The Language of Rocks, Stones
and Minerals: A Case Illustration
Cleave the wood and I am there;
lift up the stone and you shall find me there.1
– The Gospel of Thomas
Have you ever had a dream that filled you with such emotion, you awoke in the middle of the dream with the dream ‘unfinished’? Waking up may momentarily relieve the tension, but the interrupted dream leaves a residue of feeling that lingers, and might even have left you wondering, ‘What would have happened if I hadn’t woken up?’ An unfinished dream seeks resolution like a stone that will roll downhill until it comes to rest.
We have been hardwired to wake up from sleep when we sense an emergency, whether from within a dream or from an external source. Waking up at moments of extreme emotional tension in a dream happens often. Whatever emotion the dream evokes, we need to pay attention to the feeling – whether anger, sadness, anxiety, guilt, or even ecstasy – because our response has shown us that the emotion feels hard for us to bear. When we resist the feeling, it blocks our life energy, the pressure building up until it breaks through in a powerful surge of emotion portended by dream imagery. Typically, in order to avoid facing the difficult feeling, we wake up, as happens in the course of the following dream brought to me by a middle-aged man called Mark:
I stand opposite a dark, ominous rock face of granite hundreds of feet high. Unseen flood waters gather behind the rock, the water’s force threatening to split the rock face down the middle. People I feel responsible for have gathered in passageways carved into the cliffside. I wave my arms and shout in a desperate bid to shepherd them all to a safe distance, for I know the rock will give way and the waters will engulf them all. Just then, I wake up, my heart pounding!
An unfinished dream like this one calls for an awakening to our inner state and beckons us to acknowledge deep feelings and so find emotional balance. By working with a dream guide in the waking state we can re-enter the dream imaginatively, undertaking a ‘waking dream’, exploring associations and allowing the dream to play itself out.2 I invite you to engage with this dream experience, as did Mark, with my guidance.
Like the rock face in the dream, collapsing or dissolving forms, particularly those associated with permanence, cause great emotional distress if we associate their impact with personal loss, extreme vulnerability, or physical death.3 When we understand such dreams therapeutically, the intense feelings focus our attention on what needs to shift in our lives and points towards the life-changing energy that can be freed up when we do. The more powerful the natural force depicted – floodwaters, a tidal wave, an avalanche, a mighty wind or fire, the more potential life-energy it contains. How to harness and transform that energy remains our challenge.
In this instance, Mark associated the rock face with his fear of feelings that might overwhelm him, leaving him and those he cared for vulnerable. Viewed from a psychodynamic perspective, the rock may symbolise a defence against the natural flow of feelings that, if allowed, could also bring a creative influx of life energies. Mark had recently met a woman to whom he felt drawn, yet he was resisting the attraction. If the rock face in the dream could speak, it might well say, ‘Let your heart open under the influence of love. You don’t need to be afraid.’ The presence of ‘living waters’ breaking through the stone in the dream suggests that a profound inner change had already been initiated, a softening of the heart. This dream heralds the alchemical injunction, ‘Perform no operation ’til all be made water.’4
Jung drew on the teachings of the medieval alchemists to explore how alchemical processes reflected the transformative power of dream imagery. The alchemists were fascinated by the formation of iron, gold and diamonds within stone. By heating base metals from the solid to liquid state, they sought to assist nature by accelerating this natural process of transformation, thereby freeing Nature from its base aspect to a more subtle spiritual state. The alchemists, in spiritualising matter, also believed they could work a similar transformation on their own being.5 Their operations aimed to spiritualise matter and materialise spirit. While working to perfect Nature in this way, the alchemists were completing the Magnum Opus, the Great Work of alchemy, on themselves. Although to the modern mind this endeavour may seem archaic, from the standpoint of modern physics it can be found mirrored in the words of the British physicist Sir James Jeans, who compared the creation of the universe to ‘the materialisation of thought’.6
In the alchemical model proposed by Jung, we follow a similar path when we work with the emotional content of our dreams. In this model, the dissolving of old ego-structures represents a recognisable stage of our inner transformation – a darkening, to use an alchemical term – when our mental conditioning and complexes – our hardened identifications and defensive positions – no longer serve us. This darkening involves the transpersonal journey of ‘breakdown to breakthrough’. The 16th-century alchemist Gerhard Dorn articulates a comparable idea when he states: ‘Transform yourself from dead stones into living philosophic stones.’7 This entails opening ourselves to a deeper understanding of our essential nature.
