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"If one is a greyhound, ________________________ Welcome. The Dream Work Series is compiled from transcripts of a number of different seminars, workshops and lectures given over the past 13 years. They have been variably known as Working With Your Dreams, The Theory and Use of Dreams in Psychotherapy, and The Power and Purpose of Dreams, but their focus has always remained the same: learning the what's and why's of your night time dreaming life. This series is organized to walk you through the material in what I hope is a logical and linear fashion, but dreams don't always follow such a linear path. So sometimes you may find me having to circle the herd of cattle, so to speak, in order to bring the material into the corral. I mean, dreams speak in a different language. It's a more symbolic, figurative way of expression, and so I will do that myself. This series is meant to be introductory, so you might also find me repeating myself. It's not that I’m trying to beat some old dead horse. It's more that I'm also trying to talk to a different part of you. The part of you that dreams. |
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The Unconscious I'd like to start here with a discussion that compares consciousness with the unconscious. Bear with me if some of what I say covers ground that some of you may already be familiar with, but we're not all starting at the same place. Let's first try to simplify it for the purposes of definition. Consciousness is like being awake. Right? You're aware of your environment through sensory perception - sight, sound, and so forth. Or you've thought something through. Or you're mentally aware of it in a way in which you're not when you're asleep. You know that you've got to open the door to pass from one room to the next, and you're aware of the reasons for that. Take it a step further. You're in a store or someplace and there's a guy or a girl that for whatever reason turns your head. Maybe you think it's because you like the way they dress, or you're attracted to their hair color - or no hair at all! - or they're a person from another culture - someone different from you - or you just like their eyes, their legs, their smile, the way they carry themselves. Or maybe you don't even know why. There's just that "something." Something has possessed you and you pursue this other person, meet, date and "fall in love." Or maybe you're like Richard Nixon. He was President when I was growing up. You see that other person and at first sight fall in love. I don't mean I was in love with Richard Nixon. Far from it. I mean he met his wife Pat and then asked her to marry him on their first date - and she accepted. So you get married to this other person, someone you don't really know at all, and then however many months or years later you realize you do know them. You've married your mother or father. Consciousness is like being awake. Did you consciously choose to marry one of your parents? Or was that an "un" conscious choice. You in some way were not aware of what drove you into the arms of this other person. It was not a conscious choice. You were not awake. Let's take another example. We can all agree that we're perfect, right? We're thoughtful, considerate, clean. Or at least most of the time. And then one day someone looks at us the wrong way or says something or cuts us off on the freeway, and we go berserk. We're rude, we curse, or punch them - or if you're in Los Angeles on the freeway, you shoot their tires out. They look at us and say, "I've never seen you like that before." Maybe we've never seen ourselves like that before. We grow horns, breathe fire and our skin turns red. We all know the fairy tales when a beautiful maiden or lad turns into the ugly monster or a witch that terrorizes children. Well, we've become this fire breathing thing - a monster or an ugly witch. The fact is that most people are not aware of all their traits. Some of these traits are "un" conscious, just waiting for a trigger to bring them out. Or, if we're aware of them, we decide that some are good and some are bad, and we try to hide the bad ones - stuff them out of consciousness. But they usually have their way and always come out at the most embarrassing times. Right? So consciousness is what you're aware of. You're awake to it. Unconscious means it's something you're not aware of - or it's the place where all these things you're not aware of reside. But these things are still there. You're just not consciously aware of them. Let's take another, slightly different example. You're walking across the street. The light's in your favor, and you're in the cross walk, when, suddenly, a car comes from out of nowhere and BAM! The next thing you know you're seeing this whole scene down on the street below you. The sort of strobe-like red light of an ambulance is flashing, very "un" real, and people are milling around down there like ants. You even see yourself lying on the street below. Your consciousness exists quite apart from the body, the five senses and all. Yet, it is still there. You are aware of what's going on, though maybe not in a way you ever thought possible before. Well, the next thing you know, you wake ten days later in the hospital and you have amnesia. The last thing you remember you were out with friends at a dance club, or bowling, or something, and now you don't really know why you're in the hospital. The experience of the accident itself has been pushed out of your conscious awareness. The accident itself was probably too overwhelming, too life threatening at the time, for you to remain consciously aware of it. So you stuffed it. Is it still there? Ten years later, you're walking down the street and you witness someone run over, just as you were, and - WHAM! - the accident, which you didn’t remember at all, comes back to your conscious awareness just like the hammers of hell. Look at it from a different perspective. Let's say you are sitting out in a natural place in the country. You're meditating, eyes closed, and at peace with yourself and the world. Suddenly you become aware of something and open your eyes to look. Sitting right before you is a coyote, a curious look on his face. Then he gets up and takes a few steps away, stops, and turns, as if beckoning you to follow. And you do. After a few steps you pause, however, to turn back to where you were sitting, and there you see yourself still sitting a meditative posture, eyes closed, a slight smile on your face. And then you proceed to follow the coyote. So consciousness is a certain sort of awareness. Some say it's an awareness of awareness itself. Psychology is the study of the unconscious. You might also call that unconscious part of you the "psyche." Psyche is the root of the word psychology - where the word comes from. Psyche literally translates to mean the soul. And therapy? Therapy means healing. And so we have psychotherapy, or healing of the soul.
