Dream School Update

I started Jungian Dream School last fall in response to a wonderful synchronicity involving Jungian analyst Murray Stein and the This Jungian Life podcast. 

As you may already know, dreams have been an area of interest to me ever since I had the dream I call the Spirit Dream in 2007 which changed, or possibly saved, my life.

I’ve recently written my Spirit Dream / autism memoir up to the point where what I learned in those first weeks of Dream School becomes relevant. So I went back to module one and worked through it again.

In doing this I reread On the Nature of Dreams more carefully than I had done the first time around. And there was so much there, I wanted to share a bit of what I learned. I hope I will do it justice and not get too much wrong!

How Dreams Bring Balance

In On the Nature of Dreams Jung points out our dreams are rarely in accord with the sensibilities of our conscious mind. To Jung, this means that the unconscious (which he calls "the matrix of dreams") must have an independent function. In other words, the unconscious functions separately from our conscious self (which contains the ego). 

In creating dreams, the unconscious may strongly oppose our waking paradigm. This is intentional.

The gap between our everyday attitude and the dream may be slight or great (or very occasionally absent). This relates to Jung's concept of compensation. According to Jung, the dream deviation is an attempt to correct (or compensate for) the errors of our conscious self.

According to Jung there are three compensatory possibilities:

1. If the conscious attitude is one-sided the dream takes the opposite position.
2. If the conscious is more in the middle, the dream may deviate a little from our waking attitude.
3. If the conscious attitude is correct the dream will coincide (though not mirror, because the conscious always maintains what Jung calls its autonomy).

The purpose of compensation is to restore wholeness or balance. This correction usually has something to do with what is going on with us at that particular point in time. Some dreams, particularly long series of dreams, are more far-reaching (this is addressed in Psychology and Alchemy which I will have not read).

It's important to note, that compensation is not black and white. Dreams have their own kind of logic. Their relationship to our waking life is nuanced, complex and expansive. Understanding a dream is always a process.

Who Can Interpret Dreams

According Jung you don't have to be an psychologist (or any sort of professional) to interpret dream. Which isn't to say that anyone and everyone can do Jungian dream interpretation. The characteristics required to "diagnose dream compensation" according to Jung are: intelligence, some knowledge of psychology and life experience.

But these alone are not enough.

Jung is adamant in saying that an understanding of mythology, folklore, indigenous cultures and comparative religion is also required.

I loved hearing that. While I have learned through Dream School that we must always consider our personal association first when approaching a dream, I find mythological themes to be very important in dreams. Right or wrong, whenever it is there I apply it.

On the Nature of Dreams also contains a warning for people who decide that the dream "knows best” or readily believe that dreams predict the future. According to Jung, those who take this approach may find that their dreams become trivial over time. This is because these individuals are over rating the subconscious function and under valuing the conscious.

The conscious, per Jung, must fulfil its own appointed duties. It has developed for a reason and has an important role in our lives. The dream, according to On the Nature of Dreams, may fill in the blanks, correct our attitude or move us forward after our best attempts have failed. This is not to say that they never provide real life guidance, only that most of what they have to tell us relates to our internal states.

Dreams tend to be mythic, symbolic and poetic. Because of this they offer much more than ordinary, everyday advice. While some dreams are precognitive (as Jung was well aware) most are not, and it’s important to properly understand the dreams role in our life.

Dream interpretation can be challenging. While a lot has been written on it by Jung and his contemporaries very little of that is what I would consider an easy read. The book Dream Wise written by three of my Dream School instructors makes Jung's ideas accessible—as do the writings of Jungian analysist Murray Stein. 

Stein’s short book Four Pillars of Jungian Analysis talks about dream interpretation in concise and understandable way. 

Big Dreams

Big dreams are different than other dreams because they contain symbolic images found in the collective unconscious of the human race. These images are reflections of invisible energetic forms Jung calls archetypes.

Archetypes have existed at all times in human history and in all places. To Jung, this proves that there is both a personal unconscious and a collective or universal unconscious accessible to all. Archetypal images include thing like dragons, initiations, fairy tale elements or alchemical substances. For me personally, they tend to present as specific deities, symbols and themes.

Big dreams come from the collective unconscious at critical stages of our lives. They may hard to interpret, Jung says, because of the lack of personal meaning. Often, we need to go back to the mythology in order to understand them.