Developmentally, life events that force our hearts to expand – even if painfully – ultimately forge positive ends because they increase our capacity to feel deeply and to face our fears. What we perceive as a shattering crisis – a splitting open of the rock, as in the dream – holds the opportunity for inner growth and creative life change by requiring us to develop qualities and skills that have remained latent so that we can work through the crisis and rebuild our lives. The discovery of this new capacity can be compared to the alchemist’s quest for gold.
Even changes that we may think of as positive, such as having a child or falling in love, can shatter our normal ego identifications. To the ego, such change, requiring the ‘death’ of a way of being, can feel life-threatening – and no wonder! But we must remember every such ‘death’ brings new life, a ‘resurrection’. The historian of religion Mircea Eliade explains:
Every ‘death’ is at once a reintegration of cosmic night and pre-cosmological chaos ... darkness expresses the dissolution of forms, the return to the seminal stage of existence. Initiatory death and mystic darkness thus also possess a cosmological significance; they signify the reintegration of the ‘first state’, the germinal state of matter, and the ‘resurrection’ corresponds to the cosmic creation.8
In how we respond to this process, Jung noted that the degree of fear, the intensity of the ‘feeling-tone’ present, indicates the proportion of energy or effort required to shift our conscious attitude for real life-change to occur.9 A Jungian therapist might see in the dark rock face pictured in the dream a representation of what Jung calls the Shadow,10 a repository for all those painful feelings and thoughts that we supress from consciousness. There, out of our awareness, they harden like stone. Then, a dream may come that says, as the prophet Ezekiel taught, ‘I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.’11
Surprisingly, the simple act of acknowledging our fears dissolves their power. This recognition marks an important first step towards transformation. In the case described here, taking this step enabled Mark to see how his overwhelming sense of responsibility took precedence over his capacity to stay with his feelings, which, like the unseen water in the dream, felt threatening. The loosening of the rock in this dream presents a challenge common to all: risking giving up our safe, habitual way of life, our conditioned modus operandi – in order to allow a new way of life to flow naturally.
The rock face speaks not only to Mark’s personal psychology but also to a universal mystery. Mark described the rock as dark and ominous. ‘Ominous’ has its root in the word omen, meaning a portent of good or ill. The stone cliff tells us of a tremendous, unknowable mystery, greater than Mark himself – an ultimate reality, yet one in which he takes part. Like the bluestones of Neolithic monuments, the rock face takes on the power of a numen, the spirit of a place, an absolute presence. As such it had a numinous quality. As Jung noted, dream encounters with a numinous presence can be experienced as a defeat for the ego, especially when we take them to be omens of ill.12
A teaching of Hazrat Inayat Khan, the founder of Sufiism in the West, exhorts: ‘Shatter your ideals on the rock of truth.’ We don’t have to give up our ideals; we only need to be less possessed by them so that they don’t set us apart from our humanity. ‘What closes the heart,’ as Khan wisely observes, ‘is fear, confusion, depression, spite, discouragement, disappointment, and a troubled conscience; and when that is cleared away, the doors of the heart open.’13
Focusing on our ‘defeat’ – the confusion, shame, anger or guilt we may feel when we approach the numinous – we may easily forget that the numinous is there to remind us of qualities against which we have become hardened. When cut off from Nature and locked into an uncertain world that seeks facts and certainty, we lose sight of our sense of mystery, the playfulness, tenderness and loving-kindness of our soul nature. We forget what makes our heart sing.14 For instance, when asked to set aside his fear and recall what memories he associated with the rock face, Mark remembered summer holidays as a child with his family, when he played happily among the rock-pools in sandy coves at the base of encircling coastal cliffs. The memories put him in touch with a lighter, more carefree spirit.
