Death speaks to Jung through the trees

In a cold snap after his wife Emma died, the vine over the front door of Jung’s tower at Bollingen oozed a strange red sap that ran down over his crest. He felt the vine was weeping tears of blood.

    Shortly before his death, Jung dreamed of the “other Bollingen”, the counterpart in another world of the sanctuary he had helped to build with his own hands. The place was suffused with sourceless light. The deep voice he had come to trust told him his new home had been completed and was now ready for him to move in. Far below the tower, he saw a mother wolverine teaching her child to dive and swim in shining water.

    Jung died at quarter to four in the afternoon on June 6, 1961.Two hours after his death, an old poplar in the garden where he had watched the changing moods of the lake was struck by lightning in a sudden storm. The tree survived, but it was completely skinned; great strips of bark covered the garden. Those who knew felt the strong play of synchronicity in the lightning-struck tree.
     Jung might have seen a deeper level of symbolism. In his last recorded dream, he saw a grove of trees “all fibrous roots, coming up from the ground and surrounding him”, with gold threads gleaming among the roots.  He had written that our true life is “invisible, hidden in the rhizome”; what we see in the leaf and bark and blossom passes. Beneath the flux of our surface lives, the rhizome remains. Lightning stripped the bark from the tree, and death stripped away Jung’s body;  life continued, rooted in an unseen world.

Adapted from The Secret History of Dreaming by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

The grim runner

Pounding, pounding. The grim runner is pounding the cement sidewalks around a school building, running joylessly and relentlessly, round and round. His clothes are the color of sackcloth, or damp dead leaves. His straight, longish hair flaps against his neck. He is young, late teens or early twenties.

    Behind him runs a fair-haired older woman in a lacy white dress. She seems to be trying to catch up with him, to get his attention. But he is locked in his own repetitive purpose. Pounding, pounding.
    I notice that his thighs and legs have grown amazingly wide. Is this muscle, from all this running? It’s wrong, not natural, ugly. Round and round the school, he is running still.

I woke from this dream at dawn with a sense of cool distance and detachment from the runner. But beyond this, of a world of pain and grieving.

    I immediately thought of the Newtown horror. Did I glimpse the shooter, as he is after killing himself? And perhaps his mother, running behind him? The woman in white lace had a tired, homely face, one the runner would probably know. If not his mother, is she a guide?
    I knew nothing of the shooter when I went to bed. I am told now that he was a geeky guy who even wore a pocket protector. Are those crazy leg muscles part of an attempt to transform himself into an avatar from a computer game, and live in that kind of reality? Or is the ballooning weight of his limbs part of his punishment, as he trudges round and round the place of his crime, on and on?
    

Driving Up to 80: a possible end-of-life dream

I drive into an immense walled space. The walls rise for many stories. In front of me is what appears to be a giant speedometer, hanging on the wall like a clock. I know my way forward requires me to drive straight up the wall and that I need to choose a place on the dial to aim for. I think 100 is too much, so I aim nearer 80.

    I floor the gas pedal, racing towards the wall. My car adjusts beautifully, tilting up at the first touch, as if made of rubber. I fly up the wall to a place near the 80 digits on the giant speedometer. So far, so good.
    However, getting down will be a challenge. My car now seems more like a bicycle, and I realize there is no way I can ride it down the wall. I’ll have to lower myself, little by little, gripping a edge I discover. This is the edge of an enormous panel or screen that covers part of the wall. But it crumbles like an old strip of cardboard when I try to use it as a handhold as I go down the wall.
    This doesn’t faze me. I’m willing to let go and drop the whole distance, seemingly hundreds of feet. I know that no serious harm can come to me.

Feelings: mildly curious, philosophical.

Reality: I suspect this was an “end of life” dream, rehearsing me for the last stage of life. 80 or 80-something would seem a better life term than 100, especially if by that time I am losing my edge!

The Death card speaks

I am Death. I bring a term to everything. I mock your vanities, yet I also give you the limits that make your achievements matter. I am your beginning as well as your end.

I give you straight-edged clarity, sharp as a razor. I give you the chance to find courage. In my presence, what fear can the risks of your ordinary life hold for you?

Surely you feel me now, at your left shoulder. I will tell you what you need to know, but only if you let me put my noose around your neck.

I am the bridge between the tame land and the wild. I was made by your hand but I am the making or unmaking of your kind.

If you fear the crossing I narrow and rock back and forth. If you seek to avoid what lies on the other side, it will meet you on the bridge, in the form you most dread.

The face I will show you is the one you will choose for me, knowingly or unknowingly. Choose wisely.

Huntsman's coat in the water

I plunge into the waters of the lake and swim with delight. After a while I see something red on the lake floor. Curious, I dive down to check it out. I find a beautifully tailored huntsman's coat, the kind the English call a "pink" coat but is actually bright crimson. It is streaming with the water, apparently suspended a little off the bottom.

I am thrilled with excitement and a kind of fierce joy. I know that this is a sign from the great Huntsman, Death, announcing his nearness and allowing time to get everything together in order to meet him and depart the ordinary world well. When he appears in his own coat, it will be time to go. I remember (becoming conscious inside the dream) earlier dreams and dream reentries in which I discovered and revisited a classy pub named the Huntsman's Arms, located just on the other side of mortal life.

I surface from this dream as if swimming up from the depths of the lake. My feelings, as in the dreams, are excitement and fierce joy.

I reflect that I've felt an intimacy with Death for much of my life, and have encountered a personal Death in many guises.

In an earlier dream from last night I was called to be present at the death of an elderly society lady otherwise unknown to me. I seemed to be cast in the role of a gentle death messenger, a Huntsman's assistant. Seeing the fear of imminent deatb in her eyes, I grazed her lips softly with a dry kiss, like the brush of a butterfly's wing. Then she passed on to her new life journey.

Yeats spoke of Death as a Huntsman, even on his gravestone. The scene of the Huntsman's Arms that I remembered in last night's dream of the hunter's red coat is one that has become strongly planted in my imaginal geography. The wall paintings in the tap room - where I have found friends who have passed on, and their friends, engaged in genial and philosophical banter - are not the typical hunt country prints in which the fox is the quarry. A portrait that may be an image of the Huntsman himself shows an immaculately tailored figure with the head of a red fox.

I don't know whether the red coat in the water is one I am meant to wear myself, or the garment of the one who will come to take me, at the appointed time.

My philosophy is to try to make sure that any day is "a good day to die".

A natural death in water is something I've contemplated, especially when I have asked groups - in my fierce and beautiful workshops on "Making Death Your Ally" - to imagine themselves at the moment of physical death - with Death a palpable presence. I'm currently on vacation in the Champlain Islands of Vermont, swimming a few miles every day in the lake. But the water is choppy this morning. So instead of heading straight for the water, I have lingered in an Adirondack chair to write of the Huntsman. This may of course be the Huntsman's effect on the day.