This is why a knowledge of myth and folklore is so important. If we don't know these stories we may fail to recognize important elements and messages in our dreams.

We can identify big dreams by their mythic themes and "poetic force and beauty." Often these dreams haunt us, becoming the "richest jewel in the treasure-house of psychic experience." (CGJ) This, in my experience, could not be more accurate.

The Stages of Dreams

A key point in On the Nature of Dreams is a the idea examining a dream through its structure.

Jung provides four stages that describe the structure of most dreams.

1. Exposition: The statement of place, introduction of key dream characters and the initial situation of the dreamer.
2. Development: The plot of the dream as it becomes more complicated and tension develops.
3. Culmination or Peripeteia (a Greek word for an unexpected reversal or point where the situation changes dramatically): The point where something decisive happens or something changes completely.
4. Result or Solution: While not every dream will have a fourth stage Jung looks at this last stage in relation to the solution sought by the dreamer.

I like to look at the structure of the dream and question each stage keeping in mind that every aspect of a dream is there for reason. 

There is a lot to be learned from the structure of the dream. The setting, key characters, action and turning point are all important. When I look at my own dreams, I always consider the result or solution. Sometimes this fourth stage is little more than an idea or impression which may be easy to overlook—but it is still important.

Context and Associations

It is also crucially important to do what Jung calls "taking up the context" by exploring personal associations for each dream element.

Because dreams are closely tied to our lived experience, it's also helpful to think about our current situation as we try to understand how our unconscious might be trying to restore balance in the here and now.

Most dreams are not big dreams. But every dream we have is important in terms of our day to day life. Many apparently "lesser" dreams can be mapped as part of a dream series that may be factor into our individuation process (a Jungian term that describes the process of becoming the person we are meant be).

Dreams offer an immediate and crucial course correction as we journey from day to day. They do not (in the vast majority of cases) tell us what to do. Instead they help us orient ourselves to a life that aligns with our greater purpose.

I'll be writing more about what I'm learning about dreams and Jung in future posts!

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I've had a few dreams I consider big and one that figures prominently in my memoir and in my life as a whole. You can read it here: The Spirit Dream. You can read about my Murray Stein experience in my A Creation in Time post. You can learn more about Jungian Dream School via the This Jungian Life website. 

Let not your heart be troubled. You believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father's house there are many mansions. If not, I would have told you: because I go to prepare a place for you. And if I shall go, and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and will take you to myself...  - John 14:1-3 (DR)

About Interior Castle

I have read widely enough to know when I'm over my head with a book and I know that I'm over my head with this one.

Or maybe it's more accurate to say that what pertains to me personally is mostly in the beginning. So that's what I'm going to write about here.

About St. Teresa of Avila

St. Teresa of Avila was a leader and reformer of the Carmelite Orders of both women and men and the first female Doctor of the Catholic Church. She was courageous. She was articulate. And she was devoted to God.

St. Teresa was born in Ávila, Spain in 1515. She was a noblewoman whose paternal grandfather was a marrano (or forced Jewish convert to Christianity). At age 20, she entered the Carmelite Order. She read widely throughout her life. Her writing include an autobiography (The Life of St. Teresa of Jesus), The Way of Perfection and Interior Castle.

When St. Teresa began Interior Castle on Trinity Sunday, June 2nd, 1577, she was already on the radar of the Inquisitors. That may be why she is self-effacing, in the writing that follows, calling herself foolhardy or wretched, a mere woman writing for her fellow sisters only because women understand other women best.

Or that may be how she actually thought of herself. She was humble, after all. A saint.

And a mystic.

There is a lot about mysticism I don't understand but there are couple of things that I notice in St. Teresa's writing. My first observation is that legitimate mystical experience requires an unusually high degree of personal sanctity. The second is that mysticism calls for an intense and unwavering desire to get as close to God as is humanly possible.

That St. Teresa had such a desire from a young age, is obvious. We can see it in the story of how she set out for land of the Moors, as a child of seven, in order to be martyred and then see heaven. And we can see that same dedication shining through the words that she wrote.

The Interior Castle Framework

I began to think of the soul as if it were a castle made of a single diamond or of very clear crystal, in which there are many rooms, just as in Heaven there are many Mansions. - St. Teresa of Avila, Interior Castle

While St. Teresa often speaks of multiple castles or mansions the model she uses is one of rooms or levels in a greater castle which is ruled by God. The rooms are numbered one through seven, but are at the same time innumerable.