Through our dreamwork, Mark realised that the dream which had initially frightened him actually called upon him to open up in a radical way to the more playful and light-hearted feelings he would need for the next phase of his life: a new relationship built on trust, openness and love. Far from being an ill omen, his numinous dream portended good. The ‘real therapy’, as Jung observed, ‘is the approach to the numinous’, and inasmuch as we attain an experience of the numinous, we are released from ‘the curse of pathology’.15
Like rock, unhewn stone may appear static, but, having been shaped by powerful forces, holds a great deal of energy. The most common types of stone, formed from igneous rocks, have an association with fire, as revealed by the Latin root, ignis. Igneous rock arises from molten magma that cools either deep in the earth over thousands of years (forming granite of quartz and feldspar) or on the earth’s surface, where the magma cools more quickly (hence pumice, basalt and obsidian). Like stones, we too are made up of powerful forces that began long before our birth and will continue beyond them. When we access the emotional energy a ‘stone’ holds for us, we free up that psychic energy to reignite our lives.
The solidity and stability of stone makes it a symbol for the enduring nature of our inner Being: the Self. Stone evokes ‘movement in a repose’,16 a quality sculptors have delighted in over the ages. But when we become too rigid in our positions and habits, stones may signify that we have become inflexible and unyielding. Yet even our most hardened positions remain subject to the workings of time and the elements of daily life, as the psychic heat and pressures of our lives and dreams shape each of us differently, forging a core of strength with us – the lapis philosophorum, or philosopher’s stone, once sought by the alchemists.
The alchemists understood every individual to be a microcosm, each of us a miniature world. They enigmatically advised, ‘Explore the inner things of Earth and by distillation you will find the hidden stone.’17 Dreams are made of those ‘inner things’, and working with them is a distillation that enables us to know ourselves – ‘the hidden stone’. For this reason, Jung said of a dream that, ‘if we carry it around with us and turn it over and over, some-thing almost always comes of it.’18 This ‘something’ reveals the aims of the unconscious to us, thus setting our lives in motion again. One of my own dreams speaks in a direct way to the mystery of the elusive stone:
I am surprised to find myself driving a black London cab on a dirt road in the desert. The road is quite challenging, and I think how well those past years of practice off-roading in the desert have served me. The landscape has a ruggedness akin to the Badlands of the Anza-Borrego desert in California, and I feel how much I have been missing such vistas of my childhood. After crossing the desert, I drive through a passageway, carved out of a massive pink quartz boulder. In the dream, I am taken aback to see that the boulder has a heart shape. Driving through the narrow passage requires all my concentration. I am not sure how I squeeze through. I can see that beyond the quartz gateway the landscape becomes a green, lush valley, and I think, ‘Yes, this is what we need!’ The beauty of the green, its lightness and openness remind me of the Spirit’s renewal...
Working associatively with the dream, I recalled a small pink quartz my eldest brother gave me before he moved out of the family home. I was only 11 and felt heartbroken at his leaving. I have kept the stone all these years, and it now forms part of a miniature Zen rock garden. It reminds me of the heart’s capacity for love. This memory gave added meaning to the dream. The dream showed me what was lacking and what needed to be restored.
When I revisited the dream with my dream guide, we tracked the cab journey movement through my body, beginning in my head, which was full of dry, arid thoughts and strategies for dealing with life’s rugged terrain. Once I had squeezed between the rocks, my heart gave way to a more spacious quality of being, portrayed by the ‘greening’ of the landscape.19 The Jungian analyst Robert Johnson relates how the verb ‘to treat’, meaning ‘to pull or drag’ in Latin, comes from an ancient healing practice in which the healer would actually pull a person through smaller and smaller holes carved out of series of stones.20 In just this way, it felt as if the dream pulled me through the narrow space in the stone to a place of rebirth.
The quartz also spoke to me of evolutionary transformations. Between the ages of 16 and 22, I hiked down the Grand Canyon four times with my father. Time has spent over 6 million years carving out the canyon. In the process, it has created a vast abstract work grounded in geological reality. Sandstone, limestone, shale and granite form the canyon walls. Sediments recount tales of water and wind carving hours into the earth, the majestic iteration of forms creating a strangely intimate feel as you realise that your fingertips and the earth’s surface share a similar imprint.
