XVI
Dreams are always"interesting" but we live in a culture that thinks that they are little more than a conversation piece. Older cultures saw dreams as a direct line with spirit, or as oracles. What interests me most about dreams is how they are not personal property. The big ones touch on themes that are culturally significant and collectively significant or overlapping. There is almost no data or information about this, but this is how the collective psyche works. Dreams are powered by the archetypes and archetypes are transpersonal. When there is a crisis in the culture, certain archetypes are activated across the land and across communities. The only reason we don't know this is because we don't talk about dreams or share them communally, even via the Internet. But I witnessed an example of this at the college where I do dream work with the students.
There was a crisis on campus around a Black Lives Matter flag-raising, where the president was shouted down. There was a meeting afterwards that was very volatile and emotional. This incident brought a number of other crises to a head and created a rift between the administration and students. The administration felt belittled, backed off and re-grouped and some changes around racial and gender issues have started to sweep the campus, inaugurating a real sea-change. But the last few weeks have been difficult and emotionally draining for students, administration and instructors.
Two of my students had big dreams the night after the flag crisis and their dreams were remarkably similar, with certain archetypes showing up.
The three of us met to discuss these dreams and we decided to use the dreams as our inspiration and teachers to create certain healing rituals around the college and in town: At a stream that runs behind the campus, at the labyrinth, and at the veteran's memorial in nearby Rutland to commune with the restless spirits of those who died violently in past and present wars. Then we agreed to come together to collaborate in creating a healing ritual at and for the labyrinth.
It is my training to see, as Jung taught, that dreams that deal mostly with personal issues (complexes) involve the so-called personal unconscious, which helps explain why, even if it was easier to remember dreams, most people would choose to ignore them. They come across as shadow-puppet shows of our lives. When we dream, we are in the dream and in our dream-bodies, but when we remember our dreams we are looking at them from the outside with a certain indifference and relief to be back in control. But the deeper the issues the more archetypal and the less personal dreams are. Dreams have lots of ways of taking us deeper and they waste no time or psychic energy in urging us to leave our comfort zones. We might get a hint that something disruptive is about to happen, or something is shifting in the dream, and then the archetype intrudes or sweeps in and the stakes immediately go higher. The bigger the dream, the higher the stakes for the dreamer.
The psyche is hugely affected by current events. (On the flip side, the psyche can also, under special circumstances, introvert for the sake of the transformation of the self, functioning in the psychic equivalent of a vacuum, in which case the "events" that it (the self) is affected by are timeless and mythic in character. But this distillation of the process of individuation is the exception. The point is, there are many templates or blueprints for transformation of the self, the psyche being the universal access to all of them!)
In an extraverted democratic society, where people are expected (granted certain powers by their constitution) to participate and react and assume some responsibility for the ethical, moral and civil direction of change, there is a predisposition for collective engagement that figures in our dreams as a kind of basic program for moving forward in our lives and this program will guide the tenor of our dreams. As long as the dreamer is psychically invested in participating in the "program", the psyche will stay with the program. It is important to understand however, that the psyche of an American or a Canadian or a German is not quintessentially American or Canadian or German. (Consider the stories of American pioneers who, either by choice or through abduction, were absorbed into native culture, essentially turning into Indians.) As the collective sense of empowerment evaporates, the power shifts from lawyers and judges to the outlaws of society, those outside of the bankrupt system (that is, creative individuals and visionaries who have the requisite passion and integrity, combined with the talent, to make change), to rediscover purpose. It is not the job of the psyche to uphold or push certain values or principles. The psyche by itself does not dictate politics or morality. The psyche is there to infuse consciousness with depth and meaning relative to certain archetypal continuities of human destiny, but it is not invested in outcomes, only continuities. Nor does the psyche care whether we are participants in the theater of our times or recluses. But the psyche is intrinsically willing to work with all of the circumstances of its embodiment in time. The only thing the psyche refuses to do is nothing; it is never apathetic or stymied. Dreamers may be caught up in a state of bewilderment or apathy, and may have fallen into the habit of not thinking for themselves or on their own behalf or of not finding anything worth reacting to or living for. Perhaps one isn't really living one's own life but vicariously. Then it is the nature of dreams to shake things up, as they did with these two young men.
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