The Dream and Soul Making
The following essay was written by Dr David Russell - The Australian Jungian Psychologist - January 2022.
He has granted permission for me to publish it here on the Abaton.
This presentation is about an extraordinary relationship. A relationship that exists:
Between the experiences of a dream and the experiences of daily life
Between the inner life and the outer life
Between the below-world and the above world.
I want to emphasise the nature of this relationship.
It is so basic that both elements are changed by being in relationship: The experience of the dream changes, by being consciously looked at, and the experience of daily life changes, by entering the dream.
To only value one side of this relationship is to radically devalue the human condition.
It is my argument that to engage with the dream experience, in a soulful manner, is to enhance our lived experience.
Today, the common understanding of how one goes about enhancing our lived experience is to emphasise the important variables of intention, attention, reflection, decision making, flexibility etc.
The onesidedness of this emphasis denies the existence of the relationship that is the focus of this presentation.
A term that caught my imagination the very first time I came across it was soul making.[2]Having had a strong Catholic upbringing I was used to the notion of soul but back then it had carried the meaning of a divine-like presence, an inner God-given entity of sorts.
The title of this presentation, The Dream and Soul Making, is intended to link the experience of dreaming with the verb making soul. No longer is soul an entity, a noun, it is now a particular experience that enhances daily living and one that we humans are able to engage with, be in relationship with.
Following the author, James Hillman, we can enter the dream as a soul-making experience.
To do this however implies that we take the words of the medieval Italian poet, Dante Alighiari, seriously:
Abandon all hope you who enter here!
These words were written over the entrance to the underworld so it’s intended that we do take them seriously.
The hope that must be abandoned is the hope of being able to make sense, in an everyday sense, of the dream imagery.
It’s timely to clarify the use of a few key words: psyche, soul, ego
Psyche is the general term for: inner life, mind, subjective experience.
The experience of psyche, or the psychological aspect of psyche, is twofold:
1. The ego aspect: The disposition toward identity, individuality, place in the world, feet-on-the-ground. In mythology, this is the above-world experience of everyday life. The image, or longing, of the ego is of being on top of a mountain where there is clear vision and pure air.
2. The soul aspect: The disposition toward longing, belonging, sense of mystery, imagination. In mythology, this is the below-world experience. The image, or longing, of soul is of the valley with its moisture, mist, poor visibility.
The dream has all the characteristics of soul making and not ego making.
The usefulness of a psychic understanding of a dream experience
Firstly, let’s accept the assumption that there are multiple realities. From differing perspectives we perceive differing realities. For our purposes let’s accept that there is an in-the-world (empirical, of the senses) reality and a psychic reality (one that enables soulful experiences). This distinction is similar to seeing a scientific reality as being different to a humanities reality. It helps our thinking to make these distinctions.
On an experiential level, psychic reality is radically different to in-the-world reality. At times acknowledging psychic reality is pretty weird so hang in there with an open mind. My basic belief is that working with psychic reality makes for a more interesting life and for a more satisfying experience of psychotherapy. It does this essentially in the manner in which it helps us think.
Soul and ego are not entities
They have no substantial matter (they are non-entities) but, rather, are names given to discrete bodies of experience. The fact that they do matter is derived from both mythology across the cultures and reflections on events in our day-to-day living. They are useful notions in that they help us engage with and reflect on our experience.
The images of the dream are drawn from the above world of everyday life with little or no account of a timeframe.
The experience of the dream is a matter of the inner life, the below world.
This dual aspect (above world and below world) is the depth psychological perspective.
We do not turn to dreams to enlighten our hopes in progress, our personal wellbeing, or our desired transformations. Rather, our dreams tell us about the troubling inner life, what today we call our psychopathology ... the matters of the underworld.
The above world suggests to us that we are singular; we have individuality, personal identity. Dreams show us that we are multiple; each dream image manifest the multiple facets of our psychological potentials.
Our troubling psychological symptoms are akin to invitations to further experience soul making.
We don’t want to read dreams in terms of daily needs and desires. Rather, we ask: What is the soul asking of me? Or, perhaps, what is it I need to know?
To go deep into the dream requires abandoning hope. Hope of worldly success, of ego strengthening etc.
Going into the depth of the dream is neither hope nor despair as it’s of a different order.
The underworld, in the meaning I am intending, is a realm of soul. What one meets there is soul … it is a mythological style of describing a psychological cosmos.
When I use the word underworld, I am referring to a wholly psychic perspective. To know psyche at its basic depths, for a true depth psychology, one must go to the underworld.
All dream images are a movement towards a more psychological perspective.
When the dark experience of depression drags us down into the underworld, our world has opened up and we have fallen, fallen from the familiarity of the above world, into the unknown and un-knowable world (from an everyday perspective). From this vantage point we may observe our own catastrophes with a dark wisdom that resonates with death.
Entering the underworld refers to a transition from the material to the psychical point of view. This is a death of the material point of view.
Because the dream speaks in images it is the imagination that is required if we are going to approach the dream psychologically. In other words: Like needs like.
The call of the dream is to the imagination and can only be answered by the imagination.
The people in a dream
The figures we meet in dreams are not the people themselves.
Nor are they aspects or expressions of myself.
To believe in either of the above is to continue to place the dream in the above world, the world of everyday life, the ego world.
To repeat so as to emphasise: The persons that I engage with in dreams are neither representations of their living selves nor parts of myself.
The dream image of a person cannot be taken in terms of her or his actuality, since the image in a dream belongs to the underworld images and therefore refers to an archetypal person in a human shape.
