Susan Plunket's Blog

Dreamer is a 46-year-old woman.

“I am carrying a baby close to my heart. She is clinging to me. It is the most sublime feeling, the most blissful, transcendent feeling I have ever had. I never want to let her go or be parted from her or this bliss of holding her on my heart. But I’m told I gave her up. We seem to be in a hospital. Her new pretentious parents take her from my arms. They don’t care for her, feed her, or love her, and she is getting sick. My heart is breaking. I ask her new parents for food for her, and they give me some kibble, dog food. She is ill. I call a doctor for her. The doctor says her thumb is infected and she could lose it if it isn’t treated. I must get her back and care for her. A man is watching all this. He sees my situation and asks me how I feel. I tell him she is part of me that I have given away to pretentious people and I don’t know why I did it. How could I? I wake up.”

Feeling in the dream:

“Bliss, sublime love, unity while with the baby. Then shock and desperation, shock that I did this, disbelief at how I could have done this, then determination to save her and get her back from the pretentious new parents.”

Feeling upon awakening:

“All day my heart is breaking from this dream. I can’t think of anything but this baby and this sublime feeling that I have cast away and how reckless I have been.”

Dream Setting:

A hospital – place for diagnosis and treatment and hopefully healing, a place where lives can be saved. Dream is set in a place where there may be hope of healing.

Characters in the Dream:

Baby- new hope, new beginning, new life, innocence, Soul

Pretentious couple –  ego, pretentiousness, part of the dreamer that neglects her soul, her inner being, part of her that treats her Soul like a dog, starves it

Doctor – an aspect of the dreamer that knows something is wrong, the part that diagnoses the thumb infection, tells the dreamer there is an infection, a sickness in her ability to grasp what’s going on.

Man – the witness, the dreamer’s inner masculine, an aspect of her inner observer, part of her animus, which doesn’t act or interfere except to ask her how she feels about what she has done, a kind of conscience. He represents the part of the dreamer that sees what she’s doing, neglecting her inner being, allowing it to starve and sicken.

Symbols in the dream

Baby – new hope, new beginning, Soul, innocence, inner being, aspect which connects the dreamer to bliss

Kibble – food for a dog, not food for the Soul

Thumb – strength, courage, creativity. Humans have an opposable thumb which affords dexterity and allows us to grasp things and perform delicate movements. Dreamer hasn’t grasped what she’s done. It comes as surprise to her that she’s given away the baby.

Infection in thumb – illness, injury to baby’s strength, courage and creativity, threat of losing the thumb, castration of part of baby/the Soul. Ultimately, if neglected, the infection could be lethal. The part that allows dreamer to grasp things and understand what is happening is under threat from the ego. Dreamer’s ability to grasp the situation is impaired, infected with ego.

Interpretation:

Sometimes the feeling and symbols in a dream are so clear the meaning of the dream is unmistakable. It hits you over the head.

The baby represents innocence, bliss, the dreamer’s inner being, the most sublime part of any being, their eternal aspect. The Dreamer has neglected her, starved her, put her in the hands of the part of her that is pretentious, uncaring and selfish, the ego, which treats her like a dog. Left in the hands of the ego, the Soul gets sick. The dreamer is committing soul murder. The dream is a warning to wake up and nurture the inner being instead of feeding her ego. Wake up and grasp the situation before it’s too late.

Work to be done:

Self-inquiry and self-observation, commitment to be continuously aware of the ego and watch what it is trying to do. Feed the inner being with reflection and meditation, not kibble. Heal the ability to see, to grasp who you are serving, your ego or your Eternal Inner being, your Soul. The dream is a gift from the dreamer’s unconscious to get her back on track caring for her whole Self, not just her ego.

The Dream

A tall slender black-haired man in a tux, the kind with tails, leads me to an upstairs room in a café. I glance at him and think of a dragon and Dracula. Something about him is not quite human. He directs me to sit on a red upholstered bench. I am surprised to notice I’m wearing a black leather backpack I had thirty years ago.  A curly-haired woman in a 1950’s dress with a full skirt comes in and kneels before me on the red wall to wall carpet. She gives me the creeps. She's aggressive and doesn't feel quite human either.

“Did he tell you I’m a Demon?”

He didn’t.

She’s holding something that looks like four pie doughs wrapped in saran wrap. Still kneeling she piles them up on the floor in front of her and looks up and right into my eyes. It feels like she’s performing for me and wants to be sure I get her message.

“I eat human flesh.” She unwraps a package from the pile and pulls at it. It stretches like taffy or dough. She tears off a piece and stuffs it in her mouth as her eyes hold mine.

“Do you kill the humans you eat or buy them packaged?” I ask.

“I kill the humans myself.”

Either my daughter or my child self is now sitting beside me. The child is about five years old. I must get her out of this place, away from the cannibal woman.

I wake up, repulsed, revolted, sickened.

The Art of Dream Interpretation

The art of interpretation involves amplifying each aspect of a dream: the feelings you have during the dream, the feelings you have upon awakening, the dream setting, each character in the dream and the symbols in the dream.

The dream maker in each of us creates dreams as communications to the waking self, communications which bring forward images to show what has been cut off from conscious awareness. A dream is like a movie or play created to make the waking self aware of something she hasn't yet acknowledged, or at least hasn't yet sufficiently acknowledged.

