Dreaming the Soul Alive: an Experiential Journey (2006)
[Note: Depending on your motivation, I suggest you read the Preface first for context. Then try the first sections of A Book of Dreams to see how dramatically the sequence unfolds, from basic psychological clearing to substantive spiritual access in two months. If you want to understand the principles of dream work and/or apply my method for yourself, you can then start over, this time including the framing material that comes before and after Book as you go.]
8. City of Light and Revelation
Appendix: On Sacred Marriage and Human Renewal
Preface
I retired from the Irish university system in September 2005, after almost thirty years teaching philosophy and psychology. I felt a huge shift waiting to happen in me and that a complete change of circumstances was needed to facilitate it.
At the beginning of 2006 I fulfilled a long-held wish by leaving Dublin and coming to live by the Atlantic on the West coast of Ireland. From the moment I first saw this vast, rampaging, tranquil Mirror-Mother I felt a sense of deep affinity, together with deep respect for her constant, unrelenting power. This respect was coloured by elements of fear, mysterious at the time but undeniable.
I knew that coming to live by the ocean would have great importance for me but had no idea of what specifically it might entail. I was joined in this venture by a new partner who also felt strongly drawn but apprehensive. Entering into new relationship was significant for me at this time because I understood that the people we attract reflect our dispositions, challenges, liabilities and potentials back to us.
Moreover, it has always been a big part of what I call the Dreaming of my life that I should be involved in an empowering process of sacred marriage. Usually this is realised internally before manifesting successfully in outer life. Ideally, however, relationship can itself serve as a vehicle for mutual clarification and development. Like many formed in the school of relationships, I have had occasion to question this ideal.
Nevertheless, synchronicity and intuition both decreed that it was appropriate to multiply the uncertainties of my own situation by marrying them with those of someone else. I didn’t fully appreciate until recently how central this alliance would be in the unfolding of my story through 2006. I had no idea in March that I would be smitten by a great wave of dreams from late March to May or that I would be writing a book about them by July.
I had no idea that this was prerequisite for realising the major shift anticipated a year earlier. I didn’t know that themes of sacred marriage would figure prominently in the process or how crucial dreams could prove in renewing my life and, potentially, that of human culture generally. I don’t want to press any grandiose claim beyond noting that this book was written to make a case – not just for my dreams, but everyone’s.
Every human life has a Dreaming: a core destiny that it is the promise of each life to fulfil. Every soul has knowledge of its destiny and uses dreams to tell ego-us where we stand in relation to it and what we must do next the better to fulfil it. The purpose of every human life is to bring its Dreaming and its conduct into right accord, so that the life becomes an expression of its underlying dream.
I have presented my dreams so you can benefit from them as examples of how your own can work. along with directions that will help you integrate their visionary power. Read on and you will see how dreams can guide you to release destructive patterns and unimagined potentials that all humans hold within.
A Time to Dream
In the film of Brian Moore’s novel ‘Black Robe’, the Algonquin chief Neyahutin asks Jesuit missionary Laforgue how he can possibly live without dreaming. How does he know what to do? Laforgue has no idea what the savage means. Although capable of fine reflection, he has no memory of dreams. He resembles most modern people in this. Even when we do remember our dreams, we generally fail to attend further to them.
We pay a high price for this dispassion. Dreams manifest Vision, which images Destiny. Neglecting our dreams, we lose our Vision. We forget who we are and what for. Western society has become increasingly ‘rational’ over the last three centuries. As a result we have neglected dreams and lost Vision to a point where most intellectuals decry attachment to either as pious sentiment, although dissociated intellect has brought widespread devastations to Earth.
It is vital at this time for humanity to remember its dreaming, as more and more of us come to feel that ways we have been made in culture don’t adequately reflect our true nature and potentials. To overcome shortcomings of this arrangement, we must find our way back to leading authentic lives. But how can we do this, when nobody seems able to say what it might involve, specifically, for us? The answer lies within.
Every soul has knowledge of its destiny. Dreams bring this to awareness as we are ready to receive. To live authentically is to live (towards) our destiny. We realise this by following our dreams. It is even possible to restore the foundations of authentic human culture by this means, as well as appropriate trajectories for our personal lives.
Behind the play of rational intellect, the wisdom of soul is forever prompting us to realise its highest potential. Dreams are vision-bearers. They carry soul wisdom into waking consciousness. This process can be contaminated by the impact of harsh experiences in our past. By working with dreams, we can access untapped soul wisdom and at the same time bring healing to old wounds. This transforms the quality of our lives and helps us manifest our highest destiny.
It is not necessary to labour endlessly over interpretation to achieve this. All we need do is establish a general sense of what dreams are about and what messages they are attempting to convey. These invariably have to do with bringing movement into areas of our lives that have been stuck but are currently pressing for release and integration. Dreams help us move out of deadlock and into flow.
Thus, once we have established what our dream is about, we need a method that will enable us to make the leap from deadlock back to flow. This book presents such a method, along with other information required to integrate dream energies productively into our waking lives.
To prepare the ground, I open with an overview of ‘Dreaming for Beginners’. This is followed by a general account of how dreams operate (‘A Dreamer’s Apocrypha’). Later on, I provide a detailed ‘User’s Guide’ so that readers can benefit practically from their own dreams in terms of enhanced awareness, creativity and personal freedom.
My account is structured around a powerful sequence of dreams that came at a particularly charged period in my life, during which I was challenged to move beyond anything I had accomplished before and undertake something I couldn’t even imagine at the outset. This period had a potential to be one of immense creativity for me or immense frustration. Fortunately, my life had prepared me to recognise the value of dreams and discern the essence of what my soul was trying to tell me by means of them.
The dreams are presented fully in A Book of Dreams. This demonstrates the method I used with each to reveal its essential message and to make the unconscious energies behind it available for scrutiny and transformation. It also describes a procedure for enacting dreams that goes beyond interpretation-based approaches by showing how it is possible to integrate even the most deeply repressed antagonistic and creative potentials we harbour.
Every dream in my sequence builds exquisitely on those that precede it, already indicating soul direction. Together they tell the story of a huge opening in me as well as evoking potentials that inhere in every human life. Considering my dreams as examples helps open readers to an extended range of possibilities that dream-work opens up. It also shows how the method works in practice. Afterwards, when you have a sense of this practice and its rewards, I present detailed keys to help you process your own dreams.
The only limit on how far dreams can take us is the extent of our willingness to be with them. Because mine came at a particularly charged time and because I was available to process them intensively, they outline very economically a transformational pattern that could apply in anybody’s life. The circumstances of individual dreamers may vary but core underlying issues, the way they manifest and how we can best respond to them as they do – all this is essentially the same for everyone.
My Book of Dreams splits qualitatively into two halves which together reveal the archetypal structure of a human soul journey. The first half entails recovery from effects of early programming. It is followed by a progressive movement towards ever more encompassing levels of personal-spiritual fulfilment. The second stage of this process is generally masked by the first but is always implicit in it. Our dreams are constantly trying to facilitate its emergence but can succeed only in so far as we attend to them. My own journey shows this very clearly.
It also shows how rapidly dream communication escalates once we start attending consciously to it. The more we respond to the Unconscious, the more readily it ‘speaks.’ Also, practising the method of enactment as noted helps to develop a strong intuitive sense of how to move from a stage of ‘interpreting’ dreams to one of integrating their underlying energies into waking life. This allows the life to unfold more quickly, more easily and more beautifully. My chapter on Dream Weaving illustrates this.
It is followed by A User’s Guide, which presents a systematic review of all steps involved in making sense of my dreams and incorporating the energies behind them. A Woman’s Dreaming recaps the process from a female point of view. This proved crucial because the more I succeeded in integrating my dreams, the stronger my partner’s dreams became until eventually they began exhibiting tendencies that directly complemented my own. This was particularly illuminating with regard to themes of sacred marriage and sexual healing that had surfaced powerfully in my work.
Sacred marriage refers to a balancing of masculine and feminine energies in ourselves and, by extension, our relationships. The significance of this sorely needed balancing is explored in an appendix On Sacred Marriage and Human Renewal.
Dreaming for Beginners
Why should anyone be interested in dreams? Most of us don’t even remember having them and are therefore inclined to think we never dream. This assumption is categorically mistaken. Everybody dreams every night. Nevertheless, we mostly act as if dreams have no practical significance for the conduct of our lives. This too is mistaken. Dream awareness is fundamental to our happiness and fulfillment as human beings.
If this is true, you say, why are dreams so commonly disregarded that most of us don’t remember having any? This is a fair question and easy to answer in a culture where people are shaped to look outwards rather than in. We develop sensitivity to things we attend to and ignorance of those we ignore. We are taught by default to ignore our dreams and thus have only a very slight knowledge of our inner being.
This is a peculiar starting point for any human culture but it is one our modern West has firmly embraced. Dreams express the deepest wisdom and aspirations of the soul. Our culture has no time for them. This is why we create so many problems for ourselves and our world. It is never too late to recover, however, even from profound disorientation. Our dreams are constantly updated by an intelligence far greater than our conscious minds can comprehend. As a result, guidance is always available to re-turn us to the path of our soul truth. I want you to discover this and experience it for yourself.
We begin by considering the nature of sleep. For people who aren’t aware of dreaming, sleep is akin to a black hole state in which nothing happens: time out, if you will, from the process of being alive. Once again, this conception is mistaken and misleading. Sleep is an ordered activity that moves through regular cycles every night.
This has been apparent for almost fifty years, since the discovery of REM sleep - i.e. periods of sleep activity characterized by rapid eye movements. These happen under closed lids and are observed by attaching electrodes to people’s eyes. It was found that everybody goes through three or four periods of REM sleep every night. Moreover, when people are awakened out of REM sleep they almost invariably report vivid dream activity. This contrasts with an approximately one in three incidence of dream recall outside these periods.
The implications of many studies which have been made of this phenomenon are clear: everybody experiences REM sleep and everybody dreams at these times, whether or not we remember on later awakening. To appreciate the full significance of this we need to review the main stages of our human sleep cycle.
When we lie awake before sleeping our EEG, which records patterns of brainwave activity, is likely to exhibit the steady alpha rhythm characteristic of wakeful awareness. As we relax and become drowsy, this alpha rhythm is gradually replaced by the low voltage activity of Stage One sleep. This lasts only a few minutes.
The onset of Stage Two sleep is indicated by sleep spindles. These signal deepening relaxation and gradually give way to slow, high amplitude delta waves of yet deeper relaxation. When these account for 20 to 50 percent of the EEG record we are in Stage Three. When delta waves exceed 50 percent of the EEG we are in Stage Four, the deepest phase of sleep. This sequence is reversed after roughly ninety minutes.
When Stage One is reached on this ‘ascending’ phase of the cycle, REMs begin to occur prolifically. This is the period known as Stage One REM sleep. It usually lasts for about ten minutes and during it our eyes dart about under closed lids. We almost inevitably dream while this is happening.
The cycle is usually repeated three to four times through the night with variations. Generally, sleep becomes lighter and less time is spent in Stages Three and Four. REM periods get longer as the intervals between them contract from approximately ninety minutes during the first cycle to as little as forty in the last.
The occurrence of three to four REM periods nightly accounts for the fact that we sometimes wake with an impression of having had a number of separate dreams. Usually, if we remember dreams at all, it is the one we had most recently that is most clearly recalled.
Whether we remember or not, however, it is clear that everyone dreams every night. Why? What is the purpose of this universal but strangely elusive form of mental activity? It doesn’t seem plausible to dismiss it as merely random. Moreover, the question can’t be answered by any approach based on a strict practice of external observation. We have to look inside to see what we are like there.
Amazingly, when we do this, we find that our ‘inside’ is constantly trying to communicate its truth to us. Dreams are primary vehicles of this communication. They come when our ego agendas are suspended during sleep. There is thus a different order of intelligence involved than that which regulates our wakeful ordering of experience.
Dreams express a spontaneously manifesting urge towards wholeness that is prompted from the soul core of our being. I will show you how to access and facilitate this core soul impulse and, also, how it is dedicated to clarification and fulfillment of your soul destiny. This is a big claim so we must build strong foundations to support it.
Nothing can happen if you don’t have access to your dreams so I will make some preliminary suggestions now to get you started. The first is simply to intend consciously to dream and remember your dreams. You must then behave consistently with this resolution, for example by keeping some means of recording by your bed.
As I’ve said, as a culture we pay little attention to dreams. Consequently, they tend to have little energy or standing in our experience. As soon as you begin attending to them, however, this changes. The more attention you give dreams, the more they will enter your awareness. Witnessing my dreams will stimulate this process greatly for you.
Bits and pieces will begin to filter through from your sleep, even if they haven’t done before. Attending to them further by recording and thinking about them will encourage ever greater unfolding. In general, the thoughts we entertain are the thoughts we evoke. Thus, if you consciously set yourself to attend to your dreams, your dreams will start reporting to you more and more.
In fact, a dream is like a report dispatched from the journey of consciousness through sleep. It is a fragile structure and is easily lost on waking, particularly in the early stages. This is because night-time consciousness is very different from our waking orientation. When we shift abruptly from one mode to the other, dream recollections can instantly disappear.
Sometimes, just moving in the bed can trigger this, or a conversation, or reading – anything that serves to draw us out from inner-directed night consciousness into our outer-directed, logical-rational, linear-analytic daytime mode. To prevent this, you must prepare to ‘hold’ your dream carefully until you are ready to record it.
It is best to write out your dream as soon, as comprehensively and as faithfully as you can, ideally without other physical or mental activity intervening between the times of waking and recording. You need to record as fully as you can because the smallest details in a dream – a colour, number or turn of phrase – can carry important information.
You need to record as soon as you can because if you don’t, say by waiting until after breakfast, you are likely to invite elements of reconstruction into your recall. These will reflect the dispositions of your waking consciousness and will thus tend to dilute or obscure what may be most significant about your dream.
Record the dream as exactly as you can without being concerned about its length, vagueness, or seeming irrelevance. The more you welcome even fragments into your waking reality, the more readily your soul can reveal itself by means of them. We will see later that the truth of a dream is often hidden within rather than disclosed fully by its surface manifestation. Thus every detail of what manifests can be used as a ‘hook’ for drawing associated revelations into awareness.
Don’t pause to interpret or reflect much early on. Initially, you need to connect with the energies behind your dream. The best way to do this is to record it straightaway without any kind of judgment from the perspective of waking consciousness. You should also aim to preserve a sense of the dream’s inner atmosphere as best you can because, ultimately, working with this will most improve the quality of your waking life. It also helps to draw images from a dream or even paint colour portraits without form.
Some people like to use dictaphones for recording dreams. This is fine but I would also suggest that you then go on to write them as well, preferably in your own hand. This affords the dream a visible 3D presence authorised and consolidated by your own embodied energy signature. Indeed, one of the exercises I will recommend later for working with dreams presupposes a written record.
It is helpful to share your dreams by talking about them with others after you have finished your recording. This serves to establish your commitment and helps to introduce them as a concern of your waking life. It is important to note that dream-work can be far more than a casual hobby. Virtually all cultures apart from ours have acknowledged this. Dreams have a potential to transform the life of our species on this planet.
Your particular dreams tell about your Dreaming: the vision, destiny and potentials that await fulfillment in your life. Don’t doubt that you have a Dreaming. Everyone does. Realizing this brings happiness and fulfillment, irrespective of the form it takes. Celebrity or grandeur isn’t required. Your Dreaming is unique to you and beyond comparison. Only by realizing it, and not anybody else’s, will you find fulfillment.
There is no need to be anxious about this process, even if you are unfamiliar with it. Regular practice will quickly alter your experience. Don’t think about interpreting or processing your dreams until you’ve looked through mine. This will awaken your sense of what’s possible and allow you to anticipate the kinds of development you can expect. You will then be better able to work with detailed instructions I provide later on. These will tell you what you need to know about colours, chakras, numbers and so forth.
First I must show you why dreams matter: that they are significant and instructive, and that they reflect the highest wisdom of your soul, even beyond your wounds. Dreams are a language of soul. This language is fundamentally poetic and capable of expressing visionary Truth. In order to realize this, we must build a sense of how dreams work and what they do.
A Dreamer’s Apocrypha
‘Apocrypha’ refers to bits that got left out of the Bible. Freud – whose 1904 book The Interpretation of Dreams became something of a Bible in this area – says that all dreams have to do with wish fulfilment. If by this he had meant that all human beings dream of being wholly fulfilled, his statement would be comprehensively correct.
However, Freud related every aspect of human motivation to sexuality as the uncivilised, ungovernable residue of our animal past. He was correct to draw attention to this but not exhaustively so. Other aspects of human potential also press for admission into our personal and cultural awareness. In recognition of this, my aim is to reinstate much that was omitted from the Bible according to Freud.
Dreams seek to promote healing in our lives. They help us to become whole, but only if we take responsibility for them and respond appropriately to messages they carry. Dreams arise in the Unconscious and serve as pathways to greater consciousness, bridging possible rifts between both spheres. Such rifts can be of two main types.
The first arises in respect of painful situations which consciousness is unable to deal with at the time of their occurrence. When this happens, the wounding – whether caused by physical or psychological abuse – is liable to be shut out of awareness. If it is severe it may be repressed altogether, so that consciousness doesn’t even have the option of recalling it. Until such subconscious imprints are cleared we continue to be affected by them in limiting ways right through our lives.
The second major type of rift that can occur has to do with potentials that have been neglected or denied, especially in early life. It may be that, as a result, we carry gifts of which we are unaware. We try to go ahead with our ordinary business but feel frustrated by this. Whatever we do along lines we have been directed to follow doesn’t satisfy. We feel incomplete and unfulfilled without knowing why.
Dreams can help us resolve both kinds of situation as long as we know how to work with them. The purpose of this chapter is to provide some basic information and a general orientation that will help us do this.
The first principle is that dreams tend to focus two major aspects of personal psychology: our pain and our potential. They serve in the first instance to identify our pain and conditions of blockage that maintain it. In the second, they serve to bring unacknowledged potentials to awareness and also to promote their development.
So far, this seems straightforward. Why then are dreams so often apparently nonsensical and bizarre? There are several reasons.
The first is that dreams communicate information to consciousness about the state of our inner world. We have no ready-made language available for this. Consequently, the dream has to take words, symbols and images that have a particular sense in relation to our experience of the outer world and use them creatively, or metaphorically, to describe conditions of our inner world.
Animals might be used to represent abstract qualities, for example. Thus reporting nervously for a school exam with lions in tow will seem quite strange, even in a dream. If I realise that there is a testing time ahead for which I need to gather all my courage, the sense behind this apparent nonsense starts to show. It follows that it isn’t possible to read dreams literally. Any attempt to do so can only lead to a conclusion that they are nonsense. We will see that this is never the case.
Also, you will probably have noticed that dreams can seem nonsensical and yet feel very powerful and significant. How can this be? The basic reason is that many aspects of our instinctive-emotional lives are so multiply overlaid that they simply can’t gain admission into consciousness. They strive for expression but are held in check by what Freud called ego-defence mechanisms. These are psychological strategies employed to protect the often fragile stability of our ego-experience.
Their functioning creates deadlock in the psyche as our powers of expression and repression cancel each other out. This takes its toll energetically. In so far as we are affected by this condition, we are unable to feel vital, proactive or fulfilled. On the contrary, we are likely to feel frustrated and depressed.
One way in which the tension of this deadlock can be alleviated is through dreaming. This is possible because ego-consciousness is suspended during sleep and its defence mechanisms relax. Repressed content can then enter consciousness in ‘disguised’ form. This works on the same principle as the ‘lions stand for courage’ example given earlier.
Thus some point about my sexuality might be conveyed by the appearance of a bull in my dream. Further information would then be carried by the condition, treatment or behaviour of the bull. I might not understand this intellectually and yet still feel shaken by the powerful energy involved. Integrating such energy successfully is a vital aspect of working with dreams. As we will see, this takes us far beyond inherently limited practices of dream interpretation, no matter of which type.
I will return to this having considered one further reason why dreams can seem very strange – i.e., they are not bound by what we normally experience as ‘laws’ of time and space. We might turn up as adults in our infant school, for example, which may be relocated to a tropical jungle, with Cleopatra as head teacher.
These features all contribute to determining the meaning of a dream but can’t be made sense of in terms of the provisions of our ‘normal’ waking reality. The key point to bear in mind at this stage is that everything in the dream is a reflection of the dreamer. Every aspect of the dream mirrors some aspect of the person’s psyche.
Even location provides basic information concerning what a dream is about. Thus a dream set in a school will be about learning of some kind; a dream set in a hospital will be about healing, and so on. Likewise, the characters in a dream reflect attributes and potentials of the dreamer. If a friend appears in a positive role, for example, the key attributes you associate with them are waiting and need to be developed in you. You will find many examples like this in my dreams.
The action in a dream also reflects what’s happening or trying to happen in a person’s life. If nothing is happening, the dream will carry information about the nature of the blockage that is responsible for this. In such cases it is necessary to have some method of working with this information in a practical, transformative manner that goes beyond interpretation. I will present such a method systematically after we have seen examples of what it can achieve when applied to my own dreams.
Focusing on personal benefits for the moment, I would say that the overall purpose of dreams is to bring healing and guidance to our lives. If we are stuck and don’t know what direction we should be taking, our dreams will tell us. If we feel so stuck and pained that we don’t think we even have the option of moving, our dreams will pinpoint the source of the blockage that is causing us distress.
Again, dreams serve to move us out of deadlock and into flow. They do so, as far as may be warranted, by drawing our attention to aspects of our psyche that are held in confinement or limitation of some kind. Such stuck-ness invariably derives from ‘negative’ effects of difficult past experiences on our formation – i.e. the cumulative impact of pain, repression and frustrated creativity.
Dreams indicate the nature of our blockages and provide us with information needed to overcome them. They also bring to light in consciousness, from the relative obscurity of the Unconscious, formerly undisclosed information to do with life purpose, potentials and ideals. They do so with the aim of releasing hidden treasure into awareness and flow, so that we might make the best of all we have it in us to be.
More concretely, dreams serve to promote love, joy, self-acceptance, confidence, freedom and expression in our lives. Again they do so by helping to release us from painful and limiting conditions of our past. To achieve this, they must first bring these conditions to our attention, especially if we have repressed them. Thus traces of actual painful experiences are a primary source of ‘negative’ content in our dreams.
Another stems from resisting efforts to clear these in the present. It is a key feature of human psychology that we tend to prefer what is known and familiar, however painful this might be, to what is alien and unknown. The tendency is greatly amplified if we have been deeply frightened or wounded in our past.
It is important to stress that this is not usually obvious. Sometimes we are so wounded during critical phases of our growth that our comfort zones become severely restricted and we refuse to move outside them, even physically. What is more common, however, is that ‘parts’ of us are affected by patterns that applied consistently through our development - criticism, neglect, abuse etc.
Such parts exercise a persistently stifling, reactive influence over our responses in the present but we aren’t generally aware of this because ‘we’ are identified with ego aspects of consciousness that develop as we go to school, work, university, travel, have boyfriends/girlfriends etc. Our usual sense is that we choose freely to do what we do but there are often complications.
It follows from what I’ve already said, for example, that the ‘we’ who choose refers only to parts of us that actively identify with the dispositions of ego-consciousness. The parts of us that got left behind – stuck in doubt, fear and repression – are not represented by such choices. Moreover, these parts continue to exert influence by non-obvious subconscious means which ensure that familiar patterns get repeated.
A good way to clarify this for now, without going into detail, concerns the area of relationships. Consider with respect to various partners how often you’ve had occasion to reflect ‘How do I keep getting myself into these situations?’ That is to say, in other words ‘Why do I keep repeating these same patterns?’
The answer is because the limiting, confining impact of your past keeps you stuck in old ways, predisposing you to attract and respond to apparently novel situations that keep old, essential features in place. Our subconscious tendencies keep us repeating old cycles even if we choose ‘consciously’ to stage them in London or Athens rather than Brisbane or Berlin.
We may choose to go where we will. However, we have no option but to drag unresolved subconscious patterns of our past along with us. This can only change when we allow these patterns into awareness, which gives us a chance to move beyond them. Usually, they are over-ridden by the will of a guarded ego-consciousness that allows only what is familiar and consistent with its expectations and desires.
This occurs every time we ignore a pressing dream because dreams are constantly attempting to bridge unconscious tendencies into awareness. In fact, bridging gaps between ego-consciousness and what we think of as the Unconscious may be the basic function of our dreams, from which we as a culture have now largely turned away. When we do attend, however, they empower us to remember.
For this to happen we must look past established, often idealised self-concepts and readmit aspects of ourselves that we have been choosing (probably unwittingly) to leave behind. We must become responsible for our dreams, and to them. I stress this because, once we start attending to formerly repressed past wounds, unfulfilled potentials they have been blocking begin to surface also. Repression doesn’t just block ‘negative’ content. Thus lifting it creates an opportunity to follow our dreams towards completion of a destiny that encompasses the overall, gradually unfolding pattern of our lives.
Also, if everything in my dream is a reflection of me (and it is, however un/flattering this may be), then I am responsible for everything in it - all the conflicts, fears and base actions that I as ego might prefer to disown. Our dreams are projections of our whole souls, including our wounded parts. This means that if one of the characters in my dream stabs another, for example, I am doing this to myself in a metaphorical way that consciousness would do well to clarify. Dreams often carry warnings in this regard.
In being responsible for my dreams, I acknowledge my capacity to change and also my responsibility to my soul, which is the true unit of my life’s coherence and knows far more about this than my ego. Above all, my soul knows what I’m for and how I can best go about doing whatever it is, irrespective of errors I may have made up to this point. It uses dreams to relay such vital information.
It does so, moreover, in ways that are always tailored to our capacity to receive and respond to such information, protecting against overload unless we have backed ourselves into emergency situations of desperation or imminent decline. To guard against this, it is advisable to open to our soul’s transformational promptings sooner rather than later. We may elect not to, of course, in which case the function atrophies and we stumble on under the misapprehension that our life has no dreaming, or purpose, as our modern culture resolutely affirms from its baseline of psycho-spiritual ignorance.
I have no wish or need to be prescriptive here. Happiness affords a sufficient criterion, It may well be that your purpose, your dharma or spiritual duty, is simply to lead a lead a life of quiet decency. If so, you will be wholly content in the course of doing so, with no sense of frustration, emotional reactivity, unexplained anxieties, discontent or paths left unfollowed. If you are such a person I salute you. If not, it is probably advisable to read on.
I will supply the basic information you need to work with your own dreams after we work through the sequence of my dreams around which this book has grown. This will give you a chance to look at dreaming in a new way and will also extend your sense of what it’s possible to achieve as a result.
The motivation this imparts is valuable as the sequence clearly demonstrates benefits that follow from responding constrctively to dreams. If I don’t accept and pursue this principle, no benefits can be received. We see this in flight dreams, where I run away from whatever my dream is attempting to convey. The messenger may appear as a dark, ghoulish figure but even s/he represents some aspect of me in search of integration.
Subconscious fears predispose me to run but in the end I’m just running from my Self, so denying further something about me that has already been denied too long. If this weren’t so, I in the dream (my ‘dream-ego’) wouldn’t be afraid. We come to fear most what we most repress. The more we repress the greater our fear and the more it assumes terrifying guises and proportions in our dreams.
Generally, what we avoid in dreams is what we most need to admit in waking life. This usually concerns our own repressed qualities, to do with our pain and our potentials. I stress this because, despite the nightmare scenarios that resistance induces, dreams actually focus on healing. They do so by putting us into situations where we have to deal with our own ‘negative’ (by which I mean limiting) emotions. They also provide information about the nature of an issue, the source of our resistance to it and how the situation can be creatively resolved. The Apache dream in section two of my dream sequence provides a very clear example.
Some dreams also provide guidance to help us fulfil our potentials. They usually put us in situations which draw attention to our unrealised gifts. Negative elements in these dreams typically highlight our fears around developing suppressed potentials (since this too would challenge us to move outside familiar confines).
Often, healing and/or teaching figures appear in our dreams to facilitate positive transformations. We may fail to recognise them in the dream, ignore their advice or even ‘darken’ them as a result of subconscious resistance to their message. Thus I repeatedly fail to recognise Merlin as a soul teacher in my dreams until very near the end of the sequence.
We can also project negative attitudes on to benevolent figures. Last year, for example, I had a dream in which much admired Bob Dylan appeared but my negative subconscious set him snarling angrily at me because, as I realised on waking, I wasn’t paying enough attention at the time to my soul’s wish to be expressed in a new, more creative kind of writing than I had previously dared. My frustration was mirrored by Dylan’s attitude. Realising that led eventually to the writing of this book.
Sub- and Superconscious
Generically, ‘the subconscious’ refers to all parts of the psyche that are less developed than our ego-consciousness. These are mostly formed through repression and can exhibit attitudes that go all the way back to infancy. When such ‘parts’ feel threatened we find ourselves sulking, closing up, running away, getting angry or whatever the habitual response pattern is that characterises a freshly stirred part that just wants to stay asleep in some unresolved mode of adjustment that is usually established long before we could take charge of our experience or responses to it.
Dreams help us to review and resolve such issues until, eventually, we become free of them. The process gathers momentum rapidly when waking consciousness co-operates with promptings of the soul. Until then, ‘negative’ content in a dream arises from the subconscious. This too is part of our soul and thus has to be reflected in the composition of our dreams. Positive, inspirational content comes from the super-conscious, a name given by some psychologists to aspects of the soul/Unconscious that are more developed than ordinary ego-awareness.
The super-conscious has access to levels of awareness that our egos can’t fathom. This is how dream intelligence can know so much: about early experiences we weren’t able to integrate when they first occurred and are now stuck in our subconscious; about latent gifts our ego-consciousness may know nothing of; and how to regulate the subtly interwoven tasks of freeing us from our conditioned past while also pushing us towards a fulfilled and liberating future.
It may feel strange to equate the soul with the Unconscious. I do so here because most twentieth century psychologists took ego-consciousness as a norm. Anything that couldn’t be admitted into ego-consciousness was said to be Unconscious, which most took to mean subconscious, assuming ego awareness to be paramount. This overlooks vast possibilities of transforming even our ego attitudes and with them the inner structure of consciousness, so that we become aware of more and greater things than might have been considered possible before (in a context of returning spiritual consciousness).
This is exactly what happens when we follow our dreams. It has been for me an exhilarating journey and I hope that it will be the same for you. It may help to read just one of my dream chapters at a time, excepting the first four. These can be read together since the momentum that builds across them gives a clear sense of dramatic opening that happens when ego-awareness begins attending carefully to dream-borne messages from a soul that doesn’t want to stay Unconscious.
Much ‘action’ appears in my dreams once ego-I starts co-operating in this and the energies of my soul move to eliminate inhibitions held in the structure of my personality. This wave is part of a constantly recycled effort by the soul to promote psycho-spiritual integrity in the person. The difference for me on this occasion was that, for the first time in my life, I had dedicated time and space to take notice and surrender.
Try to engage my dream accounts actively, as if they were your own. Let your awareness be stimulated by their mirroring potential. This will not be hard: aspects of my experience will resonate and connect with your own. Note evidence of soul-opening within and across dreams because the essence of this opening will be the same for you as it has been for me.
Remember also that dreams serve to bring to awareness issues that were once left behind, often in secrecy and shame. Only by allowing these to return and accepting them fully can we transform old blockages into new freedoms.
We are ready now to recap my journey as a prelude to yours.
A BOOK OF DREAMS
Prologue
There is a story told about a hero who was born inside a Dragon’s Egg but knew it not. This egg had magical powers of regeneration so that every time the hero grew the egg grew with him, replenishing itself without his knowledge. The hero grew bigger and stronger within the confines of his egg. Eventually, it was said, he came of age.
Freed at last, our hero thought that he would set out on a journey to the edges of the world. There, he had been told, or somewhere on the way, he would find his Love. Eagerly, excited and compelled by irresistible urge, he sets out.
He faces many trials and challenges on his way. He encounters many mirrors but none is his Love. He approaches the edge of many horizons only to find every time that it stretches farther away than he can comprehend. His enthusiasm wanes. Despairing and exhausted, he lies down one day to sleep.
In his sleep, he dreams about a hero who is born inside a Dragon’s Egg but knows it not. This egg has magical powers of self-regeneration, so that every time the hero grows the egg grows around him, forever providing reflections of new horizons, new edges and new loves.
Of age but disappointed, confused and lonely in his heart, the hero sets out again on a quest to find her Love. This story goes on. What might it mean for us to hatch?
1. The Game of Life
The opening of my account at this moment is not arbitrary. The first dream arrived the night before a workshop which I knew was destined to have a major impact on my life, pushing me forward into changes I couldn’t even anticipate. The outer details of this process are of secondary relevance but I will provide as much information as required to establish the significance of particular dreams.
My conscious resolution was to approach the event with absolute commitment. The first dream, reflecting what was most pressing in my soul’s disposition at the time, came as something of a surprise:
I am a young teenage boy, preparing to take part in a football match against a team that plays in all-blue. My team plays in all-red. The match, a final, is important. I am at my parents’ house. They are both present and delay me. At last, I am ready to leave. I march proudly through the streets in my red soccer uniform and polished boots. By the time I arrive at the pitch, the game has started. My place has been given to another boy. I am bitterly sad and disappointed.
I can remember being such a boy very well, although no episode like this ever happened. It is symbolic. The dream sees me as a young teenager, preparing. This, in a way, is how I have felt of late. The game is a metaphor for participation in life. I am to play in red, which signifies passion and basic vital energy. Given my age in the dream, this is a powerful and mysterious force. It is also potentially dangerous, and frightening.
I am to play against a team in blue. In its positive manifestations, blue has to do with peace, communication, authority and higher purpose. If I have problems with ‘blue,’ like many young teens, I am likely to feel troubled, isolated, purpose-less and depressed – all negative ‘blue’ issues. This game between red and blue is important to me. My passion is due to play against authority. What will be the outcome of this match (note the pun) between my passion and my purpose?
The match is a final and I a young teen. It is a rite of passage, an initiatory event, like the one I have been preparing for in current adult life. This is one reason why I appear as a pubescent boy, full of energy and ideas, but incomplete. There is a part of me that is awash in red potential but needs blue direction for development. It still needs to be cultivated so it can find its true purpose and highest expression.
But there is a problem. The match never happens for me. Why? Because I am delayed, at my parents’ house. This means that the blossoming of my potential has been inhibited by attitudes I took on while under my parents’ influence. I still carry traces of this influence and these are preventing me from making the final (step or transformation). They are delaying me with regard to the crucial red-blue issue of bringing the Passion of my Life into correct alignment with its highest purpose so that both might be fulfilled.
No more information is given on this subject for now but that doesn’t matter. I have learned to trust the wisdom of my soul and know that more specific guidance will be forthcoming in due course. So, what else does the dream tell me?
I am ready inwardly to leave my parents’ house, having been delayed for a long time. This means it’s time for me to shed an inhibiting influence that has prevented me from realising my highest purpose and participating fully in the game of life. I can do so now and need to.
At this point, I recollect the demeanour of the young boy, allowing my awareness to enter his frame as he walks proudly through the streets in his red strip. There is no hint of arrogance in his pride; rather a kind of innocence that borders on naivety. He doesn’t imagine that anyone might think he looks stupid, pretentious or out of place. I admire this quality in him, even though naivety has its drawbacks.
One registers as soon as he reaches ‘the pitch.’ He never even considered that the game might start without him, or that he could miss his golden moment. But so it has proven and he feels purposeless, crestfallen, humiliated. How can he possibly make his way back home, now that everyone must know of his demotion? Where can he hide so that his shame will not be seen?
Aged 52, I take this one that I have been into my heart, so that he no longer needs to walk imaginary streets or malinger inconspicuously for fear of ridicule; so that his innocence and optimism may be restored in me, and his Passion fulfilled. Acknowledging this, I wait to see what news the coming days and nights will bring.
The next night brought the following dream:
I am in a cable car alone with C (my partner), going up a high mountain. We’re sitting at the front, enjoying spectacular views. Three males in their late teens appear suddenly and sit behind us. Their comments become intrusive. One starts pushing against me. I sense aggression building and tell C that I may need to fight these guys. I turn to face them. Two run and the third crumbles meekly at my approach. When we get to the top C disappears. Her place is taken by D, a middle-aged woman who starts berating me as a no-good male. I turn and walk away. She shouts at me to wait, what she was saying isn’t the truth, she has loved me all along. She sits by my side at the base of a monolithic Soviet-type sculpture that curves up towards a dark, lowering sky. I hold her gently without saying anything that might suggest compromise.
I am my current age and travelling with a woman who reflects my feminine side. I am ascending in consciousness (the high mountain) and have a much more encompassing outlook now (spectacular views). The young men seem to be aggressive. I interpret what I see as their intrusion in this way and respond aggressively. I relegate my feminine sensibility in so doing (C disappears). For all their brashness, the youths lack confidence and resolution. They retreat back where they came from, into my soul. They are, of course, aspects of my Self.
My adolescent legacy still shadows (sits behind) me. I am still pushing against myself and my ego-response is confrontational rather than conciliatory. I force the young men back to invisibility. Remember I spoke about energies of expression and repression getting stuck in deadlock scenarios? This is an example.
Three is the number of becoming. It stands for development and persistence. The approach of these youths is somehow necessary for my development. How can this be so? Two days later, no wiser, I try enacting the scenario from their point of view. It turns out that they are not aggressive at all, just loud because they want my attention.
The boldest of them sits on the bench, back-to-back with me, and pushes. My dream-ego treats this as aggression. The lad’s aim was to force encounter, and ultimately to promote mergence, or integration. I discover this by allowing my awareness to enter his body as he pushes – that is, by replaying the scene from his perspective.
