An Uphill Struggle

In this dream I try to come to terms with the cycle of life.
The Dream: I'm with others, my brother Greg (who died recently), my husband Clark, a man from Boston and a man from Spain. We're a team participating in a sporting event that is considered the equivalent of the Spanish bullfights. We have a huge snake in our RV: the animal is so big that its head and tale stick out the ends. The idea of the event is that we run along the outside of the camper, pushing it and its snake up a very steep, icy, snow-covered mountain. When we get to the top we are to dispose of the snake in some way, butchering and eating it, or maybe throwing it into the sea—but butchering and eating it is somehow involved.

Interpretation: My path is slippery (icy), cold and difficult, and our objective (destroying the snake) is one I'm not in complete sympathy with. My brother Greg represents the inescapable reality of my own mortality. But what about the other “players?” Clark represents my other half. We're both in the dream, so all parts of me are engaged in this struggle. The other two men represent my unresolved conflict. The man from Boston is propriety, a person who knows how the game is played, and the man from Spain evokes the dramatic ghoulishness of that country's church art. This tells me that my psyche is trying to integrate the acceptable social reaction to death (stiff upper lip, don't make others uncomfortable, pretend it doesn't happen) with my innate horrified emotional response.

In an attempt to resolve my dilemma my dream presents me with several rebirth symbols. Snakes, of course, are traditional symbols of rebirth. By eating the snake we take in his qualities and he lives on through us. Since water accompanies birth, the alternate action of throwing the snake into the water implies that he will be reborn. The issue is not resolved, but I'm working on it.

The Snake

The Dream: I don't know if this was a dream or if it actually happened. In the middle of the night I heard Clark talking in his sleep.He talked about a snake and something else that I didn't remember afterward. I spoke to him, telling him what he had said. In the morning he didn't remember any of this, and I was left wondering if I had dreamt it.

Interpretation: The snake, as a rebirth symbol, fits into the sequence of dreams from this time that attempts to get me more comfortable with death. I am not ready to embrace the rebirth idea, so I perceive it as coming from outside myself.

Guest Dreamer: The Python, Mago, and Homecoming

Occasionally people experience what dream workers call a “big” dream: one that points us in a new direction. Helen Hwang recounts one of these, along with her thoughts on what the dream has meant to her search for her own spiritual truth.

Helen's Dream: I do not have a narrative for this dream. I have a scene to describe. I saw an old, big, and long python coiled in a room at least three or four times. The coils of the snake filled four corners of the room! Its posture was firm and its head was up. It stayed still and looked at me as if smiling. It was emanating an aura of something positive and comforting, love, peace, and wisdom etc. I felt comforted and delighted with the sight. The snake felt like my grandmother to whom I was very close when young.

After awakening, I described what I saw and felt in my dream journal. Then I decided to interact with the dream. I called the old python "Grandmother Wisdom" and began to talk to her, the content of which I do not remember clearly now. (I do not have the journal with me.) I may have asked her to protect me and guide me through the years to come. I may have pleaded with her to lead me to an exciting adventure in life. I intuitively knew that this was a dream of importance. However, I had no clue about how to interpret it. It just felt good!

Helen's thoughts on her dream: That was twenty some years ago. I was a devoted Christian, liberal though, at that time, eager to follow the lifestyle of an overseas missionary. Perhaps I had already joined the missionary group and was being trained on the day that I had this dream. This dream remained a mystery for a long time. And I had almost completely forgotten it until this morning. Now, I see this python was the symbol of ouroboros leading me to the primordial knowing of the Great Goddess. She kept her promise and granted my heart's wish.

I was reminded of this dream because I wrote and published this essay today: Toward the Primordial Knowing of Mago. It feels right that this dream was a prophetic dream for my life's forthcoming and unfolding voyage to the Great Goddess. I am beginning to understand its details now.

The room that the python was sitting in was a medium-sized rectangular room with white walls and no furniture. The center was simply left empty. Just a clean and bright, pristine room. Now I can see the room is filled with the primordial energy emanated from Mago, the Great Goddess. It is the same energy that came from the time of beginning. That this was a family room of my childhood intimates that I would be coming Home with Mago, the Great Goddess of East Asia. The word, Halmeoni, in Korean means grandmother and goddess at once. This dream was a manifestation of primordial intelligence working in me at that time. It foretold that I would be re-turning to the Female Divine of my own culture.

That the python was coiling in the four corners suggests the four directions, which means all directions of the world in East Asia. Am I not bridging the worlds through my research and advocacy of Mago? Also I find it interesting that the room was undecorated exposing bare white walls. It signifies to me a new beginning to be evolved with many potentials and possibilities. Now the article that I wrote in 2007 about my homecoming with Mago comes to mind: Returning Home.

It has taken many turns over the years for me to realize that the power of the Great Goddess/Mago has been working in me!

Snakeskin

The Dream: A dream image of a snake hole, with the reptile’s shed skin emerging. I prod the skin, half afraid it’s an actual snake but realizing as I do that it isn’t.

Interpretation: Because snakes shed their skins and appear to emerge from the earth, our ancestors--close observers of nature--deduced that these animals were reborn, and they became a symbol of regeneration. The removed, cast-off skin tells me that this dream comments on the last dream post. Ready or not, I’ve entered a new phase of life.

The Snake

The Dream: Later that night, after the dream of the malicious masks (last post), I dreamed of a snake.

Interpretation: In our culture the snake has connotations both negative (the Garden of Eden provocateur) and positive (the doctor’s caduceus, a healing symbol). By its ambiguity this image warns me that good and evil can and do co-exist: as Solzhenitsyn says, if you want to rid the world of evil you must rip out half your own heart.

Jung has a different take: “The idea of transformation and renewal by means of a serpent is a well-substantiated archetype. It is the healing serpent, representing the god. . . . Probably the most significant development of serpent symbolism as regards renewal of personality is to be found in Kundalini yoga.”*

*Carl Gustav Jung, Dreams, Translated by R.F.C. Hull, (Princeton: Bollingen Paperback Edition, 1974),  218.