St. Teresa is clear in saying that the castle itself is something which we should not expect to ever understand fully.

...there is no point in our fatiguing ourselves by attempting to comprehend the beauty of this castle...the very fact that His Majesty says it is made in His image means that we can hardly form any conception of the soul's great dignity and beauty. - St. Teresa of Avila, Interior Castle

We also are shown that we should not think of the various floors or chambers in a strictly linear way.

Let us now imagine that this castle, as I have said, contains many mansions, some above, others below, others at each side; and in the center and midst of them all is the chiefest mansion where the most secret things pass between God and the soul.  - St. Teresa of Avila, Interior Castle

Entering into the Castle

The chambers that St. Teresa describes are beautifully and progressively filled with light but they are not, even on the lowest level, accessible to everyone.

...there are souls so infirm and so accustomed to busying themselves with outside affairs that nothing can be done for them, and it seems as thought they are incapable of entering with themselves at all. So accustomed have they grown to living all the time with the reptiles and other creature to be found in the outer court of the castle that they have almost become like them; and although by nature they are so richly endowed as to have the power of holding converse with none other than God Himself, there is nothing that can be done for them.  - St. Teresa of Avila, Interior Castle

While not everyone can enter the castle, those who do will come through the doorway of prayer.

As far as I can understand, the door of entry into this castle is prayer and meditation: I do not say mental prayer rather than vocal for, if it is prayer at all, it must be accompanied by meditation. If a person does not think Whom he is addressing ...I do not consider that he is praying at all even though he be constantly moving his lips.  - St. Teresa of Avila, Interior Castle

Leaving behind the poor "paralyzed souls" who are unable to gain entry, St. Teresa moves on to talk about those in a second group who may (or may not) enter in. St. Theresa describes them as people who...

...are very much absorbed in worldly affairs; but their desires are good; sometimes, though infrequently they commend themselves to Our Lord and they think about the state of their souls, though not very carefully. Full of a thousand preoccupations as they are, they pray on a few times a month and as a rule they are thinking all the time of their preoccupations, for the are very much attached to them, and, where their treasure is there is their heart.  - St. Teresa of Avila, Interior Castle

To my mind, this describes most of us. But I found that encouraging because it also holds out the hope that those who develop a true awareness of their worldly state may achieve ground level access.

The First Castle

From time to time, however they shake their mind free of them [meaning their worldly concerns] and it is a great thing that they should know themselves well enough to realize that they are not going the right way to reach the castle door. Eventually they enter the first rooms on the lowest floor, but so many reptiles get in with them they are unable to appreciate the beautify of the castle or to find any peace within it. Still they have done a good deal by entering at all. - St. Teresa of Avila, Interior Castle

The idea that we can be within the castle but still caught up in worldly desires highlights the fact that entry is only a beginning.

You must note that the light which comes from the palace occupied by the King hardly reaches these first Mansions at all; for, although they are not dark and black, as...the soul...in a state of sin, they are to some extent darkened ... because ... snakes and vipers and poisonous creatures .... have come in with the soul .... [and] prevent it from seeing the light. - St. Teresa of Avila, Interior Castle

My Reaction

Remember that in few of the mansions of this castle are we free from struggles with devils ... it is most important that we should not cease to be watchful against the devil's wiles, lest he deceive in the guise of an angel of light. For there are a multitude of ways in which he can deceive us, and gradually make his way into the castle, and until he is actually there we do not realize it.  - St. Teresa of Avila, Interior Castle

Full of a thousand preoccupations as they are, they pray only a few times a month and as a rule they are thinking all the time of their preoccupations, for the are very much attached to them, and, where their treasure is there is their heart.

I think about my own attachments and feel quite sure that I am part of the ground level group St. Teresa describes above.

I remember how spiritually advanced I imagined myself to be when I was involved in the new age and the occult. I find it interesting that now, having returned to the Church, I'm struck by how spiritually remedial I actually am.

My Application

I set aside Interior Castle and take a short personal inventory. I come up with seven behaviors that I would like to change. And I know that I'm right to want to change them. These are things that stand between me and God or at the very least show that I don't really trust him.

