Robertson Davies' novel approach to Jung

Questions opened with a Weasel Scot who said: “D’ye really know anything about this Yoong, or did ye juist mug up eneuch o’ his stuff to write that noavel?” I replied winsomely that I had been reading Jung for 30 years , and that The Manticore had been kindly received in Zurich, where they were in a position to judge.[1]  

“Do you dream much?” asks Dr. Johanna von Haller, a Jungian analyst, in their first session in Zurich. David Staunton, a wealthy Toronto barrister - and functioning alcoholic - has not been much of a dreamer, but he has one from the previous night. In this dream, he left secure and cozy surroundings to travel down back roads where he met a wild Gypsy woman in colorful rags whose whose speech is strange to him. He hurries away and is soon back on familiar ground, speaking from his brief as a barrister in court. Dr von Haller suggests this was an “anticipatory dream” – that the Gypsy was a preview of her, another foreigner whose language is strange to him and from whom he is inclined to flee. “Dreams do not foretell the future,” she observes. “They reveal states of mind in which the future is implicit.” [2] 

 With this exchange, we are in the midst of the liveliest account of the process of a Jungian analysis that I know. It's in The Manticore, the central novel in the Deptford Trilogy by the wordmaster Robertson Davies, one of my favorite novelists. Davies never underwent analysis - which he described in a letter as "barnacle-scraping" [3] - or any formal training in psychology. On the other hand, he had read Jung for thirty years, kept a portrait of Jung on the wall of his study and was a founder of the Analytical Psychology Society of Ontario. He was a depth psychologist in the classical sense of the word, a student of soul. Like his protagonist, he became increasingly attuned to his dreams and his inner life. 

It was a vision from reverie that gave him the image of the manticore and thereby gave the book its title - after he transplanted it into the mind and circumstances of a fictional character. Davies had completed part one of The Manticore when, dozing on his screened porch after lunch, he saw before him a gallery with an ancient picture, showing a beautiful woman in a classical robe, leading a strange beast on a golden chain. "It had the body and head of a lion, the clawed feet of a dragon, a tail which was barbed as the tails of scorpions are barbed in ancient art, and it had the anguished face of a man." Davies consulted an encyclopedia of mythology and identified the beast in his vision as a manticore. [4] 

In the version of the dream that Davies' character tells his analyst, the manticore has his own face and the woman commanding it is Dr Johanna von Haller. When she tells him the name of the beast, he asks, "How can I dream about something I've never heard of?" She responds: "People very often dream of things they don't know...It is because great myths are not invented stories but objectivizations of images and situations that lie very deep in the human spirit." [5] 

 Here we are deep into the Jungian understanding of the archetypes of the collective unconscious, but we have come here effortlessly and fluently, thanks to Robertson Davies' word magic and marvelous ear for dialogue. It must be granted that it is highly unlikely that many therapy sessions - and any patient autobiographies - will manifest the eloquence, wit and lightly-worn erudition of these pages. 

Here is how Dr. von Haller introduces the concept of archetypes: “You might call them the Comedy Company of the Psyche, but that would be flippant and not to do justice to the cruel blows you have had from some of them. In my profession we call them archetypes, which means that they represent and body forth patterns towards which human behavior seems to be disposed, patterns which repeat themselves endlessly, but never precisely in the same way.” [6] Later the analyst declares, "Our great task is to see people as people and not clouded by archetypes we carry about with us, looking for a peg to hang them on...You will recover all these projections which you have visited on other people like a magic lantern projecting a slide on a screen" [7] 

Davies wrote of this novel: "There have been other books which describe Freudian analyses, but I know of no other that describes a Jungian analysis." He added, "I was deeply afraid that I would put my foot in it, for I have never undergone one of those barnacle-scraping experiences, and knew of it only through reading. So I was greatly pleased when some of my Jungian friends in Zurich liked it very much." [8]  

The Zurich crowd were not unanimous, however. When Marie-Louise von Franz, one of the most brilliant of the women around Jung, arrived in Toronto, she was quite frosty to Robertson Davies because she was extremely annoyed by the suggestion that she was the model for Johanna von Haller. Davies had never previously met her, though he had read much of her work and admired her greatly as a classical scholar and interpreter of myth and fairytales, as well an excellent explicator of the Jungian psychology of projection and re-collection. [9] 

After meeting Swiss frost with Canadian froideur on their first evening, Davies charmed von Franz as he played genial host - as Master of Massey College at the University of Toronto - over the days that followed, and von Franz charmed Davies in turn, with her spin on a dream he recounted to her. In the dream, Davies (whose first career was on the London stage) found himself as an actor in a play. His cue has been given, the audience is waiting, but he does not know his lines and doesn't even know what play he is in. Davies told von Franz that he thought the dream expressed his deep sense of inadequacy. She told him robustly: "I would have said it is an indication to you that you don't go on stage to say what other people have written, but to say what you have to say yourself." [10]

References

[1]Robertson Davies to Arnold and Letitia Edinborough February 19, 1980 in For Your Eye Alone: The Letters of Robertson Davies edited by Judith Skelton Grant (New York: Viking, 2001)49. [

2] Robertson Davies, The Deptford Trilogy (New York: Penguin, 1990)276. The Manticore was first published in 1972. [3]Robertson Davies to Leon Edel, Thanksgiving (Canadian Style) 1981 in For Your Eye Alone 72.

[4] Judith Skelton Grant, Robertson Davies: Man of Myth (New York: Viking, 1994) 498.

 [5] Deptford Trilogy 404-405. 