The others wait to see my response. When I turn against them, they run away. The most forward one persists until I grab him and push him against the window. Then he vanishes and I am at the top, alone. The beautiful face of my feminine soul is no longer apparent. It seems I have frightened her as well.
Then a much harsher feminine aspect comes to the fore. She addresses me angrily. Once again, I don’t want to hear but her message is imprinted anyway: ‘I am a no-good male.’ There is a part of my soul that tells me this, and it is represented in the dream by D. Almost invariably, ‘negative’ female characters in dreams represent the limiting impact of a mother’s influence and so it is for me on this occasion.
Of course, mothers do a lot more than criticise and undermine but young souls, hungry for blessings and proof of love, register impressions of their withholding like a curse. These bite deep and stay fixed, particularly if repeated over time. The imprint ‘I am a bad/undeserving boy’ or no-good male persists more strongly than all the other things that might also have been said. As a result, I carry this message deep in my subconscious mind, which relays it when golden moments loom.
Its reappearance now is triggered by my dismissal of the youths. These represent ‘no-good male’ aspects of myself seeking to return from their confinement in my sub-conscious to the flowing, more encompassing vistas of my conscious, adult life. Their tentativeness and my response are both shaped by the impact of my mother’s criticisms. Believing them to be ‘bad’ I chase them away.
Precisely for this reason, the dream also urges that it is time for me to start healing this negative attitude in myself. I must stop walking away and listen also to other things that are (and were) being said. But I am still wary as I re-enter the shadowy atmosphere of my mother’s spell, signified by an oppressive monolith and overcast sky.
Notwithstanding misgivings I might have, the dream insists, I need to hold this imprint of my mother gently, admitting her belated declarations and allowing myself to become reconciled with all she has transmitted to me, without compromise. This is necessary to make peace in myself and has nothing to do with residual bitterness or complaining.
Parents naturally play a significant role in setting us up to learn whatever lessons and achieve whatever objectives our souls have chosen. Mothers are part of this equation. There is an Irish expression which I appreciate very much in this respect. It says ‘If it’s not one thing it’s your Mother.’ I’m not sure how old this expression is but I like to think we got it before Freud.
My next dream came two nights later:
I am walking around a Great Fire which I think of as the Fire of Truth. I carry a bowl of rice in my hand and have been selected to enter the Fire. I don’t do this but keep walking around instead. I wake with intimations of Auschwitz, Oliver Twist and survival.
This felt like a very powerful dream. The Fire is a place where ‘I’ might dissolve – be clarified, sublimated, purified. I even know this in the dream, as indicated by the ‘Fire of Truth’ reference. Fire is a symbol of Passion and Transformation. It gives us energy to move from one stage in our lives to the next, remade.
This dream also presents an opportunity for initiation and rebirth. But in order for rebirth to happen, something in us has to die – i.e. an old self, including all those aspects and dispositions that will no longer serve the life that is to come. All I have to do is enter the Fire. I know this time that I have been selected. As with my cup final, however, I shirk the appointment and for the same core reason: I still feel inhibited or ‘delayed.’
The rice is a symbol of all that I cling to, that which still delays me. In the context of Auschwitz and Oliver Twist, it is also a symbol of survival-dominated consciousness, which signifies a deformation of the (red) base chakra. This affects our ability to feel safe and at home in the world. Feeling unsafe, we are unlikely to trust and let go of the old.
We mistrust the new and refuse to open towards it, anticipating annihilation rather than transformation. We conjure crematory fires at Auschwitz rather than Ganges fires of alchemical transmutation. For these reasons, I fail to step in.
Notice that I don’t run away. I know, my soul knows, that the Fire represents a portal, a gateway to rebirth. Nevertheless, I just keep circling around. Something lingers that can’t be prevailed upon to make the leap. This is important. Destiny can’t be forced. In Celtic mythology, for example, candidates who jump into the Cauldron of Rebirth without adequate preparation end up terribly burned.
This is a symbolic warning. Myths, like dreams, are not judgmental. The message is simply that the soul won’t let you move until (all parts of) you are ready. This can be the source of many delays. The soul will, however, as in these dreams, show you exactly where the problem lies and also what must be done to overcome it.
We have already seen where the problem lies for me: in an internalised belief that I am a bad, undeserving, no-good male who, by subconscious association, will burn in Hell. Many people, male and female, are affected by such imprints, engendered early in life. I later conducted many enactment to erase mine.
I should clarify, however, regarding the dreams of this first section that I didn’t initially engage in the practice of systematic enactment which eventually became a staple of my dream work. I was able, through interpretation, to get a good sense of the meaning of my dreams and worked from there. The process evolved as I lived it.
This has the advantage of allowing you to see how the messages of my opening dreams build slowly from each other, incorporating elements of overlap and repetition. From the time I began enacting dreams systematically, the process of soul-opening got much faster and repetitive elements dropped away. You will be able to see this as my sequence unfolds through the next chapter.
In the meantime, remember that dream content is overseen by the wisdom of the soul, which knows when to release what and how much. There is no need to be concerned that the process will prove overwhelming. My case is just one example. Each person’s unfolding happens at a pace that is appropriate for them. Only essential structure and dynamics will be the same.
Before finishing this chapter, I want to emphasise some basic threads across my dreams so far: I miss vital appointments. My Passion is compromised by this. I fail to ‘die’ and enter a Fire of Rebirth.
On the face of it, this is not such an impressive record, especially in relation to an event that was to change my life radically, as Final and Fire were. As it happens, this was the last dream I had at the event, which didn’t directly produce any major transformation. How could it when, as my dreams had made abundantly clear, I wasn’t ready? The real work, I knew, would start at home.
2. Homecoming
I didn’t ‘die’ at my Big Event but was due to present a workshop myself two weeks later, at Easter. Themes of Passion, Death and Resurrection were central to this. Here is the first dream I was given to assist:
My three little daughters are asleep. The middle one is in bed. The youngest is curled up like a cat beside her and the eldest is stretched out on the floor nearby. I cover her in case she catches cold. All look happy and content.
Ostensibly, there isn’t much happening here. The atmosphere is tranquil and full of love. My daughters represent undeveloped feminine potentials in me. The dream indicates that these are literally dormant. All is quiet in my feminine soul for now. Dreams being what they are, I anticipate news concerning problems with my male side. They came the following night:
I am watching Chelsea play in a junior soccer match. I am a substitute, not good enough to make the team. They play in all blue. I look particularly at DD, who is having a very bad game. Afterwards, Mourinho (manager) storms into a white van as his team changes by the roadside. DM has been playing also but is not satisfied with his performance. He is gloomy and self-critical. I tell him that he needs only to improve his speed and self-belief, resolving to do the same myself.
Chelsea are currently England’s most successful soccer team. They are multi-national, cosmopolitan and lavishly financed. They play in London, a city which by Irish standards constitutes a very big stage. I have them playing in a junior league. Why? Perhaps a sense of under-achievement on my part, having failed recently to ‘die’? Certainly: I believe (or a part of me believes) that I am not good enough to make the team. As at my teenage final, I am forced to watch from the sideline, disqualified from participating, even at this level.
Chelsea wear all blue to match my depression. Their opponents don’t even figure in my dream awareness, so no other colours can impinge. DD, at the time their only Irish player, is having a bad game. That means in the language of dreams that I am too. Like DM, a timid and retiring friend, I am not satisfied with my performance. I am gloomy and self-critical. I need to bring myself up to speed and develop self-belief.
Mourinho, the man-ager who makes boys grow, is famously passionate and fiery. I need to develop more of these qualities in myself. He is also highly critical and a perfectionist (white undiluted by any other colour), as I am. I need to relax and release this tendency. I carry too much of it already, being a no-good male, unable to make the team. For Chelsea’s millionaire players, to change by the roadside is a humiliating come-down, the fate deserved by one who has failed to die and, in so doing, graduate to the bigger stage and a greater life in ‘London.’
Dreams never waste energy on congratulations for something that has already been achieved. They focus on what needs to be developed next. The sweeping self-indictment above doesn’t mean that I am constantly burdened by such reflections in ordinary life. Dreams don’t provide direct reflections of our ego dispositions but of sub-conscious tendencies that condition and underpin our egos.
These are alerted when significant change is in the offing, such as may threaten their state of defensive isolation. Typically, they fear for their survival. Thus they prevent me from jumping into a Fire of Truth but not, in waking life, from giving lectures and workshops on the subject or (mostly) enjoying a rich emotional-spiritual life. They have survived such exposure before and know there is no danger. We are dealing here with something a lot deeper.
My subconscious parts fear deep change because for them it implies annihilation. The only way to deal with this is by integrating such fears into consciousness, rather than denying or over-riding them. This permits them to join the flow of current awareness. It rescues them from the deadlock of a past which for them is always present. Only when they have been safely held are they free to ‘die’ alongside our more developed parts, not into oblivion but present consciousness.
This is crucial. Whenever deep change is under way, frightened parts will likely come to surface. Consciousness, forewarned, can witness and contain their emergence. If not, we become invested with their fears and our awareness contracts around theirs. We then act according to their dispositions, for example by shirking challenges or closing up. This is similar to what happens when we run away in a ‘bad dream’ scenario.
In any case, I was now feeling quite low. This is unusual for me because I am used to riding ‘waves’ from my Unconscious. I knew that something significant was waiting to break, something that my consciousness hadn’t previously been equipped to integrate. The next night brought a new dream and another clue:
I am waiting for a red double-decker bus, in London. Several pass but none stops.
I miss several buses, as a surfer might miss choice waves. These buses are red. Once again, this detail associates with passion, the base chakra and survival: I am failing to engage the big bus of my Passion at this moment because of a sub-conscious blockage which concerns a tender, vulnerable part of me that fears for its life.
What can I do to move beyond this realisation? I still need to engage my passion to fulfil my highest purpose in ‘London,’ the larger stage where the blues of Chelsea play, potentially to communicate with authority. I can do no more for now than resolve to welcome rather than resist fresh news from my Unconscious. A new dream comes that very night.
I’m in my childhood home with another cowboy. Apaches are attacking. I rush to the basement, where they’re trying to force entry from the back. My colleague defends the front. I break a hole in the rear basement window with my Winchester and kill two Apaches who are sneaking down the garden path. Three others rush in. I kill them also with repeated firing. Then there is quiet. It seems there are no more. I go back upstairs but there is no sign of my friend. Everything looks calm on the street. The house is fortified and I feel lonely.
There is action in this dream. Change is trying to happen. It’s not getting very far because something about my conscious disposition, represented by my ‘cowboy’ dream ego, prevents this by shooting down whatever the Apaches represent. Since I have experience with dream interpretation, just reviewing the text gives me lots of information. Because there is also lots of energy, I know that there is great transformative potential in this dream.
I’m one of two cowboys, which tells me I’m internally divided with regard to whatever the issue is. The Apaches represent this. That they are ‘attacking’ means I have been resisting their approach. The action takes place in my childhood home, which says that the subconscious attitude responsible for my dividedness was engendered there. The house is also a metaphor for my embodied self. Its condition is a reflection of my condition at the time.
I go to the basement, which represents the subconscious, and defend against attack from behind, which represents the past. Apaches, I know from childhood, are the cruellest of hostile Indians. They represent savages, dangerous and untamed. The part of me that is still a dutiful cowboy, childish and immature, kills them for fear of what they might unleash. I feel absolutely ruthless, desperately afraid as I do this in the dream. I can’t afford to let savages into my house for fear they will annihilate the order of my life. Thus when more appear I blast them to oblivion as well.
Having secured the frontier of my subconscious, I return upstairs to find no evidence of attack out front. My cowboy friend has disappeared. All is quiet. The house is fortified and closed. Nothing happens because my actions have prevented this. I am alone and lonely inside.
But that is not all. I now know why I have been missing the ‘bus’ (vehicle) of my passion. I even know from basement décor around what age my survival-related fears were laid down. In fact, I have a pretty full interpretation of the dream but my problem remains unsolved. I can know exactly what a dream means – in this case that I’m deeply conflicted with respect to basic instinctual energies (represented by the Apaches) that are now waiting to return – and still not have access to its gift.
Understanding, even when accurate and comprehensive, doesn’t entail transformation. To benefit fully from working with dreams, we need to do more than interpret them. We must engage the energies they bring to our attention. This is particularly true of dreams featuring overt conflict and even more so of this one, granted its place in my sequence as described so far. Something fundamental is now being brought to light. I must enact this dream fully to get under the skin of its characters, so to speak, and integrate it.
I know that the ‘conscious’ cowboy and ‘unconscious’ Apaches represent very different aspects of my Self and that these are at war with each other. Not very flattering perhaps, but true. I also know that if I can reconcile these energies a huge gift from my Unconscious will become available – nothing less, I intuit, than the wave of my true Passion. To pursue this, I go to a lonely beach the next day, intent on integrating the divided energetic streams apparent in my dream.
Having accepted that all aspects of the dream are reflections of my Self, I set myself the task of experiencing its various realities from all the points of view that it contains. That is, I resolve to enact the dream from the perspective of each of its main characters with a view to seeing how these perspectives and the energy potentials they represent can be most creatively reconciled.
I begin by focusing on the defensive cowboy, crouched low behind a rock. He clutches his rifle grimly, staring down its barrel into the coloured tunic of the first Apache. My body becomes taut with fear as I sink into this posture. My finger curls around the trigger in anticipation. I allow the Apaches to come closer, noting that they are actually moving slowly, tentatively almost. Recognising this, I suddenly feel miserable and sick. I kill them nevertheless as my dream demands. Afterwards I lie sobbing on the rock, hollow and grief-stricken.
Finally, I muster energy to go searching for the second cowboy. As he looks forward from the front of the house, I name him ‘Cowboy of the Future.’ Instinctively, I know his place is on top of a big rock facing the ocean, symbolising the upper floor of my house. I make my way there but he isn’t to be found. I realise that this is because First Cowboy, the Cowboy of my Past, carries so little energy that the world affords him no prospect, meaning that the Future is an extravagance he can’t entertain. He operates with very narrow vision, framed by a gun-sight, so nothing can flow forward through him.
I can’t discern the path of my highest future because I have yet to enter into right relationship with my past. When First Cowboy kills Apaches that symbolise returning aspects of this past, Second Cowboy has nothing to live from. The hope of his future was evoked by a promise of repressed energies which these ‘savages’ convey. Now there is nothing to sustain it or him. Their murder has been happening in me for God knows how long but my dream has only now made it apparent. Intuiting this, I turn my attention back to the Apaches.
Refocusing, I steal down the garden path as one of the lead pair. My movements are stealthy but not aggressive. I approach the back door of my house, hoping against hope to be admitted. Then I am shot once, twice, repeatedly. As I lie dying I feel dishonoured, bewildered and betrayed. I enact this scenario five times, once for each of the Apaches. Each time I am shot, I feel more and more hopeless and dismayed. Each time I revert to the role of Cowboy, I feel more leaden, mechanical and shamed.
By the time I return to front of house, I feel utterly energy-less and disconnected. My legs trail like stone impediments. I throw my rifle aside in disgust. Intuition calls me back to where the dead Apaches lie. I kneel beside the first and take him in my arms, singing a death song for him. After a while, I sense his energy rise into my body, animating it towards a slow dance of hesitant wakefulness that eventually becomes a faltering, exploratory run.
I then sing over the body of the second Apache. His spirit enters me also and likewise the third. Each time I sing my dance gets stronger and the running more sustained. By the time a fourth Apache comes to life in me I am running at breakneck speed, emitting wild whoops as I hurdle imaginary obstacles on the rock-strewn beach. The fifth Apache releases a proclamation loudly sung in a language I have never heard that I want to be a part of life again, ALL LIFE.
I clamber back up Second Cowboy’s rocky platform and face the Ocean, singing how we want to connect again with stones and Stone People, to be one with People of Stone Age, elder beings who hold the memory of Earth and know the inter-connectedness of All That Is. Ancient voices weave through me as I dance ecstatically to the music of pounding waves. We want to enter Life again. We want our wisdom and our learning to be known. These chants are neither explicit nor intelligible but my awakened reptilian brain translates instantly, drawing me ineffably into the consciousness of Earth, Cosmos and, possibly, Beyond.
When the song abates I realise, having viewed the world as Cowboy of my Past, that it would have been impossible for (the part of me that was) him to hold a greater sense of life than he had ever known in his fear and isolation. Remembering him, I remember episodes that his character dramatises in my dream, parts of me still held in trauma, defending against attacks that never end.
Filled with compassion, I return to where his imprint still lies sobbing on the rock and gather him into my Heart. He transforms into a little boy, anxious and afraid. Having thawed in my arms, been raised up and reassured of my protective intent, he thrills to scampering over rocks with Apache finesse, running flat out, fording imagined rivers and braving untold odds.
We stop a hundred metres from the rock where I had earlier taken cover as First Cowboy. I see the back wall of my childhood home interposed. Mustering all my Cowboy and Indian selves we charge the wall, smash through the gate and sprint recklessly, screaming, on to massed rifles, untroubled by their rapid fire. Numbering multitudes, we overwhelm the defensive post of the rear basement window, absorb its defenders and swarm riotously over the top floor rock manned by Cowboy of the Future. There, merging with him, we intone a deeply passionate chant to incoming waves.
As the chant fades I feel thoroughly renewed and deeply connected with Earth, Ocean, Cosmos, Stone and Sun. I recalibrate seals on the back gate and basement window of my dream and hear from within the words ‘I look forward with confidence and hope now that I can clearly see around in all directions.’
Walking home, I wonder how I could possibly have realised all this; I, John, so long unwittingly burdened with first cowboy, no-good male imprints? Then I see it, truly, viscerally, past the evanescent news of yesterday’s theory: everything in the dream is a reflection of myself, including those parts that repression has always kept at bay, out of conscious awareness. By putting consciousness into their roles, both Cowboy and Indian sensibilities become part of my present awareness. Their doubts are eased, their fears assuaged and, eventually, their gifts given and energies resorbed.
3. The Empire State
The Apache dream proclaims a major opening in my soul. This was made possible by systematic attention given to earlier dreams, even when it stopped short of wholesale enactment. The Apache dream is what I call a Big Dream. Such dreams have special significance for whatever is currently trying to happen in a person’s life that would take them closer to fulfilment of their destiny.
My next dream came the following night, before the Apache dream was fully processed. Its content is thus based on a release of the Apache material from my Unconscious but not yet its explicit integration into Awareness. There is a strong link between the two dreams. Having finished working with Apache in the morning, I turned my attention to this Theatre dream in the afternoon, back on the same beach.
I’m walking in Dublin with KM and his boys, both young teens. J, aged 13, is with me. We pass through side-streets straight into the body of an old-style theatre. We’re going to see a performance. We go out to the foyer to pay, I having left my coat to hold our seats. K and his sons stand before me in the queue. J goes off to the right to practise kung fu stretches. There are two young girls there already, one of whom performs beautifully acrobatic flips. K gets to the counter, an old-fashioned affair with a brass rail. I ask J to get my wallet from my coat, being careful not to draw attention to the fact I’ve left it inside! K questions the quality of the seats and is answered deferentially by the cashier, a young carrot-haired lad. J returns just in time for my turn at the desk. I ask for two tickets politely. When I get them they’re for the 14th, not the 4th, which is tonight. I question this, noting that my friend has just been given tickets for tonight’s show. The cashier responds haughtily that he didn’t go on with the same kind of nonsense as I do. His manner is loud and theatrical. It makes people in the other queue lines laugh. I join in their laughter.
I am in Dublin for this dream, not on London’s bigger stage. K is a former colleague whom I thought boring, passionless, conservative, diligent, pedantic, officious and assertive. This is sheer projection: my colleague serves to reflect aspects of my Self that I tend to disown. His sons are polite and dutiful in my dream but also bored, especially in the queue. J is my son. He goes off to the right, male side to ‘stretch’ (challenge) himself while K’s boys stand in line.
Now grown up, J is passionate, astute, confident and daring. At the time of writing, he is actually pursuing a risky choice to follow his dream in London! It is significant that he figures in my dream at the age I was in my red/blue soccer dream. His spontaneity engages the interest of two girls, one of whom replies in kind. This represents the first awakening of female interest since I dreamt of my sleeping daughters. Evidently, my feminine potential is beginning to stir.
J’s initiative sets an example I need to emulate, going beyond the qualities of K and his docile brood. He acts while we queue to witness a spectacle of others’ actions, rather than participating ourselves on the stage of life. The theatre is a metaphor in this respect, indicative of my old-fashioned style as distinct from J’s new one. Enactment unpacks further suspicions: I leave my coat because I fear all seats will be taken. I forget my wallet and am anxious about possible embarrassment at the counter. This echoes my humiliation at the soccer final. I don’t want to be shown up as a no-good male and so ask J not to let anyone see that I had forgotten it. There is still a part of me that affected by such concerns.
K behaves assertively at the counter, producing an effect of deference. I could be like this but more often am friendly and polite. Enacting this scenario, I realise clearly that I’m echoing my father’s wounding in this play. Even though I get my wallet on time, the trouble I anticipated manifests. I am given the wrong tickets. Why (me)? Because I am a no-good male who goes on with silly, non-functional nonsense.
The young cashier is brazen and plays to his audience. I laugh also to mask my humiliation, especially with J close by. My attempt to be assertive has backfired. Memories of my father squirming through such moments flood back, together with a deep compassion for him and my self as his hapless witness.
I carry traces of this legacy. It delays me still when I am asked to show up for Golden Moments. I feel shamed in the dream, emasculated. I want to disappear like at the soccer final but can’t now that I’ve got J to look after. That he should have witnessed this! How must my Daddy have felt!?
J represents a newly emerging masculine potential in me: a more vibrant, confident and robust 14 than I ever was. The potentials he mirrors are rising in me now, and pressing for integration. I need to look after them (me). What can I do? At this point in my enactment, I turn spontaneously and walk about fifty meters away from the old-fashioned counter and brass rail.
Untamed Apache energies gather steadily through a reconstructed dialogue with the cashier. They are poised to erupt as I turn again to face the now fragile-looking barrier that prevents consumer-spectators from finding their way through to the stage of life. Drawing on long-repressed savage energies, I and my Apache hordes charge the old-fashioned box-office and rip through it.
We don’t think to follow K and his well-mannered boys into the auditorium. We don’t want to witness someone else’s playing! We want to play ourselves! To savour the excitement of our own abundant life!
Vast energies erupt as we storm over the ‘counter.’ I absorb the young cashier in passing, knowing that he also models the shameless pedantry and superciliousness I displayed as a rookie academic at his age. My uncivil hordes pour onto the stage, skirting the edge of a mighty ocean as we go. I call upon its energies to infuse our performance on this day.
We turn once more towards the auditorium, the waiting world of those who are content to watch as we give form in movement to powerful energies that I know will carry me beyond the confines of old-fashioned dramas.
After this wave of outer expression is spent, strong energy shoots from my belly to my Heart. Passion is definitely on the move inside me now. I take my time absorbing J, K and his boys into my energy system, having established that this is now their wish. Their old reserve will now be swept up by new power.
Walking back from the beach, I recall feeling a wound in my genitals on awakening from the Theatre dream. I feel it rising again as I walk. My body crumples to the left as this happens and I hear my father’s voice say ‘I have been terribly injured by a woman’. I see a long, pointed crystal, solid and heavy, pierce my genitals. A terrible sadness fills me.
I am very tired and sleep soundly that night. Its dream brings a welcome surprise:
I’m at a workshop venue, bathing a newly born baby girl in a plastic tub. She loves this and has no difficulty slipping under water and breathing there. The workshop hasn’t begun. All the intending participants are women I know.
Next morning, I take this baby and my dream to the Ocean. The day is bright and rich with generous horizons. This child is of the Ocean, who is her mother. I am her father in consciousness. She doesn’t speak but is a channel for the deepest promptings of my soul. She will be my teacher, inner tutor and source of in-tuitions.
She represents the manifestation of a newly emerging feminine potential in me. This comes after I have brought the affairs of my male side into a new order, but also registered a need for deeper healing. It indicates a constant movement towards ever more complete sacred marriage in every human heart. A baby symbolises pure developmental potential. This one promises beautiful renewal in the adventure of my life, such as always happens when we face and resolve inner conflicts.
She can breathe in Water as well as Air: she is comfortable with the Unconscious and can move easily between it and consciousness. She is thus a source of inspiration. The women stand for different aspects of already given feminine potentials. They gather for a workshop which will soon begin. This suggests that a new synthesis is being prepared on my feminine side, in response to changes already introduced to my maleness.
The next night’s dream moves the story on dramatically:
I’m one of a wave of people evacuating a huge sky-scraper building like the Empire State. We rush out from the basement. Debris falls on us from above.
This dream conveys a lot. Its inner atmosphere is tense and urgent. Enacting brings out why. A wave of people, male and female, all parts of me, break out from the basement (subconscious) where we had previously been trapped by the sheer weight of this building and all it(s name) represents.
We emerge through a side door and are immediately dwarfed by its huge structure: a phallic tower of glass and steel that projects straight into the sky. This phallus is a symbol, a contemporary cultural metaphor built upon the image of an erect penis. Unlike a penis, the phallus is constantly erect. It has no seasons. It never rests, sleeps, dreams nor goes limp. It is inhuman: the creature of an endless fantasy, forever obsessed by its own reflections, never seeing what might lie beyond them.
It evokes and expresses a particular vision of psychological and political order. This is dominated by an idea of the ego as sovereign, rational, self-present and in charge. No instinct, spirit or emotion can upset its course. A sovereign ego is likewise always in control – always upstanding and prepared, never vulnerable or helpless.
The phallus purports to be rational and transparent. Like a dutiful cowboy, it aspires to keep unruly elements in check. It needs to control everything towards this end. It puts no trust in what is irrational, chaotic or untamed. Low trust demands high control. A dominant phallus wants everything laid-out and predetermined. Many people find it hard to live under such a regime. I turn out to be one of them. Following the release of my Apaches, something like the current mass desertion was bound to occur.
There is a space of about a hundred metres from the door to a perimeter fence. Beyond this lies freedom. My ‘phallus’ is evidently tottering: debris showers down intermittently on those who would break free. I put awareness into my body as I dash for the perimeter. Breathless, I hear the words ‘I’ve got to get out. I can’t breathe here, can’t feel here, can’t BE here!’ I reach the fence successfully and scramble clear. Many others follow. The phallic building remains intact but looks set to fall.
If everything in the dream is a reflection of me, then so is the phallus. Absolutely: my dream tells me that I am like the Empire State, a repressive phallus. I need to let more of my returning Apache energies find their true groove. Because my savages have recently been let loose and the barrier separating me from the stage of life undone, huge changes are being introduced. Old structures need to give way.
My newly unpredictable elements break for freedom, which lies outside boundaries previously laid down. The Empire State, needing the energy of its subjects, protests this by raining debris. My residual ego-structure generates a climate of fear to prevent significant movement.
Yet life always tends towards greater life. Even when impeded, it finds a way. But where will my escaping elements go? How will we eat and put roofs over our heads? Such misgivings keep us from entering our Fires of Truth but I remember that my dream is symbolic. Egos generally urge that things are best the known and familiar way they like them.
We are motivated not to break beyond our ego-vision for reasons of fear, vested interest and lack of imagination. Thus we force all parts into the limits of this mould. Such forcing induces anti-repressive eruptions. This is the process represented by my dream. The crystal wand that pierced my father was a phallus. I too have fallen under its dominion.
A controlling ego intimates that once the checks it has imposed are relinquished, chaos must ensue. Dutiful cowboys swallow this and stay in place. When Apaches try to interfere, we shoot them down. This protects controlling parts against an enemy they need to have, that which will not be controlled. To justify its controlling tendencies, a phallic ego must believe that without them chaos would be rife.
The phallic ego’s greatest fear is a possibility that this proposition might not be true. If it were untrue, if it were the case that a principle of order exists higher than that which it imposes, then the ego would have something to graduate into, a greater life than that espoused by its controls. It would have occasion to ‘die’: to surrender and let go. This is something the phallus cannot countenance.
Our whole modern Western civilisation is based on a belief that the ego is the greatest show on Earth. This is manifestly untrue. The intelligence of the dream, for example, is vastly superior to that of a rational ego, and so is the intelligence of the Universe. If things were otherwise, I would be in trouble. My escaping parts, having nowhere to go, should wreak havoc. This expectation is based on an illusion created by the propaganda of controlling egos.
I don’t need to argue this intellectually since my soul promptly supplied a second dream to disclose the upshot of such mass desertion from my Empire State:
C and I are naked in bed with a baby boy, who is also naked. He is very relaxed and well-mannered. Already he can speak very well. Jo is in the background, fading away, without resentment.
This is hardly a vision of chaos, more an evocation of sacred marriage. Nakedness is a symbol of being unconcealed as well as intimate. There is nothing hidden here. This is unlike pretences at transparency (no shadow, nightlife, mystery...) which demand repression. The reconfiguring occasioned by my Apache and Theatre dream-processing has married with that of last night’s Workshop and fruit has been born/e. My masculine and feminine aspects have come into a new level of clear, honest relationship and this has resulted in the birthing of a new generation of pure masculine potential. After all the difficult adjustments on my male side, the result is a fresh start, not destruction.
This baby boy, like his earlier dream-sister, also of last night, is symbolic of an order of intelligence that the ego, unaided, cannot begin to comprehend. He is neither chaotic nor repressed. On the contrary, he is a well-mannered and precociously articulate ‘savage.’ He carries a great gift of language that complements his sister’s gift of intuitive knowing. Both express the spontaneous creativity of my soul and, potentially, of everyone’s.
C is my current partner and Jo a former one. The child is born of my new relationship rather than the old. This means that the former condition of my feminine soul – as reflected by my former partner – has given way and ‘died’ without conflict or resentment. Such unfolding can fall within the perfect order of a soul’s destiny and the ego not be remotely in charge, or even aware.
Combining the propositions ‘I am the Empire State’ and ‘I need to get away from the Empire State’ entails that I need to transcend myself or rather, my current realisation of my Self. It also shows how liberating subconscious tendencies can cue the activation of spiritual potentials. This happens because controlling egos, acting on what they believe to be their best interests, tend to repress what is untamed and unpredictable in deference to their favoured visions of reality. Thus lifting repression releases new potentials. Each new night by now brings another dream.
4. Death and Beyond
What happens in enactments is that I put conscious awareness into unconscious tendencies that my soul brings to attention through dreams. Awareness wakes them up. Their usual condition is not to have awareness at all. When I rouse them by devoting energy to them, their inert dispositions are magnified and drawn on to centre stage. Their appearance may look like bad news in the text of a dream but issues are always brought to consciousness for healing.
Thus I welcome ‘bad’ dreams, knowing that they promise favourable change. The extent of any repression indicated is more than matched by the return of energy and blocked potentials after repression has been lifted. The whole idea is to rescue frightened, isolated parts from the deadlock of their fixity and restore them to the flow of present consciousness, strengthening this in the process.
Please assume from this point on that all elaborations of dream texts as initially presented are based on information from enactments. My next dream provides several examples, as well as developing the story further:
I’m at the university, examining a timetable in my office. I still have 4 hours teaching per week. I must tell them I’m retired now. Then I’m in a room with BK, responding to some alarm. He tells me of a place we can go for relief, a quiet room. I go there with him. Two others are already present.
Next day we go there again but there’s a mass on. A student political society is meeting in the next room. I wander through the dark, crowded corridors of my first university (where I studied myself) looking for a haven. Finally I go upstairs (towards D5: the top floor). There’s a burly man dressed in black before me on the stairs and, I fancy, an attractive woman just around the turn ahead of him.
I get lost somehow in D4, wandering into an area where a few students are loitering with little else going on. The stairs to D5 have disappeared. I find them eventually and go up.
There are a few people up there, including JT - a swarthy, tanned man in a blue shirt and white jeans. He goes out on a balcony with some companions and gives a quick demonstration which I miss. It’s based on a class he’s developed about ‘the empty essence of Lemuria.’ He’s sitting on a sunny bank of grass, with the ocean behind him.
I am still attending university, despite having left to pursue whatever tasks my soul has appointed for me. The commitment has reduced but remains substantial. Parts of me that hang on still impede my flying, although I have formally retired. BK was a colleague I respected, especially for his political commitment. He often challenged my ‘mystical’ inclinations and I always felt richly mirrored by him. He performs the same service in my dream. The part of me that he reflects is sceptical of my ‘withdrawal’ from the world.
We both respond to an alarm. ‘Quiet room’ is a rationalist euphemism for ‘place of meditation’. It’s a place where people go to de-stress and re-centre between bouts of aggravation. It offers a way of withdrawing without abandoning. BK does this a lot and wants me to as well, rather than letting go completely. His persistence is a large part of my four hours.
I try to dialogue about this but B has little energy. He is just hanging on, maintaining equilibrium by sharpening his personal story (about where he/I can be of most use) as best he can. I know this strategy so well that it is for me outmoded. For B, ‘alarm’ conjures risks of major change. For me, it evokes the dangers of not changing. The problem is that B and I are one. How can I/we manage this?
On our next visit to the quiet room, it has been taken over for a mass whose celebration is dominated by the figure of a priest. All power is vested in him and all attention. Nobody even notices when we look in. The priest is saying ‘I am the Way, the Truth and the Life.’ The congregation accepts this. He is their gateway to spiritual access and is strengthened by a power they surrender to him. I can understand the appeal of this reflection. The priest also is a part of me. I am reluctant to leave captive audiences behind and uncertain about new teachings that will draw new audiences to me. Another hook!
Next door, a political meeting is under way. I glance in at a ‘priest’ of quite another persuasion. With great passion he declaims: ‘It’s no good waiting for them to surrender power. We must take it ourselves. We must claim what is ours, cherish what is ours and defend what is ours!’ His young listeners are impressed. In my dream, I close the door on vapid rhetoric. Enacting, I see that this leaves too much of my passion behind for this man is a reflection also, related to the part that B has mirrored for me all along.
My dream shifts then to another university, one I studied in many years before. The dispositions of my present are thus referred back to my past. I wander dark corridors of transition (a corridor being neither here nor there) but this is a default resolution. I need something more empowering. I know that the energy of the orator derives from my student society days. I summon him before me and speak.
‘Your urge to fight outside yourself arises from a conflict within.’ He glares at me. ‘And your urge to convert is a reflection of your own unease.’ He doesn’t answer. ‘You think if you can persuade others to agree that you will be able to accept the truth of your own case.’ I look directly at him. His gaze falters. I extend my arms and gently draw him closer. He offers no resistance. There is no great accomplishment involved. I remember all too clearly in this place.
The priest is less forthcoming when I say that ‘I am the Way’ evokes a potential for mystical transcendence present in all human beings. These words are spoken by the Christ, not an historical person as such. They might conceivably have been spoken by equivalent transpersonal powers in other traditions. The priest scowls at me, turns and walks away.
I follow towards a stairway to D5, where I first came to philosophise years before. This journey is returning me to the origins of my entanglement within the university system and, at the same time, to a renewed sense of the passion and idealism I brought with me. My way is not uncluttered. A muse is somewhere up ahead, I know, forging a true path but the ponderous figure of a heavy-set man dressed in black is in-between.
This man may well be my priest. In the dream, however, he is first a reflection of my fear. Putting awareness into his role I feel again the drag of following the same path day after day, year after year, from office to lecture room and back. This need not be monotonous or even repetitive but for me it has become so. I want to find something new on the top floor (D5).
During enactment, the black figure becomes more and more a transform of my priest, muttering incessantly ‘I teach therefore I am. I am a teacher. Others learn from me. I impart knowledge and therefore know more than those who receive. This role is a valuable one…’ I overtake him near the Languages area and step through, consciously absorbing whatever this energetic fragment of my Self is willing to surrender.
D4 is the home of Law and the postcode for Dublin’s most fashionable suburb, home of secular-liberal values. I loiter there a while, almost getting lost. The bored students are pleased to merge with me and together we open a way to D5, where I first came as a youth in search of Truth. I know now that I am here again for the same purpose and that this time old reflections won’t suffice.
JT, the blue-shirted man, is another kind of teacher. I know this at once since he presents an image of my self that I have come back here to encounter. His blue, open-necked shirt evokes a spiritual authority unconstrained by any formal ‘ties.’ He steps outside the building (system) on to a balcony which doesn’t exist. By the time I think to follow, his demonstration is complete. I am, in other words, still delayed (unready).
I am nonetheless delighted to find myself on a grassy bank, overlooking the ocean and facing into the mirror of his eyes. I even have a sense of what ‘the empty essence of Lemuria’ might mean. This is the kind of thing I came here to learn about years before. The priests-in-residence of that era hadn’t remembered but now the adventure is starting over again.
[Lemuria is the name given to a mythic/pre-historic phase of human civilisation in which we had not yet forgotten our spiritual connectedness to Earth, Cosmos and Source. Many of us were conscious of our role as co-creators at that time – i.e. conscious beings able to consciously align our creative intent with the creativity of the Universe to make ‘magic’. In this context, the empty essence of Lemuria is the opposite of a phallic ego. The latter is obsessed with its own reflections, making it impossible for anything really new to be expressed. The secret of Lemurian magic, by contrast, is being empty, still and open to the creativity of the Universe moving through you. The cultural style of Lemuria was predominantly feminine, making it the antithesis of an Empire State. An attempt was made to balance this in a succeeding ‘Atlantean’ phase which overshot, leading to a disastrous suppression of the feminine which persists to this day.
Please note that even if we disavow references to Atlantis and Lemuria as sub-rational, they retain potent validity as mythological symbols, alluding to constant (trans-historic) potentials rather than prehistoric facts. As above, they are of interest because of what they tell us about ourselves now rather than about others then.]
