When Demons Dream
In the two month interim since I last wrote on here, much has taken place in my own life in the meantime. In brief, I no longer reside in San Francisco. This seems to have been a trend that was starting to manifest widely around the time I made the decision to move away. Just about everyone that I knew in San Francisco has, by this point, moved out of the city, since all of them are tech workers who have realized that since we're all sequestered and working remotely anyway, there is little reason to pay Bay Area rent while the city has been cryogenically frozen until the shelter-in-place order has been lifted. I speculate that the real estate bubble in the Bay Area which has been inflating over the past 15 years, has been punctured and is now quickly irreversibly losing volume, but whether or not I'm correct in any long-term sense very much remains to be seen.
For the last couple of years, I have been weighing the possibility of returning to my place of origin, which is the suburbs north of Detroit, to spend some extended time with family. It dawned on me, roughly a month ago, that now would be the opportune moment in time to do so. I gave my landlord notice, and in the space of 9 days, shed most of what I owned, crammed much into storage, and loaded what little that remained into my car for a compressed 3-day drive across the country. I've been back, crashing in an extra room in my parents's house, for a few weeks now. I feel like I left San Francisco years ago; the whole experience feels much further behind me than it objectively ought to.
I'm quite keen to be here, since I've learned since I moved away that not all suburbs in the United States are equal. I remember seeing the horror film It Follows a couple of years ago. In the opening scene, a girl runs out of her house into the middle of the street in the early morning light. I immediately said out loud, to myself, "That's Detroit." It was almost instinctual. I looked it up, and the scene in question was filmed on a residential street in Sterling Heights, one town over from where I grew up. I've spent enough time getting lost in the suburbs of various US cities over the last 10 years that I've learned that the "teenage wasteland" that The Who wailed about in the 1970's isn't all characteristically homogenous. The Detroit suburbs have a lush greenness to them, a scent or feeling in the air, that I haven't found anywhere else.
One thing I briefly rediscovered as a result of being with my parents is 1980's television. One show they are quite fond of is "ALF", which I dimly remember watching heavily as a tender youth of barely 10 years of age. I've watched a few episodes of the series with my jaw agape. Recently, I rewatched the more recent animated series "Bojack Horseman" on Netflix, which is about a washed-up star of an eighties sitcom who is dealing with the onset of middle age. The fictional sitcom in "Bojack" feels much the same as "ALF": there is a flimsy premise on which the series itself is hung, and for the most part any connection with reality or credibility is sacrificed in favor of writing episodes full of scenes which allow for a quick succession of dumb one-liners. I find watching this fascinating for anthropological reasons, instead of entertainment ones. Is this the kind of tripe my generation was reared on? How did we ever find this sort of thing funny? What does it say about us?
What does it say about me?
What things there are to say about me is, of course, very much the focus of this whole blog. I started reading Carl Jung about seven months ago, and that was a revelation on several fronts. The first chapter I read was about dream analysis, which I approached with the usual skepticism. Isn't the analysis of dreams something that Freud spearheaded in his day, and haven't our methods advanced beyond such piffle, since Freud was, as is widely supposed, mostly wrong?
Reading Jung, I quickly came to believe that this impression is sorely mistaken. For the scientifically minded among you, who are surely already groaning loudly at what I'm suggesting, here is my science-y rationale for this. I evaluate much of what happens in my life and in the world through the lens of evolution. I actually think that this force has done so much to shape just about every aspect of our lives, both individually and collectively, that I'm surprised I haven't taken it upon myself to get better acquainted with evolutionary biology. From what little I do know, I'm certain that nature is quick to eliminate waste. Any superfluous function in the organism that expends energy without any benefit, to the root of such a thing nature is quick to take an ax. If dreams had no tangible necessity for the human creature, then the creatures who do not dream would have outcompeted those who dream several eons ago. As a matter of concrete knowledge: neuroscientists know that if you are sleep deprived, then sooner or later, if you manage to stay awake, the hallucinations of your inner dream world will eventually spill over into your waking life. (source)
Besides, if I must convince the scientists among you of this, then I should concede that dream meaning to any individual really cannot be evaluated in any scientific fashion. Science is, at its core, a discipline of probabilities, which is to say that with repeated trials we can surmise with some confidence level what will most likely happen in this or that situation, given some initial boundary conditions. Dreams happen once in the course of our lives, and while there are billions of humans to study, the psychology leading to the generation of this or that dream is largely based on the psychology of the individual who is having the dream. Thus any individual dream, in isolation, cannot be investigated in any scientific sense because they are singularities whose peculiar details are specific to a subjective psychic context that is impossible for an outsider to comprehend objectively.
