Showing posts with label sea imagery. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sea imagery. Show all posts

Sunday, November 30, 2014

Madeline's Casement

Does the unconscious have a sense of humor? I'm only asking because of the dream I had the other night, which seemed in some way a response to my blog post of last week, in which I talked about two previous dreams I had eight years apart. My dreaming mind wasted no time in coming up with another installment of the cliff's edge/oceanic/sea creature saga that sprang to life so vividly in the first dream and turned sort of Moby-Dickish in the second.

First off, I have to say that the latest dream was in no way as dramatic as the previous two. There's no rapidly rising tide and no sea monster. In the beginning, the dream didn't even seem to be taking place near the sea. I worked for someone who lived in a large house and was apparently a wealthy invalid. I was in the role of a personal assistant and went into an upstairs bathroom to check on a bottle of medicine; then I went into my own room, which opened out of it. There was a small desk in front of a tall window, and I opened the drawer.

To my surprise, opening the desk caused the bottom to slide out and tilt down at an angle. There was no glass in the window, though the bottom of the desk drawer appeared to be glass--and its contents were hanging precariously over a rocky cliff that plunged into the ocean about 50 feet below. I could see a man cliff diving from the rocks, and I wanted to slide the bottom of the drawer back in so as not to drop anything into the water. There was a long, cylindrical object on the right side of the drawer, but as if it had a will of its own, the drawer slipped further down, tumbling the contents into the water.

The cliff diver had just made another dive, so he and my projectile hit the water at about the same time. I waited to see him come up, and he did. I was glad I hadn't inadvertently drowned him, but it was a near thing. After that, I noticed other people of various ages swimming nearby, none of whom seemed to have noticed that contents were raining down on their heads from an open window. I hadn't knocked anyone out, but on the other hand, wasn't their carefree attitude a bit surprising? I stood looking in some perplexity at the desk that turned gravity into a launch pad.

In this dream there was no sense of danger to me. I was an actor--though an unwitting one--not a reactor. The ocean posed no threat, I did not mourn the loss of the contents, and I was more concerned with the safety of the people in the water than they appeared to be. Above all, I was mystified by the trick drawer that seemed to have been set up to act as it did. There was an inevitability about the scene and a feeling of a sly sense of humor at work.

If you're interested in setting, I will say that the house, while having a more or less 20th-century look (and an up-to-date bathroom) had the heavy atmosphere of established wealth. I believe I had driven there in my car, which was parked on the street. As for the room with the desk, it was something like Madeline's chamber in Keats's The Eve of St. Agnes, except for the fact that it wasn't winter (or even nighttime), there was no stained glass, and in fact no feeling at all of anything medieval. I'm not sure there was even a bed. 

If you're thinking, "That doesn't sound much like Madeline's chamber," all I can say is it must have been the slightly ponderous air of the house, the feeling of looking down from a height, and the unexpected drama of the window treatment. Her window was pretty to look at, but mine was notable for its absence, the difference between a romance and the dream of a modern writer, I suppose. At least I was dry this time.

Sunday, November 23, 2014

Mythologist Dreams of a Blue Fish

I don't know why I dreamed this week about a giant blue fish jumping over a house, but I did. A few nights ago, in my dream, I was sitting or leaning on the porch railing of a white frame house very much like one I actually lived in when I was young. It was an overcast day in a small town neighborhood, and there were a number of people standing in the yard between our house and the one next door. All of a sudden, an enormous blue fish rose out of the depths, leaped over our house, and landed in a pool in the front yard.

Where the fish came from is an open question, since we were nowhere near the sea but in about as landlocked a situation as you could imagine. Not that that matters in a dream, of course. The sudden appearance of this enormous creature was extraordinary, but the lack of an ocean didn't seem to signify. Perhaps there was a subterranean ocean underneath the house.

My first thought was, "It's a blue whale." However, it was not a whale, but rather a large, flexible flatfish with a big head. It was not a kite or a ray--its shape was elongated and sinuous. It turned itself around in the pool to face us, and it may be anthropomorphizing to say so, but it did not have a friendly look. (Actually, I'm not sure it's possible to anthropomorphize in a dream, even if it sometimes is in waking life.)

It may be good to mention that Jung compared the stages of consciousness with the chakras of kundalini, so that the Leviathan that swims in the unconscious is associated with the second chakra, svadhisthana. In this stage, Jung said, one moves from lack of awareness to a confrontation with unconscious contents, a tricky undertaking requiring considerable courage since the flooding one experiences can threaten equilibrium. It's no minnow you're facing; certainly the fish in my dream had the menacing aspect of a Leviathan as it turned to look at us.

