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Posts tagged ‘Dreams’

Sep 3

Tornado_Warning_by_Meerin
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The Valley of the Shadow of Death

We were at my Nana’s house watching TV when I had this strange feeling that the air was being sucked out of the room. I yelled for everyone to get down on the floor and I covered them with blankets. Then, all of the windows in the house exploded inward and there was this overpowering sound like a train coming toward us. I ran outside and stood in the driveway looking at what must have been an F4 tornado about half a mile in the distance. It was uprooting and destroying everything in it’s path and heading directly for me.

I was just staring at the blackness of the tornado as it ripped up houses and trees in its path. But I couldn’t move. My family was yelling at me to get out of the way and run but I was paralyzed with the insatiable curiosity of staring death in the face. It was just a few yards off and I marveled at the beauty of it and the perfection of nature.
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Jun 21

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Underlying Reality Beneath It All

As I have gotten older and had a chance to catalog my dreams, I’ve noticed that each dream, though bizarre and individual in narrative, are beginning to self-assemble. It’s as if I am given only brief, random glimpses into another life – a life that keeps on moving even when I’m not around. This is not a normal life and perhaps the oddity of it all comes from our conscious attempt to make sense of the nonsensical. However, over time, recurring geography, architecture, people, machines, and themes all overlap into something more cohesive than random.

I doubt all of the pieces will ever completely fall into place, but I do wonder what it all means. I guess it is easy to dismiss as meaningless and silly the though of meditating and focusing on these dreams. But at one time it also seemed silly and meaningless to focus a telescope on a dark section of sky. If there is something to be seen, surely we can see it. Of course, we could not see it and the film on these night-long, telescopic exposures revealed the most amazing and wonderful things. Distant galaxies, quasars, pulsars, supernovae – these would all be hidden from sight without astronomy’s patient meditation on the heavens. And, taken apart, these cosmological phenomenons all seemed utterly mysterious and random – it’s only when we realized that there was an underlying reality beneath it all, did it begin to make some sense.

I’m sure we are still many millions of years away from really understanding it, but perhaps there is a psychological parallel to our cosmological discoveries. Many great thinkers have already said that the greatest frontier left to conquer is the mind. Who knows what amazing and wonderful things await us there. Here is the latest glimpse from that bizarre world, my dream from last night…

I was in someone’s backyard, somewhere in some suburb somewhere in the United States. We sat at a picnic table discussing the demon. I had requested a mandala tattoo from the tattoo artist that had a studio there in the backyard. He asked his assistant to begin. Before I knew it, the tattoo covered my entire left arm including the palm of my hand. I had to explain that my career would not allow such things. The artist seemed disappointed, like she had done me some favor that I was not happy about. She searched for a way to strip off the first few layers of skin to remove the tattoo. I asked her to complete the mandala anyway. I was weak. The mandala had to be complete before I could fight the demon.

I had a piece of raw chicken with an embedded switch that vibrated when the demon was close. I clicked the switch to the highest level of sensitivity. I was sitting next to the tattoo artist. He seemed worried and he watched the chicken to check the vibrations. We noticed that the chicken stopped vibrating – I think the batteries ran out. Then we ran into the house and saw the flying demon approaching in a flying limousine. My weapon was a samurai sword. He was too fast and I could not hit him – no matter how hard I tried. He bounced around like Nightcrawler from X-Men.

I did go to sleep reading Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse, so perhaps this dream makes perfect sense.

Feb 17

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By What Myth Am I Living?

I haven’t really written much in the past few months – other than posting stuff on politics from other sites. I’ve been reflecting on the past. I remember someone once telling me that as you get older you get the most vivid flashback memories of your life. That is what’s been happening to me. Every moment I spend unglued from the internet or work, I am forced to confront those memories. For the most part, my memories of the past are quite good.

What bothers me now is not that I have bad memories but that I have good. I have had to make certain compromises to live a normal life. Experience of new once held me captive and dazzled me with vivid dreams of freedom and greatness. Lately, those dreams have turned dark and only a shell of what once was. I wonder if the compromises are worth it. It is better to live normal or to rage on in peaks and valleys?

What I’m hoping for is that after 2 years of fear, uncertainty, and doubt, I can find that divine spark that is a part of us all. It is not what keeps us living from day to day, but it is what makes us look forward to the next and plan ahead with a sparkle in our eye. It is a barely conscious realization that each day is a chance to make good on the dreams of yesterday. Or, as Jung or Campbell would ask themselves, by what myth am I living?

Jul 9

Interesting Internet

Jun 30

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The Last Mimzy

Only occasionally do I see a movie so good that I feel compelled to write about it. I saw The Last Mimzy over the weekend and it is a beautiful story; it’s a story of hope and the simple love of a child. It is also a story of how interconnected we are to the Earth. For so long we have had a view of nature as something separate from us, something we have control over. However, as the famous quote says, “The Earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the Earth. What he does to the Earth he does to himself.”

Mimzy travels back in time from a far distance future where our damage to the Earth has become etched into human DNA. The human race is dying. It really is an absurd notion that we can somehow escape the damage we are doing to ourselves and the planet. We won’t even notice the change as it approaches. Like the beautiful sunsets we have today that result from high levels of pollution in the atmosphere. It’s called the Sunset Effect. It means that as long as we are blinded by the beautiful sunset, we won’t see the coming ecological crisis until it is too late. Read more

Apr 3

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An Interview with June Singer

Back in 1998 I interviewed one of my favorite Jungian authors, June Singer, for the old Jung Index web site. The interview is no longer available on the internet and it would be a shame to lose it. The format of the interview was collaborative – over email – so many people participated and were able to ask questions. So, here is the original interview from November 1998 – a tribute a great woman, who brought Jung’s psychology within my reach.
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Oct 18

The Dreaming Mind-Brain

From the Journal of Analytical Psychology, “In this paper I discuss the nature and role of dream and the dreaming process in Jungian clinical practice in the light of neuroscience. Insights from contemporary neuroscience support rather than contest Jung’s view that emotional truth, not censorship or disguise, underpins the dreaming process. I use clinical material to illustrate how work with dreams within the total interactive experience of the analytic dyad enables the development of the emotional scaffolding necessary for the development of ‘mind’.”

Go to Journal of Analytical Psychology

Oct 16

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Slip Into a Former Dreamland

I woke up this morning in a new place and found myself looking out the window into a new city and wondering how I arrived here. It was nine months ago that I died and it is somehow appropriate that it is now, nine months later, that I am born again. All of those past impossibilities that seemed so distant have found their way back into my life. The scale is much smaller, more manageable, and I wonder whether any sort of greatness lay ahead. I would not want to use my past as an excuse for my future. Read more

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