In terms of our present day psychology, Sigmund Freud is generally regarded as the first modern day person to widely address the existence of the unconscious in his work. Carl Jung is another pillar in the world of psychology and he started out as something of a devoted disciple of Freud. They were part of what's known as the psychoanalytic school of psychology. You know how in art there were the impressionists and expressionists, the avante garde, the moderns, and so forth? The same is true with psychology. Except it was more like first there were the shamans or medicine people, or the yogis in a different land, then the magicians, and poet or bards, the priestesses and priests, until we finally got to the shrinks and all their different specialties. Well, Freud and Jung were both part of what we've come to call the talking cure. You lie on the couch, or sit across from someone and free-associate. I say black, you say blue. I say apple, you say cider. I say egg. You say Humpty-Dumpty. I ask you about Humpty-Dumpty and you tell me how he had such a great fall. It strikes you somehow funny and then you begin to cry. And after a moment you say, "I wonder where that came from?"
Let's say Antony Scalia is lying on the couch. Scalia is one of the seven justices who sit on the U.S. Supreme Court. Let's say Scalia has come for a session with Sigmund Freud and Freud says mountain. Scalia says top. Freud says pencil. Scalia says pen. Freud says "A topless strip joint." And the first thing that comes to Scalia's mind are huge, wild, modern-day Roman orgies filling all the football stadiums in the land with undulating bosoms and enormous erections all writhing and rubbing against each other, building with some uncontrollable primitive passion which erupts and leaves everyone shattered, out of their rational minds. Free-association. You might also know this as a "Freudian slip," when you unconsciously reveal something about yourself. Something from your unconscious makes itself known. You know, Scalia actually referred to this modern day orgy bit as the probable cause in his majority opinion when the Supreme Court decided they had to shut down a small strip joint in rural Texas. Really. He did. He's a Supreme Court Justice. it's a bit of the unconscious at work.
Well, this process of free-association served as something of the springboard for Freud into the exploration of the unconscious - the human psyche. And he was one of the first psychologists (at least the first to gain wide recognition) who were actively working with dreams for that purpose. Freud called dreams "the royal road to the unconscious" - the royal road to the human soul.
At a certain point in Freud's relationship with Carl Jung, his disciple, they had a big break and they split up. You see, as a mentor, Freud was something like Jung's father. Remember what I said about marrying your father or mother? Well, it's the same thing with most anyone you're attracted to, in parts large or small. To simplify, Jung rebelled against what he thought was Freud's too tightly controlled way of working. That is, it brought up a lot of issues for Jung about his own relationship with his father, who really was a lot like Freud.