This is how I know that I am over my head with Interior Castle. While I know that I will read the rest of it anyway, I also know that it's the first chapter I need to focus on. I remember that St. Teresa said we enter the castle through the doorway of prayer so I know that prayer is the key. 

I order a book that Fr. Chad Ripperger recommends called The Ways of Mental Prayer. It promises an explanation of contemplative prayer that is based on of the work of St. Teresa of Avila, St. John of the Cross, St. Francis de Sales and others.

I think about the Interior Castle a lot over the next couple of days. I know it's not especially impressive to find myself stuck in the entryway to St. Teresa's beautiful palace. But to me it feels like a discovery.
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There are several versions of Interior Castle available.  The one I've linked in this post is the Dover Thrift Edition ($4.99).  

St. Hildegard's Visions

St. Hildegard and Holistic Wellness

St. Hildegard's Legacy

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I like science and don't spend nearly enough time thinking about it. It surprises me that so much of it is metaphysical in the popular sense of the word. Here are a few very basic facts on the frequency of color:

1. Frequency refers to the number of times light passes a given point which can be thought of as vibration. Colors with long wavelengths have a low frequency. Colors with short wavelengths have a higher frequency.
2. Red has the longest wavelength and lowest frequency of any color in the visible human spectrum. It has a low vibration or frequency and less energy than other light. Red represents earth and courage and the life-force. It is associated with the root chakra.
3. Redder than red refers to a red whose wavelength is too long for us to see. Infrared light exists beyond the color we perceive as red.
4. Violet has the shortest wavelength which translates into a very high frequency. This color contains the shortest waves we can see. It also contains the most energy. Ultra-violet is a very high vibration violet not visible to the naked eye.
5. Color exists which has a higher frequency than violet. It is invisible to humans and known as bluer than blue. It interests me that blue corresponds to wisdom, spirituality and communication. Blue is significant to me personally, as is red so that made the outside the human spectrum stuff interesting to me. For more on my personal dream experience with color symbolism please see the following entry: The Spirit Dream
6. There are many other wavelengths in the electromagnetic spectrum that which aren't visible to humans. The chart above illustrates this fact as well as all others mentioned.

Rupert Sheldrake is Cambridge educated biochemist, author and researcher of far reaching intellect and vision. His books include Morphic Resonance: The Nature of Formative Causation, Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home and The Presence of the Past. His lectures and interviews are both comprehensive and understandable and his website is well worth visiting (and deserving of an entry all its own). 

I have several Sheldrake interviews on MP3 and I was listening to his New Dimensions interview with my son this week as we traveled back and forth between our present home and our new one. We were both very impressed by the research Sheldrake referenced and the points he made. 

One highly well constructed research study was very consistent with Sheldrake's ideas about Morphic Resonance as well as metaphysical ideas regarding cosmic consciousness and telepathy.

The study involved word recognition and was conducted by Gary Schwartz, Professor of Psychology at Yale University: 24 common 3-letter words in Hebrew and 24 rare ones were selected. All were taken from the Hebrew bible and written in Hebrew script. For each word, Swartz created a scrambled word for each of the original 48 words(as, in English, one might do by scrambling "cat" to spell "tca") creating an additional 48 false or meaningless words. 

Scwartz then displayed each of the total 96 Hebrew character words (half real, half fake, a quarter rare, a quarter common) one at a time, in a random order, to subjects who did not know Hebrew. The subjects were told only that they were viewing Hebrew words and were asked to guess the meaning of each word in English by writing down the first English word that came to mind. They were then asked to estimate, on a zero-to-four scale, how confident they felt in each individual guess. 

Professor Schwartz then excluded all subjects who guessed any word correctly on the grounds they may have known some Hebrew and analyzed the confidence ratings from subjects who remained. Schwartz not only found that confidence ratings were significantly higher with the real words guesses than with the false, but that subjects were more confident about their ability to guess common words than they were about their ability to guess the rarer. 

Finally Schwartz repeated the experiment, this time telling the subjects that half the words were real and half were false and asked them to guess which was which. The results of this test were purely random showing that the patterns recognized unconsciously, could not be recognized consciously. 

This study may show, Sheldrake said in the interview, that these subjects were somehow able to resonate with millions of Hebrew speakers and scholars the word over.

That this phenomena is unconscious is strong evidence, in my opinion, for a different way of knowing and very consistent with ideas about morphic resonance and biomorphic field theory. 