Our dreams likewise lay down a sedimentary history in our psyches. Seen from an evolutionary perspective, the content of our dreams can be said to be part of ‘an evolved mechanism’ by means of which we lay down new memories.21 If you keep a record of your dreams, you will note that images and themes repeat. How these repetitions differ over time has great significance.
For instance, in my early twenties, I dreamed of a photograph of Yosemite National Park, a breathtaking valley carved out by glaciers eroding the softer earth from around massive igneous rock formations and sculpting the deep valley now overlooked by the sheer-faced cliffs of Half Dome and El Capitan. The valley’s expressive rifts call to mind the words of Khalil Gibran: ‘The deeper sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.’22 In the dream, I felt so drawn to the landscape, I seemed to pass through the photo and into yet another artwork, this time a painting...
An underwater nymph in diaphanous white swims in blue-green waters. She holds a white stone. She and I swim together in a blue-green sunlit sea. The white stone has a name inscribed on it and the name seems to be for me. The name comes to me intuitively but seems too wondrous and strange to be for me.
I cannot accept it.
More than 20 years later, I dreamed of the white stone yet again in the following dream:
I go back and forth between two buildings, feeling irritated and confused, not sure of my purpose. On the path between them, I pass by a small white stone and a falcon’s feather. These objects catch my eye, but I am in a hurry and so walk by them. As I do so, I become aware that, being caught up with my thoughts and passing by these two small objects, so small and out of place, I have somehow missed the point of the dream. Unfortunately, at this moment, I awake.
When I re-entered this dream by undertaking the waking dream process with my guide, I visualised picking up the white stone. The stone felt very secret and mysterious, as if it contained all of space. It communicated purity and forgiveness. The stone said to me, ‘A rose knows no shame’; for me, this was an important message – that shame is not a natural state, but something impressed on us, a social conditioning we acquire in childhood and carry into later life.
While we may be familiar with the evolutionary forces at work in stone, it may be surprising to know that certain minerals found in rock produce another form of energy: light. Under ultraviolet light, against a backdrop of darkness, clusters of humble, nondescript minerals such as fluorite, opalite and calcite transform into incandescent stained-glass colours of deep blue, emerald green and crimson. I remember being mesmerised by such beauty when my teenage brother would show me his mineral samples, bathing the stones in ultraviolet light to transport us into a mysterious, beautiful world of dark luminescence.
The colours left their tincture on our hearts, colours we conjured up to lift our spirits. My brother explained how ultraviolet caused the electrons in these minerals to jump to a higher state and then to emit the excess energy as photons of light at different wavelengths, one that we perceived as bright colour. The science was good to know, but even better was the magic of discovering how something perceived as rather ordinary can seize us with its hidden beauty when seen in a different light.
Rocks and stones in dreams put us in touch with time, place and eternity. It is no accident that, according to the biblical account, Jacob’s dream of a stairway to heaven began when he stopped for the night, took a stone, put it under his head and slept. He dreamed of a luminous ladder on which angels descended to earth and ascended to God. When Jacob woke up from his dream, he said, ‘How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God; this is the gate of heaven.’23 He felt God would watch over him and was empowered to face the unknown. To mark his dream, Jacob took the stone he had slept on, stood it upright, and poured tree oil over it to sanctify it. The tree oil signified blessing and sacrifice because of the time and effort required to grow the tree and produce the oil. Jacob’s stone pillow reminds us of how ancient myths depicted both humans and gods as born from stone.24 Indeed, we live out our lives on the ‘speeding stone’ that we call Earth .25
I keep a collection of stones that remind me of my dreams: a white limestone, pink quartz, a polished sphere of obsidian. A piece of granite could serve to remind Mark of the sheer rock face of his own dream and his underlying desire for a relationship, just as in ancient Rome a block of dark stone stood next to the statue of Eros, the god of love.26 Find a rock or stone that calls to mind one of your dreams. Touch it and hear what it has to say to you.