[6] Deptford Trilogy 449. 

[7] Deptford Trilogy 450-451. [8] Davies to Leon Edel; For Your Eye Alone 72. 

[9] Von Franz's master work on this theme, Spiegelungen der Seele, had not yet been published, however. The German edition appeared in 1978; Projection and Re-collection in Jungian Psyxhology, translated by William H. Kennedy, followed in 1980 (LaSalle and London: Open Court, 1980). 

[10] Grant, Robertson Davies: Man of Myth 498.

Rules of Coincidence - Streamlined

 

I have formulated the rules for navigating by synchronicity several times in slightly different ways, for example in my books The Three "Only" Things and Sidewalk Oracles. Playing the game of opening old journals at random, I found a "streamlined version" I recorded in 2008 and I rather like it. Here are the ten rules, in this simple version:

1. Read the signs all around you

2. Put your question to the world

3. Get moving

4. Work with the Library Angel

5. Notice that life rhymes

6. Look for opportunity in every setback

7. Don't be afraid to get lost

8. Notice what's showing through your slip

9. Identify your personal omens

10. Follow your star (the passions of the soul work magic)

Of course I could not resist dipping again and again into that old journal. I found a passage on the joy of watching herons nesting in May, and a poem I wrote on paths taken and untaken in life:

The berries were bluer on the path ahead
but she was drawn to huckleberry red
and familiar landscapes on the more traveled road...

I found my note on Artemidorus' report of a man who dreamed that the god Serapis - a deity of death, dreams and healing - placed him inside his calathos, a crown shaped like a tall food basket, symbolizing abundance and fertility. 

I found notes I had made from Jung's correspondence with the pioneer quantum physicist Wolfgang Pauli, including this New Year's declaration:

"In fact, the archetype represents nothing else that the probability of psychical events." [Jung to Paul, January 1, 1951]

I found my note I made from Bascom's Ifa Divination on the dream calling, via his father, of a Yoruba king's diviner who became the most renowned babalawo of his time. The father of Agboubou (died in 1947) told him:

"You were not made to be a farmer; you were made to be a babalawo. I have seen this many times during my dreams."

I found my dream travel reports from that spring and reports of group adventures, fueled and focused by my shamanic drumming, that I led at wonderful retreat centers - to a Blue Lake of Healing, to a scholar-city in the Imaginal Realm, to the astral realm of Luna. I harvested rich material for fresh writing and teaching, and saw some cases where waking events are just now catching up to things dreamed fourteen years ago. 

And I found index cards that were written and played in rounds of my Coincidence Card Game, including this, written in a clear hand I can't now identify:

What is the end, 
what is the beginning?
The cycle continues
Joy sparkles in the snow
while the budding branches
of the tree 
stand, long patient. 

Carl Jung, Shaman of the West

If you want to know what a true shaman of the West would be like, consider Carl Jung, as he is now revealed in his Red Book. He culled the material for the Red Book - whose fine calligraphy and vivid illustrations and decorative features make it resemble a medieval illuminated manuscript - from the journals and 'black books" he kept during the years of his "confrontation with the unconscious", when he walked the razor's edge between madness and genius. As he describes it, the "spirit of the depths" ripped him out of the comfortable, rational assumptions of the "spirit of our times" and dragged him, night after night, through the terrifying stages of Underworld initiation.          

       In a crater in a dark and terrifying world below, where black snakes threaten to destroy a red sun, he meets the prophet Elijah and his "daughter" Salome, the evil beauty responsible for the decapitation of John the Baptist in the Bible. Salome tells Jung - to his amazement and confusion- that they are brother and sister, the children of Mother Mary. Disbelieving and fearing for his sanity, Jung yells at her that she and the Elijah figure are only "symbols". Elijah reproves him, saying, "We are just as real as your fellow men. You solve nothing by calling us symbols." Jung's Elijah also instructs him that "your thoughts are just as much outside your self as trees or animals are outside the body." [1]    

   While he is trying to continue to lead a normal life, as a prominent psychoanalyst and the father of five children. Jung's sense of reality is being shaken by the raw power of his night visions, and by synchronistic phenomena during his days when he feels the forces of a deeper world pushing through. In December 1913, in a well-cut suit, he gives a polished lecture to the Zurich Psychoanalytical Society. Three nights later, he tells Elijah, "It seems to me as if I were more real here" - in the Underworld - "yet I do not like to be here." [2]   
     As Jung confessed, anyone reading the last chapters of Liber Primus, the first part of the Red Book, out of context might conclude that the author was crazy. Brilliant and erudite, but crazy. Yet from such perilous adventures out there beyond the roped-in precinct of sanity, Jung derived his ideas about "psychological objectivity", one of the most stimulating elements in his later work. From his dialogues with his dream characters and his efforts to integrate and balance the powers that moved with them he developed his practice of active imagination. He told the Dutch artist Roland Horst that he developed his work Psychological Types from 30 pages of his Red Book [3], apparently the pages in which the encounters with Elijah and Salome take place and in which - after Jung has been squeezed by a giant black snake until the blood gushes out of him and his head has become that of a lion - Salome tells him, "You are Christ". [4]
     Looking back on this passage in his inner and transpersonal life in 1925, from across the divide of the catastrophic Great War that some of his visions had foreshadowed, Jung told a seminar that "You cannot get conscious of these unconscious facts without giving yourself to them. If you can overcome your fear of the unconscious and can let yourself go down, then these facts take on a life of their own. You can be gripped by these ideas so much that you really go mad, or nearly so. These images...form part of the ancient mysteries; in fact, it is such fantasies that made the mysteries." [5]
     "I fell into the mystery," Jung states after he has been squeezed by the black snake and saluted by Salome [6]. Reading the Red Book, we see the enormity of the price Jung paid for his wisdom, and come to appreciate the extent of his courage and eventual self-mastery. This is a record of a thoroughly shamanic descent to the Underworld, and of long testing and initiation in houses of darkness from which lesser minds and feebler spirits might never have managed to find their way back.

