Guest Dream: Knitting Myself Together

Today' guest dreamer is Robin Whitmore, who also records and illustrates his dreams at Robin's Dream Diary. I'll respond to his dream as if it were my own. The dreamer always gets the last word, so please look at the comments following the dream for Robin's take.

Robin's Dream: I am in a huge builders merchants' yard. Workmen are milling around, busy on an important task - something has to be found out, uncovered. I pick up a plastic bag with plumbing connections in it."Leave them alone," I am told, "don't want you meddling with that." I just seem to be in the way.

Then I find a stack of old papers, all in handwriting that is not easy to decipher. It goes back years. I am convinced this has the answer to everything the men are searching for and I say to one of them,"Let me look through these, I am sure I will find the truth here." The men are a bit dismissive, they don't share my conviction but they are happy for me to take this dusty heap away. As I start to look through it my heart sinks, there is so much there and it's really hard to read, I'll never get anywhere.

Slowly I begin to sift through the paperwork, writing down each tiny detail. A woman (about 30-35 with long straight hair) sits with me. "Let's work out what this is all about. Someone's life is at stake- its about someone's life, a record." (I see an image of Beachy Head cliffs.) The documents seem to be about this woman.

Now I find pictures and objects within this pile of papers- there are three knitting needles, maybe 2'6"long, and they are covered in knitted wool in soft,"feminine" pastel shades of flame. The needles remind me of bullfighting spikes or spears or something to do with electricity like lightning rods.

"This was the beginning - one of many projects that never led anywhere." The woman laughs and admits it was another fruitless project. (Am I slightly contemptuous of her? Do I think she doesn't have it in her to create anything deep, anything meaningful?)

There are receipts in this collection. She must have been working, she must have earnt this - sums like £320 and another for a bit less. Modest sums. "Is there a date?" I ask the woman. We look and I arrange them in order.

The pictures I find are black and white newspaper cuttings collaged together and now a heap of old sepia family photos that I drop on the stone floor. I try to pick them up in order but muddle them a bit - never mind, I should be able to sort them out.

I am annoyed that I wake up before the puzzle is solved. There are pages of this novel, for that is what it is, that are maybe in german or russian. (So many times I start a book only to give up because the language is too hard.) This will be difficult language to decode but I know I can and must do it.

Carla's thoughts: This is a very complex dream, and I'm not going to pretend that I can unravel it without help from the dreamer. I have no way of knowing the allusions to Robin's waking life that play out  in this dream, so I will leave it to him to decipher those. Nevertheless, I hope my reactions will help Robin look at his dream with fresh eyes. For me (taking on the dreamer's masculine sex as I look at his dream), the dream is about coming to terms with my anima, a Jungian term for the woman who lives in every man.

The first paragraph of the dream sets the stage: I am working on uncovering a long forgotten aspect of myself. What is to emerge is connected to an unconscious process (the plumbing connections) that I have not recognized as authentic; these deep (we plumb the depths, after all) connections are covered in plastic, a material almost synonymous with phoney. The workmen have an ambivalent role. On the one hand, these manly men (and what's more masculine than a workman in a builder's yard?) are the masculine force in search of its feminine counterpart, and they don't want me to stand in their way. On the other hand, by not allowing me to help, they are obstructing the process. It's not unusual for dreams to have things two different ways simultaneously; after all, if there were no inner conflict we probably wouldn't be having the dream.

The second paragraph introduces a mini resolution, a first step on my way to a kind of internal integration: the men who didn't want me looking into things a moment ago are now ready to accept my help, and I know that I've been given access to the materials that will allow me to uncover the truth. I find out that something buried in the past is responsible for repressing what the the dream is trying to free. Did I keep a handwritten (or drawn) journal at some point in my youth? If so, the dream might be trying to get me to take a look at this time, a period when psychic events occurred that I am still having trouble understanding (the old papers that are hard to read, hard to decipher).

I need to think about the woman who is 30 to 35 years old. Who or what does she represent? Does the woman's long straight hair belong to an actual person or does it stand in for abstract qualities? For example, hair, coming out of the head as it does, can symbolize thoughts. Does this character's straight hair represent straight (and narrow) thoughts? In that case, since every part of my dream reflects some part of me, I am looking at my own straight and narrow thoughts. The woman symbolizes my own inner woman, and the dream is about my attempt to integrate her into my psyche. (Is the dreamer 30 to 35 at the time of this dream?) The men who are dismissive reflect a typical masculine reaction to women, and the dream makes it clear that I share these feelings. Did I let this cultural bias divorce me from my anima who is, in Jungian terms, the source of my spiritual self? In the past Beachy Head cliffs was known for its high number of suicides. By introducing this image my dream is pointing out—rather melodramatically in the way of dreams--how my anima feels about the issue: ("Let's work out what this is all about. Someone's life is at stake- its about someone's life, a record.") The life that is at stake is the inner life of an important part of me.

