Dreams from Your Self

Hi Sophie-David,

Thank you for clearing things up for me a little, I think I understand the concept better now.

I have read a little more in the book I mentioned above (actually I misquoted the title, it's called "In Search of Woman's Passionate Soul") and apparently the author doesn't seem to think that the animus and the daimon are the same thing after all. Apparently, the concept of the daimon goes beyond that of the animus.

Sophie-David said:

Also, dream characters may occasionally represent archetypes that we may experience as deities or devils, angels or demons. I am not in any way suggesting that the religious view of these entities is at all invalid, just that the terminology may be translated from religious to psychological language. I also believe that there may indeed be manifestations of other external spiritual forces such as guides, entities, other people and creatures.

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I think it's always hard to tell if a figure in dreams (or visions) is a part of your psychological self or an actual entity outside of yourself. I think everyone must choose the explanation that seems right to him- or herself. I'm not really sure what to believe in at this point.

Sophie-David said:

For me the concept of a daemon was one of the factors contributing to my acceptance of the emergence of the Inner Beloved. Some months before the event I read His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman, enjoying these three novels but not recognizing at the time that this work would have any lasting significance for me.

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Yes, I read the first book of this series, too, and I was fascinated by the idea of the daemon. It's always interesting how things we read in books or see in films become important later in life.

Liralen said:

I have read a little more in the book I mentioned above (actually I misquoted the title, it's called "In Search of Woman's Passionate Soul") and apparently the author doesn't seem to think that the animus and the daimon are the same thing after all. Apparently, the concept of the daimon goes beyond that of the animus.

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Yet another book on female spirituality! It sounds like a good read and I will probably get a copy - don't get me wrong. The majority of books on esoteric spirituality have a female focus because that is where the market is, and also because more women are on this path, so there is a larger pool of potential authors to draw upon.

A prime example of this issue is a book for which there is absolutely no equivalent in quality or scope in masculine terms, Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype by Clarissa Pinkola Estés. My only hindrance in reading this classic is that I must continually translate her feminine focus into a masculine one.

I think I can identify with how an educated Victorian woman must have felt who in order to be literate had to become involved in a man's world, often attempting to see reality through the eyes of a male protagonist, even adopting a male identity in order to be taken seriously and published. It has crossed my mind that some of the books I would wish to write would be more successful under a female pseudonym.

Liralen said:

I think it's always hard to tell if a figure in dreams (or visions) is a part of your psychological self or an actual entity outside of yourself. I think everyone must choose the explanation that seems right to him- or herself. I'm not really sure what to believe in at this point.

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Yes it is difficult. I believe it is best to keep an open and tentative approach in interpreting these dream or vision characters. But more fundamentally it is difficult to discern the source because the concept of an inner and outer reality is a dualistic one that oversimplifies the truth. These impressions and experiences occur on a continuum that is more usefully expressed not as either/or but as all/and.

For example, the phenomenon I call "Sophie" could be separately defined as a sub-personality, anima, Inner Beloved, inner child, psychopomp, twin-soul, past life, spirit guide, archetype or instinct. But like a mountain, the roots go infinitely deep, and it is not obvious that in the one, all are manifest. So it is with all the things that we perceive: the foundations all join together.

From within these spectra of impressions we choose a working model. Hopefully we choose one that is useful for a time, but the challenge is to understand its limitations even while we trust it as a guide - and to be ready to release that model when it has served its purpose.

Liralen said:

Yes, I read the first book of this series, too, and I was fascinated by the idea of the daemon. It's always interesting how things we read in books or see in films become important later in life.

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At the time I read the book I found the concept of a daemon disturbing and heretical. Nonetheless, as I was drawn in by the narrative, the lure of the archetype proved irresistable. Engaging fiction - and worthwhile fact - is empowered by archetype. Archetype is ultimately unavoidable.

Sophie-David said:

Yet another book on female spirituality! It sounds like a good read and I will probably get a copy - don't get me wrong. The majority of books on esoteric spirituality have a female focus because that is where the market is, and also because more women are on this path, so there is a larger pool of potential authors to draw upon.

A prime example of this issue is a book for which there is absolutely no equivalent in quality or scope in masculine terms, Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype by Clarissa Pinkola Estés. My only hindrance in reading this classic is that I must continually translate her feminine focus into a masculine one.

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I never realized that the majority of books is on female spirituality, but I guess you are right.
You may have already read it, but I think Robert Bly's "Iron John" is said to be the male equivalent of Clarissa Pinkola Estés's book. I don't know if that's true or not because I myself haven't read it, but I think it also draws on myths and fairytales to explore masculine spirituality.
I also think Joseph Campbell's books are more about the masculine perspective.