It really was a big crisis for Jung, breaking up with Freud, because he was also putting his professional credibility on the line. But at the same time he was also undergoing what he called a "creative illness." That is, the fall-out really shook him up, and he was confronted with a tremendous upsurge of unconscious material that came in large part by way of his dreams. Jung called this "creative" in the truest sense of that word, in that it came about as a means for and because of a need to re-create himself - re-create himself in a more authentic image of himself, rather than in the image of his father, or his surrogate father, Freud, or even society at large. So his psyche, his soul opened up, with images of himself welling up from the unconscious, a bit like Pandora's box. You know the story, right? Pandora can't wait to see what's inside. She's warned against it by all the nay sayers. But it's just too darn tempting, and when she opens it up, all sorts of strange and wonderful and terrifying things come pouring out - just like in your dreams. What the story portrays is Pandora in the midst of a creative illness, or a spiritual emergency - an emergence of the spirit, the human soul crying out for its due. For some of us it may be nothing more than like not feeling comfortable in our own skin. Have you ever heard somebody say that? How about, "I'm not feeling my Self today?" Jung's "creative illness" lasted about seven years, and then he spent the rest of his life writing and lecturing and working with clients as a means to validate his experiences.
So while Freud called dreams the royal road to the unconscious, Jung traveled down that road in a way far beyond what Freud had theorized, and he brought back what he considered to be a map of the unconscious, the anatomy of the human psyche, as it were.
I don't want to suggest that dreams are the only means of accessing soul material. I also don't want to suggest that Freud's or Jung's work is the gospel. They were great people, with powerful intellects, but there's been much work with dreams both before and since their time. I also don't want to suggest that dreams are only about repressed feelings or pathology. But it's the hopes, fears, questions and conflicts of our lives that dreams are made of, and if you're serious about evolving, about personal transformation, then your dreams are necessarily going to play their part. Your dreams shed light on the past, inform the present, and enliven new possibilities for your life. They will lay out the most salient, front-burner issues to be addressed at any given point in time. You wake every morning with a new one, and they're tailor-made for you.
Do you know what the Talmud is? It is a holy book in the Jewish faith. The Talmud says, in effect, that a dream, which is left on the pillow, is like a letter that is not opened and read.
Working with your dreams is like starting a new relationship. The more time you spend with the relationship, getting to know this whole other "unconscious” part of yourself, the deeper the relationship grows, the better the communication, the more intimate it becomes. Another way to look at it is that you're beginning to stoke a fire underneath a pot, and you're the pot. The water in the pot is your psyche, that other world which is a part of you, the essential you which informs the very fabric of your life. And your psyche will start bubbling as it heats - bubbles of insight, bubbles of understanding, bubbles of personal truths - welling forth in the intuitive symbolic langue of your dreams. If you continue with the work, you'll bring the water to a boil, and that's when change occurs. Real change. Inner change that you’ll find reflected in your outer world. Here's a quote from Carl Jung that pretty much hits the nail right on the head. He talks about fate:
"The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens on the outside, as fate. That is to say, when an individual remains undivided and does not become conscious of his inner contradictions, the world must perforce act out the conflict."
"As above, so below" is how the mystics would say it. You draw to yourself people or circumstances that are but a reflection of something about you. They are your teachers, so to speak, bearing a message for you to learn. It is about something that is as yet not made conscious and integrated into your being. When it is, then you will no longer draw these things to yourself. Or, if they appear on the radar screen of your life, the experience will be more akin to that of water falling off a duck's back.
Part of the myth of Ishtar serves as a good example of one of the ways that dreams work. That is, it speaks to the cyclical nature of the process. As the story goes, Ishtar is taken into the underworld where her dark sister meets her. Ishtar's sister hacks off her head and arms and legs, and then hangs her torso on a hook so all the blood can drain out. When all the blood has drained from Ishtar's body, she is then reassembled, rises up to the heavens, and after a period of time, returns to earth.