The knitting needles present a conjunctio, a marriage of opposites: a positive development in this conjoining of the masculine and feminine within my pysche. Knitting needles are associated with a feminine activity, and their function as a feminine symbol is reinforced by their feminine colored covering in the dream. At the same time, the dreamer tells us that “the needles remind me of bullfighting spikes or spears or something to do with electricity like lightning rods,” all very masculine symbols. Put together, these divergent symbols and the flame (enlightenment) that covers them represent the spiritual truth I've been searching for. The project that never led anywhere was my attempt to integrate these two seemingly irreconcilable aspects of myself.

The contempt that I express toward this anima figure encapsulates my dilemma: As an artist, I need to be on excellent terms with my anima! If Jung is right, then she represents the wellspring (there are those plumbing connections again) of my creativity. And yet—that is what I don't trust her to do. I question whether she can “create anything deep, anything meaningful?”

That she has earned some money signifies that I have begun to give her some of the credit that is her due. Not too much; the sums are modest. But at least I've been able to move from seeing everything in black and white to a more nuanced sepia. I'm still confused (I've muddled the picture) and frustrated by the novel (new) and incomprehensible (in a foreign language) puzzle, but I think I'll be able to sort it out. I've made an important beginning with this dream.

Guest Dreamer: The Cement Men of Mars

The following dream was sent to me by my brother. He was very young when he dreamt it, during the era of the competition between the US and the USSR to conquer space (the 1960s).

The Dream: It started with me watching the first manned Mars landing on TV.  But as it progressed, I became one of the astronauts landing there.  (Note:  I had this dream at the height of the race to the moon.) In my dream Mars was perfectly habitable, and we found a nice little circular grove of trees to camp in for the night.  But in the middle of the night we were suddenly attacked by Martian Cement Men who would step out from behind trees and throw spears at us.  We, of course, were armed with submachine guns (I mean, what else would you take to Mars?) and started blasting away.

As our bullets struck them, the impacts looked exactly the way bullets hitting a cement wall look.  That is, there’d be a puff of smoke and dust and a shallow crater from the impact would be created: thus the name Cement Men.  Of course it also meant that it didn’t kill them, so we had a lengthy battle on our hands.

I remember being touched (in the dream) when I saw one cement man leaving the safety of the trees to grab a fallen comrade and drag him back to safety. These guys were big, built a lot like the comic book version of the Incredible Hulk. I’m still waiting for Spirit and Opportunity to find them!

Interpretation: One truism about dreams is that every character in them is us—or a part of us—no matter how alien the dream creatures sometime seem. A character we have a particularly bad reaction to is called our shadow; it shows us some part of ourselves that we need to come to terms with. This is similar to the ogre under the bridge or the wicked witch of fairy tale: a handy screen on which to project all we hate or fear.

You might notice that this dream reads something like a mythic adventure, and there’s a well documented relationship between dream and myth. Joseph Campbell analyzed the myth’s basic plotline as the hero’s journey: each stage parallels an important life passage. In this case, the passage is from childhood to young manhood.

An important part of dream interpretation that hasn’t yet come up in this blog is that the dreamer is the final authority on the meaning of his dream. When I put forth a comment about his—or anyone else’s—dream I am inevitably talking about what the dream would mean to me had I dreamt it. So I’ll discuss my brother’s dream as if it were my dream.

I am young and full of curiosity about the world. The news is full of an exciting global competition, and I’d like to take part in it. My dream takes me to Mars, where I encounter a planet that closely resembles the world I know.

And yet: there’s some interesting symbolism here. The circle, in Jungian terms, represents the integrated self. Jung felt that the circle expressed the totality of our being, containing all our sometimes disparate elements. Perhaps because I’m young and need to grow—both mentally and physically—I cannot bask in this bliss for too long, but must meet the next challenge. It’s symbolized by the confrontation with my shadow in the form of the Cement Men.

The fact that these cement men are attacking me with very primitive weapons (spears) makes me think that I’m doing battle with a primitive part of myself, a part that I feel I must conquer if I want to become a civilized adult. I’m well armed for this confrontation, maybe a little too well-armed (am I too defensive?) pitting my sub-machine gun against their spears. Nevertheless, these creatures, being made of cement, are not easy to kill. That I can be touched by the compassion of one of the Cement Men for his comrade is a very good sign that I’m on the way toward humanizing—therefore integrating—this tough and violent part of myself.

The dreamer always gets the last word, so here’s Bro’s Interpretation: Earlier that night I'd watched an episode of “The Untouchables” in which a machine gun had sprayed a cement wall. I believe this dream was inspired the space race and that evening’s episode of the Untouchables.