When I was doing a couselling course, I came across a book called "The Inner World of Trauma: Archetypal Defenses of the Personal Spirit", by Donald Kalsched, (he is on the faculty of the C.G.Jung Institue) ... it really helped me to understand the daemon better, and I think I photocopied half the book before I had to take it back to the library!

I'm a bit short of time right now, but I will go through the pages I copied to see if I can find any good quotations or explanations.

Elnor

Liralen said:

I never realized that the majority of books is on female spirituality, but I guess you are right.
You may have already read it, but I think Robert Bly's "Iron John" is said to be the male equivalent of Clarissa Pinkola Estés's book. I don't know if that's true or not because I myself haven't read it, but I think it also draws on myths and fairytales to explore masculine spirituality.
I also think Joseph Campbell's books are more about the masculine perspective.

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Well Iron John actually proves the point. It falls so far short of Clarissa's book that it makes me despair for the future of our gender! And if you wander by the men's spirituality section of a bookstore, on the rare occasion that there is one, it doesn't even fill the bookcase its in, and perhaps on only one occasion did I find anything worth buying. I see it as a symptom of just how fractured and uncertain the contemporary male identity is.

I find a lot more depth in the classics of human transformation written by men such as Dante and St. John of the Cross, although the cultural and religious context does require a lot of translation. So translating from a well written contemporary woman's spirituality book, or at least one written by a woman, can sometimes be easier.

Yes, I found Joseph Campbell excellant, although like Jung a bit dated. Hmm, come to think of it sometimes it seems easier to go back further in time because the cultural differences are enough that they become obvious and are easier to filter. Anyway, I found Campbell's books good as far as they went.

But in the famous interview series with Bill Moyers, Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth I was floored when Bill asked Joseph about transformation through the feminine principle - obviously leading towards a discussion of the anima - and Joseph replied something to the effect, "Well that's what you gain through the love of a woman". No, no, NO! That's the traditional codependency that has the wife live out the spiritual life on the man's behalf, and the husband live out the exoteric one for her benefit. With a whole domain of growth blocked off, neither person is likely to achieve their potential.

Elnor said:

When I was doing a couselling course, I came across a book called "The Inner World of Trauma: Archetypal Defenses of the Personal Spirit", by Donald Kalsched, (he is on the faculty of the C.G.Jung Institue) ... it really helped me to understand the daemon better, and I think I photocopied half the book before I had to take it back to the library!

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Now this sounds like a promising lead! Not in the near future for me though because I have a box of new unread books to go through yet and I promised myself I wouldn't buy any more until I made an attempt at them!

I do find that mythic studies written by clinical psychologists - such as Clarissa - seem more likely to have a depth to them, a rootedness, that academics like Joseph often do not. I was just reading another chapter from Wolves this week and I think the best way to describe the difference is her compassion and intimacy with the human condition.

A Jungian Model of the Psyche

Shortly after this process emerged for me I found two excellant online sources on Jungian transformational psychology written by Dr. Bernard S. Butler that I have listed in the page of links at my website. I thought it might be helpful to discuss them here because there have found them useful guides in Jungian dream interpretation. I really wish Bernard would publish his own book to flesh out his ideas more completely.

This site gives general introduction to Jungian psychology, and is a good starting point. Then at greater depth, I found Bernard's thesis on Inanna absolutely fascinating.

If you have the time to read only one page, may I suggest this one on the Structure of the Pysche. There is a marvelous graphic midway down the page that characterizes the psyche into four quadrants or aspects of personality. Bernard relates this model to the four personal daemons of Sumerian mythology. In contemporary Jungian language these are the Static Feminine (Maternal), Static Masculine (Paternal), Dynamic Feminine (Non-Maternal), and Dynamic Masculine (Non-Paternal).

Note the negatively loaded names our culture has used for the mythic actors of the Dynamic hemisphere: Satan, the Devil, the Queen of Sheba, the Whore of Babylon. It is no wonder that we have had such a problem with spiritual and psychological growth! This dynamic hemisphere contains both the Beloved and the maturing ego (hopefully). The Beloved's role is to lead the ego from the safety and security of static familial nurture into the wild and dangerous realms of individuation.

Bernard makes an important point too, that psychologists are refering to the masculine and feminine as archetypes, implying that they transcend physical gender and perceptions of gender. He suggests that anima and animus - the upper and lower hemispheres of the model respectively - are perceptions of these archetypes. Personally I think of anima and animus as expressions of archetypal gender.