  

REFERENCES

1. C.G. Jung, The Red Book: Liber Novus edited by Sonu Shamdasani (New York: Norton, 2009) 249

2. Red Book 248

3. Stephan Hoeller, The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead(Wheaton, IL: Quest, 1985) 6.

4. Red Book 252.

5. Jung, Analytical Psychology: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1925 edited by William McGuire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991) 98-99.

6. Red Book 254.

For more on this theme, please read "The Dream Shaman of Switzerland" in my book Dreaming the Soul Back Home.

Graphic: Jung's Philemon, from the Red Book.

What’s Going On in Your Dream House?

 

When you record your dreams, pay special attention to the dream locations. The settings may be familiar or completely foreign, vivid and sensory or cloudy and indistinct. You may be in a place whose physics appears quite different from ordinary reality. You may be at home with people you don't know in regular life. You might be living in a medieval castle that seems to have been constructed yesterday.

Again and again, you dream you are in the old place – back in the home you shared with your ex, or the office where you worked at the old job, or at grandma’s house, or in the school yard. Maybe you’ll want to ask yourself: did I leave part of myself behind when I left that old situation? Maybe your dream house is a hybrid, melding elements from places you recognize from the past with novel architecture. The house may seem familiar at the outset, but then proves to have more rooms and more stories than you remember. These may be stories of your life and levels of your psyche or Self.

It can be fascinating to revisit a dream structure of this kind through conscious dream reentry, and learn more about what is going on. Jung found in his dream of a many-layered house - a dream Freud insisted on misinterpreting - a model for understanding connections between the conscious mind, the personal subconscious and the collective unconscious. In his dream, he started out on a floor that looked like a normal bourgeois home. As he descended through successive floors, he found himself in primal territory, in a dirt-floor basement containing skulls and bones of distant ancestors.

I find it especially intriguing to go up on the roof of a dream house. Sometimes I find there are levels beyond what I expected. Sometimes, on a roof terrace or garden, I meet a benign figure I recognize as a slightly higher self, a witness self who can give me perspective on my life situation, since he is up above the scrum. I have called this figure the Double on the Balcony.

I dreamed I was in a house that I used to own, in another reality. It was quite familiar in the dream, but does not correspond closely to any house I have occupied in this world. My dream house was a palace, with sections open to tour groups. It has sweeping marble staircases leading up to what used to be private family apartments and my library. I tried to go up the steps, but they petered out and I realized the library and the private rooms had been long since abandoned and sealed off. I did not give up on my detective work. I took another staircase to a balcony with wonderful views over green forests and meadows. I told ladies I met there, matter-of-factly, "I used to own this house." I know I will come here again. I need to get up that staircase. And I need to understand what life story I am inhabiting in this palace that has seen better days.

By focusing on a dream location, we have an excellent portal for conscious dreaming, shamanic journeying and astral travel. If you have been to a place in a dream, you can go there again, just as you might return to a place you have visited in ordinary reality. Your dream house may be a place you will visit in the future. I have been guided, in while series of dreams, to houses I did not recognize at the outset but proved to be future homes that I purchased and occupied. We take real estate tours in our dreams. 

The dream house may be a structure that the astral architect in you has constructed for various purposes: as a place for rest and relaxation, as a sanctuary or a study, as a place of rendezvous, as a pleasure palace. Such creations may have their own stability. They may be homes that await you in the afterlife or interlife. Your dream house may be a place where you are leading a parallel life with people you may or may not know in your physical world. It may be a construction or renovation site, a place waiting for our imagination to raise the walls or put on the finishing touches.

What's that? Your memories of such things are blurry? You can take comfort from Seth, as channeled by Jane Roberts in Dreams and the Projection of Consciousness  "If you have little memory of your dream locations when you are awake, then remember that you have little memory of your waking locations when you are in the dream situation. Both are legitimate and both are realities. When the body lies in bed, it is separated by a vast distance from the dream location in which the dreaming self may dwell.” 

Graphic: Dream House by RM

 

How the dead look younger after they die

In most dreams, the deceased appear to be living, and very often the dreamer is unaware that the person he or she encounters is “dead” until after waking. The reason is that the deceased are indeed alive, though no longer in the physical realm.

    The dead may appear as the dreamer remembers them from their last days of physical life, especially in the first dream encounters.

    Over time, it is quite common for the departed to alter their appearance, to shrug off signs of age and bodily ailments, and to present themselves as healthy and attractive. People who died in later years frequently reappear looking around 30 years old. In the west of Ireland and in Scotland, it is widely believed among country folk that the departed grow upwards or downwards in their apparent age until they look 30 years old. Lady Gregory wrote about this memorably in her Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland.    After my mother's death, she revised her appearance a number of times until she appeared to me as a lovely young woman on a beach, seemingly about 29 years old.
    A woman in one of my workshops wanted to know why her father continued to look aged, bent and ill in her dreams. I suggested that she should ask him directly. She made it her intention to reenter the most recent of her dreams of her dead father, and found herself with him right away. His appearance began to shimmer. She saw him transforming into a handsome young man dressed for a night out. She asked him why it had taken him so long to change. "You were the one who needed time," he told her, hugging her tight. "I didn't think you would recognize me if I changed faster than you could handle."

