Symbol migration and dream telepathy

I am rarely surprised when I hear accounts of telepathy between people who are closely connected. We sense each other's feelings (telepathy literally means "feeling at a distance'); we feel a tug in the head an know someone is calling us; we pick up sounds and smells and images relating to the other person's activities. When living across an ocean from me, one of my daughters always knew when I was cooking my fiery version of Hungarian goulash, which she detested. "Ugh, I know you were cooking that yukky stuff again." I would know when she was thinking about me, across all the miles,  because I would smell a little girl cologne she had bought in a general store.
      Dream telepathy is very interesting because it extends beyond picking up elements of what is going on in another person's mind or life. We may actually find that we are meeting each other in a dream space and sharing adventures. This happens spontaneously. It can also be done by setting a dream date, with a rendezvous place.
     I once agreed with a group of active dreamers who were on a residential retreat with me that we would seek to meet at the Jean Talon market in Montreal overnight. We agreed to meet at a cheese counter. Only one person in that group, a French Canadian, knew the market. He was later able to confirm details of our travel reports. It seemed we had not only shared some good times; we had been to a version of the market very close to the physical one. I found that all my senses were engaged, I came back with the taste of a perfect brie and a pungent roquefort on my palate.
     When dream telepathy extends to full-fledged interaction between two or more people, we may want t call it shared or mutual dreaming.
      A variant on this theme I find fascinating is what I have decided to call symbol migration. A symbol that is alive in your mind can exert powerful magnetism. It may help to generate effects in the world around you which you may notice in the play of synchronicity. It may also exert a reach that brings it into the minds of other people, whether or not this is any part of your intention An image you are thinking about and visualizing in your waking reality may enter the mind of someone connected to you in a dream.
     Jung gave us a wonderful example of symbol magnetism in his tale of repeating fish. I want to share a personal experience of symbol migration that also has significant fishy content.
      I often read deep in the night, when some of my best research is done and my best

discoveries are made. Over a weekend at a mountain lodge where we were doing deep shamanic work with the spirits of the land, my middle-of-the-night reading included a book by one of the great ethnographers of Northeast, Frank G. Speck, titled Midwinter Rites of the Cayuga Longhouse, based on his fieldwork among the Six Nations in the 1930s.

   I was struck by the following elements in his account: 

1. Fever Mask. Speck includes a photo of a "Fever Mask" for catching and controlling a fever spirit, and writes about how Indians can handle red-hot coals in an altered state.

2. Dreams of Angry Fish. He discusses dreams regarded as "persecution by animals". According to his native informants, animals that have suffered from humans and want redress may haunt those who killed or tormented them in dreams. Speck listened to a number of disturbing dream reports involving fish. These were taken very seriously. A dreamer afflicted by unpleasant dreams of fish was thought to required cleansing and ritual propitiation of the fish spirits. Speck reported that among the Cayuga at that time, if you had a troubling dream about fish, the first thing people should do for you is to splash water on you to reassure the fish that you will honor their element.

3. Whirlwind Mask. In the book Speck discusses the Iroquois belief that disease as well as mayhem are carried by Whirlwind Mask, and has photos of a mask representing the Whirlwind spirit that only a powerful shaman can wear. I was stirred by the idea that the greatest healer in this tradition may be one who can take on and contain the forces of chaos and disease and transmute them within their own being.

The next morning, I was excited to discover that key elements from my reading appeared to have slipped into dreams of our group through symbol migration.  

The first people to share dreams with me at the breakfast table reported the following: 

1. Fever dreams. "I dreamed of a a man whose skin was on fire." (Later a second dreamer reported, "I dreamed my husband had a fever")

2. Dream of angry fish. "I dreamed that the fish were mad at me. They stripped me to the bones, like a filleted fish. Them men wrapped me in skins and took me out into the water to grow me a new body."

3. Dream of Whirlwind Mask. "I dreamed I should make a mask of the Whirlwind and then put it into the fire to contain that power." This dreamer, an artist, had already constructed an amazing whirlwind mask, using birch bark fallen from trees in the woods around us.

