The dream today is loaded with thoughtful symbolism, but before get to that, I must say I have been going through a stretch here lately of having difficulty recalling my dreams. This is unusual for me as I have trained myself to consciously retain much of the contents of my dreams as possible for these blogs. Intuitively, I sense something is going on with me and I need to be paying closer attention to it.
Now for the dream-- I am in an empty room about the size of my bed room, and to my right is an open doorway. The doorway opens to a long dark tunnel. The entire length of this tunnel is flanked by demons. In appearance they remind me of the Orcs of J.R.R Tolkien's Middle-earth sagas. They are "filthy fanged humanoids" with simian like physical traits.
I walk down this corridor with a flash light in hand. The creatures are afraid of the light. I see and hear them writhe in agony when ever the light of my flash light touches them. They actually freeze and whatever portion of their body, that is touched by my light, that portion, turns instantly into stone! I tie them up with vine like cords. It was a pretty freaky sort thing to watch. I make my way down this hallway of shrieking demons for some distance, just how far I go forward, I cannot fully reckon, I then make my way back to the empty room.
When I am safely back in my room I walk out the front door. My unconsciousness becomes separate from my body. I watch myself from in the room leave the room and the wall becomes transparent and I see myself having a conversation with a woman about what we just experienced with the Orc/demons only minutes before. The woman is a very ordinary woman in a trench coat. She is my anima; the expression of my inner feminine unconscious personality. She is the hidden part of my psyche. She is my emissary to the unconscious and she proceeds to explain the symbolic meanings in everything that has just occurred.
The Orc/demons, she explains, represent all my worries and fears in life. My flash light is the light of truth. When the light of truth touches these worries and fears it makes them visible and binds them. The fears are seen for what they are and no longer have any power or influence over me. They are rendered useless and immobile.
Interestingly, I just had a meeting with a woman friend, the other day, at the public library. I brought with me all my papers I had relating to my fiancée's immigration visa. My hope was that my female friend had some expertise on the subject and could alleviate some of my concerns and fears. It is a fascinating synchronicity between my unconscious dream life and the conscious waking world.
Our dream analysis can go a step further into why I became disembodied when meeting my animus and why she is wearing a trench coat. The trench coat hides her feminine form from view in just the same manner as my anima is hidden within my unconscious. My anima is wanting to be recognized as an inner power. Carl Jung asserts that the secret aim of the unconscious is to force a man to develop and bring his own being to maturity by integrating more the unconscious personality with the unconscious, and bring it into his real life. The unconscious is naturally seeking equilibrium with the conscious. The unconscious is an element like water. To quote Bruce Lee, "Empty your mind, be formless. Shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.” The difficulty with us humans is that it is impossible to know where the unconscious begins or ends, or where the boundary between the unconscious and conscious really lies. Try and ponder that reality for awhile!
Perhaps my lucid dreaming mind needed to become disembodied in order to get into a discussion with my unconscious anima. I think the extra level of disassociation made it easier for my conscious self to objectively analyse what my unconscious self was trying to communicate to my conscious self and integrate with it. It is often said that the brain has a built in defence mechanism the makes it extremely difficult to remember dreams because some of that unconscious content cannot be coped with by the conscious mind. Whew! This is getting deep.
Well, this was certainly the most interesting dream I have had in a long while and wanders into territory I never thought I would be exploring. The unconscious is a mystery that we can only explore around the edges with our conscious mind. It is very much like exploring and trying to understand the mysteries of microphysics and quantum mechanics. Wolfgang Pauli and Carl Jung were of much the same mind on this matter and I recommend further reading of the published letters between the two of them for anyone wishing to explore the subject more.
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