3 Murdered in the Next Room

The Dream: Three people have been murdered in the next room. Hiro is one of them. I don't know whether or not the murderers want to kill us—us being me, another adult, and two young children. I am trying to dress the 4-year old in order to get them both out to safety. She is defiant and won't listen to me. I don't know how to make her behave; she doesn't grasp the situation and refuses to put a shirt on. I am planning to call the police, but don't want to until I've gotten us all away from the house.

I can't find my net book computer. I've gathered together all my electronic devices, but that one must be in the room with the murdered people. I can't go in there, especially once I hear that Hiro is among the murdered.

Interpretation: There are two things that tip me off as to the meaning of this dream. First, there is the fact that Hiro is among the murdered. Hiro is a close friend of my husband who has behaved like a brother. Then there are the numbers: 3 murdered people and a 4 year old. I was four when my younger brother was born, and I have lost 3 close family members: my father, my mother, and this same younger brother. The defiant child who refuses to grasp the situation is the part of me that doesn't want to accept these deaths. When people lose emotional control, especially if they get angry, we say, "Keep your shirt on!" This part of me refuses to do it. I'd like to get some help from an authority (the police), but I don't think they can help yet.

The family I want to save from danger, the danger of mortality, reflects my current family: two adults and two children. The net book computer that I can't find is the thinking part of me that's missing here. I must accept the reality of these losses, and the inevitability of death, before I'll be able to think clearly.

Betrayal

The Dream: My husband Clark is sitting on a cushy chair with a woman on his lap. They are clearly lovers. Clark doesn't mind that I see this, and indeed feels I should accept the situation. I think I would like to try to see, objectively, what this woman is like; so I observe. She seems young and light hearted. At one point a little boy, about 4, appears. He has blond curly hair and looks angelic. He is asleep, inert, lying on the floor to the left of the seated couple. She goes over to him and attends to him in a sweet, maternal way. I like this woman, but I don't like the situation.

I begin to inwardly steam over what I see as Clark's betrayal. When did he have time time to get involved with another woman?! We're almost always together. I think that I'll tell him he has to choose; he can't have us both as he seems to believe. But then I realize that even if he relinquishes this particular woman my trust in him has been destroyed, and things will never be the same again. I awaken, upset as from a nightmare, and very relieved it was a dream.

Interpretation: This dream was triggered by the news that a friend's husband is involved with someone else. The dream touches on my own residual oedipal conflict, the clue being that the other woman is a sweet maternal person whom I like, but it deals with something else as well. I had been reading about Jung's personal life and was disappointed to discover that he apparently felt that the women in his life should tolerate the same arrangement the dream portrays. This expectation strikes me as self-serving, cruel, insensitive and exploitative; it makes me angry on behalf of both Mrs. Jung and Toni Wolff. At a personal level I have to reconcile the fact that someone whose intellect and insight I so thoroughly admire, a person to whom my conception of the mind is “married,” can behave in a way I find thoroughly callous.

Somehow these people worked it out: perhaps the women felt that the man's greatness created an entitlement. Living in an era that offered no autonomy to women, they were victims of their historical moment and needed Jung in order to fulfill their own potential: reflected greatness (the golden haired boy) might have struck them as better than no greatness at all.

Still A Beginner

The Dream: I am waiting and waiting for a fellow to go skiing with. It is getting onto 4:00, about the time I would like to stop skiing for the day. At one point I think “Why did I wait for him? I should have just gone on by myself.” I think about what an inept skier I am, and how this fellow probably doesn't realize that and will be annoyed when he discovers it. I know it's a very long, but beautiful, lift ride up to the ski area. “By the time we get there,” I think, “it will be getting dark.”

Interpretation: In this attempt to do something that looks beautiful but that I seem to have difficulty grasping I see my struggle to create a meaningful life. I feel I'm running out of time. In feeling that others are impatient with my inadequacy I project my own harsh self-judgment onto them.