It was only after I’d stepped on to the non-existent balcony at D5 that I realised I’d died and found another way to leave the Empire State. My dream tells me that I need to be another kind of teacher, to trust and step out ahead of reassurance. This involves cultivating ‘the empty essence of Lemuria’ in my self. I must attend more to my feminine soul. I was excited to learn how my next dream might develop this. Here is what came:
I’m at a wedding reception and all dressed-up. I leave the bar and go downstairs for a hot chocolate. They say it’ll take ten minutes so I pass.
I’m on a path with C that cuts through open terrain, flanked by distant mountains on both sides. We drag a heavy case behind us. There’s a circular portal on the path before us. I know it must be inter-dimensional since there is nowhere it can lead to in 3D. It’s quite close but seems to be taking an eternity for us to reach. We decide to leave the case and get to it more quickly. We then step through into another world and are immediately drawn into ritual lovemaking. C lies on her back under a blanket and my fingers explore inside her. There is an atmosphere of clarity and peace. She is very wet.
The first part is leads into the second. Enacting my role and noting my clothes, I see that I am the one getting married. Dreams don’t dally, so I am plucked out of the gathering and sent downstairs to the subconscious, where more work evidently needs to be done. I’d like a sweet reward at the threshold (‘bar’) but there is no time. Where will I be going next?
I’m on a path with C, who reflects the bride of my recent dream marriage. Path means journey. I’m on a new phase of a journey, having entered a new phase of my own, ever-unfolding fe/male sacred marriage. Everything is open. The confinements and limitations of old ways have been left behind. And yet we don’t know where we might be going. Before us on the road a portal looms like something out of ‘Stargate’. Even in the dream, it’s clearly an inter-dimensional doorway.
We spend ages approaching it and seem to be getting no closer. Then we realise that we can’t take the case. We must leave all baggage behind to pass through! Having done so, we arrive in a flash and merge spontaneously in the course of stepping through, two beings remade as one. This is a powerful experience, emotionally and energetically. We become fe/male again on the other side and begin a healing process straightaway.
We find ourselves in a muted temple environment - ancient, mysterious and remote. The atmosphere is peaceful. Our lovemaking unfolds with reverence and grace. C lies on her back, a blanket covering her lower body. My fingers probe beneath it, inside her. My explorations are careful and precise. I note details of her response to every touch.
I play both parts in this enactment. As a male, it feels like I’m searching for some kind of switch, as if there’s something dead and unresponsive that needs to be turned back on. Eventually I find this and Goddess waters flow abundantly again. As a female, I sense the same deadness and lack of response, something that refuses to yield until appropriate respect and attention are shown. When this point is reached I feel myself opening inwardly as if to an inner Sun that rises in me, filling me with life and strength.
This dream came the night before I presented a Sacred Play called Earth Initiation. Given at Easter, this has much to do with Death, Passion and Resurrection. It facilitates the re-awakening of Goddess power. Mythology teaches that when Goddess is denied, Wastelands follow: everything dries up, nothing grows, people live inauthentic lives, divorced from Truth and dreaming. My last dream stretch evokes a practice of sacred sexuality that aims to reverse such denial. My next deepens this engagement:
I’m walking down the corridor of an old school – heavy, dark wooden panelling and thick walls. I pass a door behind which I hear an interview between my eldest daughter and the female Principal of this school. My daughter (aged 7) is crying. I burst into the room, sit on her chair and take her in my arms. The Principal is shocked but tries to behave calmly, saying that the interview can continue in my presence. I say I’m going to listen to my daughter first and will then interview her as appropriate.
Things are changing in this dream (corridor). This is good given that it’s set in an old school, full of dark, heavy energies. I am changing but remain affected by the legacy of old times. I am called now to protect the young feminine potentials represented by my eldest daughter, the first to awaken from an early dream in which all were asleep.
She is distressed in the old school which I still frequent. She is being criticised by a female principal: severe, dried-up, 60-ish, hair drawn back in a tight bun. This is a disguised expression of my mother’s influence, living in me still. Nevertheless, I respect the autonomy of the character in my enactment.
As a father, I am furious in my warrior/protector role and burst through the barrier of dissociation which keeps estranged aspects of my soul apart. I ignore the principal and take my daughter’s part, holding her to me until she feels safe again. This activates old memories so that grief begins to flow spontaneously in me, born of compassion for my actual daughter and troubles I have helped to create in her life. I let it come until there is no more. I then take this image of my daughter into my heart so that the energies she represents in the dream can become integral in me again.
My sharp words to the principal have caused her to withdraw. This serves the aim of rescuing the young feminine but not my welfare overall, since the principal also is a mirror of my self. I put my awareness into her role. She is rigid and up-tight, another woman/feminine reflection damaged by the phallus.
I find a posture to express her inner attitude and exaggerate it until her frustration can no longer be contained. A long wailing scream, sustained and desperate, escapes me. It rises from deep inside my belly. I hold it a long time. Then, when it is over, I release my body to a gentle rocking motion, full of loving repetition. In this way, my old-school feminine energies are also eventually integrated and renewed.
The message concerns the need for a clarified male (warrior) energy to protect a currently emerging feminine power. This includes the healing of old ways, a theme which was fully consistent with the aims of my play. My next dream came during its second night, after we had enacted the Passion of Christ in a form adapted to modern times.
I’ve been involved in some trial, perhaps in medieval Germany, although I wear modern clothes. I have been found guilty and sentenced to death. The executioner appears, wielding a huge axe. I am to be beheaded. I feel strangely reconciled and think of T (a spiritual friend) saying ‘We’ve been through all this before’. I feel a strong wave of compassion rising in me and know I will be able to surrender gracefully.
Mythically, we ‘die’ so that greater life can come through us. This is like ridding a personality of its conditioned identity so that, returning to empty essence, we can say ‘Not I but Christ (or equivalent transpersonal power) in me’. Such statements must be read symbolically, not as reactive sentiment. Anyway, I am now on trial. The discrepancy between modern clothes and medieval setting underlines the manner in which past experiences, including those of former lives, affect our present dispositions. The scenario couldn’t be more brutally intimidating. There is nowhere I can turn for mercy or reprieve.
I would have expected to be terrified but a peculiar grace prevails. T represents spiritual consciousness, which is often pre-empted by survival concerns. It reminds me that death is an illusion, based on an excessive identification of consciousness with particular forms. On this occasion, I remember to remember who I truly am before fear takes over.
The compassion I feel is universal, of the same order (I imagine) as Jesus’ on the Cross. I remain focused, even through re-enactment. I nod briefly to my executioner, masked in black, and stretch my neck carefully on the block, unforced, seeing clearly that only full co-operation can assist swift deliverance. A whole series of related lives floods through me in the moment that it takes the axe to fall.
And so I ‘die.’ My next dream follows directly from this:
I’m in a spacious underground cavern, artificially lit and humanly engineered. I am full-bodied and a captive of ‘Soviet’ guards. I am to be sent somewhere for interrogation and confinement. I am with DF, who knows about this set-up, but we are separated when he is put into a small canoe-type vehicle and taken off down a narrow canal. I am put into the next one. My questioning by guards starts immediately. A pretty blonde woman in khaki uniform with red insignia leads. She asks about a letter I’ve received from C and some technical device they found in my luggage. Despite rational apprehension at my circumstances, I answer clearly and politely, feeling reconciled to whatever may come.
This dream presents a mythic vision of the afterlife couched in modern terms (artificial lighting). It betrays a residual subconscious fear of being lost without trace in the oblivion of some nameless gulag. The Soviets are other, modern tormentors to replace the ones I’ve just escaped. The ‘canal’ represents a scaled-down Styx, the river across which shades are ferried to the Underworld in Greek myth. It will also prove, for me, a medium of rebirth.
DF was once a senior colleague – assured, respected and informed. In my dream he knows this system and I feel safe in his presence. He is a guide who welcomes me on the other side but also an image of my own potential. His removal is a possible source of terror for me. Despite this I don’t panic. I still feel the same sense of universal reconciliation that sustained me through the beheading. I realise that great freedom can be had beyond our fear of ‘dying.’
I bear myself graciously and find the young soldiers warming to me. I tell them about my partner. They tell me about their boyfriends and girlfriends. Like the youths on the cable car, they are anxious to come home. The pretty blonde plays a leading role. She wears a uniform but can’t be reduced to it. Her demeanour betrays a failed attempt to negate specifically feminine qualities by burying them under sexless military garb. My sub-conscious makes this attempt because parts of me are still wary of opening but my super-conscious over-rides by addressing the blonde woman’s healing potential.
In the end, we laugh and joke. The import of dull uniforms no longer matters. I merge with all by mutual consent and release elements of grief imposed by requirements of uniformity in my youth. I wonder where the river will flow to next.
5. Resurrection and the Fall
Working consistently with enactment takes us ever deeper into the Land of Dreams. The deeper we go into this land, the deeper we arrive into the territory of myth. A myth is like a collective dream. It comes from deep within the psyche, so deep that it transcends distinctive circumstances and expresses something of truly representative import. It expresses the truth of my soul as well as yours and of their soul as well as ours, thus pointing to essential unity. Here is my next dream:
I’m going on a journey. Many journeys are happening at the same time: a spiritual group, school trips and various tourist concerns. My view is of a crowded public space, perhaps Middle Eastern. A beautiful golden-haired boy appears before me in an alley, apparently linked with one of the school trips.
I have reached a new point of departure. Various journeys are to unfold from this point on different levels. The place from which the journeys will begin is unfamiliar and exotic. I am cast in the role of spectator, waiting for possibilities to unravel. I feel an affinity with the spiritual travellers and one of the school groups. The beautiful golden-haired boy belongs to this latter company.
Hair turning gold in myth signifies the completion of an alchemical process (or stage thereof). This boy is a symbol of my potential, beckoning but not yet realised. He represents a maturation of the male baby we met in ‘Empire State’. Like me, he is in need of further ‘schooling’ but this will not be delivered by orthodox means. A second part of this dream follows immediately from the first:
Two males, one of whom has borrowed my clothes, sit with a beautiful woman around a fire. Her genitals rest on a poultice. She looks numb and disoriented. I surmise that the men have had intercourse with her repeatedly.
The two parts are linked by the detail of my borrowed clothes. These are modern but adorn a scene that could have been set in any time. The atmosphere is again Middle Eastern. The woman is dishevelled but her clothes are of rich design. She wears the robes of a priestess, lilac and magenta. I feel directly implicated in whatever has taken place. I am, of course, since it is my dream.
The male figures are young. Two implies an element of division. The scene is very tense. The men are conflicted but collude to deny this. Entering their characters, I know that they have raped the woman over and over. She is in shock, uncertain whether it is better to be alive in their company or dead. She is too numbed to think. Her genitals are sore and her emotions paralysed. She feels dull, wounded and betrayed; thing-like, a used animal. She tries not to draw their attention.
The men are careful in their speech. They acted as they did on a pretext of the woman’s initial consent. Their play may have stretched beyond her expectation but this is a measure of their stamina and her allure. They negotiate this understanding indirectly, through banter that extends occasionally to include her. They jest uneasily and laugh with undue provocation. It seems impossible for them to admit shame or to feel it.
These men are lost – shepherds, merchants, engineers – creatures of a great forgetting. The woman is a daughter of the Goddess, beautiful and radiant with grace. The men cannot believe that she has fallen to them and would have their fill before her presence is withdrawn. They would consume, possess and empty her in every sense so that when she turns away they will feel no loss. They have no understanding that this is the case and much less why.
It is not easy to animate their roles. I am amazed to feel how little they appreciate, how tight and constrained their awareness is. They look like brothers, even twins: early twenties, handsome with dark skin and black curly hair. One is dressed in colourful ethnic garb, the other in my pressed white shirt and slacks.
The first suggests all possibilities; the second an impossible moral perfectionism (all white), the kind that comes of being told to embrace only ‘good’ and exclude ‘evil’. This is why a sovereign phallus must be constantly erect and in control (like cowboys gunning down Apaches). Such a man thinks he is no good because his wholeness includes ‘evil.’ Believing himself unworthy, he expects not to be loved. Thus he takes when opportunities arise.
I have never behaved in this way, nor remotely considered it. Nevertheless, I register the pattern clearly. The memory is in my soul and therefore in my dream. It represents a part of me asking to come home, just like youths in the cable car. Denied long enough, they too become vengeful and aggressive when there is no contrary phallic power to restrain them. Their excess is an expression of its rule. Law and crime are one in this regard.
I look back at the men and they become teenagers, thirteen or so, still clothed as before. This reflects their surface emotional age: deeper within lies an unresolved infantile lack. They expect the woman to desert them, to turn away as the Mother (Goddess) has done. This is why they seek to ‘empty’ her, to void her power before they fall enchanted by it. They take from many rather than risk the generosity of one.
But what of the woman? She too is part of my soul. She sits traumatised and sullen, knowing she must spend her life among salivating pigs who think that they can take her as they will. They can never take what she chooses from this moment not to give, nor even know what there could be for the giving. And so the woman draws a veil over her treasure, concealing a gift that she was born to carry in the world. She too becomes a creature of forgetting, numbed in her essence, responsive only to a barter of distractions.
In her heart, she remembers that there was once another song. Remembering in this moment, she looks across the campfire and swears that she will kill them in their sleep. She knows as she thinks this that she won’t. She will choose her own way, doing as she must to stay alive and wrest whatever comforts life may yield. She will owe her Truth to no man. Men will tell her that she has no Truth and she will argue in their tongues, seeking to recall why they are wrong.
Later the woman cries, acknowledging her fury and her hurt. I sit with her, holding her, and take her into my heart. A shrill, piercing scream is emitted, expressing despair beyond all prospect of revenge. She slumps to one side when her sounding is complete. I feel in this moment like the day after the Fall, when Eve and Adam wake outside the Garden, bereft of Love, Truth, Innocence and Trust. ‘God’ has put enmity between them, a gaping wound.
Who will hold me while I am holding you, now that we no longer trust?
[No-one who has not been perfectly held can hold another perfectly. This applies to women and to men. We are all equally exiles from the experience of being truly held, of belonging. The only way to break this cycle is by learning how to hold ourselves truly, clearing the imprints of un-held parents to experience the direct embrace of archetypal Father-Mother energies that we all carry. This is what the mythic symbolism of sacred marriage is about, down to the spiritual birth of a Divine Child in our Hearts.]
I kneel by water and let the woman’s anguish fill me. Her heart is heavy and her eyes blank. She is numbed to her core. Slowly, feeling returns. It rises from her first and second chakras, building and building until it flows like a river in my Heart. I am filled with the Sorrow of the World. Two parts of one divided man are pulled into this ocean. Others follow. All have been damaged by the phallus, as my father and mother have been. It feels as if the flow will never end and that my Heart must surely burst with grief. There is much weeping.
Emerging from this, I understand better why a sacred sexuality healing was given in earlier dreaming. We will return to this after considering one other:
JT approaches and says he wants to offer me a job. We sit on a plush velvet couch that hovers in metaphysical space. I am sceptical because of his links with duplicity and illusion. He wants me to co-ordinate a new project and produces an album filled with photographs of different people, male and female Polynesians, in what seems to be Hawaii. The last photograph is of a male kahuna. It suddenly comes to life. The man starts transforming before my eyes, as if in a film. He becomes a warrior, then an elder/priest, a healer, shaman, karate master and exponent of sacred dance. He then returns to himself, static in the photo, dressed in shirt and slacks. I ask JT where the job is. He answers ‘Easterland’ in a very deliberate tone.
This JT is somebody I used to know, mercurial and charming, halfway between con-man and an angel. By non-coincidence his initials are the same as those of the ‘other kind of teacher’ we met in my university dream. This establishes a connection between it and the present one. The first reflected my need to ‘step out’. The current JT forces the issue by offering me a job.
We hover in metaphysical space, suggesting that this will be no ordinary 3D posting. I am sceptical (my subconscious escape clause) because I associate JT with shady dealings. What he prophesies doesn’t always come to pass. But this is my soul’s dreaming, and he my reflection. I am more con-man than angel in terms of negative associations I project upon this combination. There is a more creative promise here that it’s my responsibility to fulfil.
Asked to co-ordinate a new project, I have no idea what this means. He shows me an album featuring Polynesian people. These are descendants of Lemuria, which was located in the Pacific prior to its submersion. Each photograph reflects a quality, potential and memory of my Self. Half of them are women, reflecting half my karmic lives. I retain fragments of a woman’s imagining. Recollecting these helps me to remember the Goddess and live once more in awareness of Her love. I am also urged to co-ordinate this process of soul-remembering and gather whatever gifts it might entail for expression in my present life.
A kahuna is a traditional Hawaiian (Lemurian) healer. This one suggests that I can be a healer too as he undergoes a series of transformations, moving through a variety of male roles that evoke almost all the spiritual forms I’ve been drawn to in this lifetime. It’s the fluidity of his shape-shifting that impresses me most, and the promise of being accurately mirrored by such a beautiful display. When he is finished, the master returns to centre, statuesque and still, all possibilities resting inside him.
I feel deeply challenged by the implications of this dream. It tells me that I need to integrate positive potentials of these male roles I have played in the past and bring them to a clear, creative resolution in the present for some purpose that is yet to be declared. There is no place for vanity in this. The work has yet to be done. Dreams don’t offer congratulations on past deeds.
My soul prompts me to ask one question only: where the ‘job’ is to be based. JT’s tone in responding makes it clear that his answer should have special meaning for me. It does: ‘Easterland’ refers to the promise of a ‘risen Earth’, beheld in the wonder of her spiritual being, yet renowned also for physical beauty and abundance. It also entails the resurrection of healed Lemurian Goddess energies, together with a re-integration of male warrior energies that got seriously lost in what we call Atlantis. This is what the master’s kinetic display was pointing towards. Retrieving balance across earlier fe/male lives will help me achieve such balance in the present.
This dream challenges me, after ‘dying’, to resurrect as all that I am qualified to be by virtue of my soul history and soul promise. Having arrived at this awareness, I crave further inspiration. This is what came:
I’m in the hallway of New Bride Street, with C. I hold her from behind, my finger inside her. The hall is dark, dingy and run-down. Two women open the door, looking for number 9. I say I don’t know where it is and close the door but it keeps swinging open, so passers-by are able to see in.
Then we’re walking through a vastly bigger building, like a huge luxury hotel with many corridors and levels. The fittings are opulent and tasteful; the atmosphere airy and bright. Writing in sacred alphabets adorns the walls. I know that I have built this house. It is my place. We stop at an elevator and go up to room 206, there to make love again. The room is vast and elegantly furnished, with a king-size bed at centre. C sits on it and starts to undress.
I go to the end of the room and find myself carrying a beautiful baby boy. His face is radiant. Catching my eye he says ‘Don’t want you’ cheekily. I carry him to C.
The first part of this dream happens in the hallway of a house my Nana (Grand/Great Mother) lived in when I was a child. This was always a magical place for me, such was her fairy spirit and generous heart. The hall was not under her care and was often as described in my dream. A hallway is a transitional space. This one combines the possibilities of magic with an atmosphere of poverty and deprivation.
The theme of sexual healing is reintroduced but this would be less clear were it not for the impact of an earlier ‘Temple’ dream. The cramped, dark atmosphere suggests something less edifying, which is why illumination is required. It is a core message of the present dream that our explorations as given are innocent. They unfold in a context of sacred marriage with my ‘new bride’ and are no less sacred by virtue of relocation, but note what happens next.
Two women interrupt our privacy, in search of number nine. By opening the door they let in floods of light and expose our love-making to public scrutiny. Nine is the number of spiritual ascension and, more immediately, of completing a cycle (leading to the ‘10’ of a new, higher beginning). Something is coming to an end, at least with respect to its current phase of realisation.
I close the door again to avoid further exposure/illumination but it keeps opening magically, as if of its own accord. Such persistence indicates that there is something which needs to be noticed here, something new to which I must attend.
At first I have no idea what this is, even after the abrupt transformation that follows. In the dream we are concerned only with breaches of privacy. I put awareness back in this scenario through re-enactment. The C figure is content. She feels trusting and safely held. My attitude as the male changes, however. Following the women’s intrusion I become self-conscious. The dingy hall becomes ‘dirty’ in a moral sense. Our activity becomes furtive, illicit and suspect.
A retrospectively determined sense of context comes to dominate my experience of our present. The judgmental ethos of my childhood falls with all its weight upon us. Innocence is lost. I feel shame on foot of being ‘caught’. This is a far cry from our empowering temple ritual and adds a new level of complication to already dysfunctional patterns of sexual conduct noted in my ‘Campfire’ dream.
Our delivery is spectacular and prompt.
The new building has the inner character of a temple, plus all the trimmings of a luxury hotel. This transformation evokes rebirth on a grander scale: stepping out from the dark confines of my past into a spacious area that needs no illuminating from outside. This is something that is waiting to happen and in need of happening. My attention to this dream seeks to assist the transformation.
We are taken out of a cramped, dark, impoverished space into one that is expansive, opulent and bright: a total reversal. And, the dream teaches, this difference is created by consciousness. The opening scenario reflects limiting influences of my childhood formation and shows how these constrain my soul’s aspiration to greater life; the second evokes the seemingly limitless potentials of adult transformation and stresses that awareness is key to their fulfilment.
The writing is in Arabic script, recalling the atmosphere of Campfire. ‘Arabic’ evokes for me a constructed world that is mysterious, hospitable, refined and sometimes cruel. I associate it with smouldering eroticism; also the oppression of women. This may be simplistic but it is the associative base from which my dream is raised. A flowering of my ‘Arabic’ culture would eliminate oppression and promote free expression of its (my) currently latent potentials. As always, healing is prerequisite.
I pause before the writing. It ‘tells’ me I have built this house from memory to serve the promise of my soul. It is ‘a temple of my soul,’ including the currently returning parts revealed by JT’s photo album. This ‘temple’ is a house for my spirit and a projection of Spirit as pure consciousness. There is also a call to create material abundance in the dream, but this requires prior liberation from limiting imprints of my childhood conditioning.
We go up to room 206 to make love. Again there is an element of graduation regarding the first scene and an agenda for healing with regard to ‘Campfire’. Several associations with the number 206 spring to mind. The first is 2006, the year of writing, of C’s joining me in Ireland and of a mooted major transformation in my life. The second is the number 8, obtained by adding 2 and 6, or the 3 and 5 of ‘New Bride’ Street. 8 is the number of infinity. It also evokes a severing of old ties which impede consciousness growth. In the Aura-Soma colour healing system, 26 is the number of the ‘shock’ bottle, orange over orange. This helps people overcome deep trauma, frequently to do with sexual abuse (orange being the colour of the second chakra). None of this is coincidental. My soul knows that I will ‘get’ the associations.
For now it seems we have come through the hard part. The room is conducive. Easy communion has been restored. Male and female wills have entered into newly gracious accord. A new level of sacred marriage will be celebrated. So fast is its energy that I conceive and deliver an already-speaking baby boy while C undresses. Despite this, he wants to be taken to his soul-mother, my other (feminine) half.
We have met the underlying symbolism before: once a new level of sacred marriage between the God/dess potentials in man and woman has been achieved, a new level of developmental consciousness is born of their enhanced union; an expansive, masculine power that knows instinctively it must attune to Centre, to Mother and (knowledge of) the Goddess.
This is classic myth, right down to the detail where C sits on the bed (centre) and I go to the end (edge) of the room. In traditional archetypal lore, the woman (feminine) holds Centre while the male (masculine) goes to the edge, expanding horizons and discovering treasures which must then be brought Home for valuing and integration. These archetypal masculine-feminine traits are currently pressing for dynamic synthesis in the lives of many biological men and women.
It is a blessing to achieve such balance in one’s life. Inner marriage generally precedes outer in this respect, since external circumstances reflect the conditions of a reality that our inner dispositions draw upon us. It strikes me how often I now appear with C in dreams, after the isolation of my early Apache/soccer phase.
I have never before had dreams like those reported here. The first brings me to a new level of departure from which many journeys will be undertaken by different aspects of my Self. This is a direct consequence of moving into the greater life made possible by my ‘death’ in the previous chapter. Such symbolic death represents the dissolution of a particular ego-stance. It enables a reconfiguring of soul-life, such that affected parts can enter new patterns of relationship. This is the substance of transformation, a continuing process whereby we come ever closer to embodying the truth of our existence.
For it to happen, wounds buried deep in our soul histories must rise into consciousness and find acceptance there. This leads to healing and release. ‘Campfire’ presents a graver challenge than I have ever encountered before in this respect. Despite its slight surface form, it carries archetypal resonances which I find utterly compelling. The desolation I experienced during its enactment is impossible to overstate. Also, its vision of the sundering of right relationship between male and female helped me to appreciate better why sacred marriage is emerging as a vital theme in our time.
Such marrying is needed to heal a fundamental split in contemporary human experience. I identify with the woman in my dream but am also responsible for clarifying the disposition of its male offenders. Healing this, I later found, would be a central theme through the longer term sequence of my dreaming.
Thus it is not a coincidence that my next (kahuna) dream returns me to awareness of earlier female lives and Goddess culture, as well as presenting images of male integrity that accord with this evocation. This re-establishes a prospect of healing and joyous transformation. It reflects an energetic shift that began in me as a result of my ‘Campfire’ processing and brings a new promise to awareness, one that had been buried under levels of sundering I have only just begun to register.
I wasn’t sure how to proceed beyond this point, despite being reminded of a male-female balance across the sequence of my former lives. The next dream helped by putting me in a situation where I have to explore further possibilities of sacred marriage and sexual healing. This happens initially in a cramped space that’s bound by imprints of my early formation but opens into a wonderfully expanded scenario where a new level of sacred marrying becomes available. Pursuing it leads to the birth of a new consciousness represented as a new male energy (baby) that wants to return to the Mother. This is what the offenders in Campfire most need. It is crucial for everybody, and especially men, in ways that Freud never allowed.
6. Children on the Seashore
I want to buy a hi-fi for J and go to meet him from university. He is now fully grown. I need to put him in contact with a supplier at the shop.
We last met my son J several chapters back, where he was reflecting warrior qualities of courage, initiative and daring for me. Now he has grown up. The parts of me reflected by him have developed and I need to integrate their qualities into my adult consciousness. The time for this is now. Attending university, a place of higher learning, prepares him. Buying the hi-fi involves connecting him with high frequency vibrations that come from Source (the supplier).
I need to connect my warrior qualities with Source. My developed consciousness is quite used to making such links through meditation so I worked to integrate the new qualities in this way over the next two days. A dream came on the night of the second which showed why this integration needed to happen just then.
I’m in a room with my mother and children (aged 5-12). I propose to take some new course of action. She sits at a table objecting, telling me how stupid I am. There’s an envelope on the table that contains information regarding my ability to achieve a particular goal. She assures me that this too will be a waste of time. I would do better to follow her preference. I take her chin in my hand, gripping it tightly and shout at her that I will do exactly as I want, no matter what she thinks. The children are alarmed at this behaviour but I am adamant. I reassure them and say that I will see to the envelope later. Now I must be about my Father’s business. I wake then feeling a huge wave of repressed energy rising in me.
I am in my mother’s kitchen. I stand while she sits behind a table. I’m proposing a new course of action. My ‘children’ carry the energies for this, representing potentials for innovation that range from early school age to pre-adolescence. My mother represents the contrary, delaying influence that her imprint has had on me since childhood. The dream calls me back to the kitchen where I was ‘fed’ these attitudes. She is alarmed by elements of risk and novelty in my projected course and tells me so bluntly, in language that might have been directed at a child. This is why I need to stand up.
It is part of my dream awareness that a sealed envelope on the table contains vital information to do with my destiny. It can tell me a lot about myself that I don’t yet know. My mother’s voice – i.e. her imprint in me – says that this is stupid and will be a waste of time. Her character becomes more insistent and aggressive. I sense while enacting this scenario that she does so in order to create a deadlock that will draw me into disputing details. This delays the course of action that ‘she’ as a part of me still fears.
I find through enactment that my ‘children’ are numbed by her vehemence. This means that their new energies are also ‘frozen’ and disqualified from acting. My response is exceptionally dynamic this time. I grab her chin tightly, with the intention of stifling further protest. I shout that I am going to pursue my objectives, irrespective of her opinions. This ensures that my voice is heard. The children are alarmed and confused, not knowing which adult to support – i.e. how the energies they represent should be directed. I reassure them with a gentler version of the warrior power I used to still my mother’s complaints, knowing that anger was required to escape the magnetism of her influence.
The positive role of anger is to provide us with energy to react appropriately whenever boundaries are threatened or violated. My outburst towards my dream mother was overdue and hence disproportionate. It provides the red warrior passion needed to break out beyond her spell. Thus I become free to take the envelope (instructions) and my children (newly released, successfully defended energy potentials) and leave.
I actually say ‘I must be about my Father’s business.’ This wasn’t at all grandiose, either in the dream or its enactment. Rather it served as a clear indication to my waking consciousness that this final severance of lingering ties to my mother’s influence (no-good male who can’t make the team etc.) will release me to pursue paths evoked by earlier dreams. The envelope will provide necessary information.
I wake from this dream feeling a great wave of suppressed energy rising up from my base chakra through my sacral and solar plexus centres into my heart. I ride the wave of this energy down to the beach and allow it to inform my enactments as reported above. In fact, because the action in the dream is quite straightforward, there wasn’t much to be learned from enacting up to this point. It did help to let freed energies rise physically and shoot through, unadorned Apaches enjoying unrestrained expression on a deserted beach.
Allowing these energies to filter through waking consciousness and move my physical body gives the dream an impact it couldn’t otherwise have sustained. It also serves to integrate rising energies into ego-consciousness. I bring the children on a little run to consolidate this, letting each select a particular challenge (jumping rocks, avoiding waves, balancing precariously…) to mark their incorporation also. I/we enjoyed this greatly but the dream-work was not yet complete.
I re-enter my mother’s house and find her slumped over the kitchen table, demoralised and sad. This reflects the condition in me of that part which had earlier been left behind. Fear of abandonment makes us cling at the best of times. When the power of our clinging is overcome, we are likely to feel devastated and forlorn. This was the condition of my mother imprint as I found her, the disposition of the energetic tendencies she reflects for me and lingering traces that continue to affect my relationship with the actual woman who bore me.
It is not enough just to leave these alone. Approaching gently as my adult self, I lay my hand across her shoulder and assure her that my future will be happy and secure, that there is no need for her to fear because I am undertaking ventures that are frightening to her. I ask if she would like to accompany me on a walk to see. After some coaxing she agrees. This is no doubt facilitated by recent energetic empowerments, from Apaches to the Empire State.
I hold her hand. She walks by my side. Standing on a high rock, looking towards America, she agrees to come into my Heart. This was a tender and illuminating moment that also brought new clarity to my relationship with my personal mother. If the language seems odd, this is because our culture has become phenomenally inept at representing the relational space between us, given its commitment to an illusion of separateness that every authentic spiritual tradition sees past. I feel boundless compassion as this registers.
All that then remained was to go about my Father’s business: i.e. my destiny. I sit on a stone and picture the envelope: flat, plain, brown. I reach in without breaking the seal and take out a heart-shaped diamond, ruby-pink, small enough to nestle in my palm. I stare into it and am drawn into a vision of myself as a child, 2-3 years old, chasing a multi-coloured butterfly, full of excitement and joy. This chase is more a dance than pursuit.
Then the diamond ‘says’ I must release it to the ocean, where-after it (the ocean) will reflect news of my soul’s unfolding back to me day by day. I find a stone to represent the diamond, hold it to my heart and throw it as far out as I can to meet the tide. I retain the envelope, knowing that some things can’t be rushed. A new dream comes to open it a little more that night:
I’m at a University event, a festival designed to celebrate community. Bleachers have been erected 4-5 deep around a quadrangular space. There’s an Eddie Rockets (fast food joint) behind me. KM sits to my right. A woman called Bunowee who’s been hired to drive this event is on my left. She passes a pat of butter around, finger to finger, to encourage participation. I comply without enthusiasm. Two football teams, all-blue and all-red, come on to a pitch but screens descend to block my view. I start talking to a guy beside me who’s into the music of indigenous tribes. I tell him I don’t know much about the music but that I am very interested in shamanism. As I speak, my vision opens like two unfolding wings into an overview of the Andes region, including a sense of the colour, love and vibrancy of its people.
I’ve been called back to a place of higher education because I need to learn about celebrating community. (This can be an issue for dreamers.) Spectators sit around the quadrangle. I’m still looking on! KM, the colleague from my ‘Theatre’ dream, is on my right, male side. Behind and left is Bunowee (Bonne Nuit or Good Night), the female intelligence who has organised this dream. She tries to stimulate contact and participation but I don’t respond well. I need to be less aloof and interact more. The fast food place brings a common touch into what otherwise tends to be an elite environment.
The quadrangle becomes a football pitch and two soccer teams appear in the red and blue colours of my teenage final. My passion and purpose are still looking to come into right relationship (and I’m still looking on!). A white screen descends so I can’t even see. My sense is that I must now put childish things away and start to ‘do’ my purpose. I’m being denied any chance of putting this off by languishing without enthusiasm.
Another man appears beside me in place of fellow spectator KM. Emboldened by his love of tribal music I declare my interest in shamanism openly. I need to do this more because my vision opens as I do into a beautiful synesthetic experience of the Andes. I have visited this place and learned much about the nature of community there. I even became more communal myself. I need to participate more in such communities and will (e.g. by relating to my Sacred Play participants as a Community of Heart).
I also sensed a blocking (screen) and opening (Andes) of vision in this dream that I felt was in some way preparatory. It took three nights before I found out for what:
I’m one of a group assembling in a large square to go on a ‘School’ trip. I am my present age but seem to have an adolescent disposition. I arrive early, one of the first. Others begin to come along, DM amongst them. We chat until it’s nearly time to go. Our ‘teachers’ arrive, those who will be guiding the journey. I suddenly feel unprepared, as if I don’t have enough of the right things with me. I decide to run back to my room for more stuff. I end up in D5, the top floor of my composite university dreamscape. There’s nobody around. I go into my office, which has been vacant since I retired. It’s empty except for a radiator and an old electric fire which are both still burning away. Anxious now about missing the bus, I search desperately for what I need. All I find is a box full of old things – a dirty pair of black leather shoes, trekking boots with holes in them and one threadbare hiking sock. There’s nothing of any use here! I hear RV counselling a student next door. Perhaps I can knock later and get advice from him? But then I’ll miss the bus! Maybe I can ask J how he studies for exams and can remember so much, even though it was I who showed him. I’m sure that even if I go back now, the bus will be gone.
Following on from this is another scene involving J and some of his friends, aged about 10. They’re awake early, me too. I come down a flight of stairs and ask them to play in a particular place that seems familiar from earlier dreams. I take them down more stairs and across a landing to a long narrow room with a red door. There are already lots of other kids playing there. I let J and his friends enter and close the door.
I’m to take part in an educational journey that will draw me away from my usual environment. The focus of my learning on this trip has to do with maturing certain under-developed potentials that remain stuck at an adolescent level. Dutiful as ever, I am one of the first to arrive, far ahead of the appointed time. I don’t want to be late. I talk with schoolmates as they come, including timid and reserved DM (my reflection from the opening red/blue soccer dream. Note its persistence.).
I remember the awkwardness and uncertainty of those years while enacting the roles, the repressive atmosphere of my actual school and much that was repressed in me. It feels like a gathering is taking place of forces intent on liberation. A red double-decker bus (evocative of my London Passion) arrives to take us on the trip.
Just as it’s time to leave, our teachers arrive, one principal and two assistants. The main ‘Teacher’ is dressed in black and looks like Darth Vader (Dark Father) from Star Wars. I suddenly feel panicky and unprepared. I don’t have what I need! I am anxious about this trip - having grown used to cramped, familiar surroundings - and project my fears on to the dark figure of the leader. Essentially I run away. Remember that I’m at my current age, despite my dream involvement in schoolboy scenarios.
I run back to D5 in the university, the place where I extended my school career into late adulthood. This is where my regressive aspects flee for reassurance, where well-turned phrases can keep treacherous reality at bay. The place is deserted. There is no-one around but me. This feels reassuring. I was due to step out, to embark on a spiritual journeys (to the Andes, for example). Instead I’ve returned to the bolt-hole of my office, a cramped, familiar space if ever there was one.
I have gone to ground. There are parts of me that still refuse to ‘fly’. There must be something that has brought me back. Energy is being wasted in my long-vacated office: an electric fire from my childhood home and a standard radiator are both blazing away. Really this office should be closed down but there’s something of me still hanging around, like ghosts of my former adaptations.
I search frantically for things that I might need. Anxious parts of me that arrived too early for the bus are now worried about missing it! There’s nothing here that could serve on my new journey. Just old footwear that’s already walked its paths. I’ve come back here for nothing!
Then I hear the pastoral tones of a former colleague RV, a ‘head of department’ as he was known, counselling in the next room. In my dream, I actually think of consulting him for advice, so lost and anxious am I at this moment. But I’d miss the bus because it sounds like it could be a while before his current session ends. Then I think with a dream consciousness that borders on irony that I could ask my warrior son to teach me about exam techniques that I taught him.
Aha! That’s it, the exam! In dreams, worrying about exams and feeling unprepared are ways of registering anxiety concerning some kind of test or threshold occasion that’s pending. This is the case even if the exam that features happened years before and is already passed. (The Irish Leaving Certificate is an apt example.) All my classic exam reflexes are thus engaged, together with fears about not making the grade, being good enough for the team etc.