The Feeling in the Dream:

The feelings you have upon awakening as well as during the dream can be counted on to be the most truthful part, the most trustworthy aspect of a dream. That's why they're a good place to look to begin understanding a dream. When I wake up from this dream I’m sickened by this brash woman cannibal. The dream bothers me like a burr under the saddle. No, more than a burr under the saddle, it shakes me up, makes me feel terrible enough to start to question in what way I am symbolically a cannibal. Which of course I am, as it's my dream.

The dream makes me think I don't know myself as well as I thought. I begin by looking at the dream setting.

The Dream Setting:

The setting is a good place to go next after looking at the feeling. The setting is where the dreamer has chosen to unfold the story. In this case it's an upstairs room in a cafe. A cafe suggests nourishment or at least coffee and perhaps socializing. But we are not in the main cafe but upstairs in a private room so it will not be the usual cafe food or experience. The room is very red, red carpet and a red upholstered bench, too red for my liking. Red suggests passion, devilry and anger to me. This room doesn't feel safe.

The Characters in the Dream:

Me in the dream, (the dream ego), who is being lead by the man

The man who reminds the me in the dream, (the dream ego), of Dracula and dragons

The brash woman in the 1950's dress kneeling tearing at the packages

The five-year-old little girl

Jung postulated that each character in a dream is an aspect of ourselves . What part of me, recognized or yet not recognized, does each of these four characters represent?

I begin with the man who reminds me of Dracula and dragons. Why has the dream maker (my greater Self) chosen this type of man. He's not quite of this world. He has a more universal, archetypal aspect. He's something from a deeper layer than my own personal unconscious. Dragons and Dracula are collective figures we all know about. But what aspect of me does he represent? Why is he in my dream? I google both Dracula and dragons. The word Dracula is derived from the Latin, Draco which means Dragon. Dragons are an old alchemical symbol and represent the unconscious. In the dream, the dream ego, me in the dream, is being led by Dracula/dragon man into an even deeper, redder realm of my unconscious. As I think more about dragons, I remember that one form of the dragon is the uroboros, the serpent swallowing his own tail. An important symbol in Jungian psychology, the uroboros represents wholeness and the ability of the unconscious to spark renewal in our psyche. In alchemy the serpent represents one stage in the transformation from base mental into gold, the incorruptible substance which represents the Self, the Divine aspect in each of us. It is the job of our dreams help us become more whole, to help us see what we don’t want to see about ourselves, in order to be whole. In this sense dreams compensate our conscious knowledge by showing us what we're keeping hidden from ourselves. Another thought about dragons is that in fairytales and myths they often guard treasure. The treasure in the human psyche is the Self, the part of us that is eternal and lives outside of time, our own spark of divinity. The Dracula/dragon aspect of myself has led me to this red room to show me something about myself. What hidden aspect does it want me to acknowledge?

Then there is the me, the dream ego, in the dream, the woman being led? The dream ego is the character the dreamer identifies with in the dream. She seems passive here allowing herself to be led around by this dragon/Dracula guy. Then she just sits on the bench. Where is her agency, her aggression? She does briefly question the woman to get more information and she decides to leave to protect the child, or perhaps to protect herself from the truth. She's wearing a black back leather pack which surprises her as she realizes in the dream is from a long time ago.

Next, we come to the woman in the 1950's dress. She is kneeling before the dream ego eating the human flesh which looks like pie crust or taffy. What ritual is she acting outing by kneeling? Though she’s kneeling she’s no supplicant in the usual sense. Is she making fun of me by kneeling as if in worship at the same time she’s trying to shock me? What is she asking of me? To be acknowledged as part of me? Her demeanor reminds me of a tarot card reader I saw twenty-five years ago. She was loud, direct, brash, aggressive but very intuitive. She pointed out to me at the time that being a Libra I was more concerned with setting the table and having pretty manners than just digging in and eating, getting down to the business of it. My bawdy, earthy side, along with my aggression was too repressed in her opinion.  I also notice the woman cannibal's directness. "Did he tell you I'm a demon?" She doesn't try to hide her true nature. She wants to make sure I know she’s a Demon. Because she’s in my dream she is my inner demon, my inner cannibal. In what way am I symbolically a demon? a cannibal? In what way have I killed, and eaten people symbolically and then buried the memory? I am up against it now. How much can I bear to see about this part of myself?

The fourth character in the dream is a five-year-old child who just seems to be there at one point. It's unclear if she's me at age five or my daughter at age five. My daughter was five, twenty-five years ago when her father and I divorced. Babies and young children in dreams can represent hope, growth, renewal and innocence. The child could be pointing to something that happened to her or to me or to both of us at age five.

The Symbols in the Dream:

Black leather backpack

1950's dress

Demon

Cannibal

Packages of flesh wrapped in saran wrap

The number four

Dreams speak in symbolic language. They prefer images to words. It's useful to amplify each symbol to understand what the dream maker is trying to communicate.

