24

Anima

Meeting the Goddess

irtually all mythologies throughout human history tell stories about the hero meeting a goddess, a woman who completes the hero and meets all his desires. These stories are often filled with imagery of love and compassion. The goddess can also represent the perfect picture of the Earth Mother, the one true love we all came from and will return to, but that is only one version of many.

For each of the many stories depicting the divine feminine as harmonious, accepting, kind, and creative, there are just as many that portray her as aggressive, jealous, unfaithful, and destructive. The Greek divinities Hera, whose jealousy and vengefulness is legendary, and Athena, who started the Trojan War after being snubbed by the warrior Paris in a beauty contest, are just two examples of irritable and irrational female behavior in Western mythology. At the same time, many other myths focus on positive traits such as Hera’s power and Athena’s wisdom.

Our own divine feminine is an amalgamation of the universal depictions of the goddess, both positive and negative, as well as their representations from our earliest lives that live on in the psyche. Known as the anima, this feminine aspect of ourselves is made up of mothers, grandmothers, sisters, daughters, aunts, female teachers, and any beings associated with our femininity. In all of us, but particularly in men, the divine not only demands to be seen and integrated, but represents an integration of the psyche that we ignore at our peril.

I see a woman standing by the window. A golden aura of divinity shines from her. I walk over and feel completely accepted, as if I have known her my whole life. She takes my hand and pulls me through the window into another world. There are crowds of people, and she easily passes through them until we arrive at a kind of platform or wall that seems to cross the whole area like a translucent, shimmering field. We pass through too fast for me to comprehend it. She leads me to another group of people—they seem much less alive than the last group. I get a creepy sense that I’m amidst the undead. The golden lady is gone, and I am alone with them. They approach me and hold me, and I feel they’re trying to suck the life force from my being. I try to run or fly away, but they grab hold of me. I kick, determined to get away, and finally break free.

Jung talked extensively about the anima within the creative unconscious and how shining a light on it can drastically change our internal worlds for the better. My dream overtly pierces the boundary between the conscious and the unconscious and offers a glimpse of the horrors that reside there. Though terrifying to experience, I believe that the crowds of undead people were not guardians bent on destroying my ego. Rather, the divine feminine aspect of my unconscious, my anima, led me into a scenario with the clear message that my psychic energy was being depleted through committing to too many projects.

An encounter with the anima in dreams also serves as a reminder about the ultimate value and purpose of a dream practice. It’s easy to become excessively focused on the goal of lucid dreaming and to continuously reality-check to test our own proficiency. In my case, at the time I had this particular dream I was pushing myself to have as many out-of-body experiences as possible. This sort of aggressive competition with the self, this macho push toward more, is a decidedly masculine path to follow. My dream was a clear message to relax, to allow insights to arise unbidden, and to trust the process and the self. Isn’t it funny how such supportive messages can often initially feel frightening? This is a clear example of how an overemphasis on classically masculine traits can hurt us as we try to know the Self and integrate the psyche.

The dream also came with a decisive road of trials moment when the goddess left. Ironically, her departure left me with a reminder that we are responsible for independently making difficult decisions in the dream world just as we are in waking life. Therefore, we need to take the dream world seriously, not as a competition to be won or a space to be mastered by brute force and control. Rather, we benefit most when we treat what we find in dreams with the reverence, humility, and gracious acceptance that we can acquire by tapping into our divine feminine nature.

Finally, this rich dream shows us that the world of the unconscious is vaster and more powerful than any conscious understanding. “The unconscious is an autonomous psychic entity,” Jung wrote. “Any efforts to drill it are only apparently successful, and moreover are harmful to the consciousness.” He warns anyone trying to control the creative aspects of their minds that “we can listen but may not meddle.” While exercising some control over the dream world is implicit in any lucid dreaming practice, it’s important to remember that manipulating objects and scenery, or hitting a target for how many times you have a lucid dream, misses the point and can actually diminish the value of the dream world. Developing the skill of lucid dreaming is no small feat, but if you can release yourself from external metrics of success and truly look at the dream world, you will quickly realize that you cannot control it, just as you cannot control the waking world.

If, as is commonly done, we look at the dream world as a sort of video game, then we can see much more easily that the dream environment is not something we create through our choices. Rather, this world is continually created around us, and our choices and their results are responses to the environment. So wherever we go in a dream, our unconscious mind has already been there. Because of that, the narrator or observer of the dream world knows what, where, and who we will see before we choose to manifest or move forward. The result is the illusion of control over the unconscious. But the dream is always one step ahead of us. Jung said it best in his essay “General Aspects of Dream Psychology” when he implied that we are all parts of the dream simultaneously. “This whole creation is essentially subjective, and the dream is the theater where the dreamer is at once scene, actor, prompter, stage manager, author, audience, and critic.”