If I haven't convinced the skeptic to entertain the idea of the meaning of dreams with this brief remarks then I'm quite sure it is a lost cause and further efforts would bear no fruit. I should hedge all of this by saying that I think dreams are more complicated beasts than we flippantly give them credit for. Bookstores usually have a "Dream" section in or around the New Age collection of materials, and these books have dictionary-like structure where a symbol can be looked up and its meaning derived from a short descriptive sentence. So, it is believed that if you dream of a large bull, and the bull is blue in color, then one can simply look up the meaning of a bull and the meaning of the color blue, and the fusion of these two meanings will tell you something about what the dream meant. Would that any worthwhile endeavour in our lives were this simple.
I've spent the last couple of weeks focused on Volume 5 of Jung's Collected Works (CW 5), published now as Symbols of Transformation, which is his earliest substantial publication putting forth his distinct ideas about the human unconscious. Much of it is centered around the analysis of dream symbolism, which he had been doing with many of his patients in the course of doing therapy with them. The book is partly a response to Freud's own The Interpretation of Dreams, which posits, roughly speaking, that the content of dreams is just an expression of a repressed desire, almost all of which have something to do with sex. Jung begins his Symbols by acknowledging that while Freud is largely correct, his assessment must be woefully incomplete. The sex urge is, without doubt, one of the most important and strong of human drives. But can that be the whole story? There are so many dreams that have nothing whatsoever to do with sex. And human creativity is so rich and varied beyond just the reproductive instinct that there much be something more. Consider all art, literature, mythology, religion, philosophy, and so on. Can all of these really just be the expression of some repressed procreative energies?
And so, here, early in Jung's career, we have Jung giving voice to the skepticism alluded to earlier: the Freudian theory of dreams has largely been subsumed, but not because Freud was incorrect. It was because Freud had tunnel vision and a disposition to oversimplify the matter.
The original impetus for Jung's own theories came from an ethnologist named Adolf Bastian, who spent much of his life traveling the world and analyzing the symbols of world religions. Bastian found that the same symbols and literary motifs recurred throughout world mythologies, over and over again, and had arisen in separate contexts mostly independent of one another. Around this time, Jung was doing Freudian dream analysis with his patients in therapy. He found that many of the symbols and themes that Bastian wrote about from world mythologies were present in the dreams of his patients, and that, if the meanings from mythology were applied to the dreams of his patients, that they lined up perfectly with the surrounding events of the dream.
This is, in short, what led Jung to formulate the idea of the collective unconscious, which is the part of our psyche that he believed was common to all of us. It's not that we're born with images stamped into our brains, but that there are underlying forms (which he called archetypes) that generate imagery and ideas, and that these forms tend to manifest themselves the same way across all human societies. This is why, for example, all deities in religions are born of virgins. This recurs because humans have an innate need to separate the profane and earthly idea of copulation, which must produce all life, from that which we consider sacred and transcendent.
Jung describes the initial hint that led him down this path in Symbols. In 1906, a schizophrenic patient of his was talking about how, in his eyes, the sun had a tube hanging down from it. The patient claimed that as he moved his head from side to side, the tube would move with his head, and it was this tube that created the wind. A few years later, in 1910, Jung was reading a mythological account from Mithraism, the form of paganism that was Christianity's largest competitor in the Roman empire in its early days. The writing stated that the sun had an erect phallus on it, which moved from side to side with the movement of the viewer, and that this phallus generated the wind. Jung dismissed the possibility that the patient could have known about this aspect of Mithraic mythology, since this was translated from an archaic language and published for educated mythologists, several countries away, in France, only after he heard this from the patient.
Dreams are, according to Jung, either complementary to our waking life, or compensatory to it. He briefly talks about the dreams of children, and where the scary experiences of childhood will lead to dreams of fantastical animals that offer assistance to the child, an idea that has certainly seeded the characters in many fairy tales. If the child's relation to the parents is too affectionate, or too dependent, then the reverse will happen: dreams will be filled with frightening animals, in contradistinction to the pampered feeling of the waking world. Consistent with my formative childhood years, this certainly explains why my earliest dreams were of monstrous dinosaurs from which I was forced to flee in abject terror.