The black leather backpack :

I have a clue in the black leather backpack I’m wearing in the dream, I no longer have the backpack in waking life. It was a gift from my then husband about thirty years ago. The dream is pointing to that time. I need to look at something related to him that happened back then. We divorced twenty-five years ago when our daughter was five. Was that breakup and divorce so selfish on my part that my psyche sees it as greedy and dark as cannibalism?  Have I not sufficiently acknowledged the degree of harm I did, especially to my daughter by breaking up our family? And how was my own self at age five hurt? Am I a demon-cannibal, cannibalizing hearts in search of being loved rather than loving?

The 1950’s dress:

I like 50’s dresses. I was a child in the 50’s. I wore a lot of 50's vintage dresses in graduate school where I met my husband and during our marriage. The dresses as well as the backpack suggest something related to this marriage, to my then husband and to my daughter. The time and the issue the dream is commenting on have roots back twenty-five or thirty years ago.

Demon

A demon can be a devil, a dark spirit, a tormentor. The idea of demons and devils and monsters created fear in me as a little girl. Demons, devils, cannibals, dragons, Dracula are all universal archetypal symbols in the collective unconsciousness. They are infused with mythic power that can attack us. They hurt and destroy life.

Cannibal

A cannibal is literally one who eats human flesh. I find literal cannibalism shocking and horrific. But cannibalism is also a metaphor for all consuming love.

The Packages of Human Flesh:

Last week my daughter made pie dough for four apple pies, wrapped them in saran wrap and stacked them in the refrigerator to chill. They looked just like the packages the woman in my dream had. Have I hurt four people in an unspeakable way? Is my own daughter one of the four I have hurt; have I harmed the person I love most in the world? What else can I say about these packages? The woman has killed the people herself. She didn’t buy these in a grocery store. But they don’t look like flesh any more than packaged meat looks like the animal. Could my psyche also feel that animal flesh is sacred, and I should not be eating animals? Do I feel I am a demon and a cannibal for eating animals? There’s little evidence for this in the dream, though in waking life I sometimes feel this way.

The Number Four:

Why four packages? Have I cannibalized four humans? Do the four packages represent four times I’ve acted the cannibal, four humans whose flesh I have symbolically torn and eaten? The demon’s cannibalism is so sanitized. Have I sanitized the hurt I’ve inflicted?

What can I learn about myself from this dream?

This dream is partly about my inner demon-cannibal and the acts of symbolic cannibalism she committed twenty-five or thirty years ago. The work is to acknowledge these repulsive aspects of myself, welcome them into consciousness and live with them, to sit with the truth that they are part of me. Jung called it owning your shadow, bringing the shadow into consciousness, allowing it to live as part of the personality rather than cutting it off.

But this is not all the dream is about. Even the darkest side of us has two aspects. My cannibal woman has good qualities too, which I have also repressed as part of my shadow.

Jung reminded us that there's gold in the shadow as well as darkness. Shadow aspects also come with gifts. Our shadow aspects are not one-sided. On the positive side the cannibal woman has energy, healthy as well as non-healthy aggression and she's honest. She’s up front, direct.

The Dracula/dragon man also has positive qualities. As the uroboros he represents wholeness. He leads me to where I am faced with a disowned aspect of myself. The presence of the child suggests new growth, new hope. I want to protect her. The only way I can protect her is to own my shadow, see it and integrate it so it doesn’t hijack me. Repressed shadow parts of us grow more wild when left in the dark and denied access to the whole psyche. If we don't bring them to light and purify them they they putrefy and poison us.

Integrating these aspects of my psyche requires a painful look at what the dream is pointing to from the past around my breakup and divorce and facing my part in it, and in whatever other acts those four packs of flesh represent. What have I been unwilling to admit about myself? Shame and guilt are often involved in what we can't face. Who have I hurt? However many times I have acknowledged my selfishness, ruthlessness and guilt in past relationships, it has not been enough, or I wouldn’t have had this dream.  I have more work to do to accept this disowned cannibal aspect. This part of me which is now kneeling before me asking to be seen, owned, admitted to consciousness and no longer kept in shadow. To become a more authentic, more whole, human being I must invite her in, inquire into everything about her, accept her as me and integrate the shadow aspect she represents. The task is self-inquiry, not self-judgment. And ultimately the task is to forgive myself.

A tall slender black-haired man in a tux, the kind with tails, leads me to an upstairs room in a café. I glance at him and think of Dracula. He directs me to sit on a red upholstered bench. It surprises me to notice I’m wearing a black leather backpack I had thirty years ago.  A curly-haired woman in a 50’s dress with a full skirt comes in and kneels before me on the red wall to wall carpet.

“Did he tell you I’m a Demon?”

He didn’t.

She’s holding something that looks like four pie doughs wrapped in saran wrap. Still kneeling she piles them up on the floor in front of her and looks up and right into my eyes. It feels like she’s performing for me and wants to be sure I get her message.

“I eat human flesh.” She unwraps a package from the pile and pulls at it. It stretches like taffy or dough. She tears off a piece and stuffs it in her mouth as her eyes hold mine.

“Do you kill the humans you eat or buy them packaged?”

“I kill the humans myself.”

Either my daughter or my child self is now sitting beside me. The child is about five years old. I must get her out of this place, away from the cannibal.

I wake up, repulsed.

Dream Interpretation

You can count on the feeling in the dream to be the most reliable part of the meaning. The feeling never lies. I’m repulsed, sickened by this woman. This dream shakes me up, reminds me of my shadow, shows me my underbelly, my inner cannibal. I have serious work to do on myself it says.