My emotional level in this dream is at a more primitive stage than J was when I taught J about exams! There are ‘parts’ in me still waiting to be exposed as deficient. The truth is that ‘I’ really don’t want to miss this bus but parts of me feel inadequate to board it. These parts keep me here in D5 delaying, preparing for life instead of embracing it. (This doesn’t imply mere repetition: core patterns tend to clear in layers, commensurate with new levels of demand that arise as we develop.)
Then my dream experience shifts. It’s a new morning and I’m going down a flight of stairs. I meet J with some of his friends, all lads around age ten. So far, I’ve gone from adolescent to pre-teen levels of (sub-) consciousness in this dreaming. I lead J and his group down to an even deeper sealed-off space in my subconscious, a tight narrow room with a closed red door, now marked ‘Passion and Spontaneity: do not open’. Enacting, I ignore the sign and go straight in.
There are around forty to fifty boys and girls, aged five to ten, already playing enthusiastically inside. I experience a chilling sense of self-betrayal as I usher J and his friends into the room and close the door. This, I understand, has been my way. I had felt this coming before the present stage of my enactment but was still guided to play the sequence through before changing anything. Changes follow quickly from this point of admitting that there are curious, burgeoning young energies that I’m still keeping locked away deep down.
Thankfully, my lonely beach remains available. I find a horseshoe rock formation that serves nicely as a tight room with a red door. This symbolises a sealed chamber in my subconscious where I still keep playful spontaneous potentials of my pre-adolescent, school-going years, masculine and feminine, locked away. These years were difficult and anxious. I shudder to recall how subdued my red passion was throughout that a part of me should worry still about getting good blue grades: see A Birthday Present under ‘Stories.’
I devote no more reflection to such topics. Instead I open the door marked ‘Do not open’ and step in amongst all the little ones I am or might have been – a boy running with a coloured ball, a girl in yellow playing keep-up with a pink balloon and many, many more. I enter their pursuits with full awareness and bend my body to express their sense of fun. I’m amazed to find that they’re relatively happy and also that they’re reluctant to leave the room. This tight, familiar world has been their home for so long!
I ask J to give the others an example. We run out of the room and along the shore, skipping through the surf of incoming waves. His friends follow on call. Then I return to the room and mobilise a little army of my inner children to join in as we run laughing and screaming into the maw of a waiting world. I will not detail forms that their excitement took except to say that they left me feeling very tired. I merged with all of them during this play, calling each and every one into my Heart.
They accompany me when I go back up to D5 with the intention of liberating all traces of my official/officious self. Once there we eavesdrop. RV, my ‘head’, is still counselling away in measured, somnolent tones. To think I could ever have wanted his (my!) advice! We break in, absorb the student and take RV, still counselling, over my shoulder. Pausing only to disconnect heaters in my room, I run with him on my back the whole way to the bus. Of course, this being my illusion, it is still there. My schoolmates cheer as I approach. I absorb them all into my expanding Body of Light.
My black-clad Dark Father/Teacher approaches. All my parts are in and around me. RV is in my heart. ‘OK my friends,’ our Teacher says, ‘let the journey begin, always and forever, from today.’ There is another cheer as I walk straight into the body of this Teacher, knowing that I must be the one to guide this journey. I drive our red bus like a madman on my beach, wondering if there’s enough petrol to reach Peru. I hear it said, presumably by the ocean ‘The envelope contains your Dreaming and your Dreaming is given in your dreams’.
*
As a new level of sacred marriage was attained in the last chapter and a new wave of masciline consciousness born as a result, it is appropriate now to integrate the warrior energies represented by J into my spiritual awareness. Thus I become a spiritual warrior. Once this happens, the energies empower a new wave of individuation, enabling me to break decisively beyond the regressive impact of my mother’s early spells.
When tensions involved in this have been broached and a new level of integration achieved, I am prepared to heal tendencies towards clinging and timidity that come to me from my father’s side. I must open to a wider world (community); transcend irrelevant, outmoded ‘tapes’ in my head, gather up lost darlings of my childhood and embark on daring journeys in my Red Bus. Enacting these imperatives creates a space for new freedoms in ‘real’ life.
7. The House of Limitations
I had no inkling what the sequel to my Red Bus liberation might be. The next morning’s dream then came to tell me:
I’m a white magician with a black magician, contemplating light and dark. We have mastered each in separate rooms and come now to a third where there’s a black-white screen that promises synthesis. An ex-schoolmate says we’re not quite ready.
I am a white magician and a black one, everything in the dream being a reflection of me. There is no tension between the two. They communicate well. On the one hand, this is an indication of attainable potential but it also stresses a need for both to engage in honest dialogue, transcending any appearance of enmity/opposition between them. They do this and thus access mysteries of Light and Dark. Both understand that there is an essential Unity underlying these polarities but have yet to realise it in their shared being, since they represent aspects of a Unity that is latent within me.
The promise of a third room is to show how these qualities can be integrated. It suggests that a potential of my current situation is to transcend all dualities of light and dark, black and white, good and evil. To do so would be to truly grasp the principles of creation as illustrated by the yin-yang diagram, for example. Imagine this as a three-dimensional sphere, with the white yang wave being constantly pulled through the white point in the black yin section and vice-versa, so that the two great waves are in perpetual motion, each one moving around and through the other. In Taoist mythos all creation is said to arise from their dance.
My challenge in the dream is not to understand this but to become it. This would entail merging with my dream alter-ego. I look forward to this from both my converging perspectives, since I am no more identified with the white pole than the black. (In my dream, neither is burdened with an imposed moral valuation.) I particularly want to get beyond the ‘embrace good, exclude evil’ dualism of Campfire. However, a servile young man announces that we’re not ready yet. I feel disappointed when it doesn’t happen but at the same time appreciate that it can’t be forced. My feeling through enactment is not to push it. At least a potential has been declared.
Two nights later I have a dream which clarifies this:
A post-WWII dream, incorporating Auschwitz: I have survived and move in a group that includes Germans, English, SS, Jews etc.
It’s just after a ‘world’ war of all my contending parts. The conflict is over and, although the mood is sombre, I have survived. I move as part of one anguished mass, following the liberation of Auschwitz as symbol of ultimate confinement. The cycle is over and lessons have been learned. SS and Jews, English and Germans move together. My community of the Andes has become a communion of all humanity in synchronised, compassionate motion. I am not just moving with them but as them, my consciousness equally vested in every one.
There are no enemies. All are on one ‘side’. There are no sides. To truly see and be this knowing is to be beyond ‘good’ and ‘evil,’ definitions of which inevitably depend on the ‘side’ one has been shaped to be on. The energy in this dream is concerted, loving and whole-hearted. ‘Us’ and ‘them’ dualities are in the course of being transcended. I need to work on this.
The above dream opens directly into another, implying carry-over:
I’m telling BC about Stan Grof, that I remember being as impressed by his stamina and drive as his content.
I’m talking to BC, a spiritual teacher, about Stan Grof, who is renowned as a leader of the transpersonal psychology movement. Talking to one potential mirror about another, I receive a message from my soul that persistence and motivation will be very important for me at this time. This means I must be prepared to carry on, even when I’m not sure why.
I had, for example, expected my run of striking dreams to dry up after ‘School Trip’ as described in the last chapter. This didn’t happen. Strong dreams are still arriving and I feel myself to be in a state of transition towards I know not what. Hence my Grof allusions, although slight, impress me as encouraging and pertinent. They suggest that my dreams are about to go ‘transpersonal,’ which I eake as a scientific-sounding word for ‘spiritual.’ There was yet another scene change in this dream, suggesting both continuity and a change of focus:
I’m waiting for a workshop that M is going to give outdoors. I’ve designed it but don’t need to present it. I move very nimbly on a wall made of large rocks.
M is a friend and beautifully clear channel for healing energies and messages. She figures here as a reflection of my developed feminine potentials. The dream tells me that, having made adequate ‘male’ structuring arrangements, I can trust my feminine side to reliably bring forth information required for upcoming Plays. This matches my recent experience. The dream also indicates that I need to be balanced and flexible at this time.
The next dream seems even more bitty, sporadic and transitional:
I’m high up in a prison block. Liverpool are playing in a stadium nearby.
There’s not much to work with here, apparently. I’m struck first by the fact that Liverpool play in all-red and for me represent archetypal opponents of Chelsea’s all-blue. The reds of Liverpool symbolise great passion. School Trip has recently demonstrated that this theme remains vitally important for me.
I enact the dream to try and make something of it. My cell is comfortable but a cell nonetheless, another place of confinement! It is situated high in a skyscraper prison building. Shades of the Empire State! I thought I had already escaped from this but have been warned that I’ll need to persist. OK, perhaps there are still high-minded parts of me waiting to go free? I will escape again. This feels like a revision course. Maybe it is.
There’s no way out through the building. All doors are heavily sealed and the corridors patrolled. My only other option is the window. I try this but am again frustrated. Even if it wasn’t so high, there are steel bars outside the tiny inwards-opening window. I am trapped, imprisoned more categorically than ever.
I can hear the roars from Liverpool’s match through my partially open window. What can this mean? I’m stuck.
The next night brings an even stranger dream:
I’m in Kilkee (dreamscape) for Peter’s funeral. There are lots of people in the parlour, including my mother and Jo. Nobody greets me so I don’t get drawn in. I am to leave early, around 2. I meet a radiant old woman on the road and exchange warm greetings, then find myself in a hotel room for a few hours rest. I’m planning to leave at 5. I get up then, reflecting that my mother will think I’m home by now. The tap has been left running. There’s an ocean view outside but men are selling fish so I just get glimpses. I try going out but am hemmed in by their stalls. They don’t appear to see me.
By ‘dreamscape’ I mean an imaginary setting that appears in essentially similar ways across different dreams, sometimes over periods of years. I have had several such. They evoke actual locations without necessarily resembling them in terms of physical character or they can be entirely imagined. Either way, they ‘feel’ familiar in our dream experience, as if they have been visited before.
The location for my present dream is such a ‘place’. Kilkee actually exists. It is a seaside town in the West of Ireland where I first met the Atlantic. It is not at all like the setting for my dream. Peter was an elderly man I liked a lot who died some years ago. He was generous and intelligent and held, in his old age, a wonderfully twinkling spirit in his eyes. In earlier, more stressful times he had been authoritarian, dogmatic, oppressive and repressed. Now he has just died in my soul.
‘Kil’ is an Anglicisation of ‘cill’, a Gaelic word meaning ‘(the place around) a church’. I always hear the second syllable as ‘key’. Thus my dream is set in a holy place which is for me a key.
I enter the scene after Peter’s funeral has ended. Many people, family and friends, have gathered in the parlour, so the room is crowded and full of talk. My mother and former partner are there. I know many of these people but they don’t greet me, although I am standing before them. I feel excluded but had planned to leave early in any case. My exclusion is a source of bewilderment rather than disappointment. No matter.
It’s sunny on the coast road when I leave, on foot. The old woman reminds me of a tribal elder with her warm smile, kind eyes and shining, wrinkled face. She salutes me generously and I her. Enactment brings no further information except a deep sense that this woman truly recognises me. She even sees something that I am not aware of.
My dealings in the hotel are cursory. Hotels in a dream often signify occasions of (re)birth, especially if one arrives into ‘reception’ as I do. I sleep for three hours in a plain room. Nothing is unusual except that water taps are left running for the duration. Peculiarly, I associate this with a continuous spiritual flow.
When I ‘get up’ in my enactment and look out, the hotel has assumed the outer façade of a church, complete with red, yellow and blue stained-glass windows which are brightly illuminated by the evening sun. I look to the ocean but can only catch glimpses because men are selling fish on stalls outside. These are arranged around three sides of a rectangle, the fourth being the back wall of my church/hotel.
A finger of land extends beyond the stalls down to the ocean. I try to go there but can’t because of the stalls. I’m clearly hemmed in but none of the men seems to notice. Certainly, none offers to assist by moving. Confined again, I never think to ask. This feels bizarre.
It then occurs to me that the men can’t see me. How can this be? And people couldn’t see me in the crowded parlour either! But the old woman, the ‘elder’, could really see me. What is this?
It’s only then I realise that it’s I who’ve died. That’s it! Churches in dreams evoke spirituality. Peter is me! I am the one they have buried. Peter symbolises the part of me that’s died, perhaps as heralded by my earlier beheading. Perhaps that’s why my mother thought I would be ‘home.’
It’s only now that I get the full sense of my beheading: I had to lose my ‘head’ in order to die, and up to recently my ‘head’ was still drawing me to the insulated head-space of D5 in my university dreamscape. Now people can’t see me as I have become? This option doesn’t convince. People can’t see me at all, excepting the old female ‘seer’. I have become a ghost in my own dream!
Shaken by this realisation, I approach the fishermen’s stalls, hesitate briefly, then walk straight through them. Their solidity offers no resistance. I walk down to the ocean, singing a song that could be a death-song or the song of a new life. It feels like both. Dreams speak a language of metaphor, and this one is very, very powerful.
Despite having to climb a big rock at the edge of my actual ocean, I feel exhilarated by fierce waves that crash and break around death-stricken me. I remember a particularly strong dream from about ten years before where I had stood in a very similar position and felt very much afraid. The raging ocean was a mirror for ‘my’ power in that dream. I was afraid of it back then. The part of me that was then so afraid is now ‘dead.’
Delighted by this, I conceive the notion of returning to my high-rise prison cell. All is as it was before except I know now that I am but the ghost of a former me who was once incarcerated here. I practice walking through walls and make rude signs at the guards until I remember that they too are parts of my (One True Universal) Self). Absorbing them quickly, I glide through various strata of locked doors until I’ve gotten out of jail and my spirit runs free.
It runs straight to the stadium where a football Passion Play is still in progress. I have no trouble gaining free admission and experiment joyfully with how it feels to occupy the strong bodies of Liverpool’s fierce-blooded warrior men. Finally, I get to play for a team in all-red. When Consciousness has had its fill of such exertion I walk away.
This whole sequence has had to do with what it takes to become a free spirit, in form or otherwise. It educates me in the art of what is possible, particularly for one who has learned to take a spiritual view. My confinement has been illusion all along, dictated by outmoded modes of thought.
Who knows what lies beyond this House of Limitations?
Or what dreams might come?
This chapter is transitional, although at the time I didn’t know to what. It begins by exhorting me to transcend any inclination to take sides with regard to issues of duality and polarisation. Truly spiritual consciousness knows that All is really One, participant in the self-same shared life. My feminine-intuitive side is best able to hold and be informed by this awareness.
Neglecting it leaves me in a prison of illusion, not knowing what my Passion is (for). There is a potential awakening in me that companions in ordinary social exchanges can’t discern. ‘Seers’ can and one reflects it back to me. The part of me reflected by this seer eventually comes to see what’s going on.
Such freedom is not reducible to tricks like walking through walls. This is a metaphor that nonetheless connotes an expanded sense of possibility and awareness. Where before I might have foundered between the polarities of this view and that, now Consciousness reveals a third way and I step through.
8. City of Light and Revelations
What new mystery would arise following my ‘spiritual turn’? Again I didn’t know but my dream energy was still burgeoning and produced a mighty offering that very night. It came in three sections, all parts of one continuous wave which picks up directly from the previous dream:
I’m part of a large crowd in Cill Key, perhaps for another ‘funeral.’ The atmosphere is celebratory. Four or five people, all males, engage me light-heartedly and give me four golden darts to throw. I see no target and there are lots of people around. They point towards the roll-back, garage-type door of a pub. The door is red. I prepare to throw but the door opens and people start going in. Once again, it seems, I am without a target.
The first part retains my associations with ‘Cill Key’. This suggests continuity and a development of themes already introduced. The atmosphere is different, however. I’m in the town square, which is crowded, and I can be seen, at least by the men who give me darts. It seems that a funeral has taken place but I don’t know whose. This means that it might still be mine. A celebration is under way to mark the occasion. The point of this is to establish the ‘death’ to hand as good, a necessary stage in a process of evolutionary unfolding. The men are in high spirits as they exhort me to accept the darts.
Four darts is unusual since three is the number used in games. So is gold, which makes them very precious. We have already noted gold’s associations with alchemy and transmutation. It is also linked to issues of spiritual healing and creativity, which may also be relevant to my ‘death.’ Four is a number of containment. It suggests provisional completion, perhaps relative to a stage in some unfolding. Implicitly, it may also suggest a breaking through beyond the frame of its own provisional completeness.
This is reinforced by the possibility that there was a fifth man involved. This introduces the 5 of going beyond 4. In this dream, 4 marks a point of respite followed by new departure, as when – having established personal balance in relation to the four cardinal directions, for example – one sets out for Centre to reconnect with geometric origin and spiritual source. This is a quintessential journey which builds on correct orientation in relation to the four directions/elements.
The relevance of this was not apparent to me till the moment of enactment. As indicated, my response in the dream is to search bemusedly for a target. What else does one do with darts? Then I am directed towards a red ‘door’ (portal, gateway) which, because of its peculiar nature, is actually square. Weighing the first dart, it seems natural that my target (goal) should be the centre of the door.
I sense that I am reckoning with an Arrow of Truth, a symbolic vehicle for the projection of my soul’s highest will. The red door signifies that my Passion isn’t over. On the contrary, in myth, after dying a greater life begins. I throw the dart. In the highly focused state of my enactment, it comes as no surprise to see the doorway to my Passion roll back in response to this energetic expression of my highest, transpersonal will.
Notwithstanding my befuddlement in the dream, a new opening has been created and I step through to follow my Passion’s still unfolding path. I don’t need to have a consciously espoused ‘target’ at this point. I just need to follow the integral pro-jection (literally, throwing forward) of my Heart. This is what the enacted throwing of my first dart evokes. The four men withdraw and I am alone again, ostensibly, in the mystery of this moment. What is for others the doorway of a pub becomes for me an opening to another world:
I am walking in a familiar but surreal Dublin dreamscape. I’m a bit lost but find my way somehow. I don’t really know what I’m looking for but stumble on a second-hand bookshop, which I enter. This too seems familiar, like a smaller branch of a bigger store I’d expected to find up ahead. (In fact, it feels like I often visit this shop.) There are two rooms with book displays. The first, larger one carries a wide range of books of general interest. The second features mostly children’s books but there’s a raised shelf in the far corner filled with esoteric-looking volumes. I’m drawn to one in particular. It strikes me as a mystical text, sparsely worded but with lots of diagrams and illustrations. I open a page with a charcoal drawing of Leonardo’s cosmic man. I ‘buy’ this book although I don’t meet the proprietor or leave money. Instead there is a note, generous in tone, signed ‘John’. I slip out into an alley, where I find the slim offprint of an academic article by SP, bound in pink. Then it feels, briefly, as if I’m in a Renaissance piazza, of a type that might have been illustrated in my book and come alive from there. This too seems strange and yet familiar. Groups of modern tourists pass but my regard is timeless.
I step through to the Dublin of my childhood, serene and traffic-free, familiar but surreal. It is a dreamscape, a place I visit often in sleep on my way to other dimensions. I don’t know this rationally but I know it. The streets are deserted now. It is early morning, sunny and bright.
There is an atmosphere of generosity and welcome about. Local geography has changed. Everything has been subtly displaced, conserving patterns so I can at once feel lost and yet know exactly where to go. I step out in the direction of my Heart’s Desire. That’s it! I am walking in Love, exploring the inner fabric of this City of Light, the Dublin of my innocent delight, where everything feels magical and blessed. I wander spellbound in this enchanted place, absorbing thankfully all that has been seed food for my soul’s investiture this time around.
I enact this physically on my beach, eyes closed. It takes no time to pass from Christchurch to Rathmines. Shop fronts, church spires, warm smells of a dawn bakery – all in the music of my making. Without knowing where I’m going or why, I suddenly find what I’ve been looking for: a second-hand bookshop, smaller than I had imagined and not where it should have been but still familiar. It’s the only place open at this hour but I hadn’t noticed. I enter still enchanted by my walk of Love.
Inside the shop is a composite of many like it that I visited with my father in early years. It is also more. In retrospect, I notice that it hovers, barely materialised, in a borderland between dimensions. Despite being open, the shop is unattended. It is also full of love. I love the haphazard nature of its cataloguing, the lurid multi-coloured spines of dusty paperbacks, the treasures hidden between Western and Romance. There are other delights but I don’t pursue them. Nothing in this trove of mysteries interests me right now. My need is for something quite particular.
There is a second room, smaller and set deep into the heart of the shop. It is filled with children’s books of all shapes and sizes. I relish briefly a sense of freedom that seeing them evokes but I have not come to find these either. Then I see in the upper right corner a shelf packed with esoteric works. I am drawn to one only and remove it carefully. The cover is silver-grey. It bears no title and has a feel of having been made, not manufactured. I open it and scan within. There are lots of diagrams and illustrations, with not so many words.
The page I stop on features a charcoal drawing of Leonardo’s ‘microcosmos’: the cosmic human spread in the shape of a five-pointed star, indicating that every wo/man contains and expresses the Mystery of the Universe. There are hand-written comments and supplementary drawings that I don’t take time to note. I know this book is for me and resolve to ‘buy’ it although I have no money. Instead I hold it to my heart, as if to absorb it vibrationally. The book dissolves into my heart.
I then see a note from the proprietor and pause to read it during my enactment. It says: Greetings and welcome to our shop. We hope you enjoy our selection. Feel free to browse as you will. Prices are marked on the inside cover of each volume – John.
This is a message from my soul to me! I didn’t notice any price marked on my book but, knowing it to be mine, I leave the golden darts as payment. I will have no need of such way-finders now that I have located the Book of my Soul. I leave the bookshop gratefully and emerge into an alley that wasn’t there when I went in.
A library or bookshop represents a place where knowledge is stored. A second-hand bookshop contains knowledge which has already been acquired, processed and ‘used’. I have come here following my death and resurrection to be reminded of all that my soul has been, to learn to be that knowing and ascertain its course into my human future. I am the embodiment of my soul’s highest aspiration for this lifetime. I have come here today to be re-minded.
The silver book of my soul’s revelation presents a distillation of all that I have been and must become. I know it is addressed into the future. My leaving of the darts represents both the marking of a completion (4) and a time for new departure, now that the Book of my Soul (Quintessence: 5) has been received back into my Heart.
Stepping out into the alley, I find a slim offprint from an academic journal. It has been written by SP, a one-time female colleague whom I considered pedantic, defensive and insecure. Back in the hall of judgmental mirroring! I’m looking at my feminine soul again, and presumably an alienated aspect that’s waiting to come home. It’s encouraging that the tight, densely argued text is bound in pink. Academics, I have found, need lots of unconditional love.
Before I can summon any in the dream I see myself in a Renaissance square that might well have materialised out of the book in my heart. I see it first in charcoal outline, then manifested fully in 3D. Groups of camera-toting tourists swarm around me. I feel like I’m standing on the edge of a page, bearing witness in time for all time. I couldn’t fathom the point of this before but it got clearer as I began enacting the third part of my dream:
I continue my ‘Dublin’ walk and wander into a department store having passed a restaurant/coffee shop where I might have met some woman but it’s empty. (This is also a familiar dreamscape feature.) It’s still early morning but the store is open so I go in. They’ve been having some trouble with their employees. Those who accepted an accommodation were sent home in pre-paid taxis. Others continued to protest overnight. There’s also a large group (50-70) of ordinary women sitting on the floor of the shop, near the back, surrounded by racks of women’s underwear. All are fully clothed but are demanding a change of knickers which the company has been unable to provide. I have no idea what I’m doing there.
As indicated, I had no idea what this section was about. Prior to enactment, I thought to consult my ‘Book’ to see what it might suggest. I reach imaginatively into my Heart, take out the Book of my Soul’s Journey and open it ‘randomly’ on a page which features two drawings side by side. The first is of Venus/Aphrodite, Goddess of Love and the second of a deep, ancient well, stone-built and cylindrical, leading down into dark, nourishing depths. ‘Deep is the well of the past.’ Dimly remembered words echo in my mind as I set out once more to the beach and resume my early morning pilgrimage, conscious also of the book’s possible vaginal imagery.
I continue walking through my strangely familiar city. My first thought had been to bin SP’s tight, defensive tract but while attempting to do so I recall that this would be a further act of repression. There is much to be unpacked from this slim offering, which as yet remains un-integrated with respect to the Book of my Soul.
I pass a restaurant/coffee shop, another strange-familiar dream-space where I might have met a woman had it not been empty and closed. It is clear now, especially following the bulletin from SP, that a renewed encounter with my feminine self is pressing. This happens in the women’s section of a prominent department store, specifically the lingerie section. I am concerned here with something that is normally covered over and unseen.
I see ordinary women staging their sit-down towards the back of the shop. I’ve been drawn into the only place that was open in the dream-timing of my Light City and find myself witness to a contemporary women’s mystery, the sense of which I cannot begin to fathom. Then I notice a red door (gateway, portal) at the very back of the shop floor and pass through.
The women sitting here are employees. They are obliged to wear blue uniforms and stay in this backstage, storeroom area. They want freedom to move unchecked through the main shop; they want not to wear a uniform and they want more pay (valuing and recognition). By contrast, the women who went home don’t mind about the uniforms or conditions but would of course like to have more pay. I ascertain this by asking but can’t think what else I might ask that could help to move things on.
Then I ‘see’ that I must experience the situation from the women’s point of view. I approach a strong-looking woman who has the bearing of a natural leader. At first, I just ask her what she wants: ‘To see and be seen; to speak and be heard.’ Her words are more cryptic and abstract than I had anticipated. I feel an extraordinary sense of kinship with this woman and surprise myself by asking if I can put my awareness into her role. I have done this many times by now over the course of many enactments but this one feels especially sensitive.
I sit gently and attentively into the space her body occupies, cueing myself to note shifts in my own body-consciousness as this happens. Her name is Cassie. Like all others locked behind this door she is (has been) a temple priestess, a woman of grace and knowledge, light and love. She describes the frustration of her group calmly and articulately. They want their sensibilities to find a rightful place in the world again. They are ready to be seen and heard. I offer my body as a vehicle to facilitate Cassie’s return, knowing that she represents another cast-off aspect of my Self, waiting to come home.
She accepts and we leave the airless, artificially lit storeroom by a door which is blue on the inside. We walk through the dream construct of the store, into the waiting embrace of Ocean, Sun and Sky. Standing on the shoreline, I appreciate more keenly than ever what a blessing it is to be conscious in such moments. The grace of Cassie’s sensibility renews my own. We walk slowly, giving her time to savour and adjust, then we return to the ‘storeroom’ where she talks to the other women. They agree to follow us out. They are no longer uniformed as our procession begins. Each wears the vestments of her office, specific to different places and times. There are about thirty in all, dressed in a rich variety of priestess styles and colours.
We move gently in a cloud of soft pastels along the shore, allowing everybody time to re-attune. I am aware that this is a daringly imaginative play, but also a necessary one. As we walk, the women are spontaneously absorbed into the left side of my body, one after the other, slowly, at their own pace. In my right hand, I carry a protective Sword of Light. The whole scene is gentle and empowering, a soft complement to my stormy Apache resurgence of weeks back. We return to a temple rather than a store. I must see now what contact I can make with the women outside.
I make my way back to the shop floor. These are ‘ordinary’ modern women before me and I don’t know what comes next. I look carefully over the group and feel especially drawn to some. The first is Mary, a middle-aged, conservative-looking woman who presumably has reasons for being here. I ask if I can speak with her. She says yes. I am surprised she can be so forthcoming (my prejudice).
So, why is she protesting in this way? What does it mean for her to be demanding a change of knickers? She answers openly but a little awkwardly. She wants to be free to choose something that’s just for herself; something that’s sexy and stylish but not to be seen. What does this mean to her on a deeper personal level? She says she doesn’t know. It’s just for herself so she doesn’t want all this advertising telling her what can and can’t be for her. But why is she protesting against this company? How can they choose for her?
They can’t. Then why don’t you choose for yourself? Mary says that she can’t choose for herself. She doesn’t even know what this means and feels frustrated.
Sandra is mid-thirties, fair-haired, political and articulate. She says she wants to ‘own’ her sexuality. She doesn’t want it packaged, commoditised or exploited in any way. But how can company tactics in this regard affect her, specifically? They can’t directly, but they do by conditioning others’ perceptions, including women’s own. So what is the focus of this protest for her? She shrugs. It’s a symbolic gesture against market exploitation of women’s freedom to be as they choose. Can you see any way through this for yourself? Sandra says she understands that she needs to reclaim her own sexual passion and aesthetic but doesn’t know how to actually go about this. She resents a culture of spectacle which surrounds her with mindless, demeaning images on all sides.
Rose is twenty-eight, plump, with curly black hair. She says she wants to be able to feel sexy without having to compare herself to model stereotypes. It’s all about making the best of who you are and the body you’ve been given. Does Rose know how to make the best? She’s not sure but wants the freedom to try. Can the company give her this? No. Or take it away? They must have because she doesn’t feel she has it. That’s why she’s here.
I ‘spoke’ with others until I was sure I had the right idea. Essentially, these women felt that they were being disempowered and manipulated by cultural packaging of their sexual identity. Eve thought it inevitable that a male culture would always define the context of women’s choices but felt obliged to express her solidarity in any case. She also couldn’t say how it might be possible for women to rebuild a sense of sexual integrity from within.
Hearing this reminded me of Campfire and the priestess’ response to violation. I told Cassie, the resurrected high priestess, what I had heard from the secular women, especially concerning their frustration at being unable to experience or restore a sense of their own sexual integrity. Cassie replied ‘Sexuality is a gift of the Goddess. Of course we have awareness and will show them. Why do you think we have been kept in isolation for so long? It is time now for women’s inner knowing to return.’
She asks me to arrange a meeting with the secular women in a public area of the store, where a full range of choice and possibility is supposedly available. Cassie says that she will mentor Sandra while her sisters will offer help to all who seek it. At this point my enactment turns into a visualisation. I watch in wonder as the priestesses in their coloured robes stride elegantly out to reacquaint modern women with ancient mysteries of the Goddess. I resolve to take this seed back to my own Centre and see what grows when it is planted there. New dreams will come.
Esoterically, death and resurrection imply ‘initiation’ – passage to a new level of awareness. This is better evoked by an idea of breaking through than the more reactive notion of breaking out. The former suggests an appointment to be kept, one that has already been arranged on higher levels of consciousness which we as ego-beings must break through to.
The current dream helps me with this process: after transition comes an inkling of that which I was always transiting towards. I need only follow the projections of my Heart (walk in Love) to find the Way. Penetrating ever more deeply, breaking through to levels of awareness that before had been the vaguest of imaginings, I engage the protests of my feminine soul as represented by a coalition of ancient and modern women.
There is just one observation I would like to make now regarding the significance of this episode. It is based on my experience of a difference between Cassie’s sensibilities and those of the modern women. For Cassie, sexuality is an integral aspect of a vastly more encompassing world picture, which is also integral. This is the birthright of every cosmic wo/man. For modern people, it is almost totally lost.
Because so much of human spiritual awareness has been forgotten, our identities tend to be constructed in terms of a correspondingly reduced notion of sexuality. This tendency is reinforced by market fixations. Hence the secular women conduct their protest around issues of sexuality within a cultural framework of department store as consumer temple. There is no good reason why anyone’s identity needs to be reckoned primarily or exclusively in terms of sexuality. Modern culture has forgotten this and built upon a repressed memory of the archetypal wound evoked in Campfire: i.e. violation of the Goddess by a debased psycho-politics of rape.
Cassie’s memory extends back to a time when the Goddess was honoured and loved. She wishes, in these declining days of our Empire State, to contribute her experience of harmony to humanity’s vital task of integral self-remembering. This in itself is wonderful but perhaps a greater wonder yet is that her beautiful Goddess sensibility, overcoming forgetfulness and trauma, should rise up from greater depths of soul, ready to heal and once more bring treasures to the world.
9. Merrill Lynne
I wake from a deep, dreamless sleep into an enchanted cartoon valley where I am filled and surrounded by ‘Merlin’, a pure creative energy named as such within the Celtic tradition. Then I awaken from one dream state into another:
I am entering a plush solicitor’s office in Harrington Street. It has dark oak panelling and furniture, very solid and tasteful. I am looking for a doctor. The solicitor, a young (40-ish) hippy-looking guy, rakish, with tousled sandy hair and twinkling eyes is there, and also four very attractive women. He says they’ll be happy to help me. I have a number which they generously offer to call but it keeps getting misplaced in ways that I’d find comical if it weren’t for my sense of urgency. Eventually they get through but say there’s no answer. They invite me to go to lunch with them. OK – I’ve no other way of contacting this doctor. We go out to an underground car park. Two women are already in the back of a big black Mercedes, to be driven by the boss. They hold the door open for me to join them. Two others, the blonde receptionist and a frizzy-haired woman pass by to a smaller red car. The frizzy woman smiles seductively at me. We sit waiting a long time. The receptionist opens the boot and rummages around before taking out an electric guitar which she starts playing while singing to me. I say ‘Have you guys heard of Kafka?’ to my fellow non-passengers. One winks at the other and says ‘What’s this thing Kafka has for men?’ ‘I’m thinking of The Castle, The Trial, legal complications, endless waiting...’ At this point the solicitor appears bearing two huge silver salvers filled with food. One seems to be raw chicken cut into cubes. The other is a kind of roasted bread. He offers me the chicken. I try it. It looks awful but tastes delicious. Everybody laughs as I eat.
I am in an up-market solicitor’s office near my mother’s. This is not a place I would ever expect to be, given my irrational dislike of solicitors and their ways. Dreams being what they are, there has to be a lesson in this for me. Naturally, I don’t realise it in the dream. All I know is that I am looking for a doctor and have been guided here. I have a clear sense of its location and had expected to find a surgery but it seems I was mistaken.
I explain my dilemma to the secretary/receptionist, a pretty blonde woman who is very sympathetic. She seems to tell everybody in the office because soon three other women are fussing over me, asking if I’m OK and if they can do anything to help. I assume that they are apprentices or employees of the firm. Then the owner of the practice appears and is also amazingly concerned about someone who has just walked in off the street, offering no business prospect whatsoever.
I’m taken aback by the appearance of this man. He is younger than I would have expected and has a distinctly bohemian style, despite being dressed in a dark, expensive suit. He too offers his help. I am somewhat embarrassed by the extent of their concern, having no way to repay it and no specific information about the doctor I’m looking for. I only have a telephone number on a scrap of paper.
They don’t seem surprised by my lack of information and offer to call the number for me. My sense is that it’s late morning in the dream. I give the number to one of the apprentices. She says she’ll pass it to the secretary. Apparently, the other women get involved in this as well because the number is mislaid and all are drawn into searching for it. I sit in an open-plan, communal office watching this farce unfold. The boss has a private office into which he has disappeared.
The number is eventually located and dialled but I’m told there is no answer at the other end. I think that they must surely now express regret and ask me politely to leave but no, they invite me to have lunch with them. I accept because I’m anxious to make contact with this doctor and the overwhelming sympathy of these people seems to be my only chance of succeeding. All of this felt quite bizarre as I was dreaming it. In my enactment, it still feels weird and unyielding. How am I to interpret such weirdness?
The fact that I’m looking for a doctor suggests that I need healing. This in itself is a surprise after my Cassie dream. I have no specific complaint or illness that I am aware of. Nevertheless, there is something I must see to. I have a sense in my enactment that the women are very forbearing, as if they know more than I do. I can only persist by default and accept all the help that’s being offered by my feminine soul.
I’m surprised to be invited to lunch, and even more surprised to learn that this involves leaving the premises. Also, there is no possibility of having underground car-parks in this area! A car-park is a place where we go to find our vehicle. In dreams it is associated with movement and choice. I am by now feeling pretty stuck, helpless even.
There are only two vehicles in the car-park, a black Mercedes which I guess, correctly, belongs to the man and a smaller red car. Two of the women sit into the back of the Mercedes and call me to join them. I sit in also, on the left side, leaving the door open.
The secretary and the third apprentice head for the smaller car. The apprentice, a very attractive woman with frizzy brown hair, smiles seductively at me, or so it seems. The secretary fiddles a long time in the boot before taking out an electric guitar, which she plays while singing to me. Her song asks me to take her with me on some journey. I have no idea what such eccentric behaviour could mean. After a while, her serenade comes to an end.
The women beside me look highly amused. I try to appear calm and sophisticated by referring to Kafka (a Czech author who wrote harrowing novels about cruel bureaucratic processes). The women’s response is irreverent. They seem to be making fun at my expense, especially regarding my maleness. At the same time, they are clearly good-natured so I never feel hurt or alarmed. I try to play along with a further display of ironic humour and literary knowledge.
The women again seem highly amused, not by my wit but my incomprehension of the situation. Again, enacting, I have a sense of being set up and that they are part of the setting up. I ask, in frustration ‘Who do you guys work for anyway?’ One winks at the other and replies ‘Merrill Lynne Associates’. Both are laughing openly at this point.
Then the ‘solicitor’ finally emerges into the car park, carrying two large silver trays piled high with raw chicken cubes and over-cooked croissants, as far as I can tell. He offers the repulsive-looking ‘chicken’ to me. In my dream, I know only that I have to try it. In my enactment, I realise with a start that I’ve been had – that the rakish, atypical, hippy-looking solicitor is none other than ‘Merrill Lynne’ or Merlin, master magician, illusionist and playful mentor of Arthur, the boy who would be king.
He is also the ‘doctor’ my soul petitioned me to visit, who teaches healing into wholeness beyond recovery from pain. As an aspect of creation that manifests creation, ‘he’ has built a further lesson into my dream by constructing it in terms of a lingering prejudice. I couldn’t see my master magician, a figure I have always loved and admired, because I could see no further than my limiting idea of ‘solicitor’. My soul has not deceived me. I have been solicited and soliciting in the right place all along! No wonder the Merrill Lynne associates were amused.
