How often does a man say as he wakes in the morning, “I had a wonderful dream last night,” and relate how Mercury or this or that philosopher appeared to him in person and taught him this or that art. But then the dream escapes him and he cannot remember it. However, anyone to whom this happens should not leave his room upon awakening, should speak to no one, but remain alone and sober until everything comes back to him, and he recalls his dream.
PARACELSUS
We all dream. Short of refusing to remember, we can’t refuse our dreams or hide from them. They simply reflect what is. Dionysus may naturally appear to us in our dreams. Meeting him on this ground and acting intelligently on the encounter is a fruitful avenue to explore.
Working with Dreams
Dream interpretation is a complex subject about which volumes have been written, and about which few people agree. In the end your dreams will mean something to you. And because they are your dreams, your interpretation is most important. This short chapter cannot begin to cover techniques of dream interpretation and dreamwork, nor should you expect to be able to plunge into dreamwork after you have read it. It will, however, give you some idea of how to connect with your inner Dionysian quality in the framework of dreaming. For more details please see Inner Work.
The world we find in dreams is at once strange and familiar. One reason for this is that our dreams are peopled by archetypes. These prototypes of inner dynamics are outside of time and space; they act and react in an infinite number of ways that would be impossible in real time. These images use the language of symbols, a very deep level of communication. If we are to comprehend the dream, we must look for meaning in this inner level.
Your dream is a great principle laid out for you to study and understand. Watch your dreams carefully, for they will give you an accurate illustration of what is happening in your inner life, what to do about it, and what you can expect from your actions.
When you work with your dreams, try to follow these four basic steps (they are outlined in more detail in Inner Work):
Two Dreams
By way of illustration I would like to share with you two dreams of my own. They show the transformation of the Dionysian quality over thirty-five years. The first dream is a great archetypal dream. It came to me at the age of twenty-five, when I was a callow youth and very ill-equipped to handle it. Unfortunately, dreams don’t always time themselves to one’s liking! Here is my dream:
Every thousand years a Buddha is born. In my dream the Buddha is born in the middle of the night. A star shines in the sky to herald the birth of the Buddha. I am there, and I am the same age throughout the dream.
I watch the birth of the Buddha, and I see the Buddha grow up. He is a young man, like me, and we are constant companions. We are happy with each other, and there is much companionship and brightness.
One day we come to the river, which flows in two directions at once. Half the river flows one way, and half flows the other way; where the two streams touch in the center of the river there are very large whirlpools. I swim across, but the Buddha is caught in a whirlpool and drowns.
I am inconsolable; my companion is gone. So I wait a thousand years, a star shines in the night sky again, and again the Buddha is born in the middle of the night. I spend another long period as the companion of the Buddha.
Here the details are lost, but for some reason I have to wait another thousand years for the birth of the third Buddha. Again a star shines, and the Buddha is born in the middle of the night, and I am his companion as he grows up. We’re friends and I’m happy. Then I have to wait a thousand years again, till modern times, for the Buddha to be born a fourth time.
This time, however, the circumstances are different and more specific. The star will shine in the sky announcing the birth of the Buddha, for the Buddha is going to be born at dawn this time. And he’s going to be born from the knothole of a tree when the first rays of sunlight fall upon it from the sunrise. I’m overcome with joy and anticipation, because I’ve waited a thousand years for my beloved companion to be born.
The first rays of the sun come. They touch the top of the tree first, descending it as the sun rises (something they wouldn’t do in real life). As the rays of the sun touch the knothole, an enormous snake comes out. The snake is huge, a hundred feet long, and he comes straight at me!
I’m so terrified that I fall over backward. Then I get to my feet and run with all the strength that I have. When I think I’ve gone far enough I look around, only to find that the snake is running in back of me and keeping his flattened head exactly over my head!
So I run twice as hard in terror. But when I turn around and look, there’s the snake’s head—still exactly over my head! I run still harder and look and the snake is still there, and I know there’s no hope. Then, by some intuition, I make a circle by touching my right hip with my right arm. I’m still running, and the snake pokes what he can of his head through the circle and I know the danger is over.
When the dream ends we are still running through the forest, but now the snake and I are talking and the danger has diminished.
This is a very difficult dream to assimilate, especially for a twenty-five-year-old. Such dreams are worthy of a later stage in life, and it is difficult when such a dream comes so early.
What is the snake? The first tumultuous appearance of my fourth, inferior function, a primitive Dionysian quality. Its appearance was certainly too early in a Westerner’s life for anybody, let alone me, to cope with. It was many years before I could stand to face the direct impact of it.
I quarreled with my analyst at the time. She said, “You shouldn’t dream dreams like that.” She meant, of course, that the appearance of the inferior function should never happen to anyone under the age of thirty-five. I replied indignantly, “You don’t tell a sixteen-year-old girl that she shouldn’t have gotten pregnant. That doesn’t help after the fact. If it happened, it happened. One has to cope with it.”
For me, the Dionysian quality became insistent, demanding, and virtually unassimilable—a six-foot-two individual and a hundred-foot snake don’t make a very good pair. I did indeed lead a driven life, as the end of the dream foretold. For many, many years I was running scared. As Dr. Jung once said, “If you have an assimilating match with a tiger, you know who’s going to assimilate whom.” The best one can do is make a truce. And the secret for that in this dream was to make a circle. I made a circle with my arm—a mandala to contain the snake. That was form enough. I didn’t assimilate the snake, and the snake didn’t assimilate me. But we could function; we could go through the woods together.