That's a lovely story, isn't it? But notice, it describes a descent into the underworld. To the land of the dark sister. That's a typical motif. This "dark land," the underworld, is the world of the unconscious, the night time land of dreams, filled with information and material which is at yet "in the dark,” not yet seen the light of day, or the light of conscious awareness. Just like Ishtar, when you begin working with your dreams, it can be a bit like being taken apart, piece by piece, being dismembered. Now I don't mean to imply that you're in for a bloody horror show night after night. Nobody would remember his or her dreams. Or at least they wouldn't want to. Still, the dream wills out. You ever hear of nightmares? Of course you have. We've all had them. But that's a perfect case in point. It’s just like somebody shouting or shaking you till your ribs rattle, saying WAKE UP! That's what a nightmare is doing, calling out to wake you up to some new awareness. It's the same thing with recurring dreams, when the same people or situations appear night after night with the same message. "Un" conscious material is beckoning, your soul is trying to make itself heard. It could be a warning, and if you're not paying attention it has to resort to extremes. If the nightmare doesn't wake you up, then "the world must perforce act the conflict out." Like an overdue bill in the mail, soon it will be turned over to the collections agency. I mean, you will meet it in your every day outer world life, walking down the street - for better or for worse.
The nightmare. I'm getting ahead of myself.
Ishtar's descent depicts the classic tale of shamanic dismemberment - the process of taking something apart to understand it better, and to put it back together in a better, more perfect way. It's a bit like playing God, joining in with the re-creation - or, rather, finishing what was started. We are human "beings," after all, in a state of ever flux. It's a matter of transformation.
Your dreams will take you back through the incidents of your own personal biography, your life, to help you better understand your personality, and to help you understand the roots of what is manifest for you today - who and what you are, where you are and why. With that understanding, the insight and awareness brings, also brings the possibility of new choices to be consciously made, new possibilities - where to go and how, as it were - for the purposes of a broader experience of, say, sexuality, creativity, love, work - life itself! If you're at a place in life where you are having difficulties or conflicts - maybe you're not feeling your Self - it's an opportunity. It’s the opportunity to shed what doesn't work and re-create your life in a more authentic image of your self.
Let me tell you about one woman who comes to see me. She's a woman of color, a woman of African descent, and we often focus on her dreams. One day presents an epic dream that's peopled with generations of her family members. There are wagon trains, mass movements of people in migration and the dream is filled with all sorts of twists and turns, taking her ever deeper and deeper into some mysterious something as the dream unfolds. It's a very rich and powerful dream and I get me goose bumps when I think of it. You see, her dream is laying out her story is one big, massive fell swoop. It is not only her story, but also the story of a whole people as it's particularized to her, and it lives within her unconscious. This woman, like the majority of people of African descent living in the United States, comes from a family of former slaves, a time of very brutal oppression in which children were taken from families, husbands separated from wives; customs and spiritual traditions from the homeland were disallowed until, over the course of some 500 years, they were left with little or no outer world recollection of themselves or where they had come from. This woman doesn't know her country of origin. Her mother's and grandmother's memories are those that were passed down, but they're references to the slave masters who owned her people - heart and soul. Anything prior to that is lost in the dim mists of it all. It is a story of a people dispossessed of their rightful heritage, a people whose collective soul was lost. And so they adapted as a matter of survival until their memories had to do with little else. Well, this woman's dream laid out the movements of that history, but, more than that, it also began to take her further back, to deeper roots still living, the inner memory of a time before her forbears were brought to this land. That's right. Like, I said, it was mysterious and uplifting, with some very archaic, primitive stuff, as well - e.g. dancing figures in leopard skins (half leopard, half man, that is) - all tinged with a bit of fear, but also filled with exhilaration.
There's a little piece by Monique Wittig, an invocation that can be found quoted in Mark Thompson's wonderful book, Gay Spirit, which addresses just this fact. I mean, it's about any people who have been disenfranchised, and it goes like this:
"There was a time when you were not a slave, remember that. Slavery can be understood on many different levels. On one level, it is the literal captivity into which one is taken. On another level, it is more the colonization of your mind, your feelings, your way of being in the world, your very soul.