These women represent aspects of my intuitive feminine soul. They understand perfectly what’s going on and know my masculine foibles all too well. Their work is to soften the blows and play up the funny side of situations I create. The Mercedes pair say, when asked: ‘We were just helping you get to the doctor’. Likewise, the frizzy-haired woman smiled ‘seductively’ just to let my male dream-ego know that they all love me (even though I can be an idiot sometimes). The blonde woman’s song, I later found, had an additional purpose which I’ll return to shortly.
Let me focus now on the moment when I finally get the point about Merrill Lynne. Despite my bemusement up to that time, I sense great power in it and appreciate immediately the mythic resonances of being invited to partake of food offered while I’m in the car park, underground. To accept this food is to accept participation in the spiritual order of this other world, including all its weird, miraculous dimensions. I am reminded of Persephone accepting the pomegranate from Hades and thereby contracting to spend half her time in the Underworld with him.
To be extended such an invitation by Merlin feels like a great honour to me, one I accept gratefully and at once. Gathering myself in enactment, I focus fully before taking one of the proffered morsels into my mouth and digesting it slowly. This food is truly of the gods! I experience quantum acceleration in my heart as this meta-physical, spiritual food is absorbed into my energy system. Merrill Lynne invites me to eat my fill and I do, gladly, knowing that this commits me to spending half my time in his ‘car park.’ I continue to experience a strong emotional sense of charge and connectedness until I have eaten my fill.
Later, wishing to ensure that all is in order before finishing, I put my awareness into the women’s roles. The ‘apprentices’, of course, were playing pre-appointed parts. I perceive an affinity between their energies and those of the priestesses from my last dream. When I invite them to merge in consciousness with me, they oblige easily. The blonde secretary tells me she was singing on behalf of the priestesses who hadn’t returned on the first occasion but who wish to do so now. I sense that there is something I must do before I can facilitate this process.
I turn to Merrill Lynne, the energy of magical creation as personified in my dream. It seems appropriate to merge with him and so I walk towards and ‘into’ him. Instead of easy mergence he disappears on impact and I sense a huge, white-bearded Gandalf figure all around me. I then walk through a variety of Merlin representations drawn from Disney, literature, Arthurian legend and the farthest reaches of my own imagination. Having exhausted these and myself, I am still walking in a boundless field of pure creative energy.
I walk back to the point of creation, where Consciousness first placed a seal upon Infinity to manifest Existence. I walk through this point back into What Is before Creation and experience impressions for which I have no words. At some point, I return again to the actor known as John, walking a beach, approaching a black car, and contemplating anew a distinctive-looking solicitor by the name of Merrill Lynne.
I know now that this enigmatic figure is also a projection of my soul’s potential. I walk directly to him and invite him to merge, consciously, with me. He agrees. We become one and the black car suddenly turns white with gold trimmings. I sit in and drive to a point where the priestesses who had gone home in pre-paid taxis are waiting, anxious now to rejoin the flow of spiritual life. I call them out, walk with them and integrate them slowly into my being.
My next dream came the following night:
I am in a big old building with many floors, connected by a mighty marble stairway. This house is huge and richly proportioned, almost palatial. The interior is handsome, tasteful and well-appointed, although it doesn’t seem lived-in. There is a party here tonight, however, with lots of people. I enter a ground floor room in the company of women. One, strikingly beautiful, smiles at me. We are very drawn to each other. Then there is word of some emergency. We rush to leave and assemble on the pavement outside. The entrance is the narrow hallway to 35 New Bride Street. There are shops on either side. Only McCann’s is open. The proprietor is cleaning outside. The area is otherwise deserted. It’s early morning and we have the look of people coming from a Ball. Someone says we need to set the house on fire and throws petrol into the hall. I say I’ve left things inside that I need to get. Others too. We race into the building and run upstairs. I find a young student sleeping and rouse him. Four young women are especially careful about rescuing things. Back outside, someone asks the shopkeeper if he’d mind looking after something small, and then big. He agrees reluctantly. He’ll put it over the mantelpiece.
My Father’s house has many mansions and I have found my way to this one, magnificent but very old. I experience it as a fore-runner of the magic hotel/house I was delivered into with C after our transformation in New Bride Street (where passing women interrupt our efforts to make love). This present house turns out to be accessed via New Bride Street also, which evokes for me both the joy of sacred marriage and lingering ties of poverty/shame. Tonight, initially, there is no sense of deprivation. There is a party going on and many parts of my soul, represented by lots of people, are gathering into new levels of right relationship. I know I will make love with the beautiful woman who smiles at me: a new level of fe/male harmony is indicated. Everything feels wonderfully alive.
Then word comes of an emergency, meaning that further emergence is required. The lovely romantic haze I’ve been enjoying suddenly belongs to another time, already past. I/we must prepare to move again. We leave our vast, imposing mansion and find ourselves huddled outside on the prosaic streets of my childhood, refugees from a Ball that never got fully started. It’s hard to credit that the hallway leading to my Nana’s flat could be the portal to a house of such vast wonders but I know now that it is, and to many others. Nana was always my salvation and Merlin the Solicitor has taught me well: that consciousness creates innumerable worlds out of longing, purity and de/formations.
I am back once more in old days, looking at shop-fronts I peered into many years ago. Buddha has cried ‘The house is burning’ and the inner revellers of my soul have been lured out to cold, deserted streets of early morning. Enacting, I practice turning 35 New Bride Street, my fairy grandmother’s house, into the palace of my past and ‘hotel’ of my possible future. What is there but creative intention to separate a doctor’s surgery from a magician’s cave?
One shop is open, although there is no reason for this. Its proprietor is outside, scrubbing vigorously, trying to make the best of modest premises. My heart swells with love for my people of this lifetime. I am not alarmed when someone says the house must be burned. I will not again become the dupe of old attachments. That said, I remember there is something I must save, something that will surely serve in my life that is to come.
I rush into the palace of my past, which I had forgotten how to occupy for so long. Others follow, including four young women, perhaps Merlin’s associates, minders from my feminine soul. I must remember to stay aligned correctly with them. I find one of my former students (from the university) asleep on an upper level. Daniel is his name and, like me at twenty-one, he is hooked on being intellectual. He is well-meaning, diligent, sincere and not very awake. This is why I find him as I do, in need of rescue.
I rouse him and we hurry downstairs. The women gather ‘jewels’ and follow after. I take Daniel out on the street and explain to him what’s going on. I also tell others, who know in any case. Our soul is being called to a major transformation. Only one young man seems concerned about hanging on to objects he has salvaged from the house – a small souvenir and a large old clock, which the shopkeeper reluctantly agrees to hold. This small part of me remains fixated on old time.
Of course I don’t ‘get’ this in the dream but now that I am practiced at enactments, I know straightaway what needs to be done. I reassure this clinging part of myself that all will be well and secure his agreement to merge with me. I merge with him, then Daniel. Others follow, re-entering my soul consciousness in new patterns of more mature and appropriate relationship. Soon I have reintegrated the whole cast of my soul.
I bid farewell once more to Merlin, a shopkeeper now and teaching still about the depth of love behind all illusion. I enter then into the hall of my Great (Grand) Mother, igniting a flaming pyre as I go, stepping into a Fire of Truth that was missed before but is forever the threshold of my Father’s House, willing with all my Heart that something beautiful might come of my next arising.
The moving display of the kahuna master in chapter 5 evoked most of the spiritual forms I’ve felt drawn to in this lifetime. One apparent omission was the art of magical transformation. Actually his shape-shifting routine evoked it but I lacked confidence to respond appropriately at the time. Now, following the return of Cassie and the onset of deep healing in my feminine soul, Merlin appears to re-ignite this potential.
His appearance links strongly with my image of Merlin as a male Earth wizard who works in service to the Goddess. Perhaps this, together with my readiness, is why he entered the frame at this point. His return is a cause for celebration and portends a new cycle in the process of my continued sacred marriage (the party at New Bride Street), even if this plan was superseded by a call to more radical emergence.
Both dreams in this chapter involve lots of transformation: soul parts being stirred and entering new patterns of relationship as a result. The process ends with me stepping intentionally into a Fire of Truth so that aspects of my personality which no longer serve the attainment of my highest destiny can burn away. Thus I finally keep the appointment offered way back in chapter 1, at a workshop that would change my life so radically.
10. The Wind
I am like the Wind of another dimension, animated and still, cartoon-like, as in the enchanted Merlin valley of a few nights back. I am also very hot, as hot as fire. I sleep again and blow around the edges of many worlds. Later I awaken, still on fire, to deliver news of all that I have learned by making love with C at centre.
This dream came the night after the great ‘Fire’ process of our last chapter. ‘Wind’ is a metaphor for the Breath of God, the spiritus that moves the world, moves all things in the world, and moves through all things in the world. It is an agent of growth and transformation; the essence of what we call inspiration. Its impact is greatly amplified by the addition of Fire, the second of the ‘male’ elements. When this combines with Air, the first, a human life is set alight. That is why I am so hot in my dream, the night after I stepped into my ‘Fire of Truth’.
The archetypal function of masculine energy is to go to the edge. As Fire-powered Wind I traverse the edges of many worlds and return bursting with a primal urge to deliver news of all that I have found at Centre. I do so allegorically by making love with the image of my feminine soul, represented by a female power that holds Centre while my male is off exploring new horizons. God and Goddess making love forever renew the One Life of All That Is.
Noting my prowess, evidently, the gods call me back for refinement:
I’m in the concourse of a bright and spacious University building, flooded by natural light. It has a beautiful geometric design, reminiscent of the Sydney Opera. I’m outside a lecture room. This may be my last class. It’s my final year and I’m due to graduate soon. My sense is that I will be a Teacher also.
I move away from the lecture venue, deeper into the building. Two young students approach from the opposite direction – a young man who’s been looking after his sick mother in anticipation of her death and an idealistic young woman who’s anxious not to miss the class. She gives me a hot chocolate. I return to the lecture room with them and go in.
This room is also spacious and bright. The class, given by TB, is already under way. I excuse us. The young man and woman go to the back. TB generously says that he can get a cup of tea. I sit in a single desk up front beside DM. He’s working on a hand-out that presents basic geometric forms and explains their esoteric significance. I glance over them and am reassured that I already know them well.
I am back in a university but it doesn’t feel the same as before. This place is bright, spacious and transparent. It is a University of Light, a Universe City of Light – a centre of wisdom and learning that aims to reproduce the intelligence of Cosmos in the order of human culture it promotes. Even the architecture reflects exquisitely beautiful cosmic geometries.
I have a sense of imminent ending. I am approaching another final, another opportunity to graduate. I can become another kind of teacher as a result, in another kind of school, perhaps like this.
I am drawn away from the lecture room, which is to one side, towards the centre of a vast public space. I then see two students approaching, the solicitous young man and idealistic young woman. These two represent the fruits, so far, of my aspiration to a more balanced and holistic way of being.
The death of the young man’s mother is imminent. This means I will soon be free of her negative internalised influence; free to pursue my destiny unchecked. The young woman gives me chocolate – perhaps a sweet reward to acknowledge my role in drawing her out from the potentialities of my Unconscious into manifestation. Robert and Tara are their names. I discover this through enacting.
Both characters are based on actual students from my academic past. They appear because they represent aspects of my inner potential that I have been attempting to streamline through conscious endeavour. I absorb them on entering the lecture room, and all of the potentials they carry.
The teacher realises this. Based on a most unsympathetic model, his generosity is actually directed towards a tenderness in me, occasioned by my love for the young couple and the flexible masculine-feminine range they put at my disposition. This is a strong healing feature of the dream, rehabilitating my experience of many less sympathetic 3D teachers from earlier stages of my life. It feels important that I should be prepared to ‘see’ anew.
I sit at the front of the class, my protégés having disappeared. DM, my diligent and timid former self, is working away on some tasks of sacred geometry. I can tell at a glance what they involve, which means I must be well prepared for whatever test I have to undergo before graduating.
I must be doing well in terms of inner preparation for this to register so clearly in a dream. Of course, dream-work is an essential part of my preparation. I have pursued it diligently and therefore, it seems, am well-prepared. I count this as assurance, not congratulations, and surmise that it will be important for me to remember this assurance in due course.
Moreover, I find through enacting, it was absolutely necessary for me to arrive late for class since everyone who makes it up represents an aspect of my Self. Everybody in the lecture room, including the teacher, is a part of me – all fragments of my old soul straining to come together in one-pointed Unity. We’ve already seen this inner tendency evoked by earlier dreams like ‘School Trip’ and ‘Apache’, for example. When I do finally realise this condition, I will be truly fit to graduate to a new level.
My next dream poses fresh challenges in this regard:
There is a problem. I am in a small flat with a woman and two children, a little boy and little girl. The woman asks me to hold them. I am deflated but take the children on my knees. I feel great love for them but am anxious inside. I’ve been recalled to work some hours in the university, three I think, all spread out.
I head for a second-hand bookshop wondering if I’d have been better off not to retire. It’s too late now anyway. The bookshop is in a back alley, small and cramped. I step into a tiny hallway, crammed with closed cabinets. I open them to find lots of books inside, all old but not of interest. There’s another shelf with old children’s books, large format, as if from a bygone age. I browse through one about Arthurian romance.
I go through another door. There’s a man inside with two young helpers, male and female. It’s cramped in here also, but the man seems generous and charismatic. He’s playing with two robots on a little table. He’s going out for five minutes and invites me to play with them. He’ll give me a revealing insight into some well-known children’s tale on his return. I can’t now remember which.
I browse around more cramped, dingy shelves a little longer but don’t play with the robots. I feel trapped in here. Nothing interests me.
On waking I feel as if I’ve taken a step back and want to erase my dream. After the Universe City of Light, I’m back in worry and illusion, feeling that lots of negativity has been released into my system. Any recall to academia is regressive. Where has this come from? ‘Me’ of course! Will this cycle never end? (Already I forget the reassurance of my previous dream.) I go into my Heart and draw an image from my Book of Soul and Revelations. An image of Merlin appears, head only first, then whole body and later a staff. I feel as if I’ve been inside my Father’s world. This is inside me too and is now part of my awareness.
There is a problem and the problem is scarcity, a constant worry that tomorrow there might not be enough. In a Universe of abundance we have created a civilisation based on lack. I feel this pressure as the father of the children in my dream. I am again a no-good male, incompetent as their provider and protector. Their hungry eyes look up to mine for sustenance but there is not enough to go around. I have failed them. There is nothing I can do.
My woman is desperate also. She is worn-out and needs relief. Desperately, I take the children on my knees and hold them close, hoping to fill them with a hope I do not have. A wave of love mixed with anguish passes from me to them. Their bodies tense with fright. They are not reassured. I’ve been recalled to work in the Old School but not enough. My hours are meagre and spread out to dissipate my focus. I must take anything that I can get. I have no choice.
Old ways die hard but I have been recalled, unknowing, for a deeper revision course. This wouldn’t happen if there weren’t traces left in me to warrant it, and maybe depths of motivation or potentials left untapped. I don’t know but must be open to whatever winds still blow. The conclusion that I have no choice is anathema to all my dreams have been labouring to teach me. No wonder I feel reluctant to return again. Despite feeling chastened by even the prospect of enactment, I set out for my second-hand bookshop.
This is an established source of wisdom and inspiration in my dreams. However, on the level of a surface political reading, it also signifies the poverty-consciousness by which I now feel stricken. I know well that a majority of human beings at virtually all times have felt stricken in this way. And yet in the moment when I enact taking the children on my knees, I experience again an unfathomable depth of love behind every illusion. Our souls create such scenarios over and over to remind us how much we are in love. This is necessary when we feel unlovable within.
Forgetfully, I question my wisdom in retiring on my way to the bookshop. I am utterly desolate and helpless. I step again into my hidden, second-hand world, shameful and cramped. Old books taunt me like the constraining residua of former lives.
A tiny hallway again plays vestibule to other worlds but this time I fail to notice. My awareness is so contracted that even the little cabinets are closed. Nothing is open or flowing in me. I am deadlocked in a trauma of survival-consciousness, precipitated by old memories that need now to be redeemed.
But there is also something vital that has carried me here. This something impels me to open the tiny closed compartments, to search for something, anything, that might be of help. I find lots of books, old, used-up, uninteresting. Even the children’s section seems faded and out-of-date. Only Arthurian lore, which is mythic and therefore timeless, wins my attention. This is at least a clue.
Faithful to my dream, I continue the enactment and go through the other door. At least I retain that much conviction. It’s cramped in here also but the man I meet feels generous and charismatic. That ‘but’ is a gateway into parallel worlds, where other potentialities of consciousness can manifest and get played out. It portends an alternative disposition of energies, another way of being.
The smallness of the space is refuted by the man’s Bigness of Heart who occupies it. His helpers are positive and cheerful. Enacting, I recognise them as transforms of Robert and Tara from my previous dream. All reflect a disposition I would do well to emulate.
The man sits in a black suit playing with two robots on a little table, somehow animating them so that they move around freely. He has to go out but invites me to play with them. He promises to teach me something important about children’s tales on his return. I forget which one(s) almost immediately. In my current state of awareness, it’s hard to remember anything at all. I certainly don’t feel like playing! I ignore the young assistants who consequently disappear. This is how things go in the life of soul.
I browse around a little longer. Everything continues to look dingy and cramped. I feel trapped but don’t want to appear impolite by leaving before the old man returns. Nothing interests me and this is the feeling with which I wake. My dream has betrayed me or, perhaps, I have betrayed my dream. I didn’t play with the robots after all. I wouldn’t even associate robots with play. And then I remember how my actual children, in 3D, used to play with plastic-metallic robots called ‘transformers’. Of course!
I go back into my enactment, fired by a new spark. I re-enter the inner sanctum to be greeted enthusiastically by a very positive, radiant young woman (my Tara transform), a concentrated representation of newly emerging feminine soul potentials welcoming her father, my male ego-consciousness, back into her world of creative possibility.
I now feel a beautiful sense of solidarity and devotion about this place. I am reminded of Santa and his helpers! The proprietor manifests conspicuously as ‘Merlin,’ this time wearing a conical black hat and cloak adorned with crescent moons and stars. He even has long white hair and a beard. I have never been so glad to see a Wizard of Change. He leaves me alone without a word.
This time I remember to play. I sit at the table, take up the robots and manipulate them as I have seen my children do, as if inviting them to some kind of combative dance. (There are two, after all, the number of duality!) Nothing happens. I put them down and try thinking piously directive thoughts. Still nothing! Then I recall how Merlin in disguise had engaged them.
I focus awareness in my Heart, allowing energy to build there and rise slowly into my third eye (brow). From here I relay my Heart’s Desire to the robots. Immediately they begin to stir. After a few trials I have them walking on the table, just like Merlin. I sense that there is more to come and continue. Energy keeps rising in my Heart and starts to flow directly from there into my plastic-metallic friends, each just a few inches high.
Then they come together and collide. There is a huge, blinding explosion after which I find myself dwarfed by two huge beings of white light, armed and helmeted, somewhere between Achilles and Archangel Michael. They give me time to note this before merging into an abstract, light form which is also boundless. This Light could expand to encompass everything.
Merlin returns at that moment. We are no longer in a dingy room but on the beach, surrounded by pellucid ocean and clear sky. He shifts between being a Wizard of Change and the shopkeeper from our last chapter. He tells me that all ‘things’ are made of light and that every doorway in a children’s story represents a portal into other worlds.
I know this but do I always remember to behave as if I know it? Children can perceive magical possibilities in every situation but adults are so literally set in our ways that we usually see nothing other than a mirroring of our own preoccupations. I know this also but do I remember to behave as if I know it? This is why I must learn to ‘see’ anew.
I remember then being tightly held in my father’s lap, a moment of remorse after eruption. Rough fibres from his sweater prick my cheek. His hard hand locks my quivering knees. I am taut in the confusion of his smells. My father didn’t have the eyes of a child but craved access to that wonder through me who denied it, having internalised his fear. This is how we live in stories that keep on going wrong.
I must satisfy the hungry eyes of my dream children. I ask Merlin about these, and his assistants. He says that he’s been teaching all of them for me. And my father? Merlin tells me to remember that all illusions are reflections of One Life. I think that this means also One Love. He disappears.
I gather myself on the beach and focus, calling on my father’s ancestral line, on all the inert human tendencies that culminated in him, his childhood and resulting dispositions, everything that has since migrated into me.
I hold this awareness steadfastly in my Heart and call on the healing powers of One Love/Life to release all the pain and sorrow that has ever arisen from the seemingly unanswered prayers of hungry hearts, bellies, eyes. This takes some moments and a powerful wave of clarifying tears. Then it’s done.
I understand that a similar clearing can be undertaken for my mother’s side but not yet. Everybody in the world has a power to evoke such healing. Imagine the gifts that would be released if we each contributed our uniquely personal keys to opening the cramped lockers of scarcity consciousness by such means.
Something essential has been liberated in me by the Fire of Truth. I become as a spirit wind in consequence, unconfined and free to move between dimensions. But this is just a fleeting, preliminary glimpse of inestimable power. Further training is required before I will be capable of entering into sustained relationship with it.
I am sent for this reason to a University of Light, where I encounter two burgeoning aspects of my soul: a young man on the point of breaking free from the spell of his personal mother and a young woman who assiduously refines her power of focused consciousness. Both are parts of me, protégés of Merlin, develop in mutual harmony and reflect the maturation of fe/male babies from my earlier dreams.
Despite this, my scarcity dream evokes still engrained, limiting and unwelcome childhood patterns, the kind that sabotages my Cup Final appearance in the Game of Life. Once again I become a no-good male: timid, pessimistic and insecure. As long as these traits persist, I can never be free as the wind! Hence I am recalled to engage them anew, in a deeper and more conscious way than heretofore. This will be my testing.
Merlin then seeks to restore my sense of childhood innocence by giving me a lesson regarding the transformative power of consciousness. My masculine spirit erupts beyond duality, fired past all early robotic programming. New realms open as a result. Overwhelmed by compassion, I experience the universal reality of One Life/Love. Empowered and inspired, I clear residual negativity from my male ancestral line and intuit that my female line must follow soon after.
Mythically, I recall, Mother endows our physical substance and a primal sense of comfort. By contrast, going about a Father’s business entails finding authentic character and destiny, for which we need to move beyond the range of Mother’s spell. Such work of individuation now falls equally to women, as repressive shackles of gender polarisation begin to lift.
Indeed, having broken from an early, childish mode of naïve adjustment, we must re-turn to a mature, grown-up relationship with Mother as Goddess. This is a challenge that humanity faces collectively in our time. I didn’t see this so clearly while I was struggling to keep waking consciousness aligned with the inspiration of my nights but it would soon be disclosed symbolically by my continuing dream journey.
11. Flying
I’m in a wide open space – bright sun, vast ocean, clear sky and green earth. An aeroplane is flying overhead, driven by a father. A mounted camera protrudes from the cockpit over his head. To his right and left a son and daughter, respectively, are perched in little niches on the wings. They too have cameras in place of guns and record my activity on Earth. I think there are other cameras mounted through the body of the plane. It soars, dives and loops through many exhilarating stunts, recording all the time. At the end of my dream a house appears, spectral, reminiscent of my childhood home but larger. Someone is recording there as well. It casts a shadow that dominates the left side of my dream-space.
Having been limited, cramped and confined for so long, I am at last delivered by my dreams into ‘a wide open space’. The feeling is light and expansive. All the elements are present in a clear and balanced way. Moreover, I am not alone: an aeroplane is flying overhead. This symbolises my potential to move in another, spiritual dimension (that of Air or ‘wind’). A ‘father’ is piloting. This is all the information given by the dream. I don’t know whose father it is or why he should be involved.
There is a ‘son and daughter’ couple present also. Cameras are mounted in places where guns might have been in old-times World War fighter planes. There is a significant element of reclamation implied by this detail. The old is being renewed, as if to facilitate new seeing. It is important also that the plane moves through many different levels, often in spectacular ways.
Before enacting, I go into a meditative state while standing centred on my beach. The physical setting echoes the setting of my dream in an uncanny manner. I can even feel and sense the aeroplane above me. It strikes me as a constant presence, something that has always been around but which I have been unable to notice up to now.
I close my eyes and ‘see’ the pilot figure in the cockpit. He wears a flying jacket, goggles and a hat, all brown. The camera is mounted on an old-fashioned tripod, with legs welded to the body of the plane. I wonder how this can be stable but it certainly appears to be. It is monitoring and recording all the time, which is clearly a reflection of the pilot’s interest in my journey through the world.
I project my awareness into the role of Pilot, whose perspectives are less limited than mine. He dives and soars through different levels of consciousness. All of these are available to him and can become so, through him, to me. Somehow, he is holding and reflects these potentials for me.
The first impression I receive is of my own father – the physical man who sired me and died more than twenty years ago. His consciousness is now focused through the pilot figure. I hear the words ‘This is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased’ and experience them as beautiful acknowledgment.
In my Heart I reciprocate this blessing from an aspect of Consciousness that played the part of physical father for me in my current Earth sojourn. I marvel at the poignancy of this arrangement, whereby one who has flown high can express freely in love all that could never have been spoken below. Such are the limitations of our pre-chosen, fore-given roles, with all the pressures from our unresolved human past bearing hard upon them.
This for me is a core moment of disillusion, in which the all-pervading reality of love is once more brought home into depths of my still human, still earthed being. In this moment I become a vessel and expression of pure love, no more or less. I will this awareness into form as Earth-based John and experience a very powerful connection that brings healing to my personal past and great hope for my journey towards the future. I am reassured that my Father on this level takes a benign and constant interest in my life.
This proves to be the opening of a mystery, for other dimensions of Fatherhood also stand behind my pilot figure. The words acclaiming a beloved son are also spoken by an archetypal father, representing the generative aspect of masculine spiritual power, a power that comes to life in me on hearing them. This is another level of blessing and transmission. It allows me to experience imaginatively a reconfiguring of male-masculine power/creativity in myself.
This has little to do with a bestowal of outstanding gifts as such. On the one hand, it entails a stripping away of distorting influences that have accumulated over the course of a difficult, disabling past. It also brings a sense of empowerment and renewed foundation, of commissioning and activation. The power raised is integral and centred. It moves only along essential lines and thus poses no threat to others also moving in fulfilment of their proper course.
Finally, the pilot is a reflection of my Self on the highest level at which it may be said ‘I and the Father are One.’ This is not the vain proclamation of an inflated ego. Rather it expresses a mystical awareness of Unity beyond individuation from within the flowing stream of the masculine principle of Life. ‘Father’ is an engendering, creative power, loving and protecting beyond all the forms it has assumed on the way to realising its essence and potentials in the world.
This ‘Father’ beyond form, the masculine polarity of Consciousness, is somehow present in the cockpit also, blessing the archetypal ‘Son’ who labours to comprehend this Mystery on Earth. The camera expresses a Creator’s interest in Creation. It monitors all that has been put into motion the better to fulfil its highest intent. I represent a moment of Consciousness in form, moving in service towards this end.
The son and daughter represent potentials of this movement also, masculine and feminine streams within my soul that may also be preparing to manifest on Earth, whether through my currently embodied form or otherwise. Even the plane represents a movement in the Sky of Consciousness, forever creating new perspectives on itself.
Consciousness puts awareness in me as I put it in the plane, so that all may be reminded of One/Source. My Father’s House is hard to comprehend, as are details of its many mansions. Words fail at this point and so my dream unfolds in feeling pictures. What appears next is my Mother’s House. Ghostly, shimmering, larger than life, it hovers as if caught by the Wind, blowing on a veil between dimensions. I stand centred, still and meditative, tuning in to the window of my mother’s upstairs flat.
She stands there grimly monitoring a play that unfolds in the street below. This monitoring has a strong element of attachment, for my mother is still engaged by dramas of our world, unable to soar or dive beyond what terms of her embodiment allow. Even in the midst of this engagement, she too is concerned for her son’s well-being. There is great love behind the illusion of her separateness also.
I call her into my Heart and from there travel through a gate into the Void for renewal, praying that she might see – if her soul is willing – through the eyes of a child made clean by Source. Then I imagine all her ancestors trailing behind me on the beach. Long histories of wounding and forgetting stream into my tender, open heart. We head back from here through the portal of Creation to a Void of pure potential where all can be made whole and released.
I hold this awareness until I sense that its promise has been fulfilled. My Mother’s House no longer hovers on a threshold. I carry her in my Heart and she sees that no evil has befallen me.
My next dream comes two nights later:
I am on a spiritual journey, a pilgrimage, as if to Santiago de Compostella, for example, but have the impression that I am going the other way. Other pilgrims move on the road before me. It feels important that I should travel as fast as possible, and also that I shouldn’t be recognised. There is still quite a way to go. I am carrying something heavy, like a steel bar stuck in a lump of concrete at one end.
I come to a university/hospital where I know I have to stop. I’m preceded by a group of women, including Una C. I have to drop off something here. The place looks familiar. I’ve given classes and meditations here before. Una and friends turn into the lecture hall I’m heading for. I carry a file on my left shoulder so she won’t see my face.
The hall becomes a large amphitheatre, which is already pretty full. I go up to the right hand side. There’s a male student I know sitting there, beside John Lennon. It seems someone famous is going to speak. I’m afraid that if I’m recognised they might think it’s me!
I pass a package to a student in the centre and leave another with the man high on the right for my C. Apparently she’s following. John Lennon winks enthusiastically, saying ‘Good on yer mate’.
Some people notice me as I’m leaving. I tell them I’ve got a journey to complete but will be back. I sense a strong energetic transmission coming to me from a lineage that includes Muhammad Ali, Sonny Liston and James J. Braddock.
I feel satisfied I’ve done the right thing. I’ll soon have my rendezvous with C.
My awareness in this dream is very particular: it is a spiritual journey that I’m on. My energies are specifically focused, as if on reaching Santiago de Compostella, but it’s very clear that I’m travelling in the opposite direction, away from whatever destination such journeys normally target. I see other pilgrims on the road before me. Their manner is more casual and their pace slacker. I know that I am in a hurry. I must get where I’m going to as quickly as possible.
It also feels important that I shouldn’t be recognised. The reason for this is that it would entail risks of delay. It could also generate premature expectations in others and perhaps in me. I still have a lot of travelling to do and am not ready yet to attempt whatever might eventually be asked of me.
I want this journey to be over because I have to carry something heavy for its duration, represented by the steel bar embedded in a lump of concrete at one end. I don’t have the option of simply putting this down. It’s a male symbol, obviously – an image of a dissociated phallus. My task is to bring this back to Source for healing, to the place where all journeys begin. This is why I move in the opposite direction to other pilgrims.
When this journey is complete, I will be able to come forward again and do whatever I must do in this world. For now, however, I must focus on healing a male wound which I carry for the express purpose of having it healed.
I come to a university/hospital, a place of healing and higher learning where I know I have to stop. There is a group of women ahead, including Una C, who knows me. Even though I have things to leave off here, I must still avoid being recognised. I am heading for a particular lecture hall. Una and her friends go there also. I hide my face by carrying a file on my left shoulder.
In addition to serving my purpose of concealment, this tells me that I’m also carrying lots of information on the feminine side of my soul history but I need not to pay attention to this now. This is a time for healing the male side of my being, which is why I head up to the right.
Una C reflects for me a female elder. She is rich in the silver (hair) of intuition. Una means (feminine) Unity or One. C evokes my feminine soul. Una C evokes the unity of my feminine soul, holding its own until it’s time for the next phase of our progressive marriage. I must first prepare for this by securing further healing for my male aspect. It is thus fitting that Una and her companions turn to the left.
I have come to this place because I am charged with dropping something off. The place is familiar, a dreamscape Universe City of Light, where healing occurs as well as education – education into greater wholeness, one might say. I’m still not sure what I’m to leave, for whom or why but, as in Dublin City of Light, my steps are guided and it’s known in my Heart where I must go.
The lecture hall becomes an amphitheatre: an arena where spectacles unfold. It is very big and already very full. Males are mostly massed on the right and females on the left, with notable mixing in the centre (Heart). I perceive the amphitheatre as a mirror of my soul, still waiting for essential parts to return (to consciousness).
The ‘someone famous’ who is due to speak is me! That’s another reason why I have been feeling unprepared and anxious to avoid recognition. I must first return to Source and have my dissociated phallus repaired. ‘Phallus’ in the alienated context of an Empire State has come to mean something oppressive and illusory. Duly healed and integrated, however, it denotes an authentic creative-generative power of the masculine principle of life.
I must experience its healing in me before I can openly address all parts of my soul and, thereafter, whosever might be interested. I need to experience wholeness in myself before I can evoke it in others. This is why an inner address must be primary. All parts of my soul are eager to hear from this John aspect details of his current Earth walk.
Some lessons have already been learned, and these I can leave with appropriate recipients. I send one package through to a student sitting near the centre, a male but in the company of women. Since my soul has composed this dream, I am confident that the part he represents will know what to do.
It’s the same for a man high on the right: the package I give him is specifically for C but can only be delivered at a particular time, when she reaches the right point in her journey. I don’t know any more than this. John Lennon apparently does because when I drop off the package he winks broadly, saying ‘Good on yer.’
The morning after I had this dream, in a bid to clarify the role John Lennon was playing for me, I put on a CD of his best-known songs. The first up was ‘Imagine’: ‘People say I’m a dreamer/but I’m not the only one …’ The next songs clinch it. John Lennon appears in my dream to transmit a message from my soul: that I must admit and express vulnerability in order to heal my dissociated phallus. Warrior energies are available to protect me through this but allowing vulnerability is the key.
I must experience first and then express. This is why I cannot talk for now. There are other parts that must first return to consciousness. I feel justified in my response, therefore, when leaving. Some people call me over but I say that I can’t stop. I have a journey to complete. I also say that I will be back. My soul thus takes the opportunity to commit me to return. I will come back to unite with all these elements of a Greater Soul. Then I can be another kind of Teacher.
As I leave, I feel a huge wave of energy carry me on. It comes from a male-warrior lineage in my soul history, represented by Muhammad Ali, Sonny Liston and James J. Braddock. John-consciousness knows little about boxing but my soul knew that I would recognise these figures as former heavyweight champions of the world, each one a man of great courage in his own way. I will need to be brave.
Everything feels alright as I’m leaving. I know that I’ll be meeting up again with C in due time. Flying, my Heart remembers, we learn where we fly to.
Having brought healing to my male ancestral line, I receive an empowering transmission from the male (Father/God) principle of life. This gives me renewed faith in authentic male creativity and power. But before this can be expressed appropriately in the world, it needs to be brought again into harmony with the female (Mother/Goddess) principle. Hence the enactment of my first dream ends with a healing of my maternal line. This opens the way for further development.
My next dream advises that I’m on a specifically spiritual journey back to Source, with the aim of healing a long-standing dissociation of the phallus as malformed by institutional patriarchy. This will be accomplished by bringing it back into right relationship with Mother/Goddess. I need to heal my soul-relationship with my personal mother absolutely in order to serve as a clear vessel on this journey.
I carry a dissociated phallus as a symbolic burden on the way. I feel an authentic male warrior energy rising to assist me (lineage of the boxers). It’s not clear why I might need to be courageous but it evidently has to do with admitting vulnerability.
Vulnerable Achilles, Earth-bound and prone to battle frenzy, must take up Michael’s Sword of Light. This is a Christian prototype of Arthur’s Excalibur, which has deeper roots in Celtic and other traditions.
As Merlin’s protégé, Arthur knows all things are made of Light and thus can draw his Sword of Light from stone. Originally a gift of the Goddess, this must be used in service to her but not for personal gain. This too involves rehabilitation of the phallus
In the meantime, all parts of my extended soul continue gathering in a lecture room-cum-amphitheatre at the University of Light, males to the right, females to the left, waiting for ‘John’ to bring his pattern to completion.
12. ReVisioning
Incredibly, it seemed, after such a sustained period of dream activity, I didn’t recall any dreams for the next week. This proved to be an intense period of writing, enacting and integrating anything that still stood in the way of my efforts to achieve Unity in my soul. It was clear that nothing further would happen until it was time for my mooted rendezvous with C. Then, finally, the following dream came through:
C and I are taking a group of children (3-4 years old) to the Botanical Gardens. We’re teaching them all kinds of things along the way. There’s a great sense of fun and adventure about this.
C and I are re-united. Male and female are back together after a period of necessary insulation during which, for example, the full gravity of the priestess’ violation was admitted back into my waking consciousness and its impact considerably eased by the return (via enactment) of Cassie and her companions. This renewed association has brought with it new potentials, represented by the children – boys and girls who are at an age when the spontaneity of our ‘inner children’ tends to get lost.
We have been charged with taking these children to Dublin’s Botanical Gardens. This evokes the mythological symbol of the Garden (Eden), a metaphor for heavenly harmony on Earth. We must educate our young in the ways of the Universe City, in which the order of human existence accords perfectly with that of the Cosmos. There is great energy and excitement around the prospect of rejuvenating our local human culture in this way. Everything is waiting now to happen in my soul.
More substantial tidings came the following night in the form of three dreams, each of which arrived as stages of one wave. We will consider them separately to begin:
I am sitting in my lakeshore house looking out. There is a wire fence between me and the waterline, surrounded by a long bed of reeds. I see through these to the lake, where a man is intentionally sinking his car. I think that he must surely drown, given the impact of water pressure, but when the car is half-immersed he opens the passenger door and gets out on the left side. It looks as if he never had any doubts about this.
I am in a house beside water, looking out. This means that I am contemplating my spiritual life, which is certainly true of these times: all that is beautifully reflected on the surface and all that remains unfathomed in its depths. There is a borderland, marked by the wire fence and reed bed. I see past these to a scene in which a man deliberately sinks his car with himself inside. The response of my dream ego, rational rather than paranoid, is that this man will surely be irretrievably immersed and drown.
