Commentary on "The Continuing Voyage"
In my collection of many significant dreams over the past few months, this one may well be the most important of them all. This is so, not so much for its particular content, but because of its very explicit references back to the dream of early morning April 29, 2004:
The Storm. This dream of egoic self-sacrifice initiated the Sacred Marriage with the Inner Beloved.
In this latest dream, the dream director appears to have taken an on-camera role as the college instructor, showing me the "chart" - implying a nautical map rather than simply a picture - of my current psychic voyage. Unlike the clunky three masted Victorian era
vessel of the past, ill equipped to survive its journey to the East intact, the new vehicle of the psyche's libido is light racing model, completely at home in the seas of the eastern Mediterranean. I would note that even at this point the journey is only halfway there (and fittingly I recently celebrated my 51st birthday), for this imagic destination lies in the Far East, even so far as the islands of the South Pacific.
This dream actually consists of three layers, and this framing technique of dreams within dreams is characteristic of particularly important material. At the top or exoteric layer there are the scenes in the college or university. Then the esoteric lies beneath it, the chart itself with its Tarot, artwork, and aspects of the personal and emergent unconscious. Lastly there is what might be the archetypal level itself, in which the Adversary and the Dream Ego engage in a godlike struggle of wills superimposed over the esoteric story unfurling beneath them.
Similar to the primary dream that initiated my new life, there is a psychic component submerged below the sailing vessel. Whereas in the dream of the Storm this took the form of three beautiful flowers, now there are two fully revealed and named feminine entities, each associated with a Tarot archetype: Sophie and Eirian. But there is a gap between them, vividly showing that Lady Death, the third flower of the triad and the third aspect of the Triple Goddess, is yet to be fully integrated.
After surveying the rest of the chart, it is to this missing person that I direct my concern, the dream ego here returning consciousness to the exoteric layer. My analytic counsellor, most likely the expression of Mercury in Aquarius, Inu the Gandharva, tries to give me practical if rather strange advice - suggesting that my love interest would by nature have no interest in me because she is gay. This seems to express the conservatism of the linear "left-brained" mind, for my experience has been that the sexual preference of the inner aspects of the psyche is pretty much irrelevant.
Sophie and Eirian are by nature involved in a gay relationship together, as well as each one being involved with the egoic masculine. Not only is this my experience, but if one thinks of this relationship in archetypal terms, this is not surprising. Just as the Magician must recognize and integrate with the High Priestess, so she too must integrate with the Empress. The unitive potential energy of the Magician comes into consciousness through the reflective love of the High Priestess. This High Priestess is the agent of Change, and through the integrative activity of this primary dualism, the Creative Love that arises from
and is their relationship is expressed as the Empress.
But it is not enough that this Empress is set forth as a free agent to act within the world. This triad must act within complete unity for its work to be perfected into Form: the Emperor who is both the Empress's son and lover. It must be remembered that these Tarot archetypes are merely personified and metaphoric models of a higher and more basic reality. We see much the same incongruities in the many of the world's religious pantheons, and of course problems arise if we attempt to apply these metaphors literally at the human level. In fact the fundamental failing of exoteric thinking is that it very regularly confuses the metaphor with the meaning, and the Word with the Truth.
Returning to the dream, I am pleased to say that the dream ego overrides the quibbles of the linear analyst. He calls up Lady Death because he must.
The next scene, the search for a washroom, is a recurring one for me. Jungian analysts have suggested that the need to go pee in a dream is equivalent to the search for a creative outlet. In this I am successful - my drumming, writing and singing bring rich rewards.
In the next scene we experience a drama at the esoteric level. I must mention that both the vole and the frog were equally wonderful, lovable and beautiful creatures in this dream, each worthy of a place on the chart. But we learn that the vole has been misdirected by the Adversary into attacking the frog. In Tarot terms, the celebratory energy of completion expressed in the Four of Wands has attempted to block out the necessary emotional withdrawal and refocusing of the Four of Cups. Active masculine energy is tries to suppress with the reflective dreamer.
The frog is itself a very rich symbol of transformation, both in its metamorphosis from tadpole to frog, its amphibious ability to "breathe" in both water and air, and its mythological cycle as prince, then frog, then prince again. You can quite often visibly the effect of a frog's heart beating, and his transformation is effected by the love of a princess who can see beyond appearances into the virtue of the soul itself.
We hear later that this frog's identity is also coincident with that of Lover or Beloved, and of course my name "David" also denotes "Beloved" in its Hebrew source. This character in the dream is the Beloved of the those who are from my conscious perspective the Inner Beloveds: Sophie and Eirian. And it is of course their love that has redeemed me, transforming frog into prince. So this frog plays the role that would most typically be taken by the ego, but in this dream this identification does not occur.
Instead the scene shifts again to that of a pair of adversaries, the Dark Queen and the Dream Ego, each of them choosing a champion on the scene of battle. There is the immediate recognition by the Dream Ego that neither of these entities should be at war, but nonetheless the frog is threatened with extinction by a colleague with a Victorian weapon - Victoria here denoting "feminine victory" in a negative context. Not only has the Dark Queen turned the vole against his brother, but she actively attempts to manipulate the outcome with the searing bright light of uncompromising objectivity.
The Dream Ego does not directly interfere, but reaches the point where he forbids further interference from the Dark Queen. It is at this point that through subtlety the frog encloses and kills the vole. Contemplative emotion has been saved, but at the expense of the masculine completive energy.
This of course has a direct bearing on my current psychic state, which is most easily summed up by saying that the two lowest and two highest Chakras are very healthy, but that the Solar Plexus, Heart and Throat definitely need work. And the basis of this is that I still find it difficult to effectively apply the egoic energy of the Solar Plexus to relational and creative problems. There has been progress, but it is still tentative.
In the life-changing Shamanic meditation on the Major Arcana in October 2004, an egoic sacrifice was made. During the encounters with The Hanged One and Death, the journeying ego offered himself up to the Old Landlady (another image of the Dark Queen or negative anima), in return for the release of Eirian, representing Creative Love, who was at that time in pregnancy. In other words there was the suppression of masculine energy and structured form in favour of creativity and creative output. It is seldom that we can go forward while staying perfectly in balance.
This imbalance is reflected visually and audibly in my drumming work. Layne Redmond has described the frame drum as having four elemental zones: Earth in the centre, Water in the intermediate areas, and Fire at the rim. Air is most vividly expressed in the jingles of a tambourine that are typically accessed beyond the edge of the rim, but more subtlely present when the surface of a drum is brushed.
In chakral theory, these four elements are expressed as follows: Earth with Root, Water with Sacral, Fire with Solar Plexus, and Air with Heart. As you may have guessed, I excel at playing in the domains of Earth and Water, but am reluctant to play in those of Fire and Air. And although I was invited by a beautiful dream late last year to play the riqq, the Arabic tambourine that is full of airy jingles, I find it quite challenging to play, and have never played it in public.
So this dream is both a reminder of the great progress that has been made, and a reflection on where I might best chart my future course. It would seem that both Lady Death and the Active Masculine (typically imaged as Aragorn, embodying Mars in Sagittarius), have a key role to play.