This is what I mean when I say that working with your dreams allows you the opportunity to re-create yourself in a more authentic image of yourself. You begin to move through and beyond the circumstances of your life to reach a place within that informs you of another reality. And like the woman with her epic dream, you begin to reclaim those lost parts from deep inside yourself. As one result, you begin to feel more empowered - not because of any accomplishments in an outer world kind of way (those will surely come) but because, quite literally you begin to feel more comfortable in your own skin. I talk about empowerment or personal power in this instance for what it genuinely is: something that springs from a well that is deeper than your own being, yet which you are also a part of. I also use the word insight to explain what occurs, but it's really much more than that, for insight is only a mental awareness of the process after the fact of the healing itself, after you've reclaimed those lost soul parts. What you do with that is then a matter of conscious choice. Yes, dreams can be very powerful in the way they work to "put you back together again" - like Ishtar was, or Humpty-Dumpty after he's taken his great fall - this time in a healthier and happier way. It's really quite remarkable. It's in service of your Self.
As a process, dream work can be fairly cyclical in nature. Dreams will take you into parts of your personal development, helping you to recognize or free you in some cases of things that are holding you back. It shines a spotlight on them, and pretty soon you may find yourself looking at yourself with new eyes, with new understanding. You could say you're beginning to fall in love with yourself. Like the Greek boy Narcissus was when he looked at his own reflection in the pond. Falling in love with yourself, sometimes for the first time. Self-love. Self-esteem. Self-worth. Self-confidence. They are all your natural given birthright. It feels great. You feel great. And that's good.
Part of the cycle also includes what we call an inflation, a notion of personal grandiosity, or feeling like a bliss ninny - just walking on air. Just like Ishtar rising up to heaven, unburdened of a lot of baggage, you can feel so light and free - before coming back to earth. If any of you are familiar with psychotherapy or know someone who has experienced it for themselves, perhaps you know of that time when the individual suddenly becomes an expert on the matter. That's part of the grandiosity. You're full of your Self. I'm not saying that's bad as a matter of some value judgment, but the inflated sense of self, when taken to its extremes, can leave you just like Narcissus was, when he was turned to stone. We call it a narcissistic personality, unable to feel anything for anyone else.
Your dreams will present to you a daily report of things, material from the unconscious for you to bring to awareness, to integrate into your life. As I mentioned, it may be matters from your past, or it may be more of the stuff of problem solving, creative solutions, even your destiny in life. Some of our most remarkable scholars and artists - from Descartes and Einstein to Robert Louis Stevenson - have said that their greatest revelations came to them in their dreams. Each of us, each night, has within our reach this same source of unlimited wisdom and vision.
You know, the world is full of people that have stopped listening to themselves or have listened only to their neighbors to learn what they ought to do, how they ought to behave, and what the values are that they should be living for. Sometimes that's okay, but sometimes it's just a lot of baloney, living out somebody else's dream of who or what we should be. You may need to wash away all the subterfuge, rip off the mask we all often wear to please the world or please somebody else in our efforts to be accepted. When we do, it's often at our own expense.
To begin to follow your dreams is to move in a happier and healthier direction. It means following an intuitive knowingness of what's right for you, almost like the awareness of a child. Such an experience of spontaneity can almost seem magical in its qualities. Yes, that's right. As you begin integrating unconscious material and insight with your conscious, outer world, daytime life, a funny thing begins to happen. The world starts to give back, sometimes in the most unexpected ways, but this magic is not necessarily something mysterious or esoteric. You have simply lifted the veiled and touched into the very real other reality, the world of serendipity, goose bumps and things.
We all know people from some time in our lives, people who held a magical draw for us. There was something about them, their apparent confidence, their spontaneity, their "free spirit," as it were. That particular phrase "free spirit" comes from the teachings of the Greco-Roman mystery schools and their rites of initiation. The saying is actually phrased: "the inner freedom of the living spirit." You free up that space to follow the impulse of your being. That's what Sophocles was also referring to in his story of Oedipus, when he visits the blind prophet's cave. Hanging over the entrance to the cave is the adage, "Know Thyself." William Shakespeare said it in just about the same way. "To Thine Own Self Be True."
I don't mean to be dogmatic here, but when you know yourself - that's Self with a capital "S" - and you honor that calling, then you can't be dishonest to anyone else. You dreams are one voice expressive of that Self.
