poem, also like the poet, is animal means that it has its own flesh and blood and is not some rarefied and insubstantial thing” (134).
Pegasus, then, is poetry, born from a “fusion of opposites.” The image emerges at the point of greatest tension. “Pegasus strikes a stone with his hoof and releases a fountain…the source of poetic inspiration henceforth sacred to the Muses” (129). Fly up, like my imagination always reaching higher.
Levertov’s essay amplified my dream. The Pegasus symbol in its archetypal meaning was not something I knew consciously. Although I had studied mythology and knew Pegasus in various myths, I was unaware of its meaning and had not been associated with it as a symbol of this peculiar hobby that I had of writing poems. In alchemy, gold is transformed from the work done on lead, the “Nigredo”, the dark night of the soul. I wasn’t riding Pegasus in my life yet, but I was drawing the soul out and facing the music, or dirge if you will, of my own darkness. That we can turn our demons into diamonds was not a new idea to me, however I had not seen it happen in concrete terms like the ones presented in these images.
My dream showed how the unconscious is not subject to time. It would be a few years before he published a book that turned loss into something outside of me with his own authority. Apparently, he was fighting with the dog.
The dream group became my religion, where I felt touched by spiritual energy. It was where I witnessed conjunctions resonating like a hall of mirrors, where I communicated with both the material and the members of the group. During those years everything in my life deepened. I saw that the dreams came from my everyday world and their hooks in my world of feelings grafted my nocturnal images.
Through active imaginative work, we make stories from our memories in ways that cannot be proven true. Memory itself is imaginative in its selection, unique to each individual. As I recounted a dream and the stories that ran beneath it, only my imagination could effect psychological changes. In fact, we create our reality and that reality is relative. From this I learned how wrong we are to judge each other. I saw how dreamwork could open a person up to the possibility of altering a worldview. We can choose to end our victimhood by re-experiencing feelings from the past and revising them in such a way that we are able to enjoy joy where pain had been.
References:
Levertov, Denise. “Horses with wings”. What is a poet? Ed. Hank Lazer. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1987. 124-134.