Dream: I am walking down the street when I see an elaborate set up of fancy containers. A man takes a ball and puts it at the beginning of the set up. It’s like he timed doing this for when I walked by. The ball begins moving automatically from one container to the next. As it goes in one, then it rolls to the next and pops into the next one. I am mesmerized as I stop to watch. It is delightful and amazing at the same time. The man walks away and the ball keeps moving from one container to the next, like clockwork. Then it gets to one container and knocks it over. The whole process stops. It’s disappointing. I think about how the man thinks that everything was flowing so perfectly and he will be disappointed that the ball stopped. It’s just as well that he is not there to see what happened. I walk away and start making my way down the street toward home feeling a wave of depression and a hopeless feeling come over me.
In the beginning the dream is magical. I feel delighted and amazed by what I see. However, there is something that I am not aware of – something that the Archetypal man – the Animus wants me to know. In the dream I don’t realize that the delightful, amazing process I am watching happens only while he is there. As soon as he leaves it stops. I don’t see that connection. In the dream session, Rodger points out that when the Animus walked away, I could have followed him. That didn’t occur to me. I didn’t see the connection. The divine nature of the Animus is playfully brought out in this dream. He sets up this mesmerizing scene for me. But I don’t get it. I come up with a story in my mind that he will be disappointed that the process stopped. I don’t have a clue that his absence is what stopped it. If I had followed him, I could have continued to feel mesmerized, amazed, delighted. Instead, I make up a story and walk away, “feeling a wave of depression and a hopeless feeling come over me.”
I feel a little sad when I read back over this dream now. Often life does feel magical to me but that can change so quickly – so easily I can slip into a wave of depression or hopelessness. Archetypal Dreamwork is not a quick fix. Yes, it has made a huge difference in my life already, but it’s a gradual process of moving forward and back, zigging and zagging through the maze of pathology – toward connection with the mysterious, divine, Archetypal realm. A truly magical process.
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