Most people would agree that it is far easier to read stuff written about Jung's work than to read Jung himself. Jung's rambly writing style, which daisy-chains various esoterica from loosely related disciplines in service of articulating a broader point, is difficult for most people to understand and engage with at length. On my drive across the country, I listened to the audiobook for Joseph Campbell's Pathways to Bliss. Campbell is perhaps the best-known of all writers on the subject of comparative mythology, and he took many of his earliest cues from Jung's writings, and this includes a writing style that doesn't summarize simple ideas for quick absorption. Pathways is perhaps his most accessible work for anyone interested in learning how to take the common themes of mythology and consider the ramifications they might have for your own path in life. I recommend it to anyone looking for a quick and concise overview of his ideas, and how to apply them to yourself.
Dreams can easily be regarded as our own personal mythologies, generated by our deep unconscious with the intent of keeping us in balance with ourselves. In Pathways, Campbell talks about two distinct kinds of dreams. The first are generally banal affairs that concern the minutia of our lives from the previous day or few days. These are the Freudian dreams. We are simply trying to determine how to make sense of the small events in our lives, or perhaps to act out sexual desires that we had to repress while in polite society or at work.
The second kind of dream is something more profound, something that goes deeper than the Freudian dreams. These are the ones that feature mythological symbols and motifs that can be found in numerous world mythologies. These belie meanings that transcend our own personal experience, and yet relate to our personal experience in some way that the dream is trying to get across to us through its narrative.
I quit my job back in February, earlier this year, with the intention of getting very well acquainted of the city of San Francisco and its myriad subcommunities and cultures while looking for my next job. A week or so after my last day of work, COVID-19 hit with full force and the city of San Francisco issued a mandantory shelter-in-place order, effectively Of Mice and Mening my best laid plans. It was at this time, by happenstance, that I first started reading the book I had by Carl Jung. It occurred to me that the most opportune thing to do, since I couldn't explore my outer world, would be to withdraw into myself and become more familiar with the inner world. Since I made this resolve, all of my dreams have been, as far as I can tell, the first type. They are simple, quotidian events that seem to be just me going about my normal life is a slightly modified way. I suspect this is because, during most of the last several months, my life was basically social isolation, deviod of any structure or responsibility, and so my dreams didn't need to consist of much. Dreaming that I was back in the office, at my former job, with my former co-workers, was enough for most nights. While some deeper symbolism may have snuck into the commonplace in my dreams, I haven't experienced anything as stark as a sun with a penis that is creating the wind.
As a means of setting the stage for this, I'll have to provide a bit more context. Much of what Jung wrote about in his later years was on the subject of alchemy, the branch of what is now regarded as a pseudo-science that was a precursor to modern-day chemistry. He was led to this, once again, by the dream of one of his patients: she dreamt of an eagle that soared high into the sky, but then turns its head around and eats it own wings, causing it to plummet back to the earth. Many years later, when dabbling in some alchemical writings, Jung found a story about an eagle with a King's head that, while flying high in the clouds, turns around and eats its own wings. (This is rather like the story of Icarus from Greek mythology, except that here the character self-castigates.)
Jung's conclusion, after investigating all of this, is that alchemy was the nascent study of matter that predates chemistry, but that much of it was psychological in nature. That is, medieval hermeticists in search of the philospher's stone via alchemical processes were actively engaging their minds in inner psychic transformations. Since they were unaware of the modern science of psychology, they projected the transformations and visions happening inside of themselves onto the metals and matter they were mixing and melting together. They engaged in meditations that Jung interpreted as having brought about about a waking dream state, and so the symbols the alchemists wrote about were actually products of their unconscious minds.
I'm not here to defend this particular idea about the psychology of alchemy, as postulated by Jung. Volumes 12 through 14 of his Collected Works, three of the more massive volumes of his writing in the series, are dedicated to this very subject. I have only read one or two hundred pages of these, so I'm not really licensed to comment on the accuracy of this idea. (Though, admittedly, I'm not really licensed to comment on most of the things I've written about in this post so far.) I mention the idea only to tie what I'm about to say with what I have said so far.
Last night, I dreamed that I was back in San Francisco (and here is where I lose the few readers who have stuck with me thus far). In the last few months of living there, I was making the most of being unemployed in the City by the Bay by going over to Ocean Beach every morning, on the west side of the city, and jogging along its sands in the winds of the Pacific. In the dream, I am facing south down the beach, as from Cliff House, where I used to park my car before jogging.
For those who are unfamiliar, here is a photograph of the exact vantage point I'm referring to. You can see, in the skyline to the left, the two windmills that punctuate the north- and southwest corners of Golden Gate Park.
In the dream, I'm looking down this beach at what I assume is nighttime. There is a lighthouse on the south end of Ocean Beach (not present in real life), and I'm looking for its light in the sky to orient myself as to where I am, to confirm that I really am looking south over Ocean Beach. However, there is a black cloud in the air that is blocking the light. The blackness completely obscures my view of the ocean and of the land to the left. The sand itself is almost entirely covered in black, with only small patches in the middle that are not covered by this blackness, which are illuminated brightly as though some isolated and invisible beams of sunlight were getting through to them.