Translating the dream’s central metaphor, I must now – this very day – surrender myself into soul waters of the deep Unconscious so that my spirit can be reborn into the next phase of its evolution. For this rebirth to occur, I must enter in consciousness the watery womb of Mother/Goddess. The dream figure does better than escape. He is released on the left to a new level of intuitive awareness. This is what my soul now asks of me.
Typically, ego-consciousness fears annihilation in such circumstances. It would be more accurate to say, as we have seen repeatedly, that the influence of un-integrated elements in our souls, stuck in survival mode, spills over into consciousness in such moments, causing us to feel afraid. The way to overcome this is for consciousness to be prepared to receive the representations of such parts, contain their panic, and hold them until they are ready to move back into flow.
I have had lots of experience at doing this, especially in recent times. Thus my soul can now ask me as John-consciousness to yield my ‘self’ (the psychological vehicle for my personal existence) back into the body of the Mother as water. I am asked to relinquish all control, becoming again like a foetus prior to birth, trusting that She will deliver me safely into whatever my new form is to be.
Symbolically, the dream asks that ego-I as dissociated phallus must set aside my historically conditioned posture of vigilance and control. I must suffer myself to become weak, helpless and small, as we all have been in the Mother’s arms. For males charged to individuate and go ruggedly to our far edge, it can be difficult to return to Centre in such a radical, trust-demanding way.
Nevertheless, this is what my dream says I must do in fulfilment of my mission to return again to Source, the place from which all journeys begin and where healing for my dissociated phallus can be found. Forewarned, I make a meditation while enacting the immersion phase of my dream.
I go to the beach, kneel before the ocean and centre myself, gathering all of my scattered parts into a unity of focus and intent. Then I enter a state in which I consciously surrender all that I am into the arms of the Goddess, becoming again as an infant in her watery embrace.
Persisting, I am drawn back to the moment of my conception in this lifetime and then back of that again to the moment of my soul’s conception, the moment when the seed of this ‘I’ first arose from the matrix of pure potential that is the Void and formless form of pure (Mother) Consciousness.
I allow myself to slump on to the sand in a gesture of utter surrender and remain, foetus-like, until the process is accomplished. Around me strong waves issue crashing reminders that ‘I’ am surrounded by the watery presence of my Mother’s body. So re-minded, I am released to a new phase.
I come out of the meditation recollecting Consciousness, All That Is and was before ‘I’ became conscious of myself as separate. I feel cleansed in my senses and my soul, made new. I see all around with new eyes my Mother’s body, old parameters of familiarity having been washed clean through my ego-I’s still binding sleep.
This is Death by Water, a feminine complement to entering the Fire of Truth. Note that, by contrast with our early Fire scenario, my Goddess/Water dream told me that I was ready for this transformation, and so it proved.
I have carried the phallus as symbolic of dissociated male sexuality and ego-consciousness back to Source, bringing it again into right relationship with the Goddess and potentially, all women, her daughters. This is a representative journey. All men have the potential to undertake it and women also, in so far as they too might need re-orientation following millennia of adjusting to distorted and disempowering norms.
My next dream has a very different atmosphere:
Then I see the interior of a spaceship, a vast flying saucer affair, judging by its shape and dimensions. A man and woman sit on separate throne-like chairs at centre, focused and prepared. On either side of them, in front, are two groups of children, boys and girls, also composed and sitting neatly in rows. The craft takes off without any friction.
The spaceship is as described, without complicated dials or instruments. I see it from the front, directly through to its interior. In fact, it doesn’t seem to have an ‘outside.’ Moreover, my awareness is inseparable from all that I behold. My consciousness is equally in the man, woman, children and seemingly material forms I imagine them to be sitting on. The man and woman look perfectly balanced, in themselves and in relation to each other. The developing potentials represented by the children are also perfectly arrayed. Everything is in right order.
In a flash, I ‘get’ it! There is no-thing to be enacted here; nothing to integrate or reconcile. This dream-vision presents a clear inner picture of my mer-ka-ba, the purest manifestation of my Light Body and template for my spirit’s existence in form. The interior is beautifully articulated as a mythic family tableau which, I intuit, reflects my soul’s internal order, as informed by all my current work of sacred marrying.
This dream pictures the essential being, the soul-form that ‘I’ – as a distinguishable part of supreme, all-encompassing I AM Consciousness – most truly am. It presents an ideal which is now achievable in my life. I am challenged to hold this level of poise and awareness at all times.
No fuel, dials, instruments or computers are required to power this ‘ship’ (which is a metaphor in any case). It operates on pure loving intent, just as Merlin did in his demonstration with the robots. I have lost my car and been given quite another vehicle in its place. I can and must maintain this level of awareness.
My final dream that night was very different again:
I am in the high-rise, space-age home of Martha and Sam, my in-law siblings through Jo (former partner). She is there also, together with my children as they were at the time. We are in a living room. Sam rests in an armchair against the wall. We are at the far end of the room, our backs to a window. It is dark outside. There is a warm feeling in the apartment. Sam jokes about the prospect of staging a Greek drama with us as the characters. He assigns classic roles to Jo and the children and asks me which I’d like to play. Despite being in a living room, I’m washing up at a sink on the left. I’m considering my response when Martha appears with a middle-aged Black Woman (of power) I haven’t met before. As introductions are made, I’m suddenly able to see out to a side-view of our apartment block, illuminated by the light of moon and stars, despite the presence of electricity all around.
This dream takes me back twelve years, as marked by my children’s ages. They, Jo and I were on holiday with Martha and Sam. I remember this holiday as a time of great joy and excitement but it led to a sequence of events which had a devastating impact on me and left me in need of great healing.
The sequence culminated in an experience of wounding and betrayal. I record this for your information, not to complain. Sometimes we must be betrayed into our Passion and can only be betrayed by ones to whom we have entrusted our love. This implies a limitation of love. My Heart, therefore, needed breaking beyond limits. All was fore-given. Realising this became the start of my conscious life.
I felt particularly injured at the time by a conspiracy between ‘sisters.’ This awakened in me a deep sense of mistrust and bewilderment in relation to women and the feminine, already prepared by early issues with my personal mother. It feels highly significant that this biographically crucial wounding should surface now at this late stage as a vehicle for whatever the deep message of my current dream might prove to be.
We are in the living room, the Heart of the home/apartment. It’s dark out but there’s a warm feeling inside. It can be so for me at this time, irrespective of ‘outer’ conditions. The warm atmosphere is reflected by the generous humour of Sam’s attitude towards us. It reminds me of the atmosphere on holiday many years ago. Enacting, I realise that it’s possible to retrieve due, unfreezing warmth from that time and go forward unsullied while integrating every lesson still being made available. I resolve to do this.
Although or perhaps because we are in the Heart-room, I am at a sink on the left, washing. This is a metaphor for clearing my relationship with the feminine (left) side of my being. Martha and Jo, of course, mirror the condition of my own inner feminine at the time. I describe this as having been defensive, insecure and over-accommodating, again for your information.
Sam’s game involves assigning mythic roles to all who were involved in the past drama. This allows the dream to signal recognition that we are all engaged in playing such mutually reflective roles for each other at all times. I haven’t yet determined what role I’ll play when Martha enters with a Black Woman I haven’t met before.
I don’t yet know what my new role in the Game of Life will be. That still remains subject to my Dreaming. When Martha enters, the warm atmosphere is unaffected, thus marking another stage of my healing in relation to the Sacred Feminine. Then comes the most difficult test of all, potentially, the introduction of a Black woman. I sense at once that she carries great power and feel very glad to be meeting her.
This entails an acknowledgment by my soul of even deeper healing within me. Black is the colour of fear. For me to encounter a Black Woman of power in my dream without feeling afraid, signals a final deliverance from any residual sense of insecurity or mistrust I might still have been unconsciously harbouring as a result of past experiences.
In fact, I am positively delighted by her Black Power because this tells me that some major feminine potential, formerly inaccessible, is now poised for reactivation in my soul consciousness. Indeed, in the instant of ‘recognising’ this woman of power as such, I see beyond the confines of the apartment (that which is isolated, set apart). It’s as if I am enabled by her presence, or return.
This return is made possible as a result of prior acknowledgments (reflected in the dream but established well before it) that Jo and Martha also mirror previously lost parts of my Self. Had I not accepted these before, the Black Woman, a part I hadn’t previously known about, who carries more powerful and deeply hidden potentials, couldn’t have entered the picture. If I hadn’t healed relatively superficial splits with known ‘white’ women before, I wouldn’t now be in a position to do so with unknown ‘black’ ones.
This is why Martha needs to make the introduction in her home. It evokes a previously alienated part of my feminine consciousness to which warmth and heart have been restored. I am (and need to be) at home again in the company of women, especially when they represent aspects of my self that must be integrated if a balanced, harmonious soul life is to be maintained, regardless of whatever dramas we have been obliged to share for educational purposes in the past.
In any case, as I integrate the Black Woman, I can see beyond apart-ment. I see whole. A potential of intuitive (feminine) seeing is restored, or can be. I see a side-view of the whole block, with little pockets of electricity advertising different living spaces, but also a Whole Living Space, gloriously framed by the light of the moon and stars. The italicised pun also suggests potential beyond accomplishment.
The Black Woman, far beyond her surface psychological significance for me, also symbolises the repressed female-feminine powers of ‘savage’ indigenous peoples. I associate her primarily with aboriginal cultures of Africa, Asia and Australia. I sense this as I finally invite her to merge with me after a beautifully moving enactment in which we learn to communicate again through primordial movement and song.
Being once more in the active presence of this dimension of my soul, acknowledging it as my own, allows me to see beyond the apart-ment of whatever high-rise Empire State I’m in and experience it anew with respect to the luminous female-feminine intelligence of darkness, night and its order of moon and stars.
We are always attending Universe City, it transpires, even when our bartering of distractions prevents us from seeing this. The Mother can and will not be disowned. We must always grow up and find our way back to right relationship with her. This is the essence of all myth and the substance of our Father’s business.
When I finally meet again with C as the image of my feminine soul, a new level of sacred marriage has been attained. This is symbolised by a new generation of inner children, representing new possibilities for consciousness. How fitting it is that we should be taking them to the Garden, a place of origins and harmony.
This theme is elaborated in my next dream, which indicates that it is now time for me to go back to Source, there to undergo a process of renewal and rebirth. I do as I am bidden in 3D. The experience leaves me feeling whole and connected in ways I have never known before. My ego/phallus is no longer dissociated. A new sense of harmony is reflected in the perfect symmetry of my Light Body as projected in my next dream.
Then, regressive though it might appear, I am recalled to the sphere of gender relations. However, there is an overtly mythic dimension to this summons, as signalled by Sam’s Greek drama. Also, just as I needed to heal my relationship with my mother in order to approach the Mother, I have also needed to clear negative traces of my relationships with actual women in order to embrace this Black Goddess/Woman of Power as Her embodiment. She symbolises all that has been disowned as Shadow and reviled as Other through millennia of unbalanced patriarchy; everything, that serves to make men afraid and disposed to control the Feminine as dark, hysterical, irrational etc.
Dancing with Her brings Consciousness down from my Light Body, back to the realms of physicality and Earth. Its potential couldn’t have been actualised, nor my dissociation truly overcome had I not been prepared. (At the time I mistook this peak exposure for accomplishment, which was wildly premature. Now, ordering these words for publication twenty years on, I know why I also needed to sojourn in Deep Forest for that long, preparing an Adventure that continues to unfold.)
13. One
My next dreams came in a flurry, one directly after the other, the following night. In all of them, Merlin is represented by G, the man who facilitated the workshop I attended back in our first dream chapter, The Game of Life. I have now almost come full circle. For expediency, the dream segments are presented one at a time.
C and I are in circle with others in a cave or dark space like a sweat lodge. G is there also. Jack Charlton opens a small door and hands me a bottle of water. I understand that he is very kind to children.
We, the fe/male aspects of my soul, sit together in a circle of seekers a long time ago and always. We are in a dark space that may be a cave or sweat lodge. This space is sacred, ancient and timeless. It represents the womb of the Goddess, to which we come over and over to die and be reborn. G supplies the face of Merlin in this dream. He also represents an ideal of male spirituality awake in service to Creation. This presupposes a marriage of God and Goddess potentials within.
Jack Charlton represents another kind of potential. A former soccer player and man-ager, he is big, gruff, plain-spoken, authoritative and inspirational. He is also the Guardian-Protector of our circle, a warrior who looks after developing souls (children) during vulnerable periods in their growth. I must be as both of these figures, spiritually and practically effective, helping to maintain a lineage of high awareness over time.
My awareness then shifts into the following scenario:
G is walking down a mountain road towards us. He is joined by a man wearing an orange shirt. C says joyfully ‘There’s Paul!’
Merlin descends from a mountain to meet us. This means that he carries teachings from a higher level of consciousness. C recognises the man in an orange shirt and hails him welcomingly as Paul, her former husband. My feminine soul, conditioned by the experiences of many lifetimes, is ready now and needs to heal all wounds and issues to do with sexuality (orange shirt: sacral chakra). It is time for a decisive reconciliation of all sundered parts. Masculine aspects of my soul which may have played the part of offender in the past – the twin brothers of Campfire, for example – are also waiting to come home, overseen by Merlin.
As quickly again, the scene shifts to a hotel venue where a course has just finished and the group dispersed:
We’re in a room now with G. A class has just finished. He looks at a broken cup and asks us where its handle is. We don’t know. Then he looks at a dingy, battered pillow. He takes it through a glass door for clearing. I see him working in the Garden and realise ‘I can do that!’
We’re alone in a room that might have been a cave with Merlin. He asks about the broken cup and where its handle is. We say that we don’t know. Enacting, I realise that we together are the ‘Cup’ and the answer to his question. ‘Cup’ in Merlin’s usage refers to the Grail, a whole (holy) cup which symbolises the creative integrity of the Divine Feminine. This cannot be realised except in a context of sacred marriage, inner and outer. There is no other way its potential can be ‘handled’ or fulfilled.
Then Merlin turns his attention to a battered pillow: the inanimate scapegoat of therapeutic culture. This absorbs the negative energies of angry, frustrated, resentful, wounded people. It carries a lot. We have forgotten how to turn such energies into Gold but Merlin hasn’t.
He takes the pillow out into the Garden (as metaphor for the realisation of divine order on Earth) and works magically, channelling spiritual energies, to clarify and transmute all that the pillow represents. This clarifies the Garden also, making it more beautiful and whole.
I watch Merlin perform his Holy Office and think ‘I can do that.’ I too can serve as a spiritual warrior-protector of Earth. Merlin reflects a potential for me that I need at this time to embrace.
G comes back in and starts talking about music. He tells us how some woman who was a scholar turned to producing music herself. He has an old vinyl record from which he’s able to produce sounds using a walkman. I hear ancient music playing. G explains that it’s ‘the Weavers.’
Merlin returns from clarifying the Garden to tell us about music and how a woman who used to be a scholar switched to making music herself. I know intuitively on hearing these words that she ‘remembered’. Her studies evoked in her a living memory of that towards which she had always been drawn in love. Merlin is not relaying this to pass the time. The scholar’s gender tells me that I must open my feminine powers of intuition to follow her example. I too can bring music to life in my soul.
Merlin then produces an old ‘record.’ This is both a large vinyl disc, quaintly packaged in a 50’s-style sleeve and an encrypted version of some knowing he wishes to transmit. He takes a ‘walkman’ CD player and somehow connects it to the record, still in its sleeve. Energy from the ‘walkman’ animates the record and I hear the sounds of an ancient, timeless music emanating from the Web of Creation all around me.
Merlin explains that the creators of this music are the Weavers. Entering its spirit as its spirit enters me, I know at once the vibration of those ageless beings who weave existence from a pool of pure potential, embellishing it with new forms over and over. I listen closely so that the living memory of my own weave might be evoked, the better to spin it out from myself.
It strikes me that C and I are always together in this sequence. The role of Sacred Marriage in my soul’s emerging Unity was much less apparent when this dreaming of its journey began. It became even clearer in my final dream, which arrived the next day:
A woman is sleeping. I touch her carefully, with reverence. She continues sleeping but is very much alive.
It is early morning as I doze. C is sleeping. I touch her carefully, with reverence. It is her birthday, a very special one. Today her spirit will be reborn. As without, so within: my living has finally caught up with my dreams. My female reflection lives the dream of my feminine soul and - as she awakens - the two, Life and Dream, I and Thou, all twos, flow into One.
I knew as soon as I acknowledged this dream that it would be my last of the sequencw. The energy wave by which I had been sustained for more than two months was at an end. Dreams would continue, of course, as the author’s interest lingers after a book, but the end of a cycle has been reached. Reflecting, I perceive that my Inner Teacher has come forth and that my New Bride who is still sleeping will soon awake. The dream must live now. Our souls will be dreamt alive.
Epilogue
Three days later I appear on a TV game show, an elaborate affair with lots of gimmicks and props. I make ready for a walk-through after the previous contestant has finished. This is amazing! Two full-scale armies are deployed with robotic precision in combat formations, from the era of Spartans versus Persians. All I need do is order them into action. There’s a huge studio set-up with a live audience and a battle-field set out on a plain fringed by distant mountains. There are various options I can activate by pressing buttons on a panel. I even win a prize for walking on!
I am dismayed. After weeks of processing and integration I have been placed once more in a conflict situation, with two contending armies ready to fight it out in the old, dualistic human way. I can choose arbitrarily who is to represent Dark and who Light, but wait a minute! This scenario has obviously been engineered and who but a Magician could oversee such a richly contrived illusion? I remember an Old Man with a Big Heart advising me to play, putting robot adversaries to their proper work of transformation.
I let Imagining continue the dream. Taking my place in a pit before the audience, I close my eyes and order the spectacle to unfold. The Persian infantry divisions, massed in black with pointed helmets advance, weapons readied, marching in fearful unison. The Spartans, scarlet tunics covered by pale armour, step out to meet them. An ominous, rhythmic thunder fills the air as the armies draw nearer and then accelerate to sprint the final hundred metres before colliding pell-mell in the centre of the plain. A huge cloud of dust is thrown up as more and more are drawn into the storm.
Like two great waves the armies merge. A mighty wind whips up and the vast dust cloud spirals into an ascending vortex. The dust gets thicker and thicker, insulating hue and cry until suddenly it clears. There is no sign of the armies. In their place, emerging from the cloud, a single figure stands, a radiant being of light, fifty five feet tall, towering high above the plain. I salute Metatron, the Breath of God, Archangel and perfected wo-man, male and female parts in true accord. The shattered remnants of a Dragon’s Egg lie strewn in fading disarray around her feet.
My eyes open to the sound of rapturous applause. The first thing I see is the game-show hostess, a blonde beauty who presents me with a trophy, a silver cup decked out in flowing ribbons of blue and red. Kissing me, she winks that old man wink and whispers ‘I’ll meet you in the Source at One.’ I nod imperceptibly, my eyes screaming ‘Yes, yes, yes, yes. Yes!’
A Woman’s Dreaming
Patterns we exhibit in our personal lives also reflect in outer relationships. As we integrate our dreams’ transformative potential our outer circumstances also transform. We attract people and situations that mirror our changing dispositions and are capable of helping us develop further. Ego-consciousness is typically unaware of both inner and outer patterns, much less correspondences between them. This too can change.
It changed to a marked extent as I shared with C throughout the dreaming and writing of this book, so much so that in the final weeks her own dreams began to reveal a complementary momentum. She agreed to share a sample of these dreams to show 1) how closely inter-woven the inner lives of partners in a sacred marriage process become, 2) how core dream issues look from a woman’s point of view, and 3) how these may be worked according to the enactment process.
This first dream came the day after I had written and C had read an account of my ‘Campfire’ dream, by which she was profoundly disturbed:
A group of people is invited to take part in a design/developmental art workshop. It seems hard to get accepted for this. There is a young black man in the group who is sponsored by a younger woman. He is very happy to have been admitted. We are guided through a dark, shabby building to the top floor of a new house which is very light, with lots of windows. We sit at small tables in groups and get advice on tasks. Then the atmosphere changes and competitiveness arises between participants.
The scene changes to an Arab bazaar with lots of noise and people. I’ve got a stand there where I present my art. Mine is a big crystal, clear quartz in the shape of a phallus. Not many people come around. I have a feeling that other participants in my class are more successful. The young black man is chatting nearby with a male teacher who is obviously enjoying the conversation and not interested in coming over to look at my work.
I cover my crystal with a light cloth (almost transparent) because I feel embarrassed and frustrated and because I have a feeling that time is up and nobody will come over any more. I feel disappointed.
The group represents diverse aspects of C’s soul. The dream tells that a significant developmental opportunity (workshop) is available at this time, to do with her creativity (art). She has had to do lots of work to reach this point, because it’s hard to get accepted. She feels it is hard for her to be accepted. This is an impression she acquired early in life. We will see later how and to what effect.
The black man represents a newly emerging masculine potential in her. We know this because he is young and happy to be admitted (into her developing consciousness). He is looked after by a younger woman. This suggests that a fresh, emerging aspect of C’s feminine soul recognises the significance of his appearing now and ‘sponsors’ it. Sub-conscious fears, however, conditioned by past experiences, dispose her to ‘darken’ him or make him ‘black’. She is nervous about the challenge that he poses.
The ‘workshop’ guides C through the dark, shabby building of her old self-image to a new, higher-level sense of embodied selfhood, one that affords lots of light and offers many new perspectives (windows). At first, participants work together at small tables with guidance from their instructors. Then a competitive atmosphere arises and the cooperative attitude of C’s soul parts is sabotaged. What could be responsible for this? Perhaps the change of scene will say.
She is now in an Arab bazaar, crowded and noisy, with lots of people showing things and competing for attention. Her course-mates are involved in this clamour so, given that what happens next is negative, we may infer that her subconscious is imposing an old pattern on a wave of positive revelation that her soul is attempting to promote by means of the dream.
I ask what the term ‘Arab’ means to her. The answer, a male society with lots of secrecy and intrigue behind the scenes, suggests a complicated relationship between male power and the unveiling of her creativity as a woman. She needs to take a stand and present her art/design, irrespective of male dominance and intrigue. She needs to show who she is, her ‘art’, and what she’s for, her ‘design.
We may take it, since there is an issue here, that something in her past has made this hard. To achieve her goal she needs to come into right relationship with the ‘phallus’ – an upright quartz crystal that stands for assertive-expressive, masculine aspects of her creativity. (C owns such a crystal, which serves as a model for the crystal wand by which I felt damaged after my Empire State processing.) There is potential for a positive relationship but her experience in the dream is negative and shaped by old experiences.
Not many people come around and nobody pays attention to this primary manifestation of her creativity. She senses that others’ work is being more favourably received and notes especially a conversation between the young black man and one of her male teachers. She desperately wants this teacher to come and praise her work but he continues to ignore both it and her.
I say ‘continues’ because elements of conditioned expectation in C’s psyche project this scenario and because the male teacher figures negatively in her dream. He represents the continuing influence, now subconscious, of her father’s early indifference and devaluation of all expressions of his daughter’s spontaneity and ‘art’. The effect this has upon her in the dream resembles the impact it had in her actual life, causing her to hide her creativity, to become embarrassed at the prospect of showing her gifts and frustrated by her failure to do so.
This core imprint of her father’s early influence has induced a subconscious expectation that nobody will be interested in her creativity and that it’s too late anyway (time up). And yet she feels ‘disappointed’ because she hasn’t kept the promise of her life. Even though the dream’s primary revelation shows that more parts of her soul are moving towards wholeness and expression, old subconscious beliefs still act to nullify this. Her father’s lingering shadow contaminates by association even new promise carried by the young black man (they talk, avoiding her).
Nevertheless, there is hope. The cloth which is used for her cover-up is light. It is almost transparent, so that essential form remains visible beneath. All the inner work C has undertaken has had this effect and her soul, through this dream, still calls for further transformation. We discuss these issues to ensure consensus throughout.
C’s relationship with the masculine principle of life has been fundamentally shaped by the impact of a critical, neglectful father and a compliant, submissive mother. This complements my formation by a judgmental, all-controlling mother and a retiring but sometimes eruptive father. We are now being asked relatively late in our lives, when necessary experience has been accumulated, to sort these matters out and come again into right fe-male relationship within and between ourselves.
If this is correct, and if dreams are potent allies in the process, we should expect to see evidence of progression. It comes in C’s next dream the following night:
Ursula, Margaret and I are a team of social workers. We get a call about a Sardinian teenage boy that we should meet at a special occasion, a kind of festival. There’s a rivalry going on with another team, of which I get to know the woman later, but there’s also a man in it. We go to this festival and see the boy performing in some athletic events. When leaving the place we encounter the other team. The woman asks us whether we have read an article in a Sardinian agricultural quarterly and we say no. She wonders about this and explains to me that it’s no problem to order and read these journals in any library. Then we go home and exchange views about the case and Sardinian lifestyle. I remember the beautiful wines they have with home-made bread, salty cheese and dark honey. Ursula seems to be very fond of that too. Only Margaret doesn’t seem to be very happy about the whole situation and is in a quite tense mood. She has connections to Italy and speaks excellent Italian.
The three women form a unit and must work together to secure the welfare of the Sardinian teenager. To achieve this, they must withstand the challenge of a rival team – a man and a woman – i.e. C’s parents, who are also vying for custody of her masculine, (expressive) potentials, as represented by the Sardinian boy. Note that his emergence entails a ‘lightening’ of the young black as a symbol of her ‘inner man.’
The dream suggests that C’s masculine potentials can and need to be drawn out from the shadows of early parental formation at this time. Her soul organises a festival for the purpose. Moreover, Sardinia represents ‘a familiar heart-place’ for her. It is vivid, sunny and wild; a mixed culture (Spanish, Italian and Arabic), passionate and full of a Southern spirit that blends the ancient and modern in ways that are beautiful and to her liking. This is very different from the regime her parents represent.
Real-life Margaret is ‘sociable, communicative, intelligent and big-hearted.’ Ursula complements this by being ‘very knowledgeable, organised and creative’. C must acknowledge and integrate all these potentials as her own to meet the challenge. Together all three women attend the festival and see the boy. A new masculine potential in C, formerly eclipsed by the impact of her father’s stance, takes the stage of consciousness when the boy performs at the event. Then another team, representing her parents’ influence, appears.
The woman, a transform of C’s mother, asks if the three have read a journal article which, it is implied, would help to substantiate their case for taking custody of the boy. They haven’t read it, of course, despite their combined expertise and the fact that this ostensibly irrelevant agricultural quarterly is readily available. You may recognise the soft bite of a veiled, gently undermining criticism which tends to disqualify C from her goal of incorporating the boy.
She loves everything he represents: a vibrant, earthy lifestyle filled with colour and excitement that go way beyond her parents’ reactive conservatism. Her soul remains split, however: Ursula is happy but big-hearted Margaret is not, even though she has strong connections to Mediterranean culture. There is still a tie, some guilt or lingering attachment that prevents direct incorporation of the boy’s Sardinian ebullience.
Note that the emphasis here is on the role of C’s mother, following treatment in the previous dream of her father’s impact. This is further evidence of design behind her dreaming. C has power to reveal this design through her ‘art.’ She needs to be more like the Sardinian boy and perform uninhibitedly at ‘festivals.’
The fact that I was pre-occupied by my own enactments at this time meant that we couldn’t process C’s dreams fully but we did discuss them daily. This had a definite opening effect, limited in that it stopped short of energetic integration but substantial in that it prepared her waking consciousness to absorb and accommodate better to further messages from her deep soul.
We skip forward a week now to a dream that came on her birthday. This was also the day of the last dream reported in my sequence, where all becomes One. As noted, I awoke on that day with a strong impression that it would mark a hugely significant leap in C’s return to wholeness. Here is her corresponding dream:
I’m in a flat spacious building that looks like a camp with lots of ground around it and a wire fence. I seem to be studying (clothes) design. A couple lives with me. He demands the sum of a thousand euros. I am not sure whether my deposit has been deducted from this amount. Then he enquires about another cheque that was due to come in. I direct him to an envelope and he finds it. Afterwards he goes to the bathroom but doesn’t close the door. I look out of the window and see a wonderful silver-white horse outside.
Then I’m in a pub/restaurant. A middle-aged woman is in charge there. She seems to be very nice. Our group is sitting at a table discussing events when a beautiful young woman comes in. She is completely naked. We are a bit surprised but not shocked. She talks to the woman and then disappears. Then a man comes in that we obviously know. We make a joke about how he has just missed something important and he goes over to the bar to get information from the woman.
Things have improved in that the building (image of C’s embodied self) is spacious with lots of ground but it is also flat and limiting (wire fence). She remains subject to her parents’ influence, as internalised long before (a couple lives with me). However, her soul still exhorts her to study her own design and fashion her own destiny (clothes).
The man wants a thousand euro. He is a representation of C’s ‘inner man’, not yet a clear image of pure masculine potential but a demanding figure based on the imprint of her actual father who assumes she owes him something. C questions this assumption for the first time to the extent of wondering whether money she has already paid (deposit) has been deducted. He asks about another payment that was due, again expecting her to know. She does and he finds it. She has a sense then that her ‘debt’ is paid.
The man disappears from her dream into the bathroom but leaves the door open. This suggests fuzzy boundaries and unfinished business: a scenario where ‘closure’ has not yet been properly achieved. She looks out the window in another direction and sees a ‘wonderful’ silver-white horse in the distance. This feels like some kind of sign or deliverance but she is unable to pursue it, either in the dream or afterwards.
Knowing C’s background, I see a huge soul-pattern striving to be declared. Its story is tragic but common to many women. I note essential details with consent in the hope that this will assist others to retrieve a sense of their integral power. Here are the key considerations:
C ‘owed’ her father from the start because she wasn’t born a boy. This is not a reflection of his singular chauvinism but of a culture which systematically degrades the feminine. He was critical, numbed and unable to show love. Because of his own tragic wounding and insecurities, he was also conformist, intolerant and bad-tempered. C’s mother policed her vigilantly to appease him. Her spontaneity was therefore constantly checked and harshly judged. An only child, she grew up feeling unloved and unlovable.
She craved male affection, never having received it in her early years and learned to feel indebted to men who would bestow it in a context of ‘adult’ relationship. Thus she learned inadvertently to exchange sex for holding by a man. She thought it was ‘the price of admission.’ This is not unusual and may often be pragmatically correct. The extremity of C’s deprivation, however, meant that – from the depths of her conditioned being – she couldn’t imagine things being any other way. Thus unwitting men became surrogate providers of a ‘love’ her father was unable to offer. She always felt she gave more than she got.
Popular culture obscures such nuances by promoting sexual activity as proof that people are grown-up. However, we repeat subconscious patterns in sexual relationships until something happens to bring them to awareness and we are somehow empowered to challenge them. This has been a core aspect of the journey I have shared with C so far. My past has equipped me to recognise old patterns. We have worked to transform ours since we met.
Previously, by default, she repeated patterns in relationship with men that were laid down through her relationship with the first man in her life. She attracted partners who were content to enact these patterns due to her beauty and their un-comprehended wounding. Neither she nor they appreciated sufficiently the extent of early deformations. Hence they contested ego-stories around emotional dramas that were never adequately understood. Scenes that were painfully familiar got rehashed again and again.
This spell begins to be broken in C’s last dream when she questions the amount she is said to owe. Her initiative challenges the internalised impact of her father’s influence. It takes power back from the teacher in her crystal phallus dream and breaks the pattern of her relationship with various ‘boyfriends’ with whom she acted the part of grown-up accomplice.
‘Boyfriend’ is an ironically apt title for adult males who haven’t matured emotionally. Such men are content apparently to possess beautiful women, even in their own eyes. Missing the power of Goddess is the cost of their deception and self-flattery. This is precisely the revenge exacted by Priestess on the Fire twins back in mythological time: that they could never take what she declined to make available. She closed her soul to them but also on herself and with this access to mysteries she was rightly privy to and never forgot. Deep soul wounds don’t allow selective closure. There is a cost to woman for her deception also. She doubts the treasure she was born to carry in the world.
And so it proved for C. She committed available energies to playing the role of grown-up accomplice to boy-men but never offered gifts of her deep soul. Patriarchal abuse through a deep past, masked by precipitating echoes in this lifetime, caused her to close in denial of neglected treasure. Mistrusting spontaneity, she ceded control of her sexual response to Fire twins, submitting earnestly to fantasies of domination while holding fast to that which must never be surrendered, or risked. The boyfriends never noticed, beyond tiring of incomplete conquest. C, distraught, refocused her courage to attract another campfire love.
The tragedy of her condition was that she could never manage better until she chose to reopen her soul. This happened inadvertently at Abydos, an ancient Egyptian temple where she actually remembered feeling whole. I first ‘saw’ her on that occasion. It has fallen to us since to build awareness and seek treasure at the Heart of this old Play.
When C went to enact her dream, the first thing she noted was a sense of sexual entanglement with the father figure. It is not generally correct to see such reflections as pointing towards actual abuse perpetrated by fathers on their daughters. A more common pattern is that fathers, by virtue of our own wounding and forgetting, are unable to impart to daughters a sense of loving support that can later serve as an empowering foundation from which to develop relationships marked by confidence and awareness rather than doubts and desperation.
A vicious cycle of cultural transmission needs to be broken before this situation can improve. The un-cleared wounds of parents are visited on their children. Fathers do give daughters a primary sense of what must be done to warrant male approval. C’s boyfriends were echoes of her father’s influence, mirrors of a disposition she still bears. Despite ‘adult’ attempts to experience her compliance as erotic, she engaged in sex as a child might perform to merit love. Her soul was always in deeply tacit recoil, gripped by unconscious memories of violation.
Such memories evoke the archetypal wounding of Priestess, where another kind of innocence is breached. This woman was accustomed to opening in sacramental awareness so that men might know the gift of Goddess’ unconditional love. Fire twins, doubting their worthiness, usurped her generosity. But the Goddess won’t be forced so Priestess’ soul contracted, precluding expression of divine feminine erotic power. This pattern has been repeated ever since. Its traces are written on my soul and C’s too. We reflect it for each other at this time of crucial healing. Deep memories underpin elements of sexual hangover implicit in her dream.
Thus, when the male figure is consigned to a bathroom – place of purification and elimination – the door is left open. On checking, she finds that the toilet lid has also been left raised. Enacting, she closes both door and lid. This implies symbolic curtailment of residual traces from a past that no longer needs to dominate her present and are no longer repressive because issues raised are now being processed consciously.
This frees her to address the wonderful silver-white horse. It too represents a returning soul potential. It approaches readily although C, in her previously compromised state, had been unable ever to imagine this. She steps out of the flat building where the couple lives to meet the horse as it draws near. She calls it within arm’s length and sings to it, a previously inconceivable freedom. The horse nuzzles her. She embraces and in due course absorbs it.
This horse represents C’s emotional body, including her sexuality. It signals a return of instinctual powers that had been crushed by effects of early checking and invalidation. These are super-imposed on archetypal memories of female soul violation. By integrating the horse C transcends many pre-emptive, under-valuing impressions she has entertained in this lifetime. This clears a way for even deeper soul returns.
The pub/restaurant is a social space where people/soul parts interact. C describes the middle-aged woman in charge (previously dominant male influence is now receding) as a communicative mother-figure who is also ‘the heart of the place.’ Her role is to bring healing to C’s feminine side, beyond the imprints of her actual mother. C’s soul parts sit together as the beautiful young woman enters naked. This tells us that she feels no shame and enjoys the full power of her natural integrity.
She mirrors a potential that C can still retrieve. The dream says that it is possible now, by settling her account with the predominantly negative male figures of earlier dreams, to move beyond shame and insecurity developed in response to circumstances of her upbringing and soul history. To do this, she must first acknowledge the beautiful naked young woman as a mirror of her returning potential. She must then absorb both the image and the energies it heralds.
The mother-figure is a source of inspiration, which is why the naked beauty talks to her. C must integrate both. This is undertaken through enactment. The first part, work with the mother-figure, involves awakening an archetypal mother energy which we can all access once we have cleared negative imprints associated with our personal mothers. C absorbs the archetypal mother-energy of the woman in charge of the pub/restaurant. She then has confidence to address the image of her own true (naked) beauty.
Having internalised the substance of the archetypal mother, she allows herself to experience the beauty, grace, spontaneity and unselfconscious sexual power of her naked reflection, whose youth signifies freshness and a potential that had been undeveloped but is now coming to the fore. She is free to admit and express in full innocence the gifts of her animal being, from wonderful horse to inviolate nakedness.
The soul company is not shocked by this return. The nude is, after all, an integral part of the ensemble, albeit estranged. I witness a moment of joy, triumph and relief as C incorporates into awareness the misplaced energies of her un-deformed powers of beauty, spontaneity and sexual grace. Once this potential has been noted in her dream, a new masculine potential is called up from her soul to join the assembled company, portending a new wave of sacred marriage in C. He too is recognised and accepts instruction from the mother-figure. He thus represents a new kind of masculine potential.
The dominant theme through the next wave of C’s unfolding dream-life is a gradual healing/lightening of male figures representing her inner masculine aspect. This trend culminates in the last dream we will look at here. Potentially, it brings the healing of C’s ‘inner man’ to a climax. It came two weeks after her naked woman integration:
I enter a room with a large window looking out to the ocean and a big ramp where car-ferries come in. It’s busy out there. There’s a table on the right side of the room, in front of the window. John sits with his back to the window facing a young woman sitting opposite him. It’s Kate, his daughter. They are having breakfast. The atmosphere in the room is tense. Nobody speaks. I’m going to join them and open a small cupboard to get a plate and cup. I’m astonished because it seems much smaller than I’d expected. Then I open a drawer in the base section to get cutlery. Everything I expected seems to have changed here also. Then I become aware of the tension in the room again. I step over and start to tell the man that I’m fed up with this atmosphere and really want to get out. I seem to hold him responsible for that. Before answering me he asks the young woman to leave the room.
