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.