Jung believed that it was helpful in understanding a dream to look at everything in it as a symbolic aspect of oneself. In what sense am I Dracula, the woman demon-cannibal, the packages of human flesh, the red room and a five-year-old girl? Where to begin making sense of this dream?

The setting is a good place to start looking at a dream. A red room and Dracula both evoke the devil for me. Dracula is a vampire. Blood is red. The devil is frequently depicted with red eyes. The word Dracula is derived from the Latin, Draco which means Dragon. Dragons are an old alchemical symbol and represent the unconscious. In the dream I am being led by Dracula into an even deeper, redder realm of my unconscious. As I think about dragons, I remember that one form of the dragon is the uroborus, the serpent swallowing his own tail. An important symbol in Jungian psychology, the uroborus represents wholeness and the ability of the unconscious to spark renewal in our psyche. It is the job of our dreams to spark new ideas about ourselves, to help us see what we don’t want to see about ourselves. Dreams compensate our conscious knowledge by showing us what we keep hidden from ourselves. Another thought about dragons is that in fairytales and myths they often guard treasure. The treasure in the human psyche is the Self, the part of us that is eternal and lives outside of time, our own spark of divinity. The Dracula/dragon aspect of myself has led me to a red bench in a red room to show me something about myself. What hidden aspect does it want me to acknowledge?

I’m seated on the red upholstered bench when the woman in the 50’s dress enters and kneels before me. Like Dracula, she too represents an aspect of my shadow. I notice the 50’s dress. I like 50’s dresses. I was a child in the 50’s. I also notice her directness. It’s almost as if she’s trying to shock and repulse me. She wants to make sure I know she’s a Demon. Because she’s in my dream she is my inner demon, my inner cannibal. In what way am I symbolically a demon? a cannibal? In what way have I killed, and eaten people symbolically and then buried the memory in my shadow? I am up against it now. How much can I bear to see about this part of myself? What horrific acts have I not sufficiently acknowledged?  I have a clue in the black leather backpack I’m wearing in the dream, the woman’s 50’s dress, and in the sudden presence of a either my daughter or myself at age five. I no longer have the backpack in waking like. It was a gift from my then husband about thirty years ago. The dream is pointing to that time. I need to look at something related to him that happened back then. We divorced twenty-five years ago when our daughter was five. Was that breakup and divorce so selfish on my part that my psyche sees it as greedy and dark as cannibalism?  Have I not sufficiently acknowledged the degree of harm I did, especially to my daughter by breaking up our family? And how was my own self at age five hurt? How did I become a demon-cannibal, cannibalizing hearts in search of being loved rather than loving?

The woman is kneeling before me eating the human flesh which looks like pie crust or taffy. What ritual is she acting outing by kneeling before me? Though she’s kneeling she’s no supplicant in the usual sense. Is she making fun of me by kneeling as if in worship at the same time she’s trying to shock me? What is she asking of me? To be acknowledged as part of me? Her demeanor reminds me of a tarot card reader I saw around the time of my divorce. She was loud, direct, brash and very intuitive. She criticized me at the time for being a Libra more concerned with setting the table and having pretty manners than just digging in and eating, getting down to the business of it. My bawdy, earthy side was too repressed in her opinion.

Which brings me to the packages of human flesh. Why four packages? Why four? Have I cannibalized four humans? Last week my daughter made pie dough for four apple pies, wrapped them in saran wrap and stacked them in the refrigerator to chill. They looked just like the packages the woman in my dream had. Is my own daughter one of the four I have hurt? Have I harmed the person I love most in the world? What else can I say about these packages? The woman has killed the people herself. She didn’t buy these in a grocery store. But they don’t look like flesh any more than packaged meat looks like the animal. Could my psyche also feel that animal flesh is sacred, and I should not be eating animals? Do I feel I am a demon and a cannibal for eating animals? There’s little evidence for this in the dream, though in waking life I sometimes feel this way.

No, this dream is about my inner demon-cannibal and the harm she’s done to other humans. What have I not yet faced about the harm I’ve done in my breakups, disloyalty and betrayals? The dream would make more sense if the demon was eating human hearts, but she’s eating what looks like uncooked piecrust. Do the four packages represent four times I’ve acted the cannibal, four humans whose flesh I have symbolically torn and eaten? The demon’s cannibalism is so sanitized. Have I sanitized the hurt I’ve inflicted?

My work is to acknowledge these repulsive aspects of myself, welcome them into consciousness and live with them, to sit with the truth of who I also am. Jung called it owning your shadow.

Shadow aspects also come with gifts. They are not one-sided. On the positive side the cannibal woman has energy and honesty – “Did he tell you I’m a demon?” She’s up front, direct. On the positive side the Dracula/dragon man represents wholeness, the uroboro. He leads me to where I am faced with a disowned aspect of myself. The presence of the child suggests new growth, new hope. I want to protect her. The only way I can protect her is to own my shadow, see it and integrate it so it doesn’t hijack me. Integrating these aspects of my psyche is a painful recognition of my guilt and shame. However many times I have acknowledged my ruthlessness and guilt, it has not been enough, or I wouldn’t have had this dream.  I have more work to do to accept this disowned aspect. This part of me is kneeling before me asking to be seen, owned as part of me. To become a more authentic, more whole, human being I must invite her in, inquire into everything about her and accept her – not judge her.