I am the John in question and Kate is my daughter. Thus C beholds a situation in which a father faces (confronts) his daughter. The atmosphere is tense. Nobody speaks. Father-figure J plays a negative role and thus features as a disguised reflection of the negative influence of C’s actual father.
This is an intriguing scenario because I represent, on the one hand, a partner C has drawn to reflect her inner masculine potential as she moves through huge amounts of soul-work. On the other hand, her fearful subconscious is still disposed to darken even this reflection by projecting on to it residual traces of her father’s influence. Core parts, moulded in her father’s attitude, still resist her aspirations to go free.
Like Kate, she is striving to look past the dominant image of a father who sits with his back to the light, ignorant of a window on to greater life through which his daughter longs to pass. His presence is still interposed, in the way. He sits between her and the promise of a new day (breakfast). This scenario obtains up to the present.
I clarify matters by asking C to note her associations for me and the J-figure in her dream. She answers ‘sophisticated, sweet, competent, loving’ and ‘earnest, depressed, immobile, tight’ respectively. The difference between these lists indicates the extent of her subconscious negative projections within the dream. She also describes Kate as ‘young, vivid, beautiful and does what she wants’. These are qualities which C really wants to manifest qualitatively herself.
The dream says she can do so now, granted a certain poetic license. Despite being overtly beautiful, for example, C has never been able to affirm beauty as an inner quality (since expressions of her inner being were over-ruled from infancy). Rather it has been a surface asset utilised to secure male affection, always with a subconscious expectation that this will be withdrawn if truth or spontaneity is excessively displayed. C has never been young in this respect. I have noted how biographical formation recaps core issues of soul history for resolution in the present life. C’s case affords a very sharp example.
It promises much that she should be moved in dreaming to display her crystal wand in an Arab bazaar, despite her father-teacher’s inattention. He too was damaged by a phallic State. At seventeen, for example, he was drafted into war, a Nazi conscript who learned that leaving home is dangerous. I have seen a photo of him newly uniformed, terrified and alone, trying to look resolute and brave. Constantly erect, he has yet to shed the copious tears his Fatherland forbade.
It is as moving an image as I have ever seen. Under different circumstances, I know, this man might have been the poet of a thousand brighter dreams. It was the same for my father in his way. And C’s compliant mother, over-run in puberty by Soviet occupiers, vengeful and war-crazed, is it strange that she should learn to pacify male anger? (Or that my mother, formed by a lethal patriarchy, should seek to dominate a ‘phallus’ that she thought she owned?) The psycho-politics of rape has many facets. It is high time now to shed them all.
C looks beyond her father-figure through a large window that gives on to an ocean port from which giant ferries carry travellers to distant lands. This is the first time I recall the ocean appearing in C’s dreams, despite the fact that we have lived beside one for six months. It signals a major breakthrough, even though a dark figure blocks her view, turned away from light and life outside. His presence makes this room in her soul feel tense, heavy and compressed.
This dream returns C to an age when she was symbolically making ready to leave (her parents’) home in order to find her own Way (Home). In the end this must be an inner journey which we usually get to make only after many ‘delays.’ C, like most women, never moved beyond her father through the window to the ocean. Rather she fled by the front door, making many physical journeys while always carrying the weight of his legacy inside her.
Her present dream arrests this tendency. It’s time now to confront the man and say she’s had enough. This time she really wants to get out. But what can it mean that she still holds ‘him’ responsible for her confinement when he is also a facet of herself? Integration is needed here, not confrontation in the sense of conflict. If another acted-out fight were all that ensued, the imminent potentials of the young woman would indeed be made to leave the room – forced to vacate a space of alternative consciousness which the dream has helped to create. C agrees to enact this dream fully to realise its promise.
We go to the ocean to prepare. She begins by focusing, allowing extraneous thoughts to pass away, bringing consciousness into her dream role as she approaches a room where Kate and her father wait by the window. She allows the tense atmosphere of this room to enter consciousness and fill it. She is not overwhelmed since Consciousness is vaster than the ocean and untrammelled.
She opens the cupboard and the drawer, again allowing impressions that arise to enter fully into consciousness. When this expansion has been witnessed and contained, she arranges everything as she wants it to be. Then she turns again to tensions in the room, allowing them to rise once more and then dissolve in the light of present Awareness. Conscious C has vast awareness, incomparably more than her beleaguered dream ego.
Ignoring the father, she walks directly to the beautiful vivid young woman who does what she wants. They regard one another. Recognition flares, and then love. Their embrace is mutual and deep. Then, when it feels right, C invites the Kate figure to come Home. They merge and C walks large circles to consolidate this substantial soul return.
Again when she feels ready, she comes back to her place by the table, opposite a father who remains seated still. She allows the tension between them to rise up and enter the immensity of consciousness, to fill it and then be dissolved. Next she regards directly those parts of her that remain trapped in the role of her earnest, depressed, tight, immobile father.
When she is ready she extends her hands slowly towards him, motivated by all the love she is feeling in her heart. Slowly he rises from his chair. Carefully, they embrace. Then gently, very gently, she calls this externalised reflection of her father’s imprint home to the full consciousness of her being. When this is done, I ask what became of the J figure through her transformation. C looks at me bemusedly and says ‘There was nobody there but my father’. I gather that he moved through different ages before finding a place of forgiveness in his daughter’s heart. She passes through the window then, down to the ocean port. I can see her still, waiting for a ferry to take her to some other shore.
C moved away physically from her father but has carried his imprint through life. We cannot run from such figures. In the end, we must go through them. There is a test involved here. The blocking figure, of which C’s father is an example, is known in mythology as a threshold guardian. S/he serves to ensure that we do not pass beyond given points until we are ready to encounter all that awaits us on the other side. The threshold guardian usually protects a gateway but can sometimes also be the gate. In C’s case, a test is passed when her love exceeds her fear in approaching. Such breakthroughs cannot happen prematurely. Our guardians delay us until the time is right.
When it is, we recognise projections of our unease that we visit on the world and withdraw them. Only then can we relate to events as they unfold and know peace. A similar scenario arose for me when I had to make final peace with my mother before surrendering to Goddess by the ocean. I needed to go through her to reach the Mother. C needs to do the same thing with respect to the masculine principle. Just as I have had to heal my dissociated phallus, she is now asked to heal her corresponding female wound.
In hindsight, our trajectory is clear. There is a generic pattern of deep unconscious wounding between women and men. This reflects on the level of human existence an imbalance between the primary yin-yang, feminine-masculine poles of duality. These are meant to function in a mode of harmonious co-operation. Human self-consciousness creates the possibility of doing otherwise. We tend towards this option since we incarnate as either male or female and thus have only half the picture available to us in particular lifetimes. Sacred marriage is needed to achieve correct balance.
The archetypal male wound is separation from the inner feminine world of Heart, Feeling, Mother and Goddess Belonging. The archetypal female wound stems from violations perpetrated by lost men. This wounding cuts so deep that women also have become dissociated from the innermost truth of their Heart and Feeling life. This is what happened to Priestess and to whole generations who came after. It is an old, old pattern that has evidently arisen between C and me for healing now.
The process has unfolded via a conscious practice of sacred loving described in Appendix On Sacred Marriage and Human Renewal. Sacred loving dissolves layers of repression. My heart began to melt in loving as this happened and my phallus became the opposite of dissociated. C, meanwhile, began experiencing flashback scenes of rape and degradation. This was for her the start of a deep remembering which demanded that she open in ever greater trust precisely at a time her soul began releasing unconscious memories that had formerly held it in recoil. This continues towards an end evoked by ‘Sacred Marriage.’
Postscript
Both Father-Mother dreams mentioned before, C’s and mine, ended with us standing on thresholds. This is how things must always seem to hero/ines. However many horizons we clear, there are always others calling us to go farther. This is in the nature of the adventure of existence with respect to the miracle of Being. The Ocean of Possibility is forever behind, beyond and transcendent of our efforts to embrace it.
I leave you with two last dream reflections which illustrate this point from female and male points of view, respectively. These dreams came to C and me on the same morning, a few days after our enactment of her John-the-Father dream. They don’t signal any end but rather the opening of a new level in our marrying of converging destinies. This convergence is what is of greatest interest here. These dreams marked the closing of this extended process for us both. I will share C’s first:
I have been given an award of some kind. Later there is a ceremony in which I am given a gold apron. John is there also and gets one too.
Dreams never congratulate but sometimes they must recognise achievement. C’s soul does so in this dream. The ceremony clarifies the nature of this achievement and its recognition. Following her ‘father’ dream, I replace him as the reflection of her current inner masculine disposition and here image one half of her inner sacred (masculine-feminine) marrying process. This would be her final contribution to our 2006 dream advent.
Our gold aprons are tiny and worn over the genitals, signifying a kind of erotic alchemy that transmutes the base red (chakra) of sexual passion into the gold of spiritual healing and creation. This symbolism also plays over the fig leaves with which Eve and Adam, our first parents, sought to hide their inexplicably sexual shame. There is no place for shame in sacred marriage, only glory. C’s dream sets her on the way to this wedding.
Her award involves no outer journeying. A Woman of Spirit, well-travelled, she always returns to Centre in her Heart, although illusion sometimes obscures essential pattern. My masculine edginess lacks this simplicity but also always returns, by desire and aspiration, to it. Here is my dream of the same hour:
We’re on a bus in Malta, travelling to an ancient Goddess site. The bus reverses along a narrow shelf that’s lapped by brilliantly clear water. We alight barefoot beside a huge rocky mound and wait until a stream of tourists has passed through. We then step over the threshold and make our way to a cave-like space in the heart of the rock. I carry two swords in my extended arms. One is Eastern and curved, the other Western and straight. I kneel in the centre of the cave before a primal Mother Goddess made of stone. I lay my swords before her, at the base of a pedestal on which she rests.
There is all and nothing to say about this classic male journey of return except to note that my (inner) Soul Woman now accompanies me as I reverse an outer trajectory back to the Sacred Centre where Primal Mother gives birth to all form. I/we walk barefoot over Holy Ground. My swords represent the dualistic tendencies of ‘male’ individuating consciousness (East-West, Saracen-Crusader, masculine-feminine, Cain-Abel…).
Malta, in addition to being a site of ancient Goddess sanctuary and witness to many East-West confrontations, is actually in me. Returning to this Universal Source, I am reminded that All is One and surrender my illusion swords to Maya as the Mother of All (Manifestation). I must return to this Point of Creation again and again, as to the generative Womb of Goddess in my Heart.
Enacting, it transpires that C kneels by my side.
I draw a single Sword of Light out from the stone.
We look upon the Mother and are Blessed.
Dream Weaving
There are two primary aspects of Soul, let us say ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’. The feminine aspect links into the soul of Earth, the Constant and What Is. Women connect better with this due to conditioning and intimate participation in the cyclical rhythms of Nature. The masculine aspect of Soul pushes beyond what is constant, given and fixed into what is new, progressive and unknown. Men are more drawn to this by virtue of conditioning and a prevalence of testosterone-fuelled aggression over hormonally regulated nurturance behaviour.
This is how properly complementary energies of holding centre and expanding horizons are negotiated into human reality. It is important that each person should find her/his own balance in the volatile swirl of their interaction. There is scope for individual variation here but for the sake of collective well-being, we need to hold a sustainable equilibrium between the two tendencies – i.e. one should never dominate the other.
To realise their best, every woman needs to connect with her highest masculine potential and every man with his highest feminine potential. All soul wounds standing in the way of both must be cleared before our highest complementary potentials can be realised in the mode of sacred marriage. My dreams have pointed consistently towards this ideal. Of course they are articulated from a male-masculine perspective. Appendix B offers a female-feminine complement.
My ‘Book of Dreams’ is complete and has an integrity I don’t wish to disturb. However, there is one aspect of its emergence that needs to be examined more. This involves clarifying an essential pattern that governs the whole as such, over and above its parts considered as individual units. A review will help us identify essential themes and show that there is a clear pattern behind the sequence as a whole.
We have looked at all my dreams and examined details of many enactments. You have seen how quickly my unfolding happened once the process got under way. I would like to stress, in case it isn’t already clear, that if the resolutions achieved by my enactments had been forced, my story would not have continued to open as it did. Every wave of processing induced significant transformation in me. This is what made successive openings possible. The process has a guaranteed authenticity and validity. It simply wouldn’t have worked had it been contrived.
Moreover, the unfolding process was highly ordered. At all stages, it was as if my soul knew what I needed to be given next in what quantity and form. This implies an exquisite over-arching intelligence. It also implies that an essential track had been laid out in advance and that I needed to wait until I attained sufficient insight and maturity to follow it ‘home’. This is what I was alluding to in earlier, seemingly vague references to the destiny or ‘Dreaming’ of a life. Again, although we have looked at my journey as an example, I stress that there is nothing special about me in this respect. There is a unique but comparable path waiting to open for everyone who cares to follow suit.
The underlying dynamic of my unfolding is already apparent: healing some aspect of my maleness calls forth an aspect of my feminine soul for complementary healing. A new level of inner marriage is then achieved, of which a new potential (child) is born. At the same time, old forms ‘die’ so that new ones can be born. Both cycles repeat through my sequence.
The dreams start with me in my early teens, a period when new energies are beginning to rise and identity is called into question. Doubts and uncertainties follow unless culture steps in with guidance and a satisfying story as to what life is really about. Our culture is not well informed in this respect, so most of us don’t even make it to our finals, much less graduate. This means that we remain crippled by disabling emotional patterns laid down in infancy and childhood.
Usually it will have been the same for our parents before us. They too are often not versed in mysteries that underpin our ostensibly obvious world. Damaged and incomplete themselves, they damage and ‘delay’ us in various ways. My early dreams provide lots of information concerning how this pattern got played out in my case and to what effect.
In fact they tell me more than almost thirty years of theoretical and experiential work had clarified in all respects. They tell me about my perfectionism, my critical tendencies and my shame: how these came about and what role they have continued until recently to play. I finally came to break their stranglehold in Apache.
Although the patterns described there were primarily relayed by my parents, they also characterise modern Western culture as a whole. We revile what is savage and primitive about ourselves, everything that might allow us to connect wisely to the life of Earth, Nature, our bodies, our Passion, the excitement of being alive.
We grow up in minefields of invidious cultural judgment. This creates insecurity even in ‘winners.’ It also creates many ‘losers’ and very few with an awareness to follow their authentic dreams. The culture which emerges from this is alienated and superficial: a network of illusions built around a central illusion that everyone else is as comfortable and in charge as we think we must appear.
In the midst of this charade, we have lost the sense of what our Hearts are for, and thus what we are for, beyond surviving. Even our most respected cultural critics cannot say because they have no savage ground to stand on. Until our hearts connect into the Heart of Earth, as happens for me in Apache, our intellectual activities must remain dissociated, offering ultimately reflections on themselves.
This is the condition of our Empire State. It is false, sterile, aggressive and disintegrating. And yet new potentials are forever struggling to be born in the midst of its debris. They are represented in my dreams by various babies who appear, always in response to further closing of the gap between masculine and feminine polarities of my being.
A culture which is cut off from the inner life of Heart and Feeling must be excessively masculine and therefore unbalanced. It is also therefore repressive. There is a history to this, of course, but we don’t need to review it critically. Our dreams are always seeking to guide us towards more robust and sustainable levels of harmony and balance.
All we need do is pay attention to them and respond with discernment. This is the proper role of rational intelligence: to serve discerningly the effective implementation of our visions of Truth, not dismiss them prematurely. We are taught to criticise our dreams (as absurd, impractical and so on) rather than pursue them. This is the first bias we must overcome in learning to connect with our souls.
An entrenched critical posture reflects a survival-oriented tendency of ego-consciousness. It inhibits spontaneity and trust. Discernment is important but critique alone can never be a source of positive vision. It cannot tell us what we’re for. Not knowing what we’re for, we build relationships and project futures by negotiating what we like, dislike and are against. This allows our unknown Truth to remain hidden.
Unbalanced criticism establishes a dismal cultural matrix. It fosters damaged, incomplete people who lack a sense of purpose and vision. We can’t have purpose or vision if we’ve forgotten how to dream. Criticism stifles dreaming and the pursuit of dreams. Ironically, given the cultural role it’s supposed to play, it drives us towards conformity rather than a celebration and fulfilment of uniqueness.
Also, every negative judgment we make against others represents the deflection outwards of a judgment that we are constantly making against ourselves, subconsciously, having internalised this tendency in childhood. We criticise in others what we most fear and repudiate in ourselves. If we were at peace in ourselves we would have no inner need to criticise.
I am not saying that ideas and institutions are beyond criticism. Like everything in conscious evolution, they warrant constant revaluing. It’s unhealthy for us, however, to be compulsively disposed to find fault. It means we aren’t at peace and don’t live in accord with our dreams. We neglect them because internalised critical tendencies have convinced us that they are trivial and we unworthy. Thus we feel aimless and untrue.
Our culture has institutionalised this primary source of our distress, ensuring its transmission across generations, together with a perpetual acting out of disowned grief, interpersonally and internationally. It’s time to break this cycle. We need to acknowledge our loss, insecurity and shame. Then we can remember our true dreaming.
This may seem very abstract but the cultural background it describes illuminates the strong subconscious focus on conformity and perfectionism that cripples development in my early dreams. These are representative. You will almost certainly remember being criticised as a child. You probably won’t remember being taught to follow your dreams. This is not a cultural accident. There is a pattern to these things.
Not knowing what we are for, we are far more likely to function in boxes devised by priests, bankers, politicians, advertisers etc., virtually any authority except our own. Not remembering our dreams, we continue telling ourselves subconsciously what we were once told (about being no-good fe/males, for example). This keeps us bound to old ties of conformity and limitation.
The energy of my dreams, once I start connecting with it, builds towards a massive break-out that opens on to progressively greater, subtler and more exciting vistas the longer I stay with it. This is the essential story that becomes apparent across my sequence – the story of a self-liberating soul breaking through various layers of imposed, internalised and limiting definitions, tending always to become more fully alive.
Greater freedom comes at every stage of this break-out. We are guided towards whatever form such freedom is meant to take for us. Your soul knows your destiny and will reveal steps towards its attainment through your dreams. I will provide directions on how to initiate this process later. For now, I offer further reflections on my journey that will alert you to likely themes and stages of your own.
My dreams, like everybody’s, try to correct fe/male imbalance and lift the repression which causes it. From the moment I free my Apaches I start moving into greater life. Connecting with these energies gives me renewed access to formerly stifled instinctual powers which are needed to fulfil the Passion of my life. They also help me to break beyond various frameworks of politeness and temerity by which I had been bound.
Above all, they restore me to a living sense of my connectedness with Earth and motions of the Universe around her. I feel responsive to and moved by natural cycles. This last part is a feminine grace, signalled by the dream-birth of my amphibious baby girl and the promise of a new synthesis in my feminine soul.
Renewal of this sensibility makes it impossible for me to live under the control of a phallic Empire State (metaphor for rigid centralised authority), so I escape. This prompts a new level of sacred marriage and the birth of a new masculine potential, represented by a baby boy who speaks a different kind of language, Heartful and poetic. These births impel me towards a ‘death,’ the first of many in the unfolding pattern of my sequence. First to go is a lingering commitment to the imprint of my university formation. Having gathered vestigial parts, I step out to an ocean vista and Goddess power again becomes visible to me.
This leads to another level of marriage and a further stepping out. I am asked to jettison all baggage and merge with C, the image of my feminine soul, as we pass through a circular portal to a new level of awareness. There I am inspired to heal my relationship with the Sacred Feminine through a meditative practice of conscious touch. I am also reminded that I must use my male powers to protect the delicate emergence of feminine potentials so awakened against Old School regimentation. Thus I protect my ‘daughter’ against the tirade of an uptight principal who is also myself.
Having integrated both, my next trial is to ‘die’ without fear. I must lose my head in order to live wholly from my Heart. This energy of whole-hearted expression wins my uniformed ‘Soviet’ aspects back to love. Dreams don’t rest on laurels however. They build from them. ‘Resurrection’ posits a foundation for new departures. Its first journey goes straight to the heart of fe/male wounding, evoked by the rape of a priestess. I need my whole Heart awareness to comprehend this.
Doing so inspires me to ‘see’ why ancient knowing needs to be rekindled in living women as embodiments of the Sacred Feminine in our time and why delicate, reverential exploration is required of males to promote this. I am shown a sequence of male and female lives to bolster my faith in the prospect of fe/male harmonisation over time. I am then placed in a hall/birth canal tainted by conditioned imprints. C and I are there together, attempting to revive our God/dess connection. Themes of sacred marriage and sexual healing are again prominent.
We are then projected into a classic re/birth scenario, away from our cramped hall into a luxury temple-hotel adorned with sacred scripts. This is a reflection of my true soul dimensions. It is promptly consolidated by the emergence of a new male consciousness (baby) which asks to be returned to the Mother. This consciousness, born of a marriage beyond rape, voices an aspiration that is urgent for all humans in our time.
The baby matures quickly and has a galvanising impact on the lingering children (under-developed or under-expressed elements) of my psyche. I am advised to connect my male warrior power with Source in order to safeguard their emergence. I then transform the restrictive influences of my actual mother, integrate an advance wave of children (new potential), take up an envelope which holds the secret of realising this and surrender the diamond of my Dreaming to the wisdom of an Ocean. I am never permitted to hang on.
Then I am returned to a university environment where the female intelligence of Good Night has supplanted daytime rationality. This leads to a vision of the Andes and of greater, truer life. It also prepares me for another educational journey in ‘School Trip’, which sees me return again to my university dreamscape. I must retrieve old ‘head’ tapes that are still playing there. I do so and put my ‘head’ under care of my Heart. I then free a roomful of children representing passion and spontaneity from their place of confinement in my soul. Liberating energies they represent empowers me finally to take responsibility for conducting my own journey through life. I can now drive the Red Bus of my Passion as I must.
My dreams become less psychological and more spiritual from this point. For example, I receive instruction about transcending Black/White dualities and witness a post-War scenario where all parties move in a flowing stream of unitary consciousness. My next dream explicitly flags that my journey is to take a spiritual turn and that my rational (masculine) intelligence must trust my feminine soul to support this.
Then I find myself stuck in a high-rise prison, with Liverpool playing outside. I don’t know how to get out until I see that I have ‘died’ yet again into a new level of awareness. I need no longer be affected by old, limiting assumptions. Thus I walk through the walls of my prison, away from the childish thing of soccer for a last time. My Dragon’s Egg has many layers, however, and I need more instruction to get really free. What will eventually become the vision of a Universe City of Light begins when I am moved to throw a golden dart at the red door of my next Passion.
Stepping through another portal, I pass into a City of Light and Revelations, the Dublin of my innocence and delight. There I find a magic bookshop and in it the magical book of my soul’s journey. This tells me that I really am getting on track. Later I pass through another red door, from department store to temple. I encounter a swelling wave of softly resurgent feminine soul energy and feel a deep bodily knowing, from within, of what must be done to heal my Priestess wound. This is pure intuitive knowing. I have never experienced anything so clearly before.
Cassie’s emergence is like a draught of rejuvenating air. It gives me new depth, breadth and perspective. I feel I can live more easily as I sense her power spread through waiting ranks of modern women, angry and confused. I am amazed by the quality of stillness it brings to awareness. This replenishes me, imparting a gift beyond channelling or the receipt of particular information. It feels like an alternative mode of being and supports my maleness rather than diminishing it. I see that Cassie’s power is threatening only to insecurities already in place. This brings healing to both Priestess and the Campfire twins inside me.
Nevertheless, once Merlin gets me in a solicitor’s office all is seemingly set to nought. I can’t even see that his women are playing with me. But tricksters disarm and then feed you if you’re still responsive. The energy that manifests as Merrill Lynne feeds me well. I have begun to register spiritual instruction in my dreams. This qualifies me for a return to the land of dying and rebirth: my Grand Mother’s hall and Father’s House. There is a party to celebrate the reconfiguring of my soul community. When all have gathered, a new emergence is declared. I respond enthusiastically and step into my Fire of Truth, sensing that I have really started to play in this Game of Life. A ‘failure’ recorded near the beginning of my journey is corrected at last.
I become as the Wind of Spirit and find my way to a University of Light, where I engage newly developing masculine-feminine potentials. These are well-matched and nearing adulthood. Another ‘final’ is imminent. Surely now it is time for a Holy Wind to carry me wherever I must go?
Not quite: numbed by repercussions of survival consciousness, I ignore Merlin’s invitation to play with ‘robots.’ I am too preoccupied and too anxious to play. And yet when I perceive a pun which is key to the dream’s construction – that the robots are ‘transformers’ – I go back and two waves that I first related to in terms of dualistic contention become One. The explosion of this gigantic light form gives me a preliminary sense of what it might be like to really break beyond my egg. Merlin teaches me to ‘see’ with a child’s eye invisible possibilities that are hidden in situations presented by waking life, just as they have been hidden in my recent dreams. I pray for the healing of my father’s lineage through time.
In response, ‘Flying’ showers blessings from a father-pilot upon me. I experience a healing of male creative-generative power in my Self. This is what the phallus was intended to evoke. Even now the old is in process of being renewed, just as cameras of careful attention replace guns of pre-emptive aggression in World War ‘fighter’ planes. This grace of my Father’s blessing, many-levelled, inspires me to a deep healing of imprints from my mother’s line.
This clears the way for a return to Goddess/Source. The purpose of my return to the Mother is to heal phallic wounding. This includes wounds the phallus has both inflicted and received. I think this has been the whole purpose of my journey and can’t engage my feminine soul until I make further progress with it. I sense that my journey has become a representative one, since it has archetypal qualities which exceed the scale of my personal story as publicly lived.
Completion of this assignment promises a unification of my soul around a John-consciousness that is currently engaged on its Earth walk. When this has been achieved I can speak at the University of Light. Perhaps I will even know what to say! I appreciate that John Lennon, a poet-dreamer, and three heavyweight boxing champions offer me their strength for what is to come. Integrating vulnerability and courage will be crucial for whatever my reborn self is to be. I undertake to return, although I don’t know when.
I also don’t know when I am to meet again with C, my feminine reflection. This is a part of the journey that my male consciousness seems obliged to complete alone. And so it proved. Despite universal REMs, I didn’t register a dream for the next week, this after two months of intensely sustained dreaming. I spent the time writing, enacting and realising in consciousness all that I have described above.
I should also note that my relationship with C was fraught over this period, which covered the final integration of everything from ‘Campfire’ to ‘Flying’. I could never have grasped the import of this material without reliving it, nor could C without benefit of my accounts and her own imagining.
This reflects perfectly the archetypal scene of a male going to the edge. C held a strong centre while this was going on. She knew that ‘without’ is always a reflection of ‘within’ and that something big was trying to happen. Nevertheless, it became very clear that such an undertaking is not just a challenge for males who feel drawn to renew their relationship with Goddess. Actual women who receive them must also be prepared to accept challenges which accompany this gift. They must admit violations of the Goddess as symbolised by the rape in Campfire, for example.
Only when we have opened to the memory of such wounding can we open beyond it. This is a condition of true healing. It requires courage and awareness on the part of women as well as men. In any case, after an intense week during which my processing was at last brought up to date, my soul spoke to me once more in the language of dreams: C and I are together again, taking all our inner children, male and female, to the Garden.
The final stage of this return can only be completed by a man who has attained a certain level of relationship with his feminine soul. My dream says this, not my ego. The reward is to break trans-generational cycles of human destructiveness. Even the foundations of a properly balanced culture can be restored as a result of enough people returning to Centre in this way.
The next night brought three very powerful dreams.
In the first, ‘Trial by Water’, I surrender myself unconditionally as a living bearer of the phallus into the body of the Goddess. I need to become completely helpless and completely trusting in order to deliver a message of sincere intent. My surrender involves a complete dropping of all that we have now come to regard as phallic posturing.
I feel like a new-born child as a result, remade of the Mother. I am completely vulnerable while this is going on. My male disposition is renewed and reoriented. I must live further beyond the event to realise better all that it entails.
The next mer-ka-ba dream is a vision of my soul in perfect harmony.
However, having become as Wind, I need to be integrated once more into Earth. A Back Woman of power is admitted towards this end and I see that I as a man must be perfectly composed in order for this last major return to be assimilated as part of my soul potential. Why?
The Black Woman stands for more than just a portion of my soul. She is also chaos, pure potential, unknown. She is the Dark Goddess, the opacity of night, madness, savagery, the Void. She is the blackness of Earth and a great yin power without which there could be no Creation, no existence and no form. She is Kali, the face of my terror and annihilation.
She stands, in other words, for everything that an Old School phallus, transparent and light-obsessed, might once have feared: a ravenous power I make One with in loving. Lost to the infinitude of her embrace, I become part again, in her, of all that she is always a part of. My phallus is recast as copula in this dance, a magic wand blessed in service to Goddess rather than a narcissistic tool of domination.
(An Old School phallus has to remain apart in order not to be lost. Fear predisposes it to hanging on and domination.)
Next the Empire State surrenders to the intelligence of night, permitting me to see that the Universe City is always here, even when human vanity prevents us from discerning its light-encoded forms.
John-consciousness has grown used to the idea of walking around embodied as if I were an isolated ‘one’. Of course this isn’t Truth. Even my intellect understands how I am connected to everything around me as the emanation of one miraculous flaring forth which brought all things into existence.
This whole seen world is an emanation of what remains unseen. The light-phallus of existence thrusts and trysts within the encompassing darkness of the Void: all that the Black Woman represents and connects me to. Remembering ourselves in love there is only One. Such perfection of inner/sacred marriage is prerequisite for a man to truly serve God/dess. By making One with his Black Soul Woman he becomes One with All That Is.
My final ‘Merlin’ dreams start from this awareness, showing an archetypal priest-magician as he has been since the beginning, serving God/dess and all Creation. The male warrior is also in service to this cause, as are all in the circle of my soul, including C, gathered since the beginning for this purpose.
The benefits of phallic healing have now been absorbed by my feminine soul also, who welcomes her estranged husband home. Not only have I made peace with my inner feminine but she has made peace with me as well, including estranged ‘offender’ parts of me, such as the Fire twins have been.
When I get this I ‘see’ that I too can be a face of Merlin, my Dream Teacher. I see that to weave dreams is also to weave worlds, drawing forms out of potential and existence out of form by staying centred in relation to a silent Womb through which dreaming conjures worlds to manifestation.
I hear ancient music rising from the centre of this Womb, weaving threads of destiny according to patterns of a timeless Dream, let us say the Dream of God. Returning to this centre over and over, miracles happen as the two of illusion, Life and Dream, again and again become the Truth of One.
There are no eggs, others, insides or outs. All meet again in Source as One. Sometimes, from the edges of our Dreaming, we remember.
*
My early dreams are largely concerned with psychological clearing, marked by bouts of release and reclamation. Every release or ‘breakout’ (Apaches, for example) happens with respect to a given level of mental-emotional structure that regulates energy flow and may even suppress it. Structure has to give way when breakout happens. This leads to temporary effects of instability and agitation, as energies that had been trapped in the Unconscious suddenly start impacting consciousness again. Integrating them brings effects of transformation, leading to new levels of structure. This is the hallmark of development as consciously pursued.
Clearing and reclamation generally happen with respect to patterns that have been laid down in early life, even though these are typically over-layered into adulthood. As we become more aware of this situation, we develop greater freedom to change. Eventually, when enough of the energies which had been held in old patterns are released, it becomes possible for us to experience breakthroughs rather than breakouts. Breakthroughs involve a qualitative leap from one level of consciousness and functioning to another, as distinct from successive acts of reclamation occurring at one level only.
Breakouts happen a lot in the early stages of my dream sequence because they have to do primarily with recovery. Energies they release supply the impetus needed for breakthroughs. These happen more in later stages, which focus increasingly on spiritual emergence. They are signalled particularly by movement through doorways, especially when there is no resistance. This suggests that energy has quietly gathered for a purpose whose time is now ripe.
When we eliminate resistance there is no need for breakouts. Breakthroughs mark new levels of order. They happen into territories that are already mysteriously structured, just like the opening of individual paths. The Way has a transpersonal order, yet we each embellish its unfolding by making our journeys through it in singular style. Thus, by the time we get Home, the stories we have made are uniquely our own. God, it is said, created the world because S/He likes stories.
Dreams: A User’s Guide
My first purpose in writing this book has been to restore awareness of the virtually unlimited potential of dream-work. Its second purpose is to show readers how to develop this potential for themselves. This takes time, practice and commitment but the present ‘Guide’ contains the essential information needed to set you on your way. Bear in mind that the more of us attend to our dreams, the easier it will become for all of us to remember who we truly are and what we are for.
This chapter is divided into two major sections, to do with what I loosely call making sense and energetic integration. ‘Making sense’ involves arriving at a basic understanding of what a dream is about. Often this is necessary to motivate waking consciousness to pursue the second phase. ‘Energetic integration’ involves freeing for expression energies which are likely to be trapped in or behind a dream’s surface content.
1. Making Sense
The first thing you must do is gain access to your dreams so, if you don’t already have this or think your access needs improving, you can review hints given in the opening ‘Beginners’ chapter. Assuming that you have access, start by writing out your dreams as soon, as fully and as faithfully as possible without judging them in terms of length, plausibility, attractiveness, moral tone, vagueness etc.
Dreams carry messages from parts of your Self that don’t often gain access to waking consciousness, so it is important that you prepare yourself to accept them as they are, without judgment. The more you develop this attitude, the easier it will be for your dreams to serve you. The more attention you give them, the easier they will come.
Prepare a written dream record which can be easily read, leaving room for notes and under-linings. A typescript is ideal as long as you don’t compromise your longhand version in producing it. It is important to date your records, since sequence is very relevant to the process of soul-opening over time.
Read your dream a few times without thinking too much about it. The aim at this point is simply to establish a holistic impression of its atmosphere and feeling. Allow yourself to form a sense of how it hangs together without getting into analysis or possible lines of interpretation.
Note the disposition of energies in the dream. Where is the action focused, if there is any? What happens? What changes or fails to change? Are there any signs of conflict, deadlock, or flow? Do characters stay put, move towards or away from one another? Given that everything in the dream is a reflection of yourself, the answers to these questions provide early signs of what is happening in you at this time.
Potentials and Liabilities
To get more precise indications, underline all positive words and phrases in one colour and all negative words and phrases in another. All positive expressions refer to potentials that are currently waiting for integration into your waking awareness. This has not yet been achieved but is imminent, subject to your appropriate response. You can signal this by writing ‘I can (be)’ or ‘I need to (be)’ opposite all such positive statements. This provides you with a series of attainable challenges rather than pointlessly flattering reflections.
All negative expressions refer to limitations which you are currently experiencing. Signal this to yourself by writing ‘I am’ in the margin beside each one. This simple linguistic key provides a clear picture of attitudes and circumstances that are currently blocking you from attaining potentials which would otherwise fall within your reach. It also curtails attempts to defend an idealised self-image through the interpretation process.
You will now have a good sense of primary reflections that the dream offers but you still need to know how they fit together and how they relate to the circumstances of your life, past and present. We need information about context at this point.
Sense and Context
Start by noting the location of your dream. This helps to clarify its subject matter. Some locations have obvious significance: a school will have to do with learning, for example, a hospital with healing and so on. You can clarify the significance of dream venues by closing your eyes and listing three or four primary associations to them.
What does ‘cinema’ mean to you, for example? What happens there? (You see a big picture? Expand your outlook? Broaden your horizons?) How does the nature of this process or activity relate to the content of your dream? My dream accounts deal with ‘theatre’, ‘bookshop’ and ‘university’ locations in this way.
Some people find it helpful to consult a dream dictionary but this defeats your purpose if you become limited by it. I present a sample of common dream locations below to give you an idea, from which you will then be able to extrapolate:
Airport dreams have to do with arrivals or departures. In the first case, they have to do with birthing or re-birthing and, in the second, with new projects or beginnings.
A bathroom dream is about cleansing or purification.
A clothes shop has to do with choice of costume and, hence, attitudes or roles you choose to adopt.
A bridge indicates a need to harmonise or bring together.
A church suggests spirituality or spiritual ideals.
Dreams set in your childhood home focus influences from the past.
Foreign countries suggest a need to expand awareness. Specific values can be ascertained by noting your associations to particular countries. Here are some (stereotyped) examples: Italy may suggest that you need warmth and passion, Sweden (in winter) that you’re emotionally cold, Germany that you’re regimented and so on, relative to your particular inclinations.
An important point to bear in mind is that dreams generally refer to conditions of the inner self, so references to outer world occurrences often serve as metaphors for inner processes. Hence a journey by boat or train, for example, concerns your journey through life; a bookshop or library dream focuses your inner wisdom and knowledge; a workplace dream reflects the status of your inner work.
It is not possible to provide fixed or comprehensive lists for the meaning of dream symbols. The process of dream composition is intrinsically creative and becomes ever more so, the subtler the meanings to be relayed. Consider the example of my mother’s ‘house’ shimmering on a veil between dimensions in ‘Flying’, for example. What dictionary could anticipate that entry, or any number of possible others like it?
A dream is fundamentally poetic in terms of its composition and, because your dream is your composition, it is your associations that provide keys to its elucidation. However, you must avoid slanting these in order to contrive a favourable reflection. It is counterproductive to impress ego-agendas on gifts from your Unconscious so be clear, honest, rapid and direct in your approach. A brief listing usually suffices.