This was an image of stark beauty. I awoke this morning with this visual front and center in my mind's eye. I wondered if I might be capable of painting it. I remember an episode of Bob Ross's "Joy of Painting" where he inverts his usual painting routine by starting with a canvas covered in black paint, and only adds the smallest bits of white, gray, and blue to the black to show the slightest bit of light creeping in to illuminate a waterfall in the darkness. It's probably my favorite painting of his.
While driving away from San Francisco a few weeks ago, I saw a large plume of smoke in the sky as I passed through the East Bay, around the town of Pleasanton. I've lived in California for long enough that I recognized it as smoke, and a quantity of which could only come from something as large as a wildfire. I had been frantically packing for the last few days, so I didn't learn until the next day that several wildfires had broken out north of San Francisco and the smoke was descending onto the city like an evil entity. Last week, I saw pictures from the news and friends still in the Bay Area that looked utterly apocalyptic: mid-day, you could barely see the sunshine. The sky simply shone with a dim orange hue that made the city look like it had descended into hell. Perhaps, I thought on first awakening, the dream had been some manifestation of that.
Last night, I opened a package I had ordered online, which contained a book by Jung's closest friend and colleague during his time as an analyst, Marie-Louise von Franz. She has a rare gift for bringing clarity and simplicity to the complex ideas that Jung elaborated in his own writings. Having decided to learn more about the psychology of alchemy, I decided to get her book on the subject. I read perhaps half of the first chapter before putting it aside, going for my evening jog, and then going to sleep for the night.
This morning, I picked that book up first thing after I had brewed my morning coffee and finished reading the first chapter. As I started getting distracted working through the start of the second chapter, I flipped aimlessly around the book looking at the many pictures throughout it. One picture later in the book caught my eye and I read the following descriptive caption beneath it:
"The prima materia, or massa confusa, as a black, chaotic cloud, a state of conscious typical of the beginning of both the alchemical work and the process of individuation."
Individuation, in Jung's argot, is the process of becoming acquainted with, and integrating, one's own deeper and personal psychology into the conscious part of oneself, which can be accomplished at least in part by analysis of one's dreams.
The image of the black cloud is a visual of a description found in an alchemical writing called "Aurora consurgens", part of which I quote here from von Franz's book:
"From afar I saw a big cloud which overshadowed the whole earth with blackness; it had absorbed the earth which covered my soul, the waters had entered my soul which had become corrupted from the aspect of the lowest hell and the shadow of death because the flood had drowned me."
Is this a coincidence? I'm quite sure most people will think so. The easiest follow-up question would be to ask what, exactly, this dream is supposed to have meant to me. There is actually a lot more to the dream than I described above, a long sequence of events that come after my dream of being mired in the black cloud cloaking Ocean Beach, but here I spare the reader those extra details which are of no interest to anyone but me and would do nothing to further the point I am making here. Suffice to say, in consideration of my own mental state last night and the preoccupations I took to bed with me, the events of the dream, black cloud and all, make resolute sense to me.
One thing I'm most excited about, regarding being back in Michigan right now, is that I will get to experience autumn as I experienced it growing up. The sight of the leaves, the smells that accompany it, the crisp bite of the equinox wind, is something that I miss living out in the homogenous climate of California. In preparation for this, I re-read one of my favorite autumn books earlier this week: Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes. The version I read this time around contains, as an appendix, several essays written by other writers about the book itself. One of them is by Stephen King, excerpted from his own semi-autobiographical Danse Macabre. I found the following passage illuminating:
"Childhood itself is a myth for almost all of us. We think we remember what happened to us when we were kids, but we don't. The reason is simple: we were crazy then. Looking back into this well of sanity as adults who are, if not totally insane, then at least neurotic instead of out-and-out psychotic, we attempt to make sense of things which made no sense, read importance into things which had no importance, and remember motivations which simply didn't exist. This is where the process of mythmaking begins."
Childhood is, doubtless, the starkest example of this kind of mental trickery that we engage ourselves in, paradoxically done both consciously and in a way that operates below our conscious awareness. The truth is that the memories we have of our entire lives are exactly like this. In the later years, we glance backwards and see a narrative structure that seems to order our lives, which makes it seem as though our days had a creator who introduced conflict, puppeteered us to work our way to resolving it, and we find meaning in the whole thing in its denouement, even while circumstances are already generating for us the next dragon we must slay.
About five years ago, in the throes of confusion around such a conflict, I went onto Twitter and tweeted a rhetorical question, which I could look up to quote verbatim, but will paraphrase here to save me the headache of having to go onto Twitter:
"If you look for meaning in a sequence of events and find it, is it really there, or is it just there because you went looking for it?"
I would now answer my question with another question: What's the difference?
For the last couple of years, I have been weighing the possibility of returning to my place of origin, which is the suburbs north of Detroit, to spend some extended time with family. It dawned on me, roughly a month ago, that now would be the opportune moment in time to do so. I gave my landlord notice, and in the space of 9 days, shed most of what I owned, crammed much into storage, and loaded what little that remained into my car for a compressed 3-day drive across the country. I've been back, crashing in an extra room in my parents's house, for a few weeks now. I feel like I left San Francisco years ago; the whole experience feels much further behind me than it objectively ought to.
I'm quite keen to be here, since I've learned since I moved away that not all suburbs in the United States are equal. I remember seeing the horror film It Follows a couple of years ago. In the opening scene, a girl runs out of her house into the middle of the street in the early morning light. I immediately said out loud, to myself, "That's Detroit." It was almost instinctual. I looked it up, and the scene in question was filmed on a residential street in Sterling Heights, one town over from where I grew up. I've spent enough time getting lost in the suburbs of various US cities over the last 10 years that I've learned that the "teenage wasteland" that The Who wailed about in the 1970's isn't all characteristically homogenous. The Detroit suburbs have a lush greenness to them, a scent or feeling in the air, that I haven't found anywhere else.
One thing I briefly rediscovered as a result of being with my parents is 1980's television. One show they are quite fond of is "ALF", which I dimly remember watching heavily as a tender youth of barely 10 years of age. I've watched a few episodes of the series with my jaw agape. Recently, I rewatched the more recent animated series "Bojack Horseman" on Netflix, which is about a washed-up star of an eighties sitcom who is dealing with the onset of middle age. The fictional sitcom in "Bojack" feels much the same as "ALF": there is a flimsy premise on which the series itself is hung, and for the most part any connection with reality or credibility is sacrificed in favor of writing episodes full of scenes which allow for a quick succession of dumb one-liners. I find watching this fascinating for anthropological reasons, instead of entertainment ones. Is this the kind of tripe my generation was reared on? How did we ever find this sort of thing funny? What does it say about us?
What does it say about me?
What things there are to say about me is, of course, very much the focus of this whole blog. I started reading Carl Jung about seven months ago, and that was a revelation on several fronts. The first chapter I read was about dream analysis, which I approached with the usual skepticism. Isn't the analysis of dreams something that Freud spearheaded in his day, and haven't our methods advanced beyond such piffle, since Freud was, as is widely supposed, mostly wrong?
Reading Jung, I quickly came to believe that this impression is sorely mistaken. For the scientifically minded among you, who are surely already groaning loudly at what I'm suggesting, here is my science-y rationale for this. I evaluate much of what happens in my life and in the world through the lens of evolution. I actually think that this force has done so much to shape just about every aspect of our lives, both individually and collectively, that I'm surprised I haven't taken it upon myself to get better acquainted with evolutionary biology. From what little I do know, I'm certain that nature is quick to eliminate waste. Any superfluous function in the organism that expends energy without any benefit, to the root of such a thing nature is quick to take an ax. If dreams had no tangible necessity for the human creature, then the creatures who do not dream would have outcompeted those who dream several eons ago. As a matter of concrete knowledge: neuroscientists know that if you are sleep deprived, then sooner or later, if you manage to stay awake, the hallucinations of your inner dream world will eventually spill over into your waking life. (source)
Besides, if I must convince the scientists among you of this, then I should concede that dream meaning to any individual really cannot be evaluated in any scientific fashion. Science is, at its core, a discipline of probabilities, which is to say that with repeated trials we can surmise with some confidence level what will most likely happen in this or that situation, given some initial boundary conditions. Dreams happen once in the course of our lives, and while there are billions of humans to study, the psychology leading to the generation of this or that dream is largely based on the psychology of the individual who is having the dream. Thus any individual dream, in isolation, cannot be investigated in any scientific sense because they are singularities whose peculiar details are specific to a subjective psychic context that is impossible for an outsider to comprehend objectively.
