Dream: I am with a man joking around, laughing, having fun with him in his workshop. He walks outside to check something out and I follow. He is looking in a small hole in the ground that is filled with water. He starts getting upset about the implications of this water. He then runs over to check out a large piece of his metal equipment. As he lifts the cover, he realizes that the inside of it is covered in water and has been ruined. He begins to freak out as he realizes that everything he has worked for, for so long is now ruined. I feel his devastation as I watch him. I wake up with that feeling.
What is the animus up to now? What is going on with the water in the ground? What about the equipment that has been ruined? I wonder about these weird parts of the dream. But what we focus on in the session is not about these things. The point is that the animus is showing me devastation so that I can feel it. Some methods of dream analysis would focus on the water in the hole, on the ruined water-logged equipment. Archetypal dreamwork is more about developing a relationship with the archetypes and learning to feel through those relationships. In this dream, I connect to the animus through the feeling of devastation. It’s a strong painful feeling; a feeling that I have not been familiar with. Life is about being able to feel a range of feelings and painful feelings of devastation are included. When the pathology is the one to run our life we become disconnected from feeling and sadly, disconnected from life. Once again I am reminded of Rumi’s “The Guest House.”
Welcome and entertain them all, even if they are a crowd of sorrows.
My homework is to feel the devastation like I felt in the dream. Apparently those feelings don’t want to be accessed right now. Although the feelings were strong in the dream, they are fading fast. I can barely remember them now. So I stop trying to feel and I go for a walk.
It’s funny because when I first started dreamwork, I thought that I was pretty spiritually enlightened and I probably wouldn’t need too many sessions. I would move quickly through the work since I have been on a “spiritual” path for a long time. I was self reflective, introspective. I really knew myself. Now I am looking back and smiling. Kind of the way you might smile at a small child that does something that shows they still have learning to do. That self seems so long ago and continues to move further and further away from this emerging self. There is so much still to discover – to uncover. I have had 50 years of creating this self and so there are many, many layers. The process is humbling. Sometimes it’s hard and brings me down so low. Sometimes it’s full of unimaginable joy. It is like a wave that I am riding. Some days I want to get off of this wave. It is overwhelming me. Today is one of those days.
As I walk, without really trying, I begin to feel the feelings from the devastation dream. Sometimes letting go of trying to feel is exactly what can allow the feelings to come up. I feel a tremendous surge of a deep something that is just beneath the surface, wanting to emerge. It feels heavy and slow. It is stationed in my heart and gut. It is just sitting there waiting for any little reason to send up some pain or grief or something unnamable. I think it’s devastation. I am not really sure. It’s a new feeling. Although, it could be labeled as a “bad” feeling, I don’t really think of it that way. At that first session Rodger mentioned that each dream is a door. I can see that now. A door to a new level of feeling. If I allow myself to feel – even when it’s hard to do, then it will lead me to another door. It’s scary because I don’t know what the next door will bring. But for some reason, I trust this process. There’s a place inside of me that knows that I am going in the right direction.
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