I awoke this morning from a dream which left me in a state of bliss. This is not usual for me. More usual is for my dreams to leave me rattled or confused because they’ve shined a light on some unexamined corner of my shadow, highlighting my character flaws, and my missteps. Welcome or not this is the gift a dream provides. And like the mirror in Snow White, dreams never lie, though the truth they offer may not be immediately decipherable because they prefer to speak in symbols. Why a dream has chosen a particular symbol to convey its message isn’t always immediately clear. Our feeling in the dream, however, is accessible. It’s also essential to understanding the dream, making it a good place to start, whatever the feeling may be.

So, bliss. I awoke in a state of bliss. How did I reach that state? The story in the dream is simple. I am standing in my bathroom looking in the mirror over the sink. A man, now dead, but alive in the dream, comes up behind me and puts his arms around me. I lean back against him resting my body on him and looking at us in the mirror. Wrapped in his arms I stand still, enveloped in peace. All day the feeling of bliss stays with me.

It’s to Carl Jung I turn for help in understanding this dream. Jung’s way of looking at a dream is to see each element as an aspect of ourselves. First there’s the setting. My dream maker has chosen to set the dream in my bathroom. I’m looking in my bathroom mirror, not the bedroom mirror over my dresser, or the living room mirror over the fireplace, but in this more private mirror in this more private room where I go alone to tend to the needs of my body. In this deeply private realm I see a man, but only in the mirror, not directly face to face. What does this choice suggest? Some things are too powerful to be seen directly, head on, but must be viewed only in reflection. The basilisk in Harry Potter, Medusa’s head in the shield of Perseus, the beauty of a Persian bride in the wedding mirror, all come to mind. That I view this man only in the mirror suggests to me that he represents more than just a man, something too powerful to be seen directly. I never turn to face him. I lean back on him and see only his reflection. In this way the dream maker is letting me know that he is not meant to be viewed only as an ordinary man. He may represent an archetype, something more universal, more powerful or more dangerous.

Of all the men I have known in life why has my dream maker cast this man in the dream? In waking life he’s dead, though I’m not sure yet whether that’s of significance to the meaning of the dream. What else is there about him that makes him right for this dream? We were in love at age 19. It was an intensely romantic relationship where we projected onto one another our idealized version of a perfect true love, especially after circumstances forced us apart. Since we didn’t get to experience one another beyond the idealization phase he remains in my psyche as an ideal love, my Abelard. Perhaps that’s why he’s in the dream. I never saw his human flaws, who he was beyond what I projected onto him. Therefore, he can carry the archetype of the perfect, Divine love. He remains, fifty years later, a Godlike erotic figure, a symbol of my own ideal inner masculine.

Jung postulated that every woman carries within a masculine ideal, her animus, just as every man has an inner feminine, his anima. These inner contra sexual selves are the bridge to the deeper archetypal layers of the psyche.

What does this mean for my dream? The man in whose arms I am wrapped in the dream is not only my old love. Rather he represents an archetypal aspect of my Self, my own inner masculine, my animus. He is the bridge connecting me to something greater than myself. To be in contact with our greater Self, our Divine aspect, is blissful. To feel that connection to the Whole, the Quantum Field, the One Consciousness is bliss. It is to lean back and rest in the arms of the Divine.

I met 90 writers from all over the world, mostly women. We represented four different generations and every continent. I loved sharing meals and ideas with them in our Harry Potteresque Dining Hall. And I aslo learned a lot.

Until this summer what I knew about writing I learned mostly from a lifetime of reading – Jane Austen, Stefan Zweig, Virginia Woolf, others. I love stories. My process was to sit most mornings before work and write, without censoring, until I had a first draft. Then, using intuition, hard thinking, and listening for the musical flow of the words, I’d revise and edit, haphazardly.

     But this summer at Oxford I learned about other things writers are supposed to be aware of. Things like the fictive dream, authorial voice, character is plot, fabula and syuzhet, psychic distance, filtering, and editing in layers.

     Maybe I’ll be a better writer now. I haven’t written anything since returning home. Instead, I’ve been rereading a book I wrote before Oxford to see if, by chance, my process incorporated any of these things whose names I had just learned. The book, A Jungian Understanding of Transcendent Experiences, is part of a series called Paranormal Perspectives. The brief was: “Write the story of your paranormal experiences from the perspective of both a Jungian psychologist and a person looking back at her life.”  I now wonder how this book would have been different had I been to Oxford before writing it. Some thoughts on this.

     Let’s take the concept of the fictive dream. I hadn’t heard that term before. And I’m pretty sure Jane Austen hadn’t heard it either, but she sure knew how to create one. I think I knew how to create one too, even before Oxford told us creating the fictive dream is rule number one of writing. I seem to have understood that I needed to evoke a world for the reader, a world with granular sensual detail, invite them in, and make them want to be there more than where they were.  I probably also sensed that to go on reading they would need to feel secure in that world. Maybe I knew this because it’s not unlike my work with patients. They must feel safe in the alchemical vessel of our therapeutic relationship, or they won’t keep coming to therapy to meet themselves in new ways. Writer and reader need mutual trust and so do therapist and patient. Strange for me to learn how akin my writing and my work with patients are. I didn’t make the connection myself. It was suggested to me by a fellow Oxford writer. Of course, now it’s like the cabbage rose pattern in the wallpaper. Once you see the pattern, it’s everywhere.