A dream image of desire, fleshy desire, in the psychic imagery of the underworld, is a desire for the numinous, for transcendence, for union. Think of the story of The Handless Maiden, or the love between Eros and Psyche.
Where do dream images come from?
If not from everyday life, from where?
The assumption is that they from another realm, they are archetypal.
They refer to an archetypal person, in a human shape, or an animal or elements of nature (wind, rain, snow). There is a mythic connection.
We are visited by mythic figures, heroes, angels, devils, spirit beings, gods, goddesses, images and events from all the sacred texts (Bible, Koran, Mahābhārata), from the Dreamtime … and so often these figures are shaped like our friends, or events, from yester-years or even from yesterday.
What makes the dream?
In mythic terms, Eros is the driving force. Today, in the language of everyday life, we would say it was a ‘motivational driver’ at work.
But in mythic terms, Eros arouses an emotion. I want you, the reader, to feel the connection here: Eros arouses … Eros does eros.
Not just any emotion. No, it will be a very particular emotion or driving force.
My hunch is that it will be an emotion in which our psyche, our inner life, needs, for its own reasons, to dwell.
So, a dream is a performance of sorts. A performative self-enactment of psyche, of our psychology.
Barriers
Two habits of mind impede grasping the idea of the underworld as a psychic realm. Impede the understanding that there is a psychic realm we experience, especially via our dreams but equally, on occasion, is daily events.
1. Materialism
Materialism in modern psychology is especially reflected in its approach to mind; mind as just an epiphenomenon of the nervous system. That the dream is nothing but the nervous system putting out the unwanted rubbish of the day.
The depth/archetypal understanding[3] has long history, long intergenerational history that connects us with dying and death. Not just the material aging and inevitable dying but of the possible daily move, in many conscious steps, downwards into the dark of the unconscious.
The depth perspective says that the dream is complete in itself.
Our task is to enter the dream, dwell in its presence. In this manner we begin to experience soul.
Dreams are homeopathic by nature. Each dream contains all that it needs to do what it needs to do.
2. Western culture
The denial of death. This denial asserts that there is no need to enter the underworld. From the early Church Fathers we have the mantra: “Christ descended into hell, that we ourselves might not have to descend thither”.
Lazarus became the paradigm for all humankind.
Having hope in a better tomorrow is a defence against death. This sort of hope is what constitutes a barrier to any psychic understanding.
Hope becomes the a good-luck charm that acts to deny the reality of our lived experience. What is more useful is: the courage to address our daily reality as we find it including our psychic reality.
The dream
Jung said: “the dream is its own interpretation” (CW 11: #41), and sometimes the most we can do is “to dream the myth onwards” (CW 9,I #271).
Even the most ordinary dream can astound us with its extraordinary detail, its artful conjunction of people and events.
So as not to engorge the ego “We must reverse our usual procedure of translating the dream into ego-language and instead translate the ego into dream-language” (Hillman, p.95).
At night the dream has me, but in the morning, I say, I had a dream.
Our psychic task is: To stay subjected to the dream. Dwell in the dream.
Why do this? Because it is necessary for soul-making.
What about the dream-ego, the figure of myself in the dream?
How not to objectify the image of the ‘I’?
The psychic task is: To subject the ego to the dream.
The aim is to move the above-world ego (the heroic ego) into an imaginal ego, one that is at home in the underworld.
The dream in no longer “mine” but the psyche’s.
The dream is subjected to the necessities staged by the dream. Mythic images are not firm evidence for anything positive.
A relevant aside …
Inanna, Queen of heaven and earth … a mythic story from ancient Sumer, a land adjoining the Persian Gulf (See Wolkstein and Kramer).
Inanna was queen of this worldly domain.
She was the keeper of order, the guardian of wisdom.
She was both high priest and possessor of all earthly power.
It then comes about that, at the height of her strength as queen of heaven and earth, Inanna opened her ear to the Great Below. (Opening her ear to a particular wisdom.)
She abandons heaven and earth to descend to the underworld.
Again, as a metaphor for psychological aliveness, Inanna has attained all the skills necessary for her day-to-day living. She is very good at what she does in the above world.
At a certain moment in her life, however, she finds that she has to abandon her accustomed position, her position of strength, and descend to the unknown, to the underworld.
Inanna begins her journey in possession of all the symbols of her high status:
· She carries with her the wisdom of the ages
· She wears the crown of authority
· Around her neck she wears small lapis beads
· Her body is wrapped with the royal robe
· On her chest she wears the breastplate of power
· On her wrist she wears the gold ring
· In her hands she carries the lapis measuring rod and line.
At the threshold of the underworld, Inanna has to declare why she wishes to enter.
It’s because of my older sister, Ereshkigal, queen of the underworld.
Her husband has died and I have come to witness the funeral rites.
Once given permission to enter, the seven gates of the underworld are unbolted, one by one.
As the first gate Inanna has the crown removed from her head
At the second gate the small lapis beads were removed from her neck
And so it goes on until at the seventh gate the royal robe is removed from her body.
Ereshkigal, queen of the under-word, leaves her with nothing.
In fact, less than nothing:
Inanna was turned into a corpse,
A piece of rotting meat,
And was hug from a hook on the wall.
To cut the story terribly short, Inanna’s transformation begins with the dirt beneath her fingernails, which come into life, as a creature neither male nor female.
Eventually, Inanna return to the above-world with the gift of mystery, what I would call the gift of using imagination creatively and psychological aliveness.
In conclusion, this ancient and mythic story invite us to consider the following:
As story tellers of life, we have two jobs to do. Most often, the construction of a life narrative will demand an adequate level of above-world competence. Every so often, however, maybe one time out of every twelve, the possibