Hanging Grandma

When trying to understand one of your dreams it’s a good idea to see if it contains a paradox. In this dream, grandmother is dead and yet she lives. This is the key to the meaning of the dream.

The Dream:  An older woman, “Grandma,” has hung herself. At first I’m afraid to look at her, but for some reason her body is left hanging in a public area, the courtyard of a school, and seeing her is unavoidable. All are in a tizzy over this event. Yet she looks very peaceful; she’s in a yoga position with a contemplative expression on her face. As awful as this incident seems, when I see her serenity I am consoled.

Interpretation: When I had this dream I was preparing to go see and admire the great Florentine painters of the medieval to Renaissance periods. Grandma represents the past; in this case not my personal past but the past artistic glories of European art, which have been an ongoing inspiration in my life. She, like the art I love, hangs in public for all to see. I am distressed that she has died.

Is the dream telling me that these earlier periods of art are now dead for me? Yes: at least as far as being at the core of my artistic inspiration. But the dream is also telling me that a new, revitalized artistic energy will emerge. After all, I take comfort in seeing the spirit live on in the dead Grandma (her yoga position and contemplative expression) despite her apparent death. The paradox this dream explores is the common dream topic of new life (energy) emerging from death (stasis).

Shifting

The Dream: A bridge. I am aware of part of it, which looks like part of a square. It has a rail on one side and is open on the other, and there is dark gray water underneath, far below. I’m afraid when I look down on the unprotected side, so I avert my eyes in order to have the courage to proceed. I am with a small group; we are filing across. We only see the section of the bridge I’ve illustrated.

Interpretation: Jeremy Taylor says that a bridge in a dream represents the difficult but doable task of living with unresolved paradox. The greatest paradox we live with is the knowledge that being (life) is bounded by non-being (death). I see this dream as part of a series building upon the last two dreams: here I explore what really frightens me about ill health: its logical conclusion, i.e., death. I am crossing this bridge – or working on my understanding of this irresolvable dilemma -- but even so I am not quite ready to see it: I avert my eyes, in order to have the courage to proceed.

The part of the bridge that I see makes three sides of a square. For Jung, a square or circle signified a complete person, one who has attained consciousness by integrating unconscious material. My square is clearly not complete.

A Dream Seminar with Jeremy Taylor

Instead of posting a dream today I’m going comment on a dream seminar I attended last weekend, lead by Jeremy Taylor and attended by 17 very knowledgeable and experienced dreamers whose life experiences run the gamut from analyst, event planner and musician to  priest, accountant and artist. Our topic was “Transpersonal Dreams and Dreams of the Divine.”  Simply put, Jeremy explains transpersonal dreams as those with material that includes the personal, but also has meaning for the rest of us.

Jeremy lectured, and we learned much from his invaluable store of dream wisdom, gleaned over a lifetime of work in the field. We also learned from each other. I hope that other attendees will post to this blog, so I am going to limit myself to commenting on the core lesson of the meeting, for me.  I expect it will be different for each. In my case, it was Jeremy’s emphasis on the crucial role of paradox in our dreams. For example, let’s say I dream of a dung beetle. In trying to puzzle out what the beetle means in my dream I think first that it is a disgusting insect, and then I’m reminded of the Egyptian scarab, a beautiful symbol of creative divinity. Which understanding of the beetle applies to my dream?  Is it disgusting, or is it divine? As Jung explains, when we are trying to bring something counter to our usual understanding to consciousness, “it is never a question of ‘this or that,’ but of ‘this and that.”1 Or, as Jeremy puts it, “all of the above.”

One of Jung’s best known concepts is that of synchronicity (things happening at the same time that may or may not be related but that strike us as if they were). So—the morning after the seminar as I opened my Sunday paper and turned to the book section, I was struck by a review of two books by Hans Keilson that spoke directly to the inner paradoxes we attempt to uncover through our dream work. The reviewer said that “. . . . Keilson performs the difficult trick of showing how a single psyche can embrace many contradictory thoughts, and how naturally extreme intelligence and sensitivity can coexist with obtuseness, denial and self-deception.”2

1 C.G.Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul, translated by W.S.Dell and Cary F. Baynes, (San Diego, New York, London: A Harvest Book, Harcourt, Inc., 1933), 21.

2 Francine Prose, “As Darkness Falls,” The New York Times Book Review (August 8, 2010): 8.