      The pattern is also in the kinship of authorial voice and therapist’s voice. Too much authorial voice takes the reader out of the fictive dream. But if you allow the protagonist to speak, you stay in the world of the fictive dream. Similarly, it’s better to allow the patient to tell her story with minimal intrusion.

     And just as you’re not a good therapist if the patient’s needs and desires aren’t clear to you, you’re not a good writer if your character’s desires, as well as whatever is stopping her from attaining those desires, aren’t clear to you. Plot is created by what the characters want and their frustrations in attaining it. Character is plot.

  I’ll venture to say the same connection between therapy and writing exists with fabula and syuzhet. Fabula is the raw material, the chronological events of a story. It’s also the raw material of an experience a patient’s is sharing. Syuzhet is how the author or the patient chooses to tell that story, how she orders the events, not necessarily sequentially, but instead with attention to some motive of her own.

     Another thing we learned about at Oxford was psychic distance. This refers to the emotional distance between the storyteller and the characters. The closest psychic distance is when the story is presented as stream of consciousness, where you’re inside the character’s head. Patients also vary the psychic distance when recounting their experiences. A further out psychic distance is telling the story in a factual way as if you’re a bystander. It’s useful to ask what motivates a character or a patient to choose a particular distance.

     We all know as writers how important editing is. After you filter out unnecessary speech tags and irrelevant generic details, you can begin the serious business of editing in layers. You read through to check that you are showing, not telling. Read through again to make sure that your timeline works, and again to see that your voice is clear. Edit again to check your characters’ motivations and the development of their arcs. Read yet again to see if you’ve varied the psychic distance, while preserving both your voice and a strong fictive dream. This too is not unlike the process of therapy where you visit and revisit a complex or a fear, or a dream, or an event, again and again, turning it over to make sense of it, to understand the symbols, the archetypes evoked so the patient can finally integrate it comfortably into her psyche.

     There’s a lot more to good writing than I realized. Loving doing it is a start, but not enough. I haven’t yet integrated all these new concepts into my writing process. Turning these new techniques over in my mind to make sense of them and learning how to work with them will take a little time. I’d like to have some fun doing it, not hold on too tightly. Hopefully they will improve my process and help me become a better writer.

I met 90 writers from all over the world, mostly women. We represented four different generations and every continent. I loved sharing meals and ideas with them in our Harry Potteresque Dining Hall. And I aslo learned a lot.

Until this summer what I knew about writing I learned mostly from a lifetime of reading – Jane Austen, Stefan Zweig, Virginia Woolf, others. I love stories. My process was to sit most mornings before work and write, without censoring, until I had a first draft. Then, using intuition, hard thinking, and listening for the musical flow of the words, I’d revise and edit, haphazardly.

     But this summer at Oxford I learned about other things writers are supposed to be aware of. Things like the fictive dream, authorial voice, character is plot, fabula and syuzhet, psychic distance, filtering, and editing in layers.

     Maybe I’ll be a better writer now. I haven’t written anything since returning home. Instead, I’ve been rereading a book I wrote before Oxford to see if, by chance, my process incorporated any of these things whose names I had just learned. The book, A Jungian Understanding of Transcendent Experiences, is part of a series called Paranormal Perspectives. The brief was: “Write the story of your paranormal experiences from the perspective of both a Jungian psychologist and a person looking back at her life.”  I now wonder how this book would have been different had I been to Oxford before writing it. Some thoughts on this.

     Let’s take the concept of the fictive dream. I hadn’t heard that term before. And I’m pretty sure Jane Austen hadn’t heard it either, but she sure knew how to create one. I think I knew how to create one too, even before Oxford told us creating the fictive dream is rule number one of writing. I seem to have understood that I needed to evoke a world for the reader, a world with granular sensual detail, invite them in, and make them want to be there more than where they were.  I probably also sensed that to go on reading they would need to feel secure in that world. Maybe I knew this because it’s not unlike my work with patients. They must feel safe in the alchemical vessel of our therapeutic relationship, or they won’t keep coming to therapy to meet themselves in new ways. Writer and reader need mutual trust and so do therapist and patient. Strange for me to learn how akin my writing and my work with patients are. I didn’t make the connection myself. It was suggested to me by a fellow Oxford writer. Of course, now it’s like the cabbage rose pattern in the wallpaper. Once you see the pattern, it’s everywhere.

      The pattern is also in the kinship of authorial voice and therapist’s voice. Too much authorial voice takes the reader out of the fictive dream. But if you allow the protagonist to speak, you stay in the world of the fictive dream. Similarly, it’s better to allow the patient to tell her story with minimal intrusion.

     And just as you’re not a good therapist if the patient’s needs and desires aren’t clear to you, you’re not a good writer if your character’s desires, as well as whatever is stopping her from attaining those desires, aren’t clear to you. Plot is created by what the characters want and their frustrations in attaining it. Character is plot.

  I’ll venture to say the same connection between therapy and writing exists with fabula and syuzhet. Fabula is the raw material, the chronological events of a story. It’s also the raw material of an experience a patient’s is sharing. Syuzhet is how the author or the patient chooses to tell that story, how she orders the events, not necessarily sequentially, but instead with attention to some motive of her own.