When Dr. Jung heard of this dream, he lectured me within an inch of my life about its content. He told me that I must live in such and such a way, and that I may trust certain things but to stay away from other things, and so forth. And all from the information contained in that dream. I took the dream to mean I must live in a circle—protected, contained, formed, structured, and very much alone. And that is what I did.
Thirty-five years later, at the much riper age of sixty, the second dream on the subject came up. Thirty-five years is a long time to be patient. During that time I worked very hard on the first dream. I took every word of it and put it through the four steps described on Chapter 12. It was only at age fifty-five that I read a reference to the life of the Buddha which explained one aspect of the dream that had always puzzled me.
It seems that on the night when the Buddha was enlightened, there was a terrible storm. All the dark forces came to put out the light, which was beginnning to glow within the Buddha. And they stormed and they stormed. And Naga, the great world cobra, came and stretched his hood over the Buddha’s head to protect him. It dawned on me with a rush of understanding that the snake in my dream had been protecting me, not trying to harm me, and in fact it was not dangerous to me. My enmity and all my running had just made it more difficult for the snake to keep his hood of protection over my head. I felt very foolish.
Here’s the second dream:
I’m on a California beach with a family of friends. The woman of the household is a particularly good friend of mine, a very wise woman. She and I are a little distance apart from the family picnic. We are discussing this holiday crush of people on the beach—everybody in the world is there. I can see at least a million people. I like this. I enjoy beaches and good fun and good atmosphere—the happiness, the sun, the children, the picnics, the sports.
But there is one discordant note. The city fathers have brought up a number of old kitchen ranges—wood, gas, electric—and distributed them along the beach, unconnected, so that they don’t function at all, except as funky art. Our party has taken up possession of one of these stoves which never produce any heat. They are there only for decoration.
My friend and I discuss the American liking for funky, emotionally shocking things as decorative. We agree that we don’t like it. Nonetheless, our picnic party is around one of these stoves.
Suddenly I look up, and who do I see but my snake! He is wriggling around through the crowd and no one but my friend and I see him. He slithers along, making no trouble at all. He comes to a pair of upright posts with a cross-piece at the top and wriggles up and does his thing. He loops and twines, and he goes over himself and back again. I watch him very carefully, because I don’t want the snake to find me.
He comes down and begins to wriggle away, and I see that he’s moving away from me. I whisper to my friend, “Good, he’s going away.” But the snake hears this, changes his path, and comes straight for me. I say, “Wouldn’t you know it! A million people and he comes straight to me!”
I don’t want him to come. I wish he would go away. But for some reason I’m not terrified, and I don’t run away as I did before. The snake comes directly at me. At this point there’s a break in the dream. There is some work of confrontation, but it’s just as if a piece of film had been cut out and the ends spliced back together.
When the dream picks up again the woman is gone and the snake is gone, but a radiant man from heaven—a young fellow who glows—is standing with me. We’re friends and we’re having a marvelous time. Again, finally, I have my companion.
We walk along and I say, “I didn’t realize we were in India.” I look again and see that we’re not in India—it’s just that these blond Americans look so dark compared with the radiant man from heaven that I thought I was among very dark-skinned people. But it was only the contrast, and we were indeed on the beach in Southern California. And I’m so happy. I say to him, “I know this is extraordinary, but I’m as happy as a mortal could be.”
We walk on, looking at this and that. He takes me some distance and we come to a dam. The dammed-up river is immensely wide but not very deep. The man from heaven turns to me and says, “All right. The dam is built, the water is backed up. Now you design and build a hydroelectric system for it, and it will fill the energy deficit for the whole world.”
That is the evolution of the Dionysian quality, which has occupied most of a lifetime and is by no means complete. Let’s take a look at how the Dionysian quality shows its evolution in these two dreams.
The funky stoves, which seemed so strange and inappropriate, had a powerful effect on me. I tend to spend a great deal of time alone. The dream is saying that it’s on a public beach, in the most extraverted of Southern California situations, that the snake comes to find me. It’s in the middle of funky Southern California, which I tend to disdain, that the enlightenment comes. That’s a bitter pill for me, because all my instincts tell me to go to a monastery in the desert to do that last stage of inner work. But the dream informs me that it must be done in the difficult circumstances of a public beach. That was a very large joke on me, but it could be done no other way.
The woman represents the feminine side of me, my anima, which is essential in making that deep confrontation with the archetypal world, the inferior function. Jung defined the anima or animus as that organ in one’s psyche which mediates between one’s conscious personality and the collective unconscious. The woman helped mediate the snake for me simply by being there.
The snake, the primitive Dionysian quality of which I was so frightened, was the god in his more terrifying form. It had me on the run for years, and turned out to be protecting me until I could come to terms with him on the beach, when it was time for a confrontation. (Theoretically, the ego never assimilates an archetype. The best one can do—and all that is required—is to make a mutually reciprocal relationship. If one tries to assimilate an archetype one is likely to be assimilated by it.)
I was still resisting, although I was no longer terrified, so the snake was able to come back to me. I was then able to accept my inferior function and return to the fourth Buddha (which had been in his snakelike, godlike, form). I was ready for the snake’s companionship, but with a new perspective: I was now ready to receive the Dionysian energy—the dam—which was there, waiting for me to put into form, and use for the benefit of, more than my own personal life.