Another study mentioned by Sheldrake involved a bird called the Blue Tit (pictured above). In the 1920s in Southampton, England, the Blue Tits began to discover that they could tear the tops of milk bottles on doorsteps and drink the cream at the top of the bottle. Soon this skill showed up in Blue Tits over a hundred miles away - significant because Blue Tits are home loving birds who rarely fly further than 15 miles from the place of their birth. 

Amateur bird-watchers caught on and traced the expansion of the habit. By 1947 the habit was not only widespread in Britain but had spread to Blue Tits in Holland, Sweden and Denmark. When the German occupation cut off milk deliveries in Holland for eight years (five years longer than the life of a Blue Tit) observers were stunned to find that within months of deliveries being reinstated Blue Tits all over Holland were drinking cream, a habit that had initially taken decades to develop.

Why was learning so much easier that time around? 

It seems obvious to me, as to Sheldrake, that a invisible field of energetic information is available to both animals and humans. It also seems likely that this field operates by way of resonance as like breeds or beings are able to access like information. In other words, the behavior of milk drinking was communicated only to other Blue Tits, not to crows or sparrows. 

Whether these energetic fields are to some degree subject to locality or proximity (the spread throughout England and then to Holland) or subject to degrees of resonance we do not yet understand is not clear to me. It does seem however that in documented incidences of parallel discoveries, for example, that distance is not a factor.

Either way it is amazing evidence for the existence of what is essential an invisible reality. 

Another point which Sheldrake made in the interview, and which I found very compelling, related to the laws of nature or (one could extrapolate) science. These laws were worked out when science believed that the universe was largely mechanistic, basically no more than a machine, running according to set rules. 

This static preexisting order implies an eternal law maker, says Sheldrake, which is notion that is traditionally theological as well as a political metaphor - a carryover from the days of established religion and monarchical rule.

If however the universe is not a machine but constantly evolving (as evidenced by the big bang) laws must be evolving as well. In other words nothing is fixed, neither from age to age, or in my world view from dimension to dimension. The laws of nature and of physics are not written in stone but mutable and capable of true evolution. 

I am thrilled to see brilliant and reasonable scientists such as Rupert Sheldrake, William Tiller and the late David Bohm at the forefront of open-mindedness and progressive thought. May there be more like them!

For more on the work of Rupert Sheldrake please check out his website @ Sheldrake.org.

Most people can create images inside their mind quite easily. About 1 in 50 people, however, have a problem with the visual cortex called aphantasia. In aphantasia, the part of the brain that processes information received from the eyes doesn't function properly. As a result, there is an inability to create mental images.

According to Web MD: “The ability to create mental images exists on a spectrum. On one end, are people who can create extra-vivid mental images. Most people are somewhere in between.” On the other, those with complete (or total) aphantasia are unable to conjure up any kind of mental imagery. Though they are able to dream because dreaming is involuntary. 

My aphantasia was and is, total. Like many people with aphantasia, I grew up thinking that everyone was like me and that the ‘image’ in imagination was a metaphor.

 But there was one "psychic" advantage to my condition. I couldn’t deliberately make up a vision if I tried.

So when I began to see visualize spots of color during a guided chakra meditation I was overjoyed.  As the meditation progressed, a distinct circle of violet light appeared, and I felt as if I was looking through this circle of color into another space. 

Then, very abruptly, I found myself surrounded by color. 

A bright endless blue. 

It was almost as if a giant curtain had fallen or a bright blue screen had blinked into being and wrapped completely around me. 

For a moment, I panicked. Thinking that I was having a seizure or even a stroke, I opened my eyes to an ordinary room. But when I shut them again, the color was waiting. This continued for a good ten or fifteen minutes before I decided to keep my eyes open and get on with my day.

Later, when I sat down to record my experience in The Mystic Review, I remembered the swirling spectrum of blue I’d seen in the Spirit Dream. While the blue I’d seen in meditation was only a single shade, it had reminded me of some kind of screen. 

Thinking about it now, I think it was almost as if my attention was being drawn away from my New Age interests, and back to the dream.

UPDATED: 2024

I will be returning to this experience in a future post and wanted to update the original with an updated version.

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The update to this post is excerpted from The Spirit Dream © 2024 All Rights Reserved

The Susquehanna River August 13th, 2011 6:23 AM