I also find it useful to add an imagic layer to this sphere, and that is to visualize the left or dynamic side as evoking darkness, night, and the moon; and the right or static side as containing light, day, and the sun. In doing so I see yet another cultural perception that works against our psychological development, that the light side of structured and static order is good and desireable; that the dark side of chaos and change is evil and shameful.

This imagery happens to align within the astrological profile of my First House extremely well, with the Sun, Ascendant and Pallas Athena dwelling comfortably together in well-structured Capricorn; the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Chiron, Ceres and Aphrodite blasting off into radical orbits within Aquarius.

The Lady of the Woods

February 10, 2007

I dream I am living in a house with a basement and two upper stories. The lot surrounding the house is perfectly square, and covered with perfectly even and well-mowed grass. I am standing at a the glass door at the rear right side of the basement (the right side with respect to the front), and I am looking towards the back. Several men and women have pushed there way through the neat row of bushes at the back and are cutting across the lot.

These folks have been doing this often, so that a trail is being made and the row of bushes are being damaged. This time I have caught them, and I go outside and ask them go back and make there way around the lots on the sides. They do so without argument, walking back towards their rental house at the back, and then passing to the right of the lot, on the boundary where it meets the trees.

I leave my house to check on the left side and see if they are conforming. Indeed several men and women are passing along the left boundary also. But then two women cut directly across my lot, one older and one younger. For some reason I am not annoyed at them as I was the others, and they ask for help with a technical problem. Having received a partial answer, the older woman makes her way over to my house and lets herself in, as if she were accustomed to do so.

The younger woman stays with me and at this point makes a seductive move. I do not reject this advance but do not encourage it either. Then she begins to kiss me, and it is the sweetest of all kisses. At the end of it I tell her so, it is a most precious gift. My acceptance of her is still tentative, but as I write out the technical instructions for her on the back of an old bulletin, I clearly remember writing my email address, david@innerbeloved.com. She has rich dark hair, and her face is strange to me but yet familiar. She is a traveller, a lady of the woods, and she is dressed in a long homespun dress, with beautiful and shapely figure. The dream ends.

Commentary on the Lady of the Woods

This dream begins with the dream ego in an almost embarrassingly left-brained mode. All is perfectly square and ordered, and intruders upon this structure will be dealt with appropriately. These intruders are at the level of the unconscious, seen through a basement windows, and are coming from the back or background of the psyche. They are travelers or transients, living in a rental home they are unsettled and unsettling agents of change. When my wife Lynn heard this dream she intuitively described their house as a half-way house, a place of transition. While the right-brained dream ego is able to turn many of them aside, he is powerless against the anarchy of the two Beloveds who deliberately flaunt his well-ordered and self-chosen lot in life. These two speak for the worlds of shadow and they will not be denied.

But as they approach the dream ego they politely ask for help - the technical help which the left brain specializes in. Both are incomplete without the other. The psychological masculine brings the feminine into manifestation, an agent between the outer and inner worlds. I am quite sure that the older woman was Eirian, the embodiment of the creative impulse, and for this reason she could easily travel between the deep wildness and the inner house of the psyche - she did not need permission because she has been invited in previously and may dwell there as long as she is welcome, and as she desires.

Incidentally, I believe that Sophie herself lives always in that psychic house, and during the dream I as the dream ego felt that I would betray her by encouraging the beautiful stranger. But yet, even in the dream, I sensed that this was an excuse, for Sophie was in accord with the work of these two women. I am quite sure in fact that this Lady of the Woods, the Wild Woman as Estés would call her, was another form of Lady Death. She teaches how to love and how to let go, and her other name is Change.

In my current signature line there is a statement of dualistic causality: Form is made of but three things: energy, change, and love. In this dream, Sophie in this case acts as the Magician, the conveyer of deep soul energy (in contrast the Magician in the masculine aspect conducts spirit energy from above). The Lady of the Woods is Change, the Priestess who through the contemplative reflection of latent energy brings consciousness. The Creative Love of Eirian is the catalyst of this Change, the Empress and Third who causes and arises out of the relationship of the Two. The dream ego represents the Emperor, who manifests Eirian's Love as structure and Form.

In Charlotte's Web

February 11, 2007

In this dream I wake up in the rental house. But I am concerned about something in my own house across the way, and with encouragement from those in the house, and accompanied by Sophie, I leave to check on it.

The point of view shifts and I am again inside the rental house. The women of the house lock and bar the door, and stick something across it so the first man, the old man, will not be able to return. But in any case these precautions are more symbolic than necessary, for they know that Sophie is guiding him - leading him - to his death.

