The Shelf Elf School of Dream Interpretation

Shelf elves are constantly at play in my book-filled life. They may push a book off my shelves, or hide one, or send one flying across the room. Sometimes they want to give me an opinion on a dream. I woke before dawn one morning from this dramatic scene:

Battle of the Turtles and the Crocodile

There is a commotion outside. I go to the window and see an army is encamped along the edge of a body of water where a battle is taking place between a giant turtle (the size of a dozen men) and a giant crocodile. I call to the others to come and see. When I turn back, I see that the army has saved the turtle, which is being transported to safer waters. They have constructed or opened a kind of raceway, and the turtle is swimming between walls. Now I see that there are actually two giant turtles.

    I look out to the water again. Beyond military lines, the crocodile stands on a headland, tail raised like a scorpion, apparently triumphant for now. I understand that the conflict will be resumed. It’s part of life. The role of the army is to ensure that neither party destroys the other.

I left the dream feeling both excited and satisfied. In the dream, I was an observer with a commanding view. I felt that I was being shown something of huge importance in life.

    I know both Turtle and Crocodile as members of my personal mythic bestiary. I have swum with sea turtles, and I am from a country famous for crocodiles. I know that in life, there are contests between opposing forces and attitudes that must continue if life itself is to go on.

     Instead of spending much time analyzing the dream, I made a quick drawing and decided to ask Jung for a second opinion. Who better? I had already had it in mind to do my daily bibliomancy with Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections, a book of seminal importance in my life and the most personal and accessible of his works. 

     However, when I reached into the Jung section in a glass-fronted bookcase in my personal library, the shelf elves had other ideas. Another volume in Jung’s Collected Works came flying off the shelf, striking me lightly on the chest.

    Naturally, I changed my ideas about where to look for guidance and took this flying book to my desk. Its title is Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, which seemed to match the revelation of the two turtles in my dream rather nicely. The volume is a dual edition of two of Jung’s early essays, volume 7 in the Collected Works. I opened the book at random and read this:

There is no energy unless there is a tension of opposites; hence it is necessary to discover the opposite to the attitude of the conscious mind…Repressed content must be made conscious so as to produce a tension of opposites, without which no forward movement is possible…Just as high always longs for low and hot for cold, so all consciousness, perhaps without being aware of it, seeks its unconscious opposite, lacking which it is doomed to stagnation, congestion and ossification. Life is born only of the spark of opposites.

     I saw that there was no need to invent a snapper to carry the essence of my dream. Jung had given me one. Life is born only of the spark of opposites.

     This little incident is a practical example of how we can turn to a book to give us a second opinion on a dream. Our curiosity may, of course, take us far beyond the initial passage we find when we open a book at random. I found myself drawn, irresistibly, to read both of the essays in that volume of Jung, in which we find his mind devising and developing theories of aspect psychology, the shadow, and the relations between the ego-self and the collective unconscious, which were to become fundamental to his approach.

I went looking in an old journal for my drawing of the battle of the turtles and the crocodile to post with this article. I found the relevant journal fairly quickly. But as I pulled it off the shelf another journal, bound in green leather, shot off the shelf above it and slapped my shoulder. Yes, I will spend some time with the journal that was thrown at me. A sketch on the first page immediately catches my attention.
     As I rise from my desk, green journal in hand, to make coffee, I am pretty sure I can hear mumbling and squeaking among the stacks of my personal library.

Text adapted from SidewalkOracles: Playing with Signs, Symbols and Synchronicity in Everyday Life by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Journal drawing by RM