I was first introduced to Robert Bosnak’s dreamwork technique at the CG Jung Institute in Boston and was later invited to a private dream group that gathered around a wood stove upstairs in his barn in suburban New York. Boston. This group deeply explored the unconscious lives of the group members. Huddled in a small circle under the blankets, we only knew each other by sharing our dreams. Here I learned more about archetypal symbolism. Universal symbols can contribute to the meaning of a dream, not always by translating them but by seeing the dream on the mythical level. Joseph Campbell once said in an interview that myths are the dreams of society.

Throughout all of known history, archetypes recur, albeit in different forms. The archetypes are dynamic forces, identified for example, as The Divine Child, The Elder or the Wise Woman, The Female Devourer, The Hero, The Underworld, The Trickster, The Shadow, among others.

When we can look at our lives mythically, we can accept the most difficult passages as the continuum of inevitable change. The Dark Night of the Soul is equivalent to the Nigredo in alchemy, descent into the depths, and whether of pain or trauma, this stage is universal to the hero or heroine of many myths. When we see our particular pain as a rite of passage rather than a termination, then we have the courage to confront the situation with the dragon or the witch (or the loss of the job or the lawyer), understanding and feeling what part of ourselves is missing. resist growing.

In Bosnak’s private group we learned to exert more pressure on the vessel by questioning the dreamer; we enter the discomfort of difficult images, autonomously observing the psyche in action. A discovery was seeing how the dream expanded under this “heat” and in the two-hour sessions we also talked about personal stories. All members were able to enter twilight consciousness under the pressure of intensive questioning.

Sometimes there were silences when everyone had fallen into the picture like a black hole. Sometimes active imagination caused new images to appear. Going back to earlier scenes after feeling an emotional release, we found that they had changed and quite often the monster was what. Most of the detours that a dreamer took turned out to be relevant, resonating in a new way. This exploration each week felt like a sacred ceremony. Even when we sat for a long time with a grotesque image, a serial killer, a river of worms, an explosive plane crash, sexual abuse, bloody wars, there was a deep sense of mystical participation in a ritual and the group bonded closely.

Sometimes synchronous phenomena accompanied the work and frightened us unsettlingly. Once, a dream of an airplane invoked low-flying jets. A dream of insects produced a large horsefly in the room. Or there would be noises at significant moments: the hum of the oven turning on, a neighborhood siren or dog barking, a coughing fit, a trio of sneezes occurring at precise moments when the pressure cooker contained related images.

There was also the contagion of laughter and tears, usually from the unimaginable pain that represses the human psyche. Dreams exaggerate, but the range of orphans, rag dolls, misshapen babies, tree stumps, vile reptiles, severed limbs, earthquakes, and floods was not infrequently disconcerting, especially to the dreamer. From time to time the group dreams in sync, dreams of animals, dreams of diving, eroticism. I remember once when we traveled to space and hung there like the floating fetus in the movie “2001”. In the luxury of time spent on a single dream, all nuances were followed.

We often left these meetings in a daze, smiling sheepishly when we finally opened our eyes. There was also a cautious respect for distance and the absolute understanding that the work was confidential. I felt privileged to be a part of this cult of dreams and stayed with this group for four years and, along with my son, became the most important thing in my life. We lead each other through questions about the atmosphere, time of day, colors, sounds, and sensory images. A dream I experienced there demonstrates the transformative aspects of the work. Here is the dream:

I’m on a beach, the beach I walk on every day near home. It’s night and I just left a party where there were many males who bothered me as well as rejecting me. I walk down to the beach in a bad mood when a huge German shepherd climbs out of a rock and starts barking at me like he’s getting ready to attack. I am terrified. I grab a stick and shove it between his teeth, starting to wrestle him for the stick. I think if I get him involved in the game, he might see me as a friend. I throw the stick for him to look for it and as he chases it, I brace myself against a rock. It seems that I can relax, because I have made friends with the wolf. As I lean back, the rock begins to move and I realize that I am thrown up on the back of a horse, in the saddle. The horse is white and has wings; he scatters them and lifts me up with him as he ascends to heaven. I am amazed and amazed to wake up.