Many of the Native American traditions consider the Self to be a gift that you are born with. The Hopis, for example, believe that at birth each person is given this particular gift at birth by the Creator, what's called elsewhere "The Everywhere Spirit." That's rather poetic isn't it? "The Everywhere Spirit." It carries a certain gentleness with it, like it is something that we belong to. The Hopi's land borders the Navajo's in the four corners region of the United States, where Arizona, Colorado, Utah and New Mexico come together. Some people believe the Hopis are the western counter part to the Tibetans. Much of their symbology and religious iconography and ritual are uncannily similar to the Chinese Tibetans. It probably has something to do with where they originally migrated from, across the Bering Strait, way back when it was still frozen over, that is. But that's a different story.
The Hopi's believed that it was one's mission in life to express that gift, to bring it into being in one's own lifetime, that it was absolutely essential to live true to yourself in order to make the universe whole and complete at any given point in time. That is, to live in balance with yourself you cannot help but live in balance with the rest of the world. Now that's a very different world view from somehow who takes their cues by trying to keep up with their neighbors.
In the native traditions, denying your own true calling, conforming to someone else's dream of yourself would be what in a different tradition might be called a sin. The way the Hopi see it, in the eyes of the creator, each person's gift, or authentic identity, is equally important. Rulers of the nation, potters weavers, the homemakers, they were all an equally important and necessary part of life. Even the gay people, with traditional roles and purposes accorded them, stretching back to the beginnings of time. Living true to yourself. The Hopis' neighbors, the Navajo, call this walking in beauty. Or maybe you've heard a different way of expressing this: as having medicine, as having power. And so they also have their medicine man, the man or woman who helps you find your own medicine, helps you reclaim your own power, your own soul, if it's become lost. He or she is not a doctor who prescribes pills, though they're knowledgeable in the natural ways of pharmacology in their use healing herbs and such. The medicine man or medicine woman is the person on whom you call to help you retrieve lost soul parts.
Know Thyself.
Walking In Beauty.
To Thine Own Self Be True For Then Thou Canst Not Be False To Any Other Man (or woman, as it were).
Working With Your Dreams.
There's a story from the shamanic tradition that tells why the Self is often hidden from us and how we can make sense of it. It has to do with what is called the vision quest. As I just mentioned, native peoples recognize that at birth we are born unique unto ourselves. We are born into beauty. We are not born into sin. But, you see, they also recognize that we are totally dependent on our caregivers during the earliest days of our lives and, as such, we necessarily begin to lose a bit of ourselves. First of all, someone else gives us a name. Literally, be it Michael or Lynne or Rufus. It's somebody else's vision of us. Perhaps they name us after a parent or a grandparent or somebody else. Or maybe they give us a different kind of identity. They want us to be a doctor or to go into the family business, to become a tennis star, or to provide them with grandchildren. Or they want us to conform in our behavior to better meet their expectations, which themselves are formed by how they see others living their lives. Yet it's even more than that. We learn the traits and characteristics that are at work within our interpersonal family dynamics, such as the values and other things that are passed from mother or father to daughter or son, which we take into ourselves unaware. The Bible would refer to this as the sins of our fathers passed down to the sons for four generations. As such, we begin to lose our original beauty; we give up bits and pieces of our own uniqueness, of our own soul. The native's prescription to remedy this was the vision quest, for you to go out into the wilderness all by yourself to find out who and what you really are, and to discover it coming from inside yourself. In this story, the chief of the tribe has a son, and one day he goes to the boy and tells him that it is time for him to take his first step into manhood. It is time to go on his vision quest.
The boy follows his father to the head of a trail that leads into the mountains. He's told to go to the mountains, make himself a camp on a particular ledge that faces the desert, where he is to fast for three days. The boy does as he is told. He fasts for three days and on the fourth night he has a dream. In the dream, the boy loses his way in the mountains. When it begins to rain very hard, with lightening and thunder, he seeks refuge in a cave. The cave is pitch black, and he's a little frightened, but at least he's out of the rain. That's when he hears a sound and that frightens him even more. He reaches out and feels something. It is alive right next to him and it's reaching out to touch him! The boy is terrified when he feels a hand grab his wrist. He tries to pull away, but he can't, and so he starts to struggle with this creature. It seems to have many arms and legs, and he's convinced he's going to die. Finally, he finds the creature's throat and with a great effort he squeezes the windpipe closed. The life goes out of the unseen creature and the boy falls back exhausted and enters a deep sleep.