    The departed may change their appearance and personal style even more radically, as they evolve in understanding and come to realize that they are now living in energy bodies that are quite malleable.   

    Jung dreamed of the two central women in his life, his wife and his “junior wife” and life companion Toni Wolff, after their deaths. Toni appeared looking much taller and younger than she had been when she died, and exceedingly beautiful, wearing a lovely multi-colored dress in which the wonderful blue of the kingfisher was the dominant hue.
    After Emma’s death, Jung saw her in a vivid dream in which she appeared in her prime, “perhaps about thirty” but with a depth of wisdom beyond youth or age. Jung concluded that his wife’s dream persona was “a portrait she had made or commissioned” for him. “It contained the beginning of our relationship, the events of fifty-three years of marriage, and the end of her life also. Face to face with such wholeness one remains speechless.”

In one of my own dream excursions this week, I spent good times in a pleasant village of the dead where everyone looked 30ish apart from the elder of the group, who looked to be a healthy 40 years old, less than half his age when he left his physical body. He has been a dear friend, before and after his death, and I was intrigued to find him presiding over an agreeable consensual afterlife situation for educated, upper crust Brits who delight in games of many kinds, from croquet to riddling and verbal competition. It became clear that some people here are rehearsing for their next transition on the many roads of the interlife.
   

Photo: Jung with Emma (née Rauschenbach)

Shimmers of synchronicity

Powers of the deeper world move among us. Call them gods or daimons, ancestors or archetypes. Most of the time we are unaware of their presence. When they are in the field - noticed or invisible, invoked or uninvoked - their presence has a shimmer effect on the ordinary world.  The fabric of physical reality in their vicinity becomes fluid and unstable. We experience the shift as synchronicity or anomaly. If we become alert to the shimmer effect, and make the right moves in that moment, we can help manifest extraordinary things.
    Synchronicity is when the universe gets personal. Though the word “synchronicity” is a modern invention — Jung made it up because he noticed that people have a hard time talking about coincidence — the phenomenon has been recognized, and highly valued, from the most ancient times. The Greek philosopher Heraclitus maintained that the deepest order in our experienced universe is the effect of “a child playing with game pieces” in another reality. As the game pieces fall, we notice the reverberations, in the play of coincidence.
    When we pay attention, we find that we are given signs by the world around us every day. Like a street sign, a synchronistic event may seem to say Stop or Go, Dead End or Fast Lane.  Beyond these signs, we find ourselves moving in a field of symbolic resonance which not only reflects back our inner themes and preoccupations, but provides confirmation or course correction. A symbol is more than a sign: it brings together what we know with what we do not yet know.
    Through the weaving of synchronicity, we are brought awake and alive to a hidden order of events, to the understory of our world and our lives. You do not need to travel far to encounter powers of the deeper world or hear oracles speak. You are at the center of the multidimensional universe right now. The extraordinary lies in plain sight, in the midst of the ordinary, if only you pay attention. The doors to the Otherworld open from wherever you are, and the traffic moves both ways. 
    Grow your poetic health - learn to read what rhymes in a day, or a life - dream with your eyes wide open and all your senses aquiver, and you may become a kairomancer. I invented this word to describe someone who is forever poised to notice and act in those special moments of synchronicity when the universe gets personal and opportunity strikes. It incorporates the name of Kairos, a Greek god who personifies a kind of time that is altogether different from tedious tick-tock time: that special moment of jump time when more is possible than you imagined before. Kairos is the time you must seize by the forelock before it is gone.
     In my book Sidewalk Oracles, I offer the OATH of the Kairomancer. It is not a vow but a mnemonic. To be a kairomancer you must be

Open to the play of signs and symbols around you
Available to the special moment and willing to say
Thank you to the powers in play and take action to
Honor the magic moment 

Photos: "The Houses Have Eyes in Sibiu" by Robert Moss

Birth of the Kairomancer

 

While working on my book Sidewalk Oracles,  I tried to come up with a new word to describe the phenomenon of meaningful coincidence. Jung coined the word "synchronicity" because he was frustrated by the difficulty we have in talking coherently about coincidence. "Synchronicity" is actually a very unsatisfactory term, since in its literal derivation, it refers only to phenomena occurring at the same time, while synchronistic events - as Jung was well aware -may play out over extended periods of time.
     Wolfgang Pauli,the quantum physicist who helped Jung develop his theory of synchronicity, insisted that the key element in this phenomenon is isomorphy, which means the identity or strong similarity of forms. Things resemble one another. What is inside us is around us, and a symbol recurs in both worlds. auli dreamed that "we must build cathedrals to isomorphy" and encouraged Jung to adopt the term. But Jung cleaved to "synchronicity" and since it sounds respectable and scientific, many of us use it to allay the skepticism and confusion that arise at the mention of "coincidence".
     I had the sense, however, that we can do better. I considered older terms for meaningful coincidence and what generates it, from correspondence and confluence to sympathy and signatures, from wryd to weirder. I played with some neologisms of my own,but found them awkward. 
    I dreamed the word "reincidence", for a riff of coincidence. I thought that was cool,but not the suitcase term I was seeking. I reviewed the central elements in the experience of synchronicity:

-          You know it when you feel it.
     There is a meetup between what is on your mind and what is in the world around you.

-          You know that this is a special moment, a moment of revelation.            

           You may feel that ordinary time has been suspended.           

