…and unwrapping Self. Through dreams.

There are dreams that communicate an earnest seriousness, with a luminous feeling from key figures in those dreams. Those kinds of dreams ask (usually, sometimes demanding) the dreamer  wake up. By this I mean waking up to parts of ourselves that we need to acknowledge exist, let alone accept. 

Those figures of our the inner landscapes might also be more than simply unconscious aspects of our personalities, with their own values, capabilities and agendas (ie. their highest intention for us, regardless of how dysfunctional those values play out in our lives). They act out, take over the show – we might even go so far as to say possess when emotions are heighten enough – in ways that leave us asking ourselves, “who was I? That wasn’t me, surely…”

In a previous post I’ve talked about the old psychological ‘templates’ of experience Carl Jung named archetypes. Perhaps we do not come into this world as a clean slate. Based on my experience, I’d be inclined to agree. We all come into the world with culturally pre-set inner images or ‘templates’ that our personal experiences wrap our personal selves/egos around. We might call one of these templates ‘the masculine principle’, and all that masculinity means to us as individuals in a society with its own ideas on what acceptable, and unacceptable, expressions of masculinity can be.

As we grow as human beings  into adults, we instinctively know what is right and wrong, what is socially acceptable, as a general rule. We (hopefully) come to an understanding of our ‘Mars/masculine’ nature, of how that personalised template plays out in our lives.

If the physical embodiment of the masculine principle in childhood, our Father, was generally healthy and well-rounded, then we grow into adults with a healthy inner image. For some that experience is less than healthy, for various reasons. So that inner image of the masculine (applying equally to the feminine) might be lop-sided, distorted.

Those dream images, like the Sun shining across the horizon at dawn, are messengers of illuminating our inner lives.