In the morning the sun comes streaming through the mouth of the cave and he wakes. Remembering the fight with the creature, he looks over to where it lies. But all he sees is the body of an old woman. He realizes he has killed a grandmother, a grandmother who is a shaman. He kneels over her, weeping. "Forgive me," he cries. "I didn't mean to kill you. It was the fault of the darkness. It made me fear for my life." To his surprise, the eyes of the grandmother flutter open, and the boy watches as the leathery wrinkles of age fade from her face. Soon he is looking into the eyes of a young man his own age. In fact, it's his own face he's seeing. That's when the shaman - his mirror image - speaks. "You have only killed a part of yourself".
"You are still a child and have many things to learn, but do not blame the darkness for your error. Instead, look at yourself. The lesson you have been given here is that your own fears are a mask, hiding the mysteries of your inner being from you. Last night you entered this dark cave and discovered your own powers for the first time. Yet in the darkness of your own ignorance, you recognized neither your powers nor your fears, nor did you know what you must do to claim them as your own."
The boy was horrified that he would never have his own power. "No," his mirror image replied. "You will find your power, but first you must take off your mask. You must come to know your own face, as well as you know the trails to the river where you were born." The boy asked, "How do I do that?' "You must dare to show your own face to the world. That face which is already in you. This is the only path."
"I don't know how to do that," he said, and then he asked her to be his teacher. She responded, "Your own powers will teach you, just as they have done in this dream." And then the boy wakes up. He finds he is not in the cave as he had thought but he is sitting on the ledge where he has been camped for four days. He rises and goes back down to the village where he tells his father what happened. The father understands and the boy then walks into the rest of the village on the right side of the Chief, which signifies to everyone that the boy has found his medicine.
The vision quest takes place in the form of a dream.
There's another story from the Crow legends that looks at the same movement from another more humorous direction. It deals with the trickster figure found in their mythology. The trickster appears in myths and cultural stories throughout the world. In ancient Pelasgian-Greece he was known as Hermes. In West Africa, it's known as Esau. In South American traditions, you might know him as Huascar. You can find this figure embodied as the Fool in any common deck of playing cards, or the Holy Fool in medieval times. Maybe you've heard of him as Br'er Rabbit from the Uncle Remus stories. She's a he, and he's a she, essentially a shape-shifter - someone with a lot of creative energy who likes to mix things up, to see what will transpire, and what can be learned from that. Well, with the Crow people, he's called Coyote, and Coyote gets into all sorts of trouble. The stories of his exploits are told to the young as a way to convey certain essential truths.
In this story, Coyote is going along when he sees a cowboy sitting on his horse. The Cowboy is rolling a cigarette. Coyote is very interested as he watches the cowboy. It seems to be some very strange and fabulous ritual as the Cowboy takes a little pouch of tobacco out of his shirt pocket, along with some rolling papers. He pours the tobacco onto the paper, then pulls the string of the pouch tight with his teeth and puts it back into his breast pocket. Then he rolls up the paper, licks it, and sticks the cigarette in his mouth. He lights it with a match. Now, Coyote had smoked a pipe before, but he had never seen anything quite so wonderful as rolling a cigarette. "I want to do that, “ says Coyote.
"You can't," says the Cowboy.
"Why not?"
"You ain't got a shirt, so you ain't got a shirt pocket for your tobacco pouch."
So Coyote says, "I can make a pocket in my chest."
"Well, why don't you do that?" The Cowboy unfolds a pocketknife and hands it to Coyote. Coyote looks at the Cowboy's pocket to get the size right and then makes a deep cut in his chest, right into his heart He looks a little surprised, then falls over dead. The Cowboy takes back his knife and rides off.
A little while later, Coyote's brother comes along and sees the trickster lying dead on the ground. He jumps over Coyote's body four times and Coyote springs back to life. "You did it again," the brother says.
"But I really want to be like the cowboy." Coyote's brother shakes his head and says, "You've got to learn. Just because you want to be like something else, it doesn't mean that it's good for you."