           You may feel epiphany, a lifting of the veil of the regular world.-          

           You feel the universe just got personal.
     You sense that a hidden hand is giving you a secret handshake or pushing you pack.
     You feel it in your shivers.

It is easier to describe the experience than to account for it. The trick is to apply the phenomenon, to use for navigational guidance, to make it part of a personal, practice method of divination: a mantic art.

      I ask myself, what word would Jung use for synchronicity now that he is living outside time? Wouldn’t he want to remove the Chronos who lives on in the word, as the younger gods overthrew old Chronos and jailed him in a cave? 
|    I ponder this under the shower. I recollect that in Greek, there are two kinds of time. Chronos time is what we observe when we look at a clock and measure out our days. The name of the old god lives on in words like chronology and chronometer, and of course in that slightly problematic word synchronicity.
     Then there is Kairos time, the time of a younger and less predictable god. Kairos time is the "appointed time", when powers and movements of a deeper world irrupt into our regular lives, when the Greater Trumps are in play. 

    Kairos time is risky time, offering both opportunity and danger, the excitement of living on the edge. Lynn Haupt says beautifully in Crow Planet, "It is a time brimming with meaning, a time more potent than 'normal' time."

    Kairos is the god of special moments, when time works differently or seems suspended. He is the lord of jump time, opportunity time, of what Jung once called - in dialogue with Mircea Eliade - a "rupture in time" (that is to say, Chronos time).
     In the iconography Kairos was depicted as a handsome youth. He is fast and slippery.When he appears, bringing perhaps amazing opportunity, you have to grab him while he is on front of you. His hair curls over his forehead but the back of his head is bald.Once he's sped by you, there is nothing to grab. This is the origin of our phrase "seize time by the forelock". 
     The celebrated Greek sculptor Lysippos carved his image, showing a winged figure with a razor and hair hanging down over his face. As explained by Poseidippos, the razor is "a sign to men that I am sharper than any sharp edge." His hair hangs over his face because "he who meets me must take me by the forelock." The back of his head is bald because "once I have sped by none can seize me from behind." 

     It comes to me, standing naked as Kairos on the bathroom tiles with a towel in my hand, that I have a word for the practice of navigating by synchronicity.
      Kairomancy. Divination by special moments of Kairos time. Develop this practice and you become a kairomancer, someone who is always poised to recognize and act in those special Kairos moments of opportunity.
     In my book Sidewalk Oracles, I lay out the basic rules of kairomancy. I summarize the key qualities and qualifications for a kairomancer as:

OATH OF THE KAIROMANCER

Don’t worry. It’s not a solemn pledge but a mnemonic. To navigate by synchronicity and catch Kairos moments, we need to be 

Open to new experience
Available, willing to set aside plans and step out of boxes
Thankful, grateful for secret handshakes and surprises, and ready to
Honor our special moments by taking appropriate action.

Part of this text is adapted from Sidewalk Oracles: Playing with Signs, Symbols and Synchronicity in Everyday Life by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Image: a copy of Lysippos' carving of Kairos

Symbol magnets and Jung's fish tales

The magnetic power of a symbol, in our lives, can bring together inner and outer events in ways that shift our perception of reality. We learn best about these things through direct experience, and through stories - like Jung's fish tales - that we can trust.    
    When Jung was immersed in his study of the symbolism of the fish in Christianity, alchemy and world mythology, the theme started leaping at him in everyday life. On April 1, 1949, he made some notes about an ancient inscription describing a man whose bottom half was a fish. At lunch that day, he was served fish. In the conversation, there was talk of the custom of making an "April fish" - a European term for "April fool" - of someone.
    In the afternoon, a former patient of Jung's, whom he had not seen for months, arrived at his house and displayed him some "impressive" pictures of fish. That evening, Jung was shown embroidery that featured fishy sea monsters. The next day, another former patient he had not seen in a decade recounted a dream in which a large fish swam towards her.
    Several months later, mulling over this sequence as an example of the phenomenon he dubbed synchronicity, Jung walked by the lake near his house, returning to the same spot several times. The last time he repeated this loop, he found a fish a foot long lying on top of the sea-wall. Jung had seen no one else on the lake shore that morning. While the fish might have been dropped by a bird, its appearance seemed to him quite magical, part of a "run of chance" in which more than "chance" seemed to be at play. [1]
    If we're keeping count (as Jung did) this sequence includes six discrete instances of meaningful coincidence, five of them bobbing up, like koi in a pond, within 24 hours, and all reflecting Jung's preoccupation with the symbolism of the fish. Such unlikely riffs of coincidence prompted Jung to ask whether it is possible that the physical world mirrors psychic processes "as continuously as the psyche perceives the physical world."
    In her discussion of how inner and outer events can mirror each other, Jungian analyst Marie-Louise von Franz suggested that "if the psychic mirrorings of the material world - in short, the natural sciences - really constitute valid statements about matter, then the reverse mirror-relation would also have to be valid. This would mean that material events in the external world would have to be regarded as statements about conditions in the objective psyche." [2]
    Some of the greatest minds of the past century - Jung and Wolfgang Pauli and David Bohm - sought to model a universe in which mind and matter, subject and object, inner and outer, are everywhere interweaving. Events, both physical and psychic, unfold from a unified field, the unus mundus of the alchemists, that may be synonymous with Bohm's "implicate order", Their interaction escapes our ordinary perception of causation and of time and space. “Precisely because the psychic and the physical are mutually dependent...they may be identical somewhere beyond our present experience.” [3] 
    Living symbols deeply ingrained in the imaginal history of humankind are charged with magnetic force, which can draw clusters of events together. For those familiar with tarot, it feels at such moments as if one of the Greater Trumps is at play in the world. Traditional diviners understand this, as do true priests and priestesses. Thus one of the Odu, or patterns, of Ifa, the oracle of the Yoruba, is held to bring the fierce orisha Ogun into the space, while another is believed to carry spirits of the dead into the realm of the living. When that happens, you don't just study the pattern; you move to accommodate or propitiate the power that is manifesting.
    To grasp the full power of a symbol, we need to go back to the root meaning of the word. "Symbol" is derived from the Greek σύμβολον (sýmbolon) which combines συν- (syn-) meaning "together" and βολή (bolē) a "throw" or a "cast" A symbol is that which is "thrown together" or "cast together". This is very close to the root meaning of "coincidence". In Latin, to coincide is to "fall together". So it's not surprising that when symbols are in play, coincidence multiplies.
   The first literary mention of a symbol is in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, in which the god Hermes exclaims, on finding a tortoise, "O what a happy symbol for me", before turning the tortoise shell into a lyre. In the ancient world, sýmbolon came to mean a token, that which brings things together. Thus a symbol might be a pair of tokens that could be fitted together to make a single object. Such tokens might be broken halves of potsherd, a ring or a seal. They would vouch for the truthfulness of a messenger, or an enduring loyalty.    
-  Jung noted in his foreword to his most important work on synchronicity that "my researches into the history of symbols. and of the fish symbol in particular, brought the problem [of explaining synchronicity] ever closer to me" [4] His experiences of symbols irrupting into the physical world led him to sympathize with Goethe's magical view that "We all have certain electric and magnetic powers within us and ourselves exercise an attractive and repelling force, according as we come into touch with something like or unlike." [5] Such powers are magnified when our minds and our environment are charged with the energy of a living symbol.

    

REFERENCES

1. C.G.Jung, "On Synchronicity". Lecture to the 1951 Eranos conference. Republished in The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche translated by R.F.C.Hull [Collected Works vol. 8}, par. 970. Also Jung, "Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle" in CW8 pars. 826-827.
2. Marie-Louise von Franz, Projection and Re-collection in Jungian Psychology. translated by William H. Kennedy (LaSalle and London: Open Court, 1990) 190.
3. C.G.Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis: An Inquiry into the Separation and Synthesis of Psychic Opposites in Alchemy translated by R.F.C.Hull [CW14] par. 765.
4. Jung, "Synchronicity" CW8 par. 816.
5. J.P. Eckermann, Conversations with Goethe quoted in Jung, "Synchronicity" CW8 par. 860.


Art: René Magritte, "Collective Invention", oil, 1934. 

Funerary stele of  Licinia Amias, early 3rd century, with the Christian motto in Greek letters ΙΧΘΥC ΖΩΝΤΩΝ / Ikhthus zōntōn ("fish of the living") and the image of fish and an anchor

Dreaming yourself in a different body

Have you dreamed of being in the situation and seemingly the body of another person?
    Maybe you looked in a mirror and saw a quite different face. Maybe, as you left the dream, you noticed you were wearing clothes of the opposite sex (and are not a cross-dresser). Maybe you weren't aware that you were not your regular self until you tried to figure out the who, what, when, where of what was going on in the dream.
    Experiencing things with the perspective and senses of another person is a common experience for psychic dreamers, which frequently requires them to pause and ask: who am I in this dream? This kind of transference is especially common, by my observation, among women who are closely related, as mother-and-daughter, sisters, intimate friends, They wake with information that may be disturbing or delightful, and then have to check on whether the details are actually from another's person's life and imminent future.
     In dreams, we enter parallel lives in which we are traveling roads abandoned or not taken on our current event tracks. We also enter the lives and apparently the bodies of characters who are quite different from our present selves. In this way, we learn about our family of personalities connected across time and place within the multidimensional self. We gain insight into past life dramas - whether they belong to an ancestor or a previous incarnation of our spirit - that are relevant to our present life choices.
    Of course, dreams in which we inhabit different identities reveal different aspects of our personalities, including the ones Jung called the shadow and the anima or animus. Yet the experiences can also be transpersonal.
    Such "body-hopping" experiences can also expand our humanity. They open the locks between different kinds of people and different levels of society. As a mere man, I am grateful for dream adventures in which I find myself in a woman's body. As a white man from a fairly privileged background, I am grateful for dream experiences that take me inside the life situations of people of different ethnicity in far less privileged circumstances. As an Anglo whose three countries of residence - Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States - have not been invaded or occupied in recent generations, I am grateful for dream episodes in which I am in the situation of a person seeking to survive under conditions of war and occupation.
     I am smiling now as I remember one of my most entertaining, and increasingly relevant, nights of body-hopping dreams.
     More than 20 years ago, I found myself, in a dream sequence that became lucid, in a series of unfamiliar bodies. In the first episode, I am in the body of a black basketball player. I enjoy the things he can do with his magnificent athletic body, and his very active sex life. Then, as an unpleasant scene involving racial bigotry is starting to develop, an inner voice warns, "Get out before you succumb to his rage."
    I blink my eyes. In the next instant, I am in a very different body. It belongs to a prosperous middle-aged white guy in plaid pants who is playing golf with his buddies at a Midwestern country club, The scene makes me think of Dan Quayle. It is heaven to the golfer, hell to me. I scream inwardly, Get me out of here!
    Now, in the climactic scene, I am in the body and situation of an eccentric, independent scholar of a certain age. He is free to purchase any book he likes and add it to his three-floor home library. He is weaving mental connections between different cultures and practices beyond what anyone has done before. He is highly respected by those who read him and attend his classes, but he remains very human, even humble.
    I like his life. I don't like the pains he feels in his legs. What happened to his right knee? What is that occasional stabbing pain in his left heel?
    Still, I'll take his life over the others, any day.
    Twenty years later - seven years since I injured my right knee, a year since bursitis in my left heel was diagnosed - I recognize I am in the body of that eccentric scholar. It does not take higher math to count the three floors of the home library that is now mine. When you find yourself in another body in a dream, don't dismiss the chance that it is a body that you will some day occupy.

Photo: Locks by Wanda Burch

Manifesting a cosmic man

I am in a magical library of the kind Jung would have loved, full of rare volumes of alchemy, mythology, ancient philosophy. I am in modern clothes, but I act like a Renaissance magus who actually knows what he is doing. I am engaged in the Great Work of creating a kind of Cosmic Man.
    He comes to life as a tall, well-built Caucasian man with fine red-gold hair and trimmed beard. His body is draped with planetary, elemental and zodiacal symbols, clustered especially over the upper torso and lower body. 
    Over his shoulder he wears a loose-flapping banner with the inscription, "Fortunate is he who is able to know the causes of things."

I woke happy and excited.
    I recognized the words on the banner. They are borrowed from Virgil's Georgics, Book 2, line 490. The original Latin is Felix, qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas, literally "fortunate was he who was able to know the causes of things." I shall have to do some reentry work to recover all the symbols.
   The 19th century image (above) from Jaipur of Vishnu as Cosmic Man has a similar placement of symbols, though as human types the figures are very different. 

How many floors in your dream house?

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"In the Norse heaven of our forefathers, Thor's house had five hundred and forty floors; and man's house has five hundred and forty floors."  The voice is that of Ralph Waldo Emerson in his essay "Conduct of Life".
    We begin to see the truth of it in dreams in which we discover that our home has an extra level, or many of them. I have yet to meet a dreamer who claims to have discovered all five hundred and forty floors. Yet when  we discover even a single room we had not opened before, we discover that we are more than we know.

     To spin from Norse gods to the Bible, in the dream house, there are many mansions - extra stories and hidden rooms and basements, wings of possibility.

     The state of a dream house may reflect the state of the body. If the dream house is in need of repairs, or there's a problem with the plumbing or the furnace, you may want to consider whether there is a health advisory concerning a corresponding part of the body..

     Different rooms in the dream house may represent different functions, of body or soul. The kitchen may represent the digestive system, or the state of the family, or of our creativity (since the kitchen is the place where we cook things up and often the hub of family life).
     When I'm living in an apartment in my dreams (which I have not done in waking life for 30 years) I ask myself "what am I a part of, or apart from?" 

    I love the sense of expanding life possibility that comes when I am in a dream house that has levels or rooms beyond any physical house I know.

    I'm intrigued by how life memories help design my dream houses, which are sometimes composites of several past places where I have lived. 

     When I find myself moving to a new place in my dreams, I'll ask myself whether this could be preview of a literal house move (maybe one I haven't yet considered in ordinary life). I'll also ask: what changes in my life situation are in store for me in a larger sense?

     In dreams, we often find ourselves back in the old place, a childhood home or a home we shared with a former partner. Being back in the old place could be a journey back across time, or into a parallel reality in which a parallel self never left the old situation - and/or an invitation to reclaim vital soul energy and identity we left behind when we made a major life change. 

     There are dream houses that are not of this world, places of learning and adventure and initiation in the Imaginal Realm. These may be places of encounter with a second self, an aspect of our multidimensional Self. Over many years, I have found myself traveling in dreams to an old house on a canal in Europe, the home of an eccentric scholar who is something of a magus, with an extraordinary library and collection of working tools of magic. It took me a couple of visits before I recognized that this dream house belongs to me,

     Jung's dream of a "many-storied house" led him for the first time to the concept of the "collective unconscious" (and also to his rift with Freud, who refused to accept the depth of this dream). Jung found in his multi-level dream house a "structural diagram of the human psyche." In the dream, he became aware that there was a story below the respectable middle-class environment in which he was living. When he went downstairs, he found successive stories below his previous consciousness: a darkened floor with medieval furnishings, and below that a beautifully vaulted Roman cellar, and down below that - when he lifted a stone slab by a ring - a primal cave with scattered bones and pottery and the two skulls.

Image: The so-called "Wooden Gagster" house in Archangel, Russia, built without permit or architect, demolished in 2008. Photo credit: Wikipedia, Mr 850

Getting a second opinion from Jung on the Battle of the Giants

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 woke from this first dream of the night feeling both excited and satisfied. In the dream, I was an observer. 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 in self-analysis of 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 his early essays, Volume VII 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 from this dreamer’s life 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 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.

Drawing by RM

The causes of dream drought

Too many of us have lost touch with our dreams. It's no exaggeration to state that our society is suffering a severe and protracted dream drought.
   From the viewpoint of many spiritual traditions, this is a very serious condition. It's through dreams, say the Navajo, that humans keep in touch with the spirit realm. If you have lost your dreams, say the Iroquois, you've lost part of your soul. "It is an age-old fact," declared the great psychologist C.G.Jung in his last major essay, "that God speaks chiefly through dreams and visions."
    There are three main reasons for the dream drought in many modern lives:

1. Bad habits.

The rhythms and routines of a typical urban life simply don't support dream recall. Too often, we are jolted awake by alarm clocks - or bed mates, or kids who need to get to school - and stumble out into the world, fueled with caffeine, to try to get through our rounds of deadlines and obligations. In many situations, we have nothing that supports and rewards the habit of taking time to collect our dreams. Most of us also lack a practice for creating a safe space where we can share our dreams, receive helpful feedback, and be supported in devising creative action to embody the guidance and energy of our dreams. If we don't do something with our dreams, we will not dream well.

2. Fear and regret.

We run away from our dreams because we think they might be telling us something we don't want to hear - about the dark side of ourselves, or trouble or illness ahead. We slam the door and say "it's only a dream." This is a poor strategy. Issues we leave unresolved in the night are likely to come round and bite us in the rear end in the everyday world.
    Alternatively, we dream of something wonderful - of joy and delight with Mr or Ms Right, of a dream home, a dream job, a world of peace and beauty. But when we wake up we tell ourselves there's no one like Mr Right in our life, or we don't have the looks or the money or the ability to manifest what we enjoyed in our dreams. So we kiss off the dreams, telling ourselves they are "only" dreams. Again, this is a foolish reflex. If we can dream it, we may just be able to do it.

3. Artificial sleep cycles.

Very often our concept of a good night's sleep is at odds with our dreams. Many of us believe - supported by any number of sleep doctors and pharmaceutical companies - that we need to spend seven or eight hours each night in uninterrupted sleep. This idea would have amazed our ancestors. Before the advent of artificial lighting (gas and then electricity) most humans experienced "segmented sleep" divided into at least two distinct cycles, a "first sleep" and a "second sleep" as they used to be called in England.
    Experiments by a team led by Dr Thomas Wehr for the National Institutes of Mental Health suggest that, deprived of artificial lighting, people revert to the ancient sleep plan, with an interval of several hours between the two sleeps.One of the most interesting findings of Wehr's research was that during this interval subjects typically register elevated levels of prolactin, a pituitary hormone that helps hens to brood peacefully on their eggs for prolonged periods, and assists humans to lay eggs of a different kind, but putting them into a benign altered state of consciousness not unlike meditation. Sleep historian A.Roger Ekirch says flatly, "Consolidated sleep, as we experience it today, is unnatural."
    The French had a charming word for the liminal state between two sleeps: dorveille, which literally means wake-sleep. Among indigenous and early peoples, it's a time when you might stir and share dreams with whoever is available. It's a highly creative state, so much so that in my Secret History of Dreaming I have called it the "solution state", based on the many scientific discoveries, and other breakthoughs, have come in this zone. While we are primed or medicated to give ourselves just one longish sleep period,we are limiting our chances of recalling and sharing dreams, and depriving ourselves of easy access to the fertile field of hypnagogia - the images that come and the connections that are made - between sleep and waking.

For more on natural and artificial sleep cycles, and the "solution state", please see The Secret History of Dreaming. For practical help on breaking a dream drought, please see my book Active Dreaming.

Graphic: Sign in Rawnsley Park, South Australia during a drought. By Peripitus via Wikimedia Commons.

Freud studies isomorphy at the corner of my street

Freud is observing the traffic at the corner of my street. He looks to be in the prime of life, wearing a well-cut suit and hat, his beard glossy and recently trimmed.
     Some of the cars approaching the stop light look like parade floats. Freud pays close attention when they slow as the light changes. A group atop a truck look like rebel soldiers from India in the era of the British Raj. People in costume on other vehicles seem to be enacting historical tableaux, showing the passage of great events.
     Freud is adjusting his view that dreams are inner psychological experiences that have nothing to do with anyone except the dreamer (and of course the analyst). He is tracking resemblances between inner dreams and outer events, in the world as well as an individual life. He is a keen student of isomorphy.
     With some excitement, he is also developing and modifying his theories - reflected in his "historical novels" (as he once called his works on Leonardo, Moses and Akhenaten)  - that the evolution of a society or a religion can be compared to that of an individual. Standing outside the swirl of events, he can read their patterns better. Like the observer of a passing parade.

I woke from this dream before 4:00 a.m. today with feelings of satisfaction. It seemed well and good that Freud is alive and well in my neighborhood, his agile mind in motion, not stuck in past grooves. Freud, after all, was not - and, it seems, is not - a Freudian.

    I love finding that Freud is a student of isomorphy. In his correspondence with Jung, quantum physicist Wolfgang Pauli suggested that "isomorphy" - meaning identity or close similarity of forms - is a better term than "synchronicity" for the phenomena Jung tagged with that neologism.
    I am curious about the people dressed as Indian soldiers, maybe sepoys from the Indian Mutiny. Freud kept a statue of Vishnu, commissioned for him by his followers in the Indian Psychoanalytical Society, on his desk. In her memoir of her sessions with him, the writer H.D. describes handling it; the shape of this white figure reminded her of a lotus. I don't know whether Freud knew much about India, or studied Indian history. I will add that to my list of research topics.

As I record this short dream report, I do a quick count of the stack of books by Freud and about him on a table of current reading near my desk. Only ten. Ah, that's a manageable assignment for reading and re-reading. Only half the size of the stack of books by and about Mircea Eliade on the same table.
    I have been writing a story about Freud, off and on. I have great admiration for the depth of his culture and his studies of archaeology, history, mythology, languages, literature, religion. I have often wondered what he makes of his own theories, wherever he is now. Maybe I'll have the chance to learn more about that through direct observation. Will "my" Freud choose to speak with me face-to-face? I'll be open for that.

Action plan: Finish my story about Freud.
Bumper Sticker: On my street, Freud is not a Freudian.