If I haven't convinced the skeptic to entertain the idea of the meaning of dreams with this brief remarks then I'm quite sure it is a lost cause and further efforts would bear no fruit. I should hedge all of this by saying that I think dreams are more complicated beasts than we flippantly give them credit for. Bookstores usually have a "Dream" section in or around the New Age collection of materials, and these books have dictionary-like structure where a symbol can be looked up and its meaning derived from a short descriptive sentence. So, it is believed that if you dream of a large bull, and the bull is blue in color, then one can simply look up the meaning of a bull and the meaning of the color blue, and the fusion of these two meanings will tell you something about what the dream meant. Would that any worthwhile endeavour in our lives were this simple.
I've spent the last couple of weeks focused on Volume 5 of Jung's Collected Works (CW 5), published now as Symbols of Transformation, which is his earliest substantial publication putting forth his distinct ideas about the human unconscious. Much of it is centered around the analysis of dream symbolism, which he had been doing with many of his patients in the course of doing therapy with them. The book is partly a response to Freud's own The Interpretation of Dreams, which posits, roughly speaking, that the content of dreams is just an expression of a repressed desire, almost all of which have something to do with sex. Jung begins his Symbols by acknowledging that while Freud is largely correct, his assessment must be woefully incomplete. The sex urge is, without doubt, one of the most important and strong of human drives. But can that be the whole story? There are so many dreams that have nothing whatsoever to do with sex. And human creativity is so rich and varied beyond just the reproductive instinct that there much be something more. Consider all art, literature, mythology, religion, philosophy, and so on. Can all of these really just be the expression of some repressed procreative energies?
And so, here, early in Jung's career, we have Jung giving voice to the skepticism alluded to earlier: the Freudian theory of dreams has largely been subsumed, but not because Freud was incorrect. It was because Freud had tunnel vision and a disposition to oversimplify the matter.
The original impetus for Jung's own theories came from an ethnologist named Adolf Bastian, who spent much of his life traveling the world and analyzing the symbols of world religions. Bastian found that the same symbols and literary motifs recurred throughout world mythologies, over and over again, and had arisen in separate contexts mostly independent of one another. Around this time, Jung was doing Freudian dream analysis with his patients in therapy. He found that many of the symbols and themes that Bastian wrote about from world mythologies were present in the dreams of his patients, and that, if the meanings from mythology were applied to the dreams of his patients, that they lined up perfectly with the surrounding events of the dream.
This is, in short, what led Jung to formulate the idea of the collective unconscious, which is the part of our psyche that he believed was common to all of us. It's not that we're born with images stamped into our brains, but that there are underlying forms (which he called archetypes) that generate imagery and ideas, and that these forms tend to manifest themselves the same way across all human societies. This is why, for example, all deities in religions are born of virgins. This recurs because humans have an innate need to separate the profane and earthly idea of copulation, which must produce all life, from that which we consider sacred and transcendent.
Jung describes the initial hint that led him down this path in Symbols. In 1906, a schizophrenic patient of his was talking about how, in his eyes, the sun had a tube hanging down from it. The patient claimed that as he moved his head from side to side, the tube would move with his head, and it was this tube that created the wind. A few years later, in 1910, Jung was reading a mythological account from Mithraism, the form of paganism that was Christianity's largest competitor in the Roman empire in its early days. The writing stated that the sun had an erect phallus on it, which moved from side to side with the movement of the viewer, and that this phallus generated the wind. Jung dismissed the possibility that the patient could have known about this aspect of Mithraic mythology, since this was translated from an archaic language and published for educated mythologists, several countries away, in France, only after he heard this from the patient.
Dreams are, according to Jung, either complementary to our waking life, or compensatory to it. He briefly talks about the dreams of children, and where the scary experiences of childhood will lead to dreams of fantastical animals that offer assistance to the child, an idea that has certainly seeded the characters in many fairy tales. If the child's relation to the parents is too affectionate, or too dependent, then the reverse will happen: dreams will be filled with frightening animals, in contradistinction to the pampered feeling of the waking world. Consistent with my formative childhood years, this certainly explains why my earliest dreams were of monstrous dinosaurs from which I was forced to flee in abject terror.
Most people would agree that it is far easier to read stuff written about Jung's work than to read Jung himself. Jung's rambly writing style, which daisy-chains various esoterica from loosely related disciplines in service of articulating a broader point, is difficult for most people to understand and engage with at length. On my drive across the country, I listened to the audiobook for Joseph Campbell's Pathways to Bliss. Campbell is perhaps the best-known of all writers on the subject of comparative mythology, and he took many of his earliest cues from Jung's writings, and this includes a writing style that doesn't summarize simple ideas for quick absorption. Pathways is perhaps his most accessible work for anyone interested in learning how to take the common themes of mythology and consider the ramifications they might have for your own path in life. I recommend it to anyone looking for a quick and concise overview of his ideas, and how to apply them to yourself.