     Another thing we learned about at Oxford was psychic distance. This refers to the emotional distance between the storyteller and the characters. The closest psychic distance is when the story is presented as stream of consciousness, where you’re inside the character’s head. Patients also vary the psychic distance when recounting their experiences. A further out psychic distance is telling the story in a factual way as if you’re a bystander. It’s useful to ask what motivates a character or a patient to choose a particular distance.

     We all know as writers how important editing is. After you filter out unnecessary speech tags and irrelevant generic details, you can begin the serious business of editing in layers. You read through to check that you are showing, not telling. Read through again to make sure that your timeline works, and again to see that your voice is clear. Edit again to check your characters’ motivations and the development of their arcs. Read yet again to see if you’ve varied the psychic distance, while preserving both your voice and a strong fictive dream. This too is not unlike the process of therapy where you visit and revisit a complex or a fear, or a dream, or an event, again and again, turning it over to make sense of it, to understand the symbols, the archetypes evoked so the patient can finally integrate it comfortably into her psyche.

     There’s a lot more to good writing than I realized. Loving doing it is a start, but not enough. I haven’t yet integrated all these new concepts into my writing process. Turning these new techniques over in my mind to make sense of them and learning how to work with them will take a little time. I’d like to have some fun doing it, not hold on too tightly. Hopefully they will improve my process and help me become a better writer.

I won't even ask you if you've ever tortured yourself with your own thoughts, because I know you have. And most of what our mind says to us is not even true: "You're not smart enough, attractive enough, thin enough, organized enough, pretty enough, rich enough. You're an idiot. You ruined your life. You're incompetent, you're a loser, no one likes you, you'll never succeed. You're going to be alone forever. There's something wrong with you." These examples are not even subtle. Our mind can do much worse, get a lot more personal in its attacks on us.

Some of why this happens is our conditioning throughout our childhood. When you were a small child you weren't judgmental or afraid of existential things. You were closer to your Self and closer to animals and joy and freedom. But then conditioning, educating, civilizing began. We all get conditioned by our parents, caregivers, teachers, communities, by society, to behave, be good, to fit in, to succeed by society's standards. A lot of our true Self, the self of our childhood who knew how to experience life, is sacrificed in the name of civilizing and educating us as children. Our mind gets set- up to run by fear.

As we grow up and get conditioned to being a human on Earth in the Third dimension our mind tries to cope by pinning bits of life onto a meaningless grid. Even the grid of life versus death isn't real, it's an oversimplification of reality. There's lots of evidence now that greater part of us survives our human body's death. that our consciousness doesn't require a physical body. But the mind won't tell you that. The mind creates this grid of separation and you feel alone. It's a lie. You are never alone. Your greater being, your Self, is always with you as are your many guides. But you have been conditioned to tune them out. Maybe you remember having an imaginary friend as a child. They weren't imaginary. You won't find them again in your mind. and you won't find your Self or your guides in your mind either.

If you stay focused in your mind as you've been trained to do you'll constantly be chased by fear. But you don't have to stay in your mind. You are not your mind. You are so much more. Leave the pain factory known as your mind. Separate from it by observing it. If you're observing it then you are not it. You're separate from it. You're the observer. As Krishna said to Arjuna 5,000 years ago in the Bhagavad Gita. "I am the field and I am the Knower of the Field."

The mind is the vehicle of separation. If you would save yourself from the pain factory known as the mind, develop a relationship with your greater Self, the eternal, immortal aspect of you that always was and always will be. Do this by dropping into your heart and observing your thoughts from there. One day you will shed this body like old clothes. And you will shine like new and feel light-hearted. To experience your immortal Self instead of your ego mind - dissolve your mind in your heart. Taste the sweetness. Practice is the solvent. Practice observing your thoughts from the vantage point of your heart.

True knowledge is knowledge of Ultimate Reality, who and what we are. This is not knowledge that your ego mind has. But your eternal aspect knows all about it. Talk to her.

At the time I received these lessons I didn't know how my teacher manifested, only that he had never been a human or an animal. Below are two of the earliest assignments he gave me.

Try it this week, 3 occasions in which you notice yourself involuntarily turning away, rejecting someone, and then remembering – I really do have 2 minutes to be with this, and see what happens. Set your ego aside for a moment and see the human before you. Maybe it's a homeless person asking for money, or your child needing attention, or your partner wanting to share what happened at work, or your dog who has been waiting all day for you, or a friend, a neighbor or colleague, or the checkout clerk, or the mailman seeking your smile for his joke. Everyone is a manifestation of the Infinite. Everyone. What more important are you doing than recognizing that? The magic is very simple.

Another assignment he gave me was to notice how much I was experiencing of each day. "Observe how often you are distracted," he said. "And how much are you present in the moment." Self observation, self inquiry is our great tool for change. Choose at least 3 opportunities for change – change of habit, change of action, change of attitude about something or someone. Catch yourself in a moment of choice and change your usual response. Deliberately mobilize within yourself to change your ways. Observe your behavior and your thoughts. Simply notice. Notice what you are doing and accept it. Without judgement. Awareness opens with acceptance. Watch to see what this great goddess -- you -- is doing. Learn everything you can about how she manifests. Change will come. It's already happening.

