I had a dream this morning, for which I drew some cards, but it reminded me of something that I'd like to share here. I like to record my dreams using a stream-of-conscious method suggested by James Hillman in his book "Inter Views." He suggests "taking the punctuation out" when you record a dream, and I realized that what he has to say about dreams is also important for tarot reading, especially the kind of reading that EE is teaching us:
The verbal mode of working with the image, the poetic mode of working with the image, releases their meanings that were concealed in the phonemes, concealed in the etymology. The word in the dream is not restricted to conceptual interpretation because the word in the dream is not a concept. It's an image arriving out of imagination, and the dictionary meaning, the denotation of the word, is only part....
There are lots of simple things you can do to break up the literal sense of your dream interpretations, those fixed meanings inherent in our usual language. That literalism, that dayworld rational secular commonsense has to be overcome again and again.... For instance, most people ... tell their dreams in sentences. If you take the punctuation out of the dream, so that you're looking at it the way you would look at an ancient Babylonian or Hebrew text, where you don't know quite whether that's an "ayn" or ... an "alef," you don't know what it is, you don't really know what to do, and then you get about ten different possibilities about that text. Freud used the same metaphor for the dream: an ancient text.
We're talking about animating the images, not content of dreams. This is the crucial job now.... It's not a question of ... recognizing that there are images [in your dreams] or that images are important.... All these images ... are ... tremendously significant.... [But] the imagination is fundamental.
[Freud and Jung, however,] took what they saw and didn't leave it where it was, but moved it into "this means that." ... They brought up the material and then by the translation sent it back down again.... Once you've translated the dream,... you no longer need the image, and you let the image only say one thing.... This leaves the soul unanimated. That is, unalive. The images are not walking around on their own legs. They've been turned into meanings.... Now let's leave [behind] meaning and the search for meaning, and the meaning of life.
Dreams are extraordinary, people's lives are extraordinary, unbelievable; fantastic things happen all the time ... and it's translated into the deadest, dullest, most serious, most unimaginative ... an utter bore.... Instead,... we have to let in the puer [silly, playful, imaginative, wild] aspect of what's going on in one's life.
That's what we are doing here, with the Marseille and EE. We are animating the images -- the images of the tarot, and the images of our lives.
For my dream, I drew the following cards:
Ten of Coins - a tree
Royne de Bastons - I sit beneath the tree, while a root and my husband's hand reach playfully up from below
Royne de Denier - A gift (my husband, playfulness, and imagination) that I give to myself and my children
This provides a metaphor for all the things that I want for my family: balance (roots and branches, above and below), stability, play, love, friends, and the gift of imagination. It's also a metaphor for what my husband and I each provide to that picture -- my seriousness, and his playfulness. Through him, I give something to my children that I have a harder time giving.
But I think the larger metaphor of these cards is about tarot itself. Through working with Marseille, we have come to sit beneath a very old tree. We invite the images of subconscious (the roots of the tree) to come out, to push playfully up into the light of day and give us a hand, as we work to listen to those images and present them back to the world as a gift in the form of metaphor.
(I have written more about my dream on my blog, but I wanted to share the Hillman quote and the cards that I drew here.)
Mosaica