Everybody seemed to know the fish was going to make another leap and probably land on the house. There seemed to be a collective impulse to move out of the way, even a surge of panic. But for some reason, no one really did anything except stand and watch. I remained on the porch, oddly disinclined to move quickly, though part of me thought it was a grand idea. The fish did leap and actually landed on the house . . . but all that came down were a few splinters.

This dream reminds me of one I had some years ago (and have written about before) in which I was lounging on a cliff high above the sea, a brief idyll that ended when the water began to rise. It was not a single creature but rather the ocean itself that threatened. Interestingly, it was not so much physical danger in that dream but the damage to my belongings that concerned me; I was urging people in the house on the cliff to help me move things inside before they got wet.

In the fish dream, there was no water visible except in the pool, which was somewhat shallow, and though the fish carried through on its destructive leap, the result was anticlimactic--though there was still some talk of adjourning to the neighboring house for safety. The situation seemed unresolved, some feeling of uncertainty still remaining.

Maybe it's too much to pair two dreams occurring eight years apart, but I do seem to see a kind of progression from one dream to the next: from a diffuse but overwhelming threat to a specific, visible one; from a beautiful but exotic location to homely, familiar ground; from a frustrated feeling of trying to rouse others to a shared (but measured) sense of danger. The contrast between the urgent activity of the first dream and the watchfulness of the second dream is also striking, though I am not sure what we all were waiting for. A fish fry, maybe?

Wednesday, January 9, 2013

What Are You Doing After the Apocalypse?

I first became aware of the energy surrounding the apocalypse when people started talking about it my first year at Pacifica. I remember hearing about images of giant waves that were coming up in people's dreams and artwork. Not long after that, I heard about the Mayan calendar and the hype surrounding December 21, 2012. Over the last few years, I've seen so many references to not only the Mayan myth (misinterpreted though it may have been) but to other variations--involving everything from zombies to asteroids--that it seemed to amount to a collective obsession.

That first quarter at school, I had a dream that I did not connect at the time to any collective concerns because it seemed so personal. Still dazzled by the novel experience of commuting to lush, sea-swept Santa Barbara County, I dreamed that I was sleeping on the balcony of a house on a cliff, under a full moon. It was just before dawn, and there was a magic moment when the moon gave way to a newly risen sun. It was wonderful to wake up in the open air, but the feeling of incredible joy was soon interrupted by a realization that the sea was rising.

I went into the house--where a male relative and some others were hanging around--to get help moving the furniture inside, but no one was moving very fast, and in any case, the water was already at our feet. The perch on the cliff was now at sea level, and I was upset over the way the water was ruining everything. Then the dream ended.

Just the other day, I saw a picture of a young woman standing in a room with the end wall missing, looking down at the sea just below her feet. The caption was a quote from Rumi that said, "Listen to the sound of waves within you." The ethereal quality of the illustration, with the moody sky and the missing wall, was remarkably reminiscent of my dream.

At school, I was fascinated by the sea as a metaphor for the unconscious and explored it in several papers. Rumi advises listening for something the waves can tell us. In my dream, I was focused on the destructive quality of the water, which not only interrupted my idyll but ruined the furniture. It rose silently, for no apparent reason. When I thought about it later, I decided that the dream was a clue indicating that the new freedom and exhilaration I was experiencing had another side. It meant being closer to the place where all the myths and dreams well up and therefore in a good position to see whatever came into view, good or bad. The people in the house, by contrast, all seemed unmotivated, unable to act.

I think now that my dream was probably more like the dreams and artistic creations I heard other people talking about than I realized. Tsunami or rapidly rising sea; apocalypse or meteor strike; the specific forms no doubt have their own individual meanings, but there is a common theme of an overwhelmingly destructive force. Why were so many people captivated by these images? Why was everybody talking about them, either in jest or in earnest? Where did they come from to begin with?

These questions can probably be answered in more than one way. I tend to think anxiety over climate change might be playing into it, but there are other issues, economic, social, and environmental, that could also be playing a part. What interests me now is how people see the world beyond the wave. After it passes, what then?

Destruction and creation are two sides of a coin. Was all the attention focused on the idea of destruction somehow cathartic? Did the ending of 2012 sweep out the old and make room for a different kind of energy, something focused on creative change and new beginnings? All of that water and blood--were we having unconscious labor pains?

I want to think so. You might think that, as a responsible myth person, I spent December waving around the Penguin Dictionary of Symbols and advising calm, but I didn't. I have to admit that, other than observing the fray, I tried to stay out of it (I'd already lost one set of furniture in the dream). I spent the day of destruction baking cookies and trying to remember how to create an href tag. Modest attainments, but hopeful ones. Like Scarlett O'Hara, I guess I always believed that "tomorrow is another day." I'm glad we were right.