Dreams can easily be regarded as our own personal mythologies, generated by our deep unconscious with the intent of keeping us in balance with ourselves. In Pathways, Campbell talks about two distinct kinds of dreams. The first are generally banal affairs that concern the minutia of our lives from the previous day or few days. These are the Freudian dreams. We are simply trying to determine how to make sense of the small events in our lives, or perhaps to act out sexual desires that we had to repress while in polite society or at work.
The second kind of dream is something more profound, something that goes deeper than the Freudian dreams. These are the ones that feature mythological symbols and motifs that can be found in numerous world mythologies. These belie meanings that transcend our own personal experience, and yet relate to our personal experience in some way that the dream is trying to get across to us through its narrative.
I quit my job back in February, earlier this year, with the intention of getting very well acquainted of the city of San Francisco and its myriad subcommunities and cultures while looking for my next job. A week or so after my last day of work, COVID-19 hit with full force and the city of San Francisco issued a mandantory shelter-in-place order, effectively Of Mice and Mening my best laid plans. It was at this time, by happenstance, that I first started reading the book I had by Carl Jung. It occurred to me that the most opportune thing to do, since I couldn't explore my outer world, would be to withdraw into myself and become more familiar with the inner world. Since I made this resolve, all of my dreams have been, as far as I can tell, the first type. They are simple, quotidian events that seem to be just me going about my normal life is a slightly modified way. I suspect this is because, during most of the last several months, my life was basically social isolation, deviod of any structure or responsibility, and so my dreams didn't need to consist of much. Dreaming that I was back in the office, at my former job, with my former co-workers, was enough for most nights. While some deeper symbolism may have snuck into the commonplace in my dreams, I haven't experienced anything as stark as a sun with a penis that is creating the wind.
As a means of setting the stage for this, I'll have to provide a bit more context. Much of what Jung wrote about in his later years was on the subject of alchemy, the branch of what is now regarded as a pseudo-science that was a precursor to modern-day chemistry. He was led to this, once again, by the dream of one of his patients: she dreamt of an eagle that soared high into the sky, but then turns its head around and eats it own wings, causing it to plummet back to the earth. Many years later, when dabbling in some alchemical writings, Jung found a story about an eagle with a King's head that, while flying high in the clouds, turns around and eats its own wings. (This is rather like the story of Icarus from Greek mythology, except that here the character self-castigates.)
Jung's conclusion, after investigating all of this, is that alchemy was the nascent study of matter that predates chemistry, but that much of it was psychological in nature. That is, medieval hermeticists in search of the philospher's stone via alchemical processes were actively engaging their minds in inner psychic transformations. Since they were unaware of the modern science of psychology, they projected the transformations and visions happening inside of themselves onto the metals and matter they were mixing and melting together. They engaged in meditations that Jung interpreted as having brought about about a waking dream state, and so the symbols the alchemists wrote about were actually products of their unconscious minds.
I'm not here to defend this particular idea about the psychology of alchemy, as postulated by Jung. Volumes 12 through 14 of his Collected Works, three of the more massive volumes of his writing in the series, are dedicated to this very subject. I have only read one or two hundred pages of these, so I'm not really licensed to comment on the accuracy of this idea. (Though, admittedly, I'm not really licensed to comment on most of the things I've written about in this post so far.) I mention the idea only to tie what I'm about to say with what I have said so far.
Last night, I dreamed that I was back in San Francisco (and here is where I lose the few readers who have stuck with me thus far). In the last few months of living there, I was making the most of being unemployed in the City by the Bay by going over to Ocean Beach every morning, on the west side of the city, and jogging along its sands in the winds of the Pacific. In the dream, I am facing south down the beach, as from Cliff House, where I used to park my car before jogging.
For those who are unfamiliar, here is a photograph of the exact vantage point I'm referring to. You can see, in the skyline to the left, the two windmills that punctuate the north- and southwest corners of Golden Gate Park.
In the dream, I'm looking down this beach at what I assume is nighttime. There is a lighthouse on the south end of Ocean Beach (not present in real life), and I'm looking for its light in the sky to orient myself as to where I am, to confirm that I really am looking south over Ocean Beach. However, there is a black cloud in the air that is blocking the light. The blackness completely obscures my view of the ocean and of the land to the left. The sand itself is almost entirely covered in black, with only small patches in the middle that are not covered by this blackness, which are illuminated brightly as though some isolated and invisible beams of sunlight were getting through to them.