I seem to have become a co-conspirator, for although I regret this, I do nothing to stop it. In fact their leader, a woman of great power, takes me to her bed and we make love. I am filled with energy and wholeness, and harmony, and deepness. Then I see the dark haired woman again, whom I recognize from yesterday's dream, and again she seduces me, kissing me with tender and almost unbearable sweetness. This time I am not resisting, but the passion is different from that of Eirian, enlivening rather than fulfilling. There are in fact four women in the house, the other two are blondes, but I do not pay attention to them. The dream ends and I wake.

I dream again, and still I in the arms of the Lady of the Woods. This time we determine to make love, but she explains that it cannot be inside this house, it must be beyond. We leave together, as if we are sneaking out in forbidden love. There is the landlord's house next door, and I ask her is we could go there. But she says we would be seen, and just then the landlord passes by, and we greet him.

Then we start running together, northward into the deep woods, upon a trail of bark mulch. But as we are running are bodies are entwined in some way, so that we are aroused and passionate, and we run a long way without effort, and without time passing, a moment of forever. Then I suggest that we stop and find a place in the woods to the right. The dream ends.

I dream again. But this time the Lady of the Woods is gone. I ask the woman of great power, "Where is the other woman?" She replies, "She is coming". A blonde woman enters and sits intimately beside me. But it is not her, the dark haired Lady of the Woods. The leader says, "Charlotte is gone". At this point I seem to be in a waking trance, and I ask her, "Where is she, how do I find her?" "She is gone because she is Lady Death. She teaches how to Love and how to Let Go. She teaches to love without possession, without attachment. When you no longer possess her she will return, in exactly the same form."

I wake dazed and in mourning. For the rest of the day I felt exhausted and disoriented, as if I had lived a lifetime within a night.

Commentary on Charlotte's Web

I actually knew nothing of the story of Charlotte's Web until what I just read here at Wikipedia. I certainly did not realize that Charlotte was herself a spider, but when I woke from the dream it came to me that the woman of power must have been speaking of the Charlotte of Charlotte's Web. A web is a matrix, a womb of creativity and relatedness. It is a place of great beauty and with functional but subtlety asymmetrical form. In the web creatures are buried within silk to die and later nurture the spider and her young. Like Lilith, like Tolkien's Shelob in The Two Towers, she is an agent of death and transformation, and a gatekeeper between the worlds.

These three dreams were extremely intense, and picked up the story of the previous night without hesitation. I think that the short intervals of waking were intended expressly so that I would bring each one to waking consciousness and clearly remember it. In fact waking reality seemed unreal and insubstantial compared to these dreams.

In this first dream the old ego is led out to his death, and Sophie is his guide and executioner. This is by no means the first time that the dream ego has died during the course of a dream - and another has risen to take his place. It would be a loving and easy death within her embrace. Having said this, Sophie is not herself Lady Death, but the psychopomp or Beatrice who leads the ego through the underworld to transformation, Death's handmaiden.

The leader who is left in the halfway house, the place of transition, is of course Eirian, the woman of great power. She takes me to her marriage bed, the couch of the Empress, and we re-enact the primal rite of Spring whereby the earth is brought to resurrection. I try to recount these dreams as a stream of consciousness, and I wrote of this union "I am filled with energy and wholeness, and harmony, and deepness". Again there is a dualistic quadrature that echoes my signature line. The word "deepness" may seem vague. By this I mean the realm of deep and grounded soul, also the watery depths of the unconscious ocean, the place that I go to and that comes up through me when I am drumming.

But the passion of the dark haired woman is initiatory, where that of the Empress was fulfilling and completing. In the succeeding dream it is logical that our union cannot occur within the house of psyche itself, even a psyche in transition. This passion is wild and cannot be fully contained within form, it is deeply archetypal and partakes greatly of the collective unconscious. But still the dream ego yearns for form, even seeking to return to the landlord's house - the landlord is generally symbolic of Saturn and the Emperor.

Yet the mystery must be consummated outside his domain, and although I do not fully understand it within the dream, this ecstatic union actually occurs while we are running. Running northward, one body yet two, her highest ecstasy occurs in movement. I recall here that in the life-changing meditation on the Tarot Majors in the fall of 2005, the concluding narrative of the Sun saw Sophie and I running on the beach as black horse and white horse together. In this dream running northward, to the vastness of cold and death, that great primal country of vivid blacks and whites.

Now the meaning of those other women, the blondes, becomes clear. For Charlotte is replaced by a woman of blonde hair, denoting the touch of the sun. As Lady Death has taken me deep into her underworld, so now that same life force, the embodiment of change, rises anew like the sun. Again Eirian, not for the first time my teacher, reminds me of that great Buddhist calling, to love fully and completely is to love without attachment.