Of Dreams and Omens

Photo by Bro Man on Unsplash

 About Dreams 

I discovered Carl Jung through a lovely synchronicity. And, to me, a good synchronicity carries more meaning than any intellectual process. So I paid attention.

I enrolled in a Jungian Dream School and joined a Jungian dream group. I took a Jungian tarot course. I bought Jungian books.

It has all been good and the group has been the best of it. So I wanted to say that first.

Dream groups work. Dream groups are a call back to thousands of years ago, when people sat around the fire  and shared the magic they encountered in the night.

These weren’t just any people, either. They were our people—navigating life by dreams and signs and sixth-sense intuition. Or that’s how I see it, anyway.

For me that way of navigating is the only way that really works, but not necessarily precisely.

About This Morning

This morning I was thinking about one of the imprecise bits, sitting with a part of a big dream about a numinous woman in blue and a scribe who began as a healer. 

In this particular part of the dream, the scribe letters monuments to my parents and my mother’s monument transforms into an ornament. I am to go to the farm where she grew up and hang it. When I get there I see that a tree has been cut back for that purpose. So I hang the ornament and leave.

I’ve had lots of ideas about that dream. But the part about the tree and the ornament and my mother never quite made sense to me. I have connected it to my family tree and the bridge between the worlds but never felt I really understood it.

Then this morning, as I was thinking about the tree and the ornament and kind absently scrolling on Substack, an article caught my eye. So I read it.

And this part spoke to me very directly:

I finally found what runs through that line. I found the colour of the flame held inside those lineages, expressed through the colours of those lands. The sapphire. The indigos. The azzurro, the water. - Selvia Filteau, The One Lineage Nobody is Allowed to Reclaim

If you've read my dream The Spirit Dream, you'll know why that part resonated. But it wasn't only that passage. It was the article as a whole which was about connecting with your ancestral spirituality. Trees were mentioned specifically and color and what is handed down through mother's and grandmother's.

So it all worked for me and I thought, maybe that’s it. Or part of it. 

Or a lead.

And I think lead is the best word here because that’s my system. I let dreams lead. I don’t connect them back to the everyday. I am not psychological. I don’t look for insights into my relationships or my work or any aspect of my secular life.

Like Jung, I know dreams have meaning. Like Jung, I think the symbols in dreams are expansive. And, thanks to the dream school I attend, I have learned the difference between a symbol and a sign.

But I have my own way of understanding that difference.

My Approach to Dreams

In my experience dreams almost never give you practical advice. 

They don't tell you who to marry or what do about a difficult family member or what job offer to accept. Though they can lead you into a below-the-surface analysis of your feelings about any or all of that. Which is valuable if that's what you're looking for.

But I'll be honest. I'm usually not.

I'm neurodivergent person, late-diagnosed with autism and ADHD. Before that I was misdiagnosed with Bipolar 1 which I take as an indicator of how far I deviate from the norm. My intense focus on my special interests has a lot to do with the way I've been perceived. 

Those interests are literature and metaphysics. So that's the kind of in-depth analysis I'm after—which works out pretty well because that's the kind of in-depth dreams provide best. In my opinion. So I let them lead in that department. 

I analyze them. I do my best to not be reductive. I let the symbols breath. But I still treat them more like omens than psychology. And, right or wrong, I don't think that's going to change.

Omens of Things to Come

According to Merriam Webster, an omen is "an occurrence or phenomenon believed to portend a future event." Portend means to "signify" or "anticipate." Not to cause.

So I don’t think of portends or omens or dreams as predictions of the future. I think them as guidance, especially when a dream and a related idea co-occur as they did this morning.

I was wondering about the tree and the ornament and the connection to my mother and then I found an article that helped explain it. And before that there was a dream that made me think of the ornament and the tree and brought me to that spot.

I am still making sense of it. 

I'll try to connect the dots a little better in a future post.

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If you haven't read the dream I'm referencing, you can read it here: The Spirit Dream  The transforming monument is at the end of part three.

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