This was an image of stark beauty. I awoke this morning with this visual front and center in my mind's eye. I wondered if I might be capable of painting it. I remember an episode of Bob Ross's "Joy of Painting" where he inverts his usual painting routine by starting with a canvas covered in black paint, and only adds the smallest bits of white, gray, and blue to the black to show the slightest bit of light creeping in to illuminate a waterfall in the darkness. It's probably my favorite painting of his.
While driving away from San Francisco a few weeks ago, I saw a large plume of smoke in the sky as I passed through the East Bay, around the town of Pleasanton. I've lived in California for long enough that I recognized it as smoke, and a quantity of which could only come from something as large as a wildfire. I had been frantically packing for the last few days, so I didn't learn until the next day that several wildfires had broken out north of San Francisco and the smoke was descending onto the city like an evil entity. Last week, I saw pictures from the news and friends still in the Bay Area that looked utterly apocalyptic: mid-day, you could barely see the sunshine. The sky simply shone with a dim orange hue that made the city look like it had descended into hell. Perhaps, I thought on first awakening, the dream had been some manifestation of that.
Last night, I opened a package I had ordered online, which contained a book by Jung's closest friend and colleague during his time as an analyst, Marie-Louise von Franz. She has a rare gift for bringing clarity and simplicity to the complex ideas that Jung elaborated in his own writings. Having decided to learn more about the psychology of alchemy, I decided to get her book on the subject. I read perhaps half of the first chapter before putting it aside, going for my evening jog, and then going to sleep for the night.
This morning, I picked that book up first thing after I had brewed my morning coffee and finished reading the first chapter. As I started getting distracted working through the start of the second chapter, I flipped aimlessly around the book looking at the many pictures throughout it. One picture later in the book caught my eye and I read the following descriptive caption beneath it:
"The prima materia, or massa confusa, as a black, chaotic cloud, a state of conscious typical of the beginning of both the alchemical work and the process of individuation."
Individuation, in Jung's argot, is the process of becoming acquainted with, and integrating, one's own deeper and personal psychology into the conscious part of oneself, which can be accomplished at least in part by analysis of one's dreams.
The image of the black cloud is a visual of a description found in an alchemical writing called "Aurora consurgens", part of which I quote here from von Franz's book:
"From afar I saw a big cloud which overshadowed the whole earth with blackness; it had absorbed the earth which covered my soul, the waters had entered my soul which had become corrupted from the aspect of the lowest hell and the shadow of death because the flood had drowned me."
Is this a coincidence? I'm quite sure most people will think so. The easiest follow-up question would be to ask what, exactly, this dream is supposed to have meant to me. There is actually a lot more to the dream than I described above, a long sequence of events that come after my dream of being mired in the black cloud cloaking Ocean Beach, but here I spare the reader those extra details which are of no interest to anyone but me and would do nothing to further the point I am making here. Suffice to say, in consideration of my own mental state last night and the preoccupations I took to bed with me, the events of the dream, black cloud and all, make resolute sense to me.
One thing I'm most excited about, regarding being back in Michigan right now, is that I will get to experience autumn as I experienced it growing up. The sight of the leaves, the smells that accompany it, the crisp bite of the equinox wind, is something that I miss living out in the homogenous climate of California. In preparation for this, I re-read one of my favorite autumn books earlier this week: Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes. The version I read this time around contains, as an appendix, several essays written by other writers about the book itself. One of them is by Stephen King, excerpted from his own semi-autobiographical Danse Macabre. I found the following passage illuminating:
"Childhood itself is a myth for almost all of us. We think we remember what happened to us when we were kids, but we don't. The reason is simple: we were crazy then. Looking back into this well of sanity as adults who are, if not totally insane, then at least neurotic instead of out-and-out psychotic, we attempt to make sense of things which made no sense, read importance into things which had no importance, and remember motivations which simply didn't exist. This is where the process of mythmaking begins."
Childhood is, doubtless, the starkest example of this kind of mental trickery that we engage ourselves in, paradoxically done both consciously and in a way that operates below our conscious awareness. The truth is that the memories we have of our entire lives are exactly like this. In the later years, we glance backwards and see a narrative structure that seems to order our lives, which makes it seem as though our days had a creator who introduced conflict, puppeteered us to work our way to resolving it, and we find meaning in the whole thing in its denouement, even while circumstances are already generating for us the next dragon we must slay.
About five years ago, in the throes of confusion around such a conflict, I went onto Twitter and tweeted a rhetorical question, which I could look up to quote verbatim, but will paraphrase here to save me the headache of having to go onto Twitter:
"If you look for meaning in a sequence of events and find it, is it really there, or is it just there because you went looking for it?"
I would now answer my question with another question: What's the difference?