The group spent a lot of time making me feel the dog’s instincts. The value of “archetypal amplification” here is shown when we realize that the dog is often a psychopomp guiding us through the underworld. Think of Anubis, the dog-headed Egyptian god. He was still in the lower realms with my negative masculine complex, fighting my demons, so to speak, and yet all the freedom, the sky the horse flies in, was meaningful to me. Some of the group laughed at the strange fairy-tale ending to this dream: riding a Pegasus to the stars!

When I amplified the archetypal meaning of Pegasus. I was surprised to learn that the winged horse was born from the blood that flowed in Medusa’s beheading. If Medusa is the witch, the dark side of the feminine, the devouring bitch, she gives birth, however, to the beautiful Pegasus who represents, without knowing it, my favorite art form, poetry!

Later I came across the essay “Horses with Wings” by the poet Denise Levertov. Pegasus’ father is Poseidon, the god of the sea—”…undifferentiated energy…a source of life but also of terror” (Levertov 125).

Levertov also informs us that “…The legends of Medusa place her as a manifestation of the terrible and devouring aspects of Mother Earth…” (126). Furthermore, “The word Gorgon is related to gargling, gurgling, and gargoyles: Medusa is called ‘a personified shriek'” (127). Pegasus was born from the neck of Medusa, a middle ground between mental and physical abilities. In fact “…it was not until the moment when Medusa’s blood, pouring from her neck, touched the earth that it became manifest” (129). Levertov associates Medusa’s face with “…snakes and claws, wings and scales…gorgonian features that “correspond to the quivering magma of emotion” (133).

Emotion is often the catalyst for the poet’s creation. Levertov speaks of Pegasus as intuitive, as a metaphor for the poem rather than for the poet” (134). I saw that my dream demonstrated how the material of the underworld could be transformed into something expressive. “To say that the poem, as well as the poet, is animal it means that it has its own flesh and blood and is not a rarefied and insubstantial thing” (134).

Pegasus, then, is poetry, born from a “fusion of opposites.” The image emerges at the point of greatest tension. “Pegasus strikes a stone with his hoof and releases a fountain…the fountain of poetic inspiration henceforth sacred to the Muses” (129). Fly up, like my imagination always reaching higher.

Levertov’s essay amplified my dream. The Pegasus symbol in its archetypal meaning was not something I was consciously aware of. Although I had studied mythology and knew Pegasus in various myths, I did not know its meaning and had not related to it as a symbol of this peculiar hobby I had of writing poems. In alchemy, gold is transformed from the work done on lead, the “Nigredo”, the dark night of the soul. I wasn’t riding Pegasus in my life yet, but I was extracting the soul and facing the music, or the dirge if you will, of my own darkness. That we can turn our demons into diamonds was not a new idea to me, however, I had not seen it happen in concrete terms like those presented in these images.

My dream showed how the unconscious is not subject to time. It would be a few years before he published a book that turned loss into something outside of me on his own authority. Apparently he was wrestling with the dog.

The dream group became my religion, where I felt touched by spiritual energy. It was where I witnessed conjunctions resounding like a hall of mirrors, where I communed both with the material and with the members of the group. During those years everything in my life deepened. I saw that dreams came from my everyday world and their hooks in my world of feelings grafted my nocturnal images.

Through active imaginative work, we make stories of our memories in ways that cannot be proven true. Memory itself is imaginative in its selection, unique to each individual. As I recounted a dream and the stories that ran beneath it, only my imagination could effect psychological changes. In fact, we create our reality and that reality is relative. From this I learned how wrong we are to judge each other. I saw how dream work could open a person to the possibility of altering a world view. We can choose to end our victimhood by re-experiencing past feelings and reviewing them in such a way that we are able to enjoy the joy where the pain had been.

References:

Levertov, Denise. “Horses with wings”. What is a poet? Ed. Hank Lazer. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1987. 124-134.