Doing these exercises is like hitting the refresh button on my life, it's setting my ego aside for a moment to be present with my eternal Self. Doing these simple exercises can change my state when I'm down or lost or confused. They carry me back to what matters, the consciousness that all of us are One Being. Or as Quantum pioneer Scrodinger said, "the number of mind's in the universe is One."

The day after I visit to Jung’s house I set off for his tower on the other side of Lake Zurich at Bollingen. His grandson Andreas has told me that none of the family is there now. The train doesn’t stop at Bollingen so I get off at the closest town and walk a few miles along the railroad tracks which run beside the lake. I stop to greet some friendly goats. I must slow my approach to Jung’s tower to prepare myself. At any moment it could appear in a clearing or through the treetops.

Half a mile later there it is, standing behind the swaying branches of a group of tall trees, peaking out. I stop and stand still. I cannot believe that it exists in the here and now and I am looking at it. It has lived in my psyche since at least the the late 1970s. It's now 2003. I take my disposable camera out of my backpack and snap the photo above. I move toward the tower. I am approaching what is for me a sacred place.

Jung called his tower a concretization of his psyche in stone, the place where he could be his inner being. I walk closer, right up to it and I lay my palm on it in greeting, not believing. yet that it is real.

One wall is so close to the lake’s edge it’s as if the tower is wading in the lake, its feet in the water up to its ankles. It’s fitting for the tower to be in touch with the unconscious in this way, standing right in it, as Jung did when he lived, in contact with both his personal unconscious and the collective conscious. A powerful silence encases me, the tower, and the trees. I feel I’m in Medieval times.

This is the home which Jung built out of stone a palace for his eternal Self, that deeper, more private solitary part of his being, to live while he was on Earth. And I am here touching it. It feels as if Jung’s consciousness is spread out over the tower, trees, the land, the water. The breeze has stilled. Only the water moves lapping at the tower’s feet. I bend down and run my fingertips through the water. They close around a small stone. I put it in the pocket of my skirt. Maybe it will help me write down all the piled-up images from that other deeper realm with in my Self. I whisper a prayer to Jung asking for his help to live as he did, expressing my inner being through my human existence, developing my consciousness through contact with my unconscious.

I walk around the tower examining it from every angle, feeling its strength. I sit beside it. I try to tuck all my feelings about it into a pocket in my heart. My feet and heart feel stuck to this ground. I am sad at the thought of walking away, too sad to pick up my feet.

I remember Jung wrote that when he was in the grip of a powerful emotion he’d look for an image concealed in the emotion, almost like a sculpture hidden in a stone not yet carved. When he found the image he’d focus on it and in that way understand the feeling and free himself from its grip. So what is the image concealed inside my paralyzing sadness?

I lean back against the tower and close my eyes. I ask my unconscious to produce an image to help me understand my overwhelming sadness at leaving Jung’s tower. I remind myself that my unconscious can produce an image to help me. I feel the tower supporting me. I wait, then it comes; I see a mountain in my mind’s eye.

I hear my inner voice say, “Look at it. You must stand like a mountain in the center of your life.”

The idea that I can embody the steadfastness of a mountain, be my own tower, have access to my inner masculine reassures me. I breathe a little easier. My energy returns. My feet come unglued. I muster the libido to walk away. Jung’s tower cannot be the source of my strength. My inner mountain must be that source as it reaches up connecting me to the Divine and downward grounding me into the earth.

(This is an excerpt from Paranormal Perspectives: A Jungian Understanding of Transcendent Experiences, Collective Ink Books, October 1, 2024)

Paranormal experiences, also known as transcendent experiences because they transcend our ordinary everyday perception of reality, can be achieved or just happen to anyone. Generally we perceive reality through our five senses. But sometimes we perceive a reality beyond our five senses. How? Why?

Ancient Vedic texts teach us that to know Ultimate Reality we must transcend our five senses. We can expand our consciousness to reach True Reality, which is Infinite, ineffable, non-physical, formless, beyond space and time. Psychedelics, plant medicine, meditation, yogic breathing practices, and sensory deprivation tanks are a few ways to do this. Five-thousand-year-old Indian teachings speak of One Consciousness from which all experience arises. The One Consciousness, which underlies everything, modifies itself into all beings and all things. It is us and we are It. Physicist max Planck tells us that the number of Minds in the universe is One. We are all part of this One Infinite Mind. When we are in touch with this feeling state transcendent experiences happen.

For humans transcendent states can be things like feeling an exalted state of love for all beings, communicating via telepathy, having an out of body experience, astral traveling, seeing angelic beings, hearing plants, trees, animals speak to you, crossing over to the life between life plane and returning, seeing the future, receiving guidance from beings in formless dimensions, in short, transcending space/time.

There is freedom in the view that we humans are part of the Oneness and It is part of us. In accepting our divinity and understanding that we eternal beings whose true home is beyond duality, we can stop judging one another for our differences in Third dimensional dualistic reality. It is not Ultimate reality which is beyond ideas of right and wrong. As the mystic poet Rumi said, "Out beyond ideas of right-doing and wrong-doing there is a field. I'll meet you there."

In that field we can even lose our fear of death.