And so the moral of the story is that sometimes we deny our Self, or maybe we don't know our selves. We don't think that we're good enough and so we want to be like something or somebody else - which we're not. And sometimes, in trying to be what we're not, we're killing ourselves. The native peoples of the Americas were saying the same as Shakespeare back in England. "To thine own self be true."
Let's back up a half step here, and take a look at the Indian boy's dream, the structure of it, that is. As in most dreams, the first sentence lays out what the dream is going to be talking about. This dream starts with a typical motif. The boy loses his way in the mountains. I say that's typical because it's a motif that is found throughout the world and across time. Moses went into the mountains. Jesus went into the desert. The great literature of the world abounds with references to going into the wilderness. They went to the wilderness in order to find some answer to something. They went into the wildness of nature - some might say human nature, as well - to bring something into being. Just like the boy, many lose their way, but you have to be lost before you can be found.
So the dream is going to address some aspect of the boy losing his way, or perhaps more accurately, that he has not yet found his own way, his own path, his own true identity. In the dream, it's raining very hard, with lightening and thunder, and so the boy seeks refuge in a cave. The cave is dark.
With this, the dream is suggesting the reasons why this person is "lost in the wilderness," of what is essentially his life. That is, there is a storm. Just like in our lives today, we may be going along with the way we are, thinking that there's no great problem, or maybe life isn't full of wonder and energy and joy, but you think maybe it just doesn't get any better than that. Then the proverbial storm hits you, like Dorothy carried off in a tornado to the wonderful Land of Oz. When there's a storm, if we're not rooted in something genuine, rooted in our selves, we might get knocked for a loop. Let's say you're in a relationship, and you've really given yourself to this other person. Maybe you've given too much, too soon, or something like that. They leave and we fall apart. We’re like trees without roots that might fall over with the first big gust that blows against us. We're not rooted in the ground of our own being. So the boy seeks refuge from the storm by going into the cave. And it's dark.
A cave, or a basement in your house, a hole in the ground, or a spiral staircase that takes you downward - whatever your psyche might choose as the most appropriate symbol - all of these motifs are references to going down into unconscious or pre-conscious material, where it's dark. You are in the dark about it. You are being led to something unconscious, something that the dream wants to help you bring to consciousness. In that way, for the Indian boy, it's also the solution to his problem, because whether or not the boy realizes it, he seeks refuge in himself. "Know they Self," and that's what the rest of the dream deals with. It's about a crisis of identity and that's a pretty good way to sum up the experience of adolescence. For many of us, we often re-visit this rite of passage with a renewed vigor at some point in our life, because there are many stages in life to pass through, when our sense of our selves is challenged - not so different from our teenage years when we all fell apart. Well, for the young Indian boy, his dream is pretty literal about the process. "In the darkness of your own ignorance." Like I said, he's in the dark about something - meaning he doesn't yet know about it. But he will. That's part of the purpose of dreams, bringing light to what can often seem like the darkness of discontent.
The Indian boy is frightened, perhaps because he doesn't know or never has trusted his own inner prompting - that inner part of himself. He struggles with it and tries to kill it, but it just won't die. Just like the Coyote story, we kill ourselves in small or in large by trying to be accepted, to be wanted, in trying to be something we're not. We succumb to peer pressure. We are more concerned with what other people might think or say, or what society imposes on us. But you can't kill that part of yourself off, as the young boy finds out. It will always be there. You can hide it or deny it until, perhaps, like Humpty-Dumpty, you fall and shatter. Maybe you make yourself miserable or even physically ill, but it's still there. All you need to do is call it forth.
To face it you might feel fear, just like the young Indian boy. Indeed, he's convinced that he's going to die. Well yes, he is going to die, but not literally. It's more that one part of himself must die in order for another to be reborn - a more perfect representation of himself. We're talking about change, and the young boy fears that because it is unknown. Of course, the way to approach fear is to face it, just as the good old shaman said. Just turn around and face it in your dreams and face it in your outer lives. The alchemists had a saying for this: "Through the dung heap lies the gold." End, Part I of The Dream Work Series. Proceed To:
Part II Digging For Gold In The Underworld |
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