Because a dream is fundamentally poetic it may be he helpful to approach it as if it were a poem, allowing that its references are evocative rather than factual. Don’t worry about this if you dislike poetry. Your ‘I am’ listings will stop you from going far wrong and you will quickly become sensitised with practice. All of this genuinely does get easier. You will also develop new and more flexible modes of thinking if you persist.
Roles and Characters
We look next at characters in your dream, bearing in mind that they all represent aspects of yourself. Every regressive aspect in us has a history. It developed as a way of coping with stressful situations when we didn’t have discretion to respond otherwise. It is generally modelled on the examples of our main co-participants in such situations: Father, Mother or uneasy combinations of both. My Cowboy, for example, represents a direct incorporation of my mother’s acquired obsession with smacking down ‘boldness’ as it arose.
Dreams reveal such limiting tendencies to us in symbolic form every time an opportunity to clear them comes around. Often they are represented by people we know who model the attributes or tendencies in question. Always we need to acknowledge such figures as reflecting parts of ourselves. We must then apply as much tact and compassion as we can in helping them unravel and come home.
I will show you how to do this in the ‘Energetic Integration’ section. Here our focus is still on establishing the dream’s basic sense:
If characters are positive and play positive roles, they are guiding or healing figures who reflect your imminent potential(s) back to you. Mark this with ‘I can’ or ‘I need to’ statements. If they play negative roles, they mirror your currently limiting attitudes and provide information regarding their functioning and source. Again, mark these as ‘I am’.
The conduct and treatment of ‘your’ character (dream ego) clarifies the nature of your relationship with these other soul forces. Generally, a negative adult figure in a dream represents a limiting and still current influence of your father or mother, depending on their gender. Children usually represent developing and/or under-developed potentials, depending on context. You will be able to tell which by accompanying ‘I am’ and ‘I can’ or ‘need to’ indications.
If characters are simply present in support or accompanying roles, just close your eyes and quickly list the primary attributes you associate with each of them. Three or four adjectives per person will generally suffice. Write these down and note as before how they reflect your potentials if they are positive and your limitations if they are negative.
Negative attributes point to some characteristic of your self which is contributing to stuckness or difficulties in the dream. Positive attributes always point to some potential quality that you need to develop in order to overcome the problem. We will see how to work with this information under ‘Energetic Integration’.
Past and Present
Dreams can also provide information about how present difficulties have been caused by experiences in the past. Such notices are flagged by references within dreams to events that are clearly past-related: childhood home, ancient building, period costume, very old people etc. If the dream is set in your childhood home, for example, you will know that the attitude or attribute in question was developed there.
Dreams generally ask old habits to make way for new potentials, especially in the early stages of a recovery process. In later stages, the role of ‘elder’ manifestations may be subtly re-valued, as in the teaching role that Merlin gradually assumes for me.
The Role of Objects
Objects in a dream can also convey significant information, especially if they are described as damaged in some way. These reflections will be picked up by your ‘I am/can be’ listings and, of course, apply to yourself. If objects are rod-shaped they have to do with male/masculine aspects of your being. If they are container-shaped, they have to do with female/feminine aspects.
These reflections may concern general personality traits or may be specifically focused on sexuality. The context of a dream will generally make this clear. For example, it was very clear to me that carrying a steel rod in my ‘spiritual journey’ dream had much to do with sexuality although this applies within a very broad frame of interpretation.
Houses and Vehicles
Houses, buildings and cars serve as important symbols of the embodied Self. Hence the condition of these ‘vehicles’ as revealed in dreams may be particularly relevant. Houses and other dwelling places are of special interest since we spend so much time and absorb so many influences in them. There are also specific parts of houses which have a symbolic correspondence with body parts or bodily functions. They may also have metaphorical ramifications beyond this.
Kitchens, for example, are associated with feeding, digestion, absorption and new days (starts). Toilets are associated with elimination, clearing and purification; bedrooms with sexuality, living rooms with the heart, basements with the subconscious, attics with the mind or brain, and so on. Windows are like eyes. Thus looking out front is to regard the future; looking out back is to review the past.
Again, with practice, the metaphorical basis of these associations becomes more apparent and familiar. It doesn’t help to be rigid in these matters. Dream construction is the opposite of a mechanical process. It is ordered, certainly, but never predictable. The more you work with it, the more developed your intuitive sense will become.
Before looking further at the nature of this development, I want to give you some basic information concerning the role of number and colour in dream-work. There are many different accounts of both but I have never needed to do more than associate around the basic keys I am about to provide. We will consider number first.
Number Symbolism
Zero is a number of pure potential and can’t be qualified in any way.
One represents unity and singularity. It is the number of beginning, of pioneering energy and initiative. It contains all required potentials but needs unfolding for these to be realised.
Two is the number of duality. It represents the first stage of an unfolding whereby primal unity comes to know itself more. It holds energies of relationship and dividedness.
Three is the number of development and becoming. It represents the transcending of any opposition between the ones which make up two. It is forever going beyond itself.
Four represents an energy of containment, of giving form and holding it. It shapes the energy of three into various levels of durable but provisional resolution.
Five is another number of going beyond. More focused than three, it represents an energy of breakthrough with respect to the conservative, holding tendencies of four, implying a movement into centre or ‘quintessence’. It is also the number of karma (a principle whereby past actions determine our current state and obligations).
Six is the number of spiritual descent. It implies a recollection in the midst of our Earth lives of a spiritual reality that informs them. It suggests that we are ready to follow the path of our soul’s destiny, relative to determining influences of our karmic past.
Seven is the number of spiritual perfection. It implies a developed spiritual awareness and a corresponding attitude of loving harmony.
Eight is the number of infinity. It unites the energies of Heaven and Earth. It can also be associated with a severing of old ties which exert restricting influences on us.
Nine is the number of spiritual ascent. It implies an energy of completion and marks the ending of a particular phase or cycle of development.
Ten is the number of new beginnings. It represents a fulfilment of the energy of one but also takes this to a new level of beginning where a new wave of still enfolded potential awaits unfolding through another cycle.
Colour Symbolism
Colour can also be an important key in making sense of dreams. Again there are many accounts with different stresses. The following summary, based primarily on the chakra system, outlines the main associations that I have found useful.
Red associates with the base chakra. It represents the basic energy of creativity and passion for life. Its negative aspects are anger, rage, frustration and a fixation on survival.
Orange associates with the second chakra. Its positive energies are bliss, enthusiasm, sexuality, sensual delight and dreaming. Its negative aspects include shock, trauma and abuse, especially of a sexual nature.
Yellow is the energy of the solar plexus, of power, enterprise, ego, intellect and personal will. Its negative associations are fear, self-consciousness and inhibition.
Green is the colour of Heart. It associates with healing, generosity, spaciousness, stillness and calm. Negatively, it associates with constriction, envy and resentment.
Pink is the colour of a fully open Heart. It represents compassion and unconditional love or, in a negative setting, the absence of and need for these.
Blue associates with the throat. It is the colour of peace, communication, authority and higher will. Failing due personal authority, it associates negatively with depression, isolation, reticence and withdrawal.
Indigo is the colour of the brow. It associates with intuition and clear ‘seeing’ of all kinds. Its negative aspect, fuelled by psychological immaturity, is illusion.
Purple, the colour of the crown, concerns spiritual power, leadership and teaching. It associates negatively with disillusionment, deep frustration and withdrawal.
White associates with enlightenment, purity and hope. Mixed with other colours, it suggests a positive impact of their values. Alone, in negative contexts, it indicates a rigid, judgmental perfectionism.
Black is the colour of fear. Mixed with other colours, it signifies a darkening of their values. It associates also with anxiety, hatred and depression.
Brown associates with groundedness and practicality. It balances airy spirituality and its negative aspect is excessive materialism.
Gold signifies spiritual healing and creativity as silver stands for intuition. The negative aspect of gold is irrational worry while dulled silver becomes the grey of anxious preoccupation. The dream context generally makes it clear whether positive or negative values apply.
We will next consider the process of energetic integration, which begins after we have completed preliminary work of making sense. If we don’t take this step, our souls won’t unfold. All that can happen is that we will continue recycling the same dream plots over and over in different forms that reflect surface developments in our waking lives.
2. Energetic Integration
Every dream implicitly expresses the Truth of the soul that produces it. This could never be fully presented or made fully explicit. The dream expresses what is most pressing in the life of the soul but this is always fore-grounded against a background of what is not declared. The momentum of the whole soul is behind every dream, tempered by the limits of our processing power and deformations of our personal psychology.
We could never hope to interpret or understand fully the total soul movement that underlies every dream. Dreams are not primarily about meaning. They promote energies that arise in us towards particular ends, all of which have to do with healing and fulfilling our lives. Dreams clarify the various stages of this process. They provide a symbolic language by means of which ego-consciousness can become aware of deeper, grander and vaster currents that constantly suffuse and affect it.
All we need do to begin aligning with these greater tides is get a basic sense of what our dream is about and go forward in some way to meet the energies it is seeking to release at the time. Ultimately, every dream expresses a spiritual energy that informs all life and seeks fulfilment in accordance with the soul history and life purpose of individual human beings.
Thus, our goal in working with dreams is not just to interpret or understand them. Even if we could do this perfectly, it would be of no benefit unless we were also able to engage the energies they present, reconciling these as appropriate and integrating them into the flow of our daily lives. This is how we get to ride winds of powerful, unconscious impulse that are seeking to move through us at all times.
For this we need a method that goes beyond interpretation and allows us to access energies carried by the forms of the dream. These energies are generally only hinted at and rarely exhausted by what dreams actually declare. We need to get behind the forms of a dream in order to experience its energies.
The Method of Enactment
I have referred throughout the accounts of my own dreaming to a method of enactment which I use to move beyond interpretation towards the integration of energetic charge and visionary content. This is a wonderful practice because it also transforms the dispositions of waking consciousness, leaving us more flexible, imaginative and creative every time we bring our dreams to life.
It is not necessary to have a definitive interpretation to start enacting, just a good sense of what’s happening in the dream, especially with regard to where energies are flowing or blocked. Remember that the dreamer’s subconscious negativity can block what’s trying to happen from manifesting in the dream itself. If it hadn’t been for the Cowboy of my Past, for example, Apaches would have entered the house of my being without any fuss and God knows what might have happened then as a result.
Re-entering the atmosphere of that dream with focused intent, it was easy to sense their frustration and desolation clearly. This will always be so in cases where there is blockage of something that is trying to unfold. Assuming that you’ve already done preliminary ‘making sense’ work in relation to your dream, it’s generally sufficient to ‘walk through’ it, pausing at points where you sense impedance of the full flow of what might have been.
This is usually signalled by a stand-off between characters, as in Cowboy-Apaches, but it is also possible to detect in more subtle manifestations – as when I fail to play with the robots in Merlin’s shop. Always there is a sense of incompletion, of frustration caused by a promise unfulfilled.
You need to come out of the dream energy having noted such a shortfall. Walk around, let go of all ego-agendas and then go in again receptive to any impressions or impulses that may now be ready to arise.
The key consideration is that the dream-ego (the part played overtly by you) usually has very limited awareness, typically because it is dominated by whatever strain of negativity the dream is trying to bring to our attention: the Cowboy of my Past again provides a classic example. We figure in such dream scenarios as embodiments of parts of ourselves which our waking ego-dispositions normally eclipse, since we tend to believe our own publicity about being whole and perfectly in charge.
This first level of blockage maintains further blockages of energetic potentials that are even more deeply repressed. These are likely to include
1) gifts that our younger selves might spontaneously have exhibited had we not been choked off in some way at an early stage in our development; and
2) deeper still, an undisclosed, under-developed range of skills, knowing and potentials that are carried by our souls but were also choked off when our inner children were made to conform to regimes of our biographical past.
Our biographies recap our soul histories in crucial respects. Hence to revive the child is often to revive the soul. There is a vast work of reclamation here. What follows is a way of going about this. I have described the Apache dream in detail earlier and present it again now for reference:
I’m in my childhood home with another cowboy. Apaches are attacking. I rush to the basement, where they’re trying to force entry from the back. My colleague defends the front. I break a hole in the rear basement window with my Winchester and kill two Apaches who are sneaking down the garden path. Three others rush in. I kill them also with repeated firing. Then there is quiet. It seems there are no more. I go back upstairs but there is no sign of my friend. Everything looks calm on the street. The house is fortified and I feel lonely.
The core of the enactment process is that we act out a dream from the perspective of all its characters and then work to integrate these, rather than identifying exclusively with the part played by the dream-ego. I will first provide an overview to give you a sense of the process as a whole, then I will present specific step-by-step directions.
Enactment: An Overview
Before we go any farther, there is a subtle truth about consciousness that needs to be clarified. You will have memories of being sad, for example, and of knowing that you were sad. The consciousness of this ‘knowing’ is of a higher, more inclusive type than the sadness per se. This reveals a very important property of consciousness, namely that it can always transcend its contents. Thus I can be conscious of myself knowing that I know that I am sad and so on ad infinitum. (It is possible for consciousness to transcend the subjective processes of identity in this way, but we don’t need to consider that now.)
It follows that consciousness, in principle, always has the option of being fully engaged by sadness (or any other emotion) or of simply observing/witnessing it. Just witnessing dissolves the emotion. What happens under duress is that consciousness forgets its transcendent nature and contracts around whatever content is causing it to feel sad, angry, afraid or whatever. This happens when Cowboy panics in Apache: his consciousness locks completely around the threatening content by which it is faced.
My adult consciousness is not so bound. All I need do to integrate Cowboy’s restricted consciousness is rid myself of present agendas and preoccupations so that my awareness can be filled by his concerns and hold them without judgment in a fully accepting witness mode. Thus our first step is to bring developed consciousness to bear on the dream scenario, having been informed by the preliminary orientation process described earlier. At this point I intend to be the cowboy.
In practical terms, I start by emptying my waking consciousness so that it’s not dominated by ego-agendas. Breathing in and out deeply three times, emptying on the exhales, is sufficient to achieve this, or you can use some other method if you already have one. I then literally walk myself out of John-consciousness and enter imaginatively into the Cowboy role, crouching behind rocks and so on when it’s time. This allows developed consciousness to experience how it feels to be in his position.
I simply let consciousness fill his role. Unchecked, consciousness then registers ‘his’ emotions but, unlike the consciousness of that virtual little cowboy stuck back in 1950s time, ‘my’ consciousness knows that it’s playing a role which it has the option of quitting when it wants. This gives it a freedom to experience fully, which is precisely what Little Cowboy cannot do. He is permanently stuck in pain and fear.
Thus I stay focused so that consciousness can experience all there is to be experienced in the role. My consciousness becomes filled with Cowboy’s apprehensions as a result, but it also witnesses and contains them. It knows (that there is) more, including a way out. It even knows that being ‘in’ is optional but for Cowboy himself there has never been any escape. This is why I have to rescue him and bring him forward out of deadlock into flow.
Before I then turn consciousness to the Apaches, I must empty myself of all that being Cowboy entailed. To do this, I integrate him by taking him into my Heart. The fact that this is an imaginative process doesn’t mean it is unreal. On the contrary, it is powerfully ‘real’.
I need then to settle all energies that are re-leased in me by his release as part of the integration process. There is poignant holding and a little crying. I feel my enthusiasm stir as Cowboy’s freed energies begin to move again in my body.
There is no deliberation in this. It’s just something that intuition tells me has to be done. Having done it, I walk myself out of his role, emptying myself again before re-focusing for the next stage. Then I walk myself into whatever this next role or situation is to be.
In our present example, I walk into the tentatively advancing frame of the first Apache, imagining him/myself stealing down the garden path. Otherwise, I don’t do anything. I simply put consciousness into a part of myself, represented by the role, to which consciousness has habitually been denied.
Consciousness first registers the limitations of the role – feeling the mistrust and apprehension, for example, and accepting them. It thus allows the ‘part’ represented by this role to open into the durable, loving flow by which it is now being embraced. Such loving acceptance stimulates further expression of energies that are implicit in the role, behind the scenes as it were, but which fail to manifest because of what happens: namely, the shooting down of the Apaches.
Now, accepted instead of being shot down, Apache consciousness has somewhere to go. A sense of true welcome inspires previously repressed parts to start moving again towards integration. This process can’t be forced but it doesn’t need to be since the characters/potentials wouldn’t have surfaced in my dream unless the energies they represent were ready to move.
All that is needed is for consciousness to meet a formerly isolated role with love and acceptance. There is no sentiment or piety involved. This is what un-deformed consciousness is actually like. Once it feels accepted, the stuck part moves towards being fully lived and fully expressed, beyond the arrestment of its trauma response.
A pattern is completed as a result and a way into transformation opened. A part that was deadlocked in isolation is admitted to a company in flow, and other parts are enabled or made ready to move also as a result.
This process is not by any means one-way. When consciousness takes up the bodies of the dead Apaches, for example, it knows that it needs to sing. Melodies rise up from formerly blocked potentials of that which is sung to. They are enabled to rejoin the flow of life by this means. Trust your spontaneity in such moments.
Even in virtual death, the gifts for living carried by my savage Apaches inform consciousness in ways that are both renewing and renewed. Eventually I feel their vital sensibilities flood through me, alerting me to previously un-discerned life in sea and stone, Stone People, elder beings, all that I am and have ever been. This happens because potentials which had been dormant are now awake again.
Again, all I need do is be conscious and extend this power of consciousness into parts from which it has previously been withdrawn, due to effects of trauma. This initiative brings healing of itself.
Other Examples
My Cowboy-Apache example is quite clear-cut. Others aren’t. Just remember 1) the very fact something has appeared in your dream means it’s ready to move; and 2) that your ego-consciousness doesn’t need to understand, beyond appreciating the need of keeping its appointments with the soul. Indeed, by directing consciousness into a role, it suspends itself and allows fugitive parts of the Self to fill consciousness with their sense of whatever needs to be done.
This won’t necessarily be heroic. The priestess doesn’t kiss and make up with the Fire twins, but neither does she kill them in their sleep. Their reconciliation is an alchemy that happens gradually in my soul. No deal-cutting is required, although in other cases it might be. All that is needed is for movement to occur, so that energetic mingling of two previously opposed ‘sides’ becomes possible. This happens whenever there is acceptance of both. Usually, developed consciousness is called on to provide this.
In cases where there are no other characters – e.g. Merlin’s vacated bookshop – I find that just putting consciousness into a dream scenario attracts the inspiration needed to release whatever is waiting to happen next. Acting according to this inspiration brings out the hidden promise of the dream. This is a dance, an interaction. There is nothing objective involved. The following down-to-earth example comes from C’s dream-work (see ‘A Woman’s Dreaming’).
A bathroom door has been left open in the aftermath of a tangled sexual affair. Looking away from it C sees a silver-white horse in the distance. She feels energetically stuck, as if she has been left suspended between two scenarios. Resolution comes only when she re-enters the bathroom and, finding the toilet lid raised, puts it down before closing the door.
She is now empowered to turn away and draw the horse closer. Eventually she integrates its power. The horse, it transpires, brings healing to her emotional body and, more specifically, her sexuality. She is moved to draw it towards her only after she has ‘put the lid’ and closed the door on her old affair. It pays to keep an eye out for raised lids and unclosed doors.
The crucial point is that when you put consciousness into the ‘parts’ of a dream, it becomes informed with a sense of what is waiting to happen. Enacting one part of a dream opens a door to the next, and so on. Sensitivity develops with practice and so will the subtlety of your dreaming, so long as you keep attending to it.
The most important thing is not to be limited by agendas in your approach. This is why you must empty yourself before entering the atmosphere of a dream and then let consciousness flow into its various roles to facilitate transformation.
As this happens, the vision of soul-purpose borne implicitly by all our dreams enters more and more intimately into the process of our waking consciousness, elevating, ennobling and enriching it. This is a radically open-ended process which cannot be reduced to a closed, mechanical system. Always there will be other dreams, fresh visions and new horizons.
Steps to Enactment
Process your dream as soon as possible after recording it. This gives you the best chance of preserving an authentic sense of its energetic atmosphere. Also, an opening that impacts urgently today may not be available or relevant next week.
Walk through the dream from the perspective of your dream-ego, having first familiarised yourself thoroughly with it. Determine where you wish to begin enacting and which role you want to play first. Usually, you will start with the dream-ego.
Empty yourself of agendas by breathing out emphatically three times. Then walk yourself imaginatively into the role. Devote the full power of your consciousness to experiencing the action of the dream from this perspective.
Let consciousness experience fully all constraints by which your dream-ego has been bound; then let it feel the total acceptance and support of consciousness. This will help it to be more imaginative and daring.
Allow yourself to feel all emotions and reactions as you play through, noting any insights or impulses to change that arise. Stay with this until the energy winds down. It may be that you will need to enact the dream in stages, in which case you will simply recycle these directions.
If your dream-ego blocks some potential development within the dream, explore this next by shifting consciousness to the other role. To do this, walk out of the dream-ego role you’ve been involved in, note any realisations associated with it, empty yourself, refocus and walk your way into the next role.
Repeat the steps outlined above with respect to the new role, allowing consciousness to experience the frustration of the blocked part and the blocked part to experience total acceptance by consciousness.
Let this blocked ‘part’ speak or be otherwise expressed. If your consciousness enters the role of Apache, for example, it will feel like singing, so SING! Revert if necessary to your dream-ego role to encourage this. Remember always to walk out, empty, refocus and walk in with every role shift. This becomes automatic over time.
If in your primary dream-ego role, you have left some situation incomplete and undeveloped (as when I failed to play with Merlin’s robots) revisit it and explore alternative possibilities that will now arise, with new consciousness.
Close the bathroom door, in terms of our example, and encourage your horse to draw near. Don’t fear rejection. Bear in mind that everything in your dream represents a part or potential of you that’s waiting to return to awareness.
Even negative manifestations represent the influence of parts that have been wounded by criticism, neglect or abuse. Loving acceptance by consciousness heals this and permits new options to emerge. The key is to hold each part in compassionate awareness, accepting that its limiting disposition was formed in relation to limiting conditions which no longer apply and freeing it by this acceptance into a greater life.
The essence of integration involves bringing hurt and isolated ‘parts’ marooned in trauma while the rest of consciousness developed, back into the flow of present awareness. We manage this from the perspective of consciousness by letting our hurt part experience being safe, held and accepted so that there is no need for it to stay closed and aloof.
If there are two or more such parts, developed consciousness can oversee their integration separately, even if there is conflict between them. This can be quite direct as in Apache or subtle and indirect as in Campfire, where reconciliation of Priestess and the Fire Twins has been for a long time ongoing in my Heart. It is imperative for developed consciousness to provide a forum for reconciliation.
The integration process usually culminates for me in an imagined physical mergence, often after the fugitive part has been drawn into expressive activity of some kind. This releases energies that had been confined by its repression and gets the process of transformation under way.
Lend your body as a vehicle for expression when this is required. A previously withdrawn child may wish to dance or run, for example. If your body is offered with the innocence of pure consciousness, the innocence of your damaged child will be restored.
You will then find a means to integrate her/him. I recommend in the case of a very young or severely wounded part that you take her/him imaginatively into your Heart. This is a very moving process and movement is exactly what is needed to pass out of deadlock into flow. Sometimes a more muted form of mergence may feel appropriate, as when the priestesses were gradually absorbed into my body on the shore.
Remember that this is primarily a symbolic-imaginative play which has the purpose of re-integrating into consciousness aspects of yourself whose existence you may not have suspected before or whose confidence you had been unable to win.
Using your dreams as a platform in this manner brings powerful transformative energies into awareness that will continue to unfold with attention. You will know after each stage in a cycle when its hidden energy potentials have been harvested because you will no longer feel frustrated or incomplete.
This sense of satisfaction will be total but will only last until your next dream presents a new challenge and new opportunity. As you repeat the process over time, it becomes subtler, more exciting, more fluid, spontaneous and rewarding, just like any life process engaged in evolution.
Don’t feel intimidated. There is never any more involved than parts of yourself coming home to love, acceptance and a greater sense of life. Dreams just show the way.
Appendix: On Sacred Marriage and Human Renewal
Sacred marriage involves bringing into right relationship masculine-feminine and God-Goddess potentials that are latent in all humans. These potentials emerge constantly from Source. Hence the process of sacred marriage is constantly unfolding through Creation. It unfolds uniquely, with awareness, in conscious human beings. This tends to happen initially within particular individuals and then to manifest in outer relationships, as our work of self-clarification draws appropriate partners to us.
The process is generally accelerated when this occurs due to increased opportunities for shared mirroring and dialogue. This is the kind of interaction I have been engaged with in the time through which this book was written. It occurs to some extent in all relationships as partners get to know each other better, beyond idealised projections of an early romantic phase. We invariably stumble over blind spots and points of arrestment which the other person helps us to discover and, all being well, surmount.
If we stay with this process, availing of such opportunities to move beyond the spheres of conditioned limitation that normally apply, what may first have been an outer marriage can also become the vehicle for an inner one. All that is required is for partners to feel well matched and keep faith with each other through challenges that invariably, responding to every one as an occasion of growth. No prescriptions are possible here: each party must act according to the impulse of her/his Heart rather than the blandishments of social desirability, wealth, prospects, dependency needs etc.
The goal of an inner sacred marriage is to balance masculine and feminine aspects of wholeness in oneself. Its outer form assists partners to achieve and develop this while also realising the bliss of Divine Play in shared experience. This process becomes sacred as partners work through issues that surface between them to clear old karmic backlogs. Karma refers to unpaid debts or unresolved issues left over from previous lifetimes. It can also involve learning certain lessons that can be applied positively in fulfilling our purpose this time around, beyond a simple elimination of past residues.
Our karma comes from our soul history. It is largely reconstituted in our current lives via the impact of our parents and their conditioning influences vis-à-vis the place, time and cultural-economic circumstances of our birth. Our biographies thus recap core aspects of soul history that are relevant to fulfilling the purpose of our current lives. As agents of this process, our parents set us up with required attitudes, problems, habits, qualities and so on.
Our adult partners then evoke projections of all the un-cleared tendencies our parents set us up with. If we defend these projections as truth in face of dissonant reflections, recycling of our karma will continue. If, however, the quality of reflection and response available is such that it enables me to identify my projections and withdraw them, I become clearer and clearer as more and more of my old patterns are released. Sacred marriage then acquires a potential for healing beyond recovery into wholeness.
There is a potential for sacred marriage in every relationship but repressive inertia tends to be more common. Sexuality is especially rife with unconscious repetitions and evasions. It is a primary arena in which karmic issues get replayed over and over, where we do the same things again and again till we get bored. Then we do them with other people till we get bored again and try doing them in inflated, fantasy-driven ways. Habituation always follows, such that stronger measures are always required to prove we can still feel in a dysfunctionally ‘functional’ culture that suppresses our inner life of Heart and Feeling.
We act in such scenarios from an unwitting sense of limitation imposed by old wounds. This includes extreme sadomasochistic variations. Indeed, the greater our attachment to such practices, the more we become stuck in a split, contracted consciousness that denies its wound on one hand while acting constantly from it on another. Under such circumstances, we eroticise our wounds and/or bury them beneath alternative possibilities of feeling. Both options diminish our response-ability.
Sacred marriage permits reversal of these tendencies. Specifically, as I work through old wounds that have come to me via my male and female (father-mother) lines, I reconnect with Divine Father and Divine Mother archetypes in myself. This allows me to access God/dess potential in me and my partner. The same will be true for her/him (assuming congruence) since reflection happens both ways. Man comes to acknowledge the Goddess in woman and She the God in him. This leads to a process known as adoration of the beloved and an active honouring of God/dess in sacred sex via every conscious touch and body gesture.
I am not speaking of romantic idolatry. There is a spiritual substance to sacred marriage that goes beyond necessary waves of psychological clearing. Outer sacred marriage permits physical realisation of God in the male and Goddess in the female. It draws these polarities into right relationship within and between partners, enabling both to realise Godhood in her/his appropriate way. (This can happen for same sex couples also, but my focus now is on archetypal fe/male bonding.) Sacred sex is an integral expression of and vehicle for this process (1).
It fosters a mode of erotic devotion that repairs the sundering of God/dess energies in human consciousness and facilitates experiential recovery of the blissful play of Creator Consciousness as our mysteriously inherent masculine-feminine poles begin to move again in sacred unison, making One of two to reveal Unity in duality (yin/yang-like). This happens everywhere in the process of Creation but humanity has lost awareness of it due to events symbolised by the archetypal rape of the priestess in my Campfire dream. I will explain the significance of this further in due course.
The over-riding purpose of sacred marriage is to bring male-masculine and female-femimine aspects of Godhood into right, creative relationship in our lives. We become spiritual adults as this happens, capable of re-parenting our wounded inner child. Indeed, as we realise the ongoing, progressive marriage of ‘Father-Mother God’ in ourselves, a ‘Divine Child’ of new consciousness is forever reborn through us into existence. We become ever clearer expressions of Living Mystery as this happens. Boredom is not an option in sacred marriage, nor in the ‘flowery combat’ of erotic play which expresses it.
Every woman plays the role of Creatrix-Goddess in this process and every man the role of Creator-God. Such play has nothing to do with arbitrary redeployment of ego energies in stilted roles. On the contrary, we must become wholly emptied of our ‘selves’ – our stories, wounds, agendas etc. – in order that God/dess energies can enter and be expressed. We must surrender ourselves completely, giving up every structure we cling to in order to make way so that the bliss of Creator Consciousness can be realised and broadcast through us out to all existence.
Traditionally, a male partner initiates this process, stimulating response in the female, leading her into ecstatic celebration of her role as Divine Lover and channel of pure Goddess power. She receives the impulse of his will; contains, nourishes and encompasses it, building it towards full expression as an orgasmic surge that crashes through her, endlessly amplified, feeding both partners on every level (physical, mental, emotional and spiritual) before pulsing out to renew all Life and all Creation.
This is a physical analogue of the relationship between Divine Father and Divine Mother archetypes described in The Dream of God. As with pregnancy, penetration by the male – duly heralded and received – is merely preliminary. His coming brings news of difference, treasures from the edge of existence, borne on spirit winds, into the Goddess’ Womb at the Heart of Being. Her response, tumultuous and ecstatic, blasts out tidings that seed stars and give form to unknown worlds, in direct continuation of a process named by our scientific mythos as the Big Bang, whose distant echoes reverberate still as Passion in our loins.
This is a power that Priestess relinquishes following her violation in ‘Campfire’. It has become virtually lost to human awareness in consequence of that choice. The Goddess can’t be forced. Blame is not an issue at this stage, only the prospect of restoration and whatever must be done to achieve it. The awareness of Cassie helped me to retrieve a sense of integral vision in this respect, after my department store dream. I am working from it now in my attempts at recollection.
A first requirement, obviously, is that the dissociated phallus – torn from a matrix of right relationship with Goddess and thus moved to engage in the forced activity of rape – must be brought again into right relationship. This explains the significance of my mythical dream-journey back to Source, which ends with absolute surrender to Mother-Goddess by the ocean. I let myself be remade there according to Divine Will, embracing vulnerability and totally relinquishing ego agendas. This realigns my personal will with Divine Will and restores my male creative striving to an awareness of Universal Creation.
We have also noted, from a woman’s perspective, C’s complementary undertaking to make peace with Father-God, her father and the world of unbalanced father-rule we know as patriarchy. Her journey also brought her to the edge of an ocean – to a threshold of new depths, visions, journeys and remembering. It required her to integrate memories of exploitation, neglect and abuse before opening beyond them. This warranted new trust. Hence it is not just men who must surrender if an order of correct relationship is to be restored between the sexes.
And yet the archetypal wound of existence is carried by male individuating consciousness as it pushes to new edges, ever tending to forget Centre as it goes. The healing of this is always to bring the phallus – as symbolic of male creative-generative power – back into right relationship with the Mother/Goddess at Source, the Centre of all centres (as in Vedic lingam-yoni lore, for example). Within the high awareness of sacred marriage, this constant return of the phallus is celebrated by a process of conscious loving. It requires that the woman, as a living embodiment of Goddess power and sensibility, must also open completely in an attitude of total surrender beyond misgivings induced by memories of her archetypal wound.
The essence of this wound is evoked by the rape of the priestess, as C’s response to my account made very clear. The core issue, dramatized in my dream, is that individuating consciousness – a masculine (not just male) quality – pushes so far away from Centre that it forgets what it is to be Centre-d in relationship. It becomes de-centred and alienated as a result. Thus it behaves exploitatively, even rapaciously. It tries to force what it no longer believes will come as natural blessing. Every act of forcing consolidates its status as alienated and out of right relationship. This process escalates until we come to feel hopelessly lost.
The male falls out of balance with the female and the masculine with the feminine. Our actions betray no sense of right relationship with the Mother. The world of unbalanced father-rule gets deeper and deeper into trouble until a point is reached where we just have to attend to the promptings of our souls/Dreaming. Attending thus we find that alienation has contaminated all our relationships; that the wounds of mothers and fathers are passed on to daughters and sons. We understand how individuating consciousness forgets itself to become lost in separation but is still haunted by echoes of all that it feels separated from, especially love of the Mother.
Let me reframe this mythically: Man is born of Mother-Goddess through the body of one woman and seeks to be re-united with Her through the body of another. This has little to do with incest unless early fixation on the figure of the actual mother remains un-transcended. There will inevitably be limiting psychological imprints until clearance has been achieved in this respect, for women as well as men. Thus men are unable to relate to the Goddess in women as long as they remain bound by negative imprints of their actual mother/maternal lineage. Women cannot know themselves as embodiments of the Goddess as long as they too are so afflicted. Likewise, men can’t experience themselves as Creator-Gods as long as the wounds of their personal fathers are alive in them; correlatively, women can’t risk opening to the God in every man as long as they also carry imprints of male wounding.
Freud’s account of this mythic process was too literal. Man seeks to re-unite with the archetypal power of Mother-Goddess, not the physical form of his actual mother. Having no clear sense of this, however, and shaped by an actual mother whose wounds prevented her from filling him with unconditional love, he doubts his worthiness and seeks to control the female rather than risk becoming helpless before her again. This is the condition from which a mentality of rape is born. Women respond to it as Priestess responds to the Fire Twins, by closing down. They lose awareness of miraculous Goddess powers they carry and forget that they are, every one, a Holy Grail, a Centre for birthing and rebirth. Men forget this too. Like women, we are reduced to producers and consumers of distraction in a world ruled by getting and spending
Holding Centre does not mean being stuck at home. ‘Centre’ is a qualitative state, not a mystified physical location. Women are on the whole specialised to maintain relationships and men to break them (by pushing to new edges and introducing new elements, when we remember to come Home). Transformation is a desired balance that comes of integrating these tendencies. Our situation is complicated because many women have adopted male norms, which they accept or try to emulate. Also, even archetypes can change. Now is a time of emerging human mysteries, in which men and women are asked to integrate our contra-sexual aspects, both feminine and masculine potentials, so eclipsing millennia of gender polarisation. Such inner marrying births integral humans, transcendent of biological sex.
It is a characteristic of Human Mysteries that all of us, male or female, harbour freedom to explore far edges and return to Centre, there to find our Love and know it as if for a first time by virtue of apparently having strayed. Masculine and feminine, such is the nature of our adventure in existence with regard to the Miracle of Be-ing. It is by virtue of inner (sacred) marrying that we come to know this. Outer marriage brings this potential to life in public worlds of politics and history. Finding our Love, we cease from struggle and are freed to wonder anew what we are for.
A conscious healing process is needed to reverse our current alienation. This takes time and needs to be shared across sexes at least part of the way. Sacred marriage is a crucible in which relevant issues can be raised and resolved as part of a broader process of collective healing. It takes courage and great resolution to adopt this course at first but in the end it is much easier and more beautiful to follow it than not. Its implications for human renewal are far-reaching since it re-introduces us – men and women alike – to the true nature, context and scope of our creativity. Also, it is mandated by our dreams.
This is crucial since modern culture has become so lost that it doesn’t know what to do, beyond adhering further to established destructive patterns of short-term survival. It has no sense of our true potential as human beings and no knowledge of how to awaken or promote this. Despite such large-scale forgetting, the answers are literally to hand. They flow through us on the rivers of our dreaming every night. Our daytime ego-consciousness, manufactured by an alienated culture, has only to pay heed. We each have a rich soul life waiting to guide us on our way. Our dreams convey its wisdom daily. We dream in vain, however, until we see the need to realise our dreams.
Our Dreaming teaches that bringing male and female, masculine and feminine poles into balanced relationship is prerequisite for human well-being, personal and collective. Thus our dreams, expressing the wisdom of our souls, urge us again and again to realise this potential. Our souls connect us into All That Is, visible and invisible. We attend to them by tending to our dreams. Living from them, we become part of a flowing, harmonious whole in which the order of Cosmos, Polis and Psyche exquisitely mesh.
(1) It is also not the last word, there being higher forms of tantric expression. Even in the heterosexual pattern of outer sacred marrying evoked above, the internal balancing of masculine and feminine energies is paramount. This is a qualitative process, not just a quantitative, incremental one, although there are phased approach routes marked by distinct stages of growing trust, openness and expression. In the end, overall enlightenment on a collective cultural level is impeded both by people operating at higher levels of tantric practice decrying sacred loving as merely physical or indicative of obsession and self-regarding practitioners on this level who promote it as the highest good without knowing of possibilities beyond it. To the first camp I say that attention needs clarifying on lower levels before it can turn integrally towards the higher ones, and to the second that the practice of Sacred Loving is indeed a Way to Heaven until it is made a fixation that blocks free passage.
