This week I am attending the Haden Institute Summer Dream
Conference - Dreams: God’s Forgotten
Language at the Kanuga Conference Center in Hendersonville, NC. This is my
second Dream Conference I have attended and I find myself ever more drawn to
look at dreams as messages from God- or from the Ground of Being to use Tillich’s
phrase. I am still a novice at understanding Jung- most of my training about
dreams were influenced by Freud and his sense of the Id’s attempts to seduce us
into a fuller life. Dreams are attempts to get around the Ego’s defense
mechanisms to keep the world in manageable choices but the Jungian perspective
is the core of the deeper unconscious is spiritual rather than sexual, while
the goal is the same of living a fuller life, within the Jungian view, the Self,
or what I like to call, the Christ within us, keeps trying to communicate with
us to call us into deeper relationship. The purpose of encountering dreams is
to be faithful and to bring more of the unconscious into the conscious. The
dreams can be the results of things we ate, or the working out of things that
happened during the day, or they could be messages from God to call us into deeper relationship – not all
Spirits are Holy Spirits so discernment is necessary.My first night at the
Conference Center I had this dream.
The Runaway Car:
I’m back in school as a Drama Major and in a series of
sketches with the help of Ben Affleck. We are trying to create something
profound but I the critic in me suspects that it is pretentious.
The performance is to go on at 7:00 but I step out to run a
small errand. I drive my car back to the apartment and get out to run inside.
The car, my old white Rambler, continues without me and starts to go up and
down hills. I run after it.
But then my dog gets hit by another car. There are three scummy
characters with Balkan, or Trans Caucasus, accents who help me with the dog. The
leader of the three reminds me of a character I saw in a Macedonian movie who
was a burned out soldier who has seen and done too much killing. I hold the damaged
puppy in my arms and argue with them to help me get my car.
I realize that they are going to take advantage of me but I
go along with them in order to track after my car.
As we drive along I see Mountain lions on the sides of the
street which the head of the group says he does not see but I think he is lying.
We go through tunnels and I don’t know if the car is even on
this road or going up and down streets. One of the characters, nicknamed the “Shark”
is getting sick and throwing up in the back seat.
We get to a bridge area where are stalled cars and I ask
people if they have seen my car. I have a conversation with a woman who says
she saw my car earlier but that doesn’t work because the car she saw left an
half hour before my car left me. Looking at thre time I ralize that there is no
way I can get back to the play in time.
Still holding on to the dog, I rush into the stalled line of
traffic at the bridge going through busses and trains to get to the other side
of the stalled traffic so I can get a good view of the runaway car. The “Shark”
is right behind me.
The bus I am going through
starts up and we start to cross the bridge. The character of the “Shark”
is still with me. In panic I pull the cord to stop the bus.
The character of the “Shark” is coming up behind me and I am
scared as he come up behind me. The bus is coming to a stop and the space
between the “Shark” and I is closing. I am pulling on the cord to stop and
I wake up and sit straight up in bed.
I worked the dream out in group a couple days later,
yesterday afternoon, but I had been thinking about it intensely and on
yesterday morning I had a fragment of a dream where I was told I was pregnant
and I saw that this was a follow up to the earlier disturbing dream.
I had come to the conference to look at dreams to help me
make some decisions on how to deal with a dear friend’s depression and with my
own sense of direction of my ministry as I have been at my church which I love
for almost 10 years and wonder if I am giving them their money’s worth. At first
I thought the dream was a warning of depression with the damaged puppy being my
concern for dear friend, the car being myself wandering without direction and
the three character being the dark forces of violence and anger within me overwhelming
me with depression as a substitution for anxiety about future.
On reflection I think it is about direction in my life and a
call to go deeper into dream worlds. The three scummy character might be the
Trinity, for Death is always a symbol of Transformation and in the collective unconsciousness
ancient religions the predator is usually a metaphor of the God, e.g. Lion,
Bear, Bull, and in the South Seas the Metaphor is the Shark.
Still working on it !
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