The most vivid part of my memory of the dream begins when I am flipping through photographs of landscapes on my iPad — gorgeous pictures that I've taken (in dream, not in real life) of mountains, rolling hills, misty forests, etc. — and, when I come across one I want to share with everyone else, I "flick it" up from the iPad onto a large projector screen (using some sort of bluetooth connection and an app that recognizes the gesture — someone should actually invent this because it was awesome)... At which point, the photo would appear not simply as large as life, but also in 3-D, as if the projector screen were actually a window we were looking through to see into the landscape beyond. I don't remember if the photos were actually video clips that moved — since they were mostly landscapes, there wouldn't have been much movement, but a sense of the swaying of trees or the gentle movement of mist or flowing water or birds taking flight now and then, maybe...
He was standing right beside me. As usual, there was an intense longing to be near him, to have his attention on me, and yet also a sense that this was taboo or forbidden in some way.
Back when I was Christian, I thought of him as the "angel at the gate" — the one who stands with a fiery sword guarding the gates of Eden. (Although technically I think Genesis says God stationed several angels, specifically cherubim, to guard the gate, I've always thought of this angel as Archangel Michael, probably because he, too, is depicted as having a fiery sword.) Years ago when I was little, he was the one who appeared to me in the forest and then dissolved into sunlight — though the feeling then was all affection, as if for an older brother, rather than this kind of attraction/eros. Still, even the eros in recent years has been of an almost innocent, adolescent kind — more ecstatic longing than sexual desire, if that makes any sense. Being near him feels thrilling, almost electric, but it's all in the heart and soul, rather than the body (or rather, it's throughout the body, a bone-deep magnetism rather than a sexual pull). I don't know who this figure is — I find it problematic to continue to think of him as an angel in the Judeo-Christian context — but I wonder if he is some kind of expression of my animus. Sometimes he takes on the appearance in dream of people I know in real life, though I can always recognize it's him, but that often only serves to exacerbate the feelings of taboo or discomfort (for instance, he once appeared in a dream as a college professor I had, which left me feeling deeply embarrassed because I felt completely impersonal and professional towards the actual professor himself, who was anyway kind of old and goofy).
In any case, in this dream, I was showing pictures to a group of people, the usual half-anonymous Crowd of Family and Friends. We were all standing and milling about outside in a park-like area, with the projection screen off to one side, and he was standing quite close to me so that I could feel the warmth of his presence alongside me. Then, the landscape photograph I was displaying seemed to somehow come alive and expand, until we were standing within the landscape looking out across a vast mountain range with beautiful shadowy valleys — mist snagged on the mountain peaks high above and pooled in the low valleys below us. It began to snow, and everyone was so excited at the beauty of it. It was as if we were all kids again, thrilled at the first snowfall. This snow was not exactly ordinary snow, for it didn't feel all that cold and it drifted down in huge, lazy flakes that seemed more like autumn leaves, except that they were white and crystalline in delicate designs, and they melted when they touched bare skin. People began laughing and playing, trying to catch the slowly drifting snowflakes on their tongues or with outstretched hands, some people leaning down to scoop up handfuls from the ground to throw like snowballs, though the snowballs were always soft and feathery, not cold and compact in a way that might hurt if you got hit. There was a lot of happy bumping around and into each other as everybody played in the snow, which jostled me into him a couple times so that I got that warm electric thrill passing through me, but the sense of taboo always made me withdraw and try to play it casually. (I'm not sure if I'm exactly describing this well — it always seems to me that he shares my understanding, both the attraction and the awareness of the taboo, though it doesn't bother him as much, as if neither weighs as heavily on him as they do on me in these dreams. Yet it seems as if the taboo is because of him, some other obligation or duty that holds him back, and not so much because of me or who I am.) In any case, in this dream I thought somehow the snow was his doing, and I joked with him about it or hinted at it, as if the others didn't know who exactly he really was, but he shook his head and said it had been my doing, somehow. While everyone was distracted playing and no one was looking, he briefly placed his hands on either side of my face, drew me close to him and kissed me on the forehead. It was at that point that I woke up.
I can't help but think that this has something to do with my work with the tarot cards. Last night I began work with the Magician/Magus, reading through some of the various books I'm working with and examining the various Magician cards from all my different decks. I wonder if I'm connecting the Magician with the Animus/Angel at the Gate somehow, who has always been a figure of energy, light and warmth, somewhat fiery but also ecstatic and creative in his energies.
I just hopped over to Wikipedia to see if I could find anything on the animus, since I really know next to nothing about it other than that it's supposedly the female's parallel to the male's anima, the archetype manifesting from the collective unconscious the totality of the feminine (or, for the animus, the masculine). I seemed to remember reading that Jung really didn't examine the animus at all, being much more interested in the anima in the male psyche. This is what Wikipedia has to say:
Jung focused more on the male's anima and wrote less about the female's animus. Jung believed that every woman has an analogous animus within her psyche, this being a set of unconscious masculine attributes and potentials. He viewed the animus as being more complex than the anima, postulating that women have a host of animus images while the male anima consists only of one dominant image.
Jung stated that there are four parallel levels of animus development in a female.
The animus "first appears as a personification of mere physical power - for instance as an athletic champion or muscle man, such as 'the fictional jungle hero Tarzan'".
In the next phase, the animus "possesses initiative and the capacity for planned action...the romantic man - the 19th century British poet Shelley; or the man of action - America's Ernest Hemingway, war hero, hunter, etc."
In the third phase "the animus becomes the word, often appearing as a professor or clergyman...the bearer of the word - Lloyd George, the great political orator".
"Finally, in his fourth manifestation, the animus is the incarnation of meaning. On this highest level he becomes (like the anima) a mediator of...spiritual profundity". Jung noted that "in mythology, this aspect of the animus appears as Hermes, messenger of the gods; in dreams he is a helpful guide." Like Sophia this is the highest level of mediation between the unconscious and conscious mind. [emphasis added]
::foreheadsmack:: This seems like a pretty obvious connection between the Magician (symbolized especially in the Thoth tarot but in other decks as well as the figure Hermes, messenger of the gods, with snakes twining around his helmet and wings on his feet)... and the figure who appears to me in dreams.
No comments:
Post a Comment