We are porous to the thoughts and feelings of those connected with us. Within a loving and supportive community, this offers seeds for growth and healing and deepening understanding. It may also remind us to check our boundaries and may sure we are not open to the migration of unwanted images or preoccupations. In my groups we always take care to set up effective psychic screens and shields, not least by invoking the Gatekeeper, that entity that opens and closes our roads between the worlds.

Art: René Magritte, Les merveilles de la nature (The Wonders of Nature), 1953.

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

The Antlered Christ and the Synchronicity Hammer

Sometimes synchronicity feels like a secret handshake from the universe. Sometimes it falls like a hammer. Synchronicity hammered me in a sunlit park, softly, to confirm the importance of a certain line of research.
     I had returned to studying the symbolism of antlers. Every world culture that knows the deer family has been fascinated by the horns that die and grow back. For many ancient and indigenous traditions, the antlers are a symbol of spiritual authority because they grow above the physical head, reaching towards the realm of spirit. They signify regeneration, because they die and grow back, bigger than before. They are worn by Cernunnos, the ancient Celtic Master of the Animals, by Mongol women shamans, and by the rotiyaner or "men of good minds", the traditional chiefs of the Six Nations of the Longhouse, or Iroquois. 
   

Visually, deer antlers suggest the shape of a tree, even the World Tree that shamans climb; the resemblance is in the French word for antlers, which are called the bois - wood - of the deer. There is a mystical connection between the deer, especially the flying deer (cerf volant) and the early kings of France. [1] In The Secret History of Dreaming, I describe how a mysterious stag, taking the English archers by surprise, helped Joan of Arc win a battle, and hint that this may have been an animal guardian whose form she could borrow.
     Studying religious iconography in France in 2005, I became fascinated by the moment in the history of the Western imagination when the old pagan image of the Antlered One fused with that of the Christ. You can view the results on the facade of the great Gothic church of St-Eustache at Les Halles, once the site of the famous market. Look up and near the top, lording it over the gargoyles, you'll find the figure of an antlered stag with the Calvary cross between his antlers.
    According to legend, St. Eustace (to give him the Anglo version of his name) was formerly a pagan Roman general named Placidus, who reveled in the hunt until one day he confronted a magnificent stag through whose deep eyes the Christ light shone. Christ spoke to him through the deer. The general gave up hunting and converted to the new religion. This moment of conversion through the agency of the deer has been memorialized in numerous painted and woven and sculpted images, including a marvelous 15th century painting by Pisanello that I viewed in the National Gallery in London.
    The St.Eustace legend may be an invention, designed to claim the luster of a commanding symbol of the old ways for the new religion, just as churches were placed on the sacred sites where pre-Christian rituals were celebrated. However, the theme of the power of the deer spirit to tame the killer in man resonated with me deeply, because on a mountain in the Adirondack mountains of New York, I had heard a similar tale from mountain men who knew nothing of Placidus or Eustace: that three hunters, on separate occasions, had come face to face with a great stag in that wild terrain, and that each time, something in the deep, steady eyes of the deer had persuaded the hunter to lay down his rifle and go home. 

   Not long after that trip to France, I was talking about the theme of Christ in the Stag on my cell phone, while walking my dog in a park in upstate New York that is notably clean. As I described the stag with the cross between his antlers on the church at Les Halles, I glanced down and saw an orange cardboard disk at my feet. It bore the image of a stag with a Calvary cross shining between his antlers. This was one of those moments when the universe gets personal. I knew that in that moment, the symbol that was blazing in my mind was shining back at me, on the grass at my feet.
    I put the cardboard disk in my wallet and have carried it ever since, a token from the world. I did not identify the source of this version of the stag with the cross until, on my way to give a talk at a bookshop in Vancouver B.C. some months later, I stopped at an Irish pub across the street. I needed to use what Canadians call the washroom, and as I did what boys do, I saw the image from the cardboard disk in front of my nose, in a framed poster for Jägermeister, a herbal liqueur whose name means "hunt-master" and (I later learned from my youngest daughter) is a favorite on college campuses with kinds who want to get "hammered."

1. Anne Lombard-Jourdan, Aux origines du carnaval (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2005) 139-141.

IMAGES
Pisanello, "The Vision of St. Eustace", c.1440.
Dream of flying deer in XIV century manuscript book in the Louvre. Photo (c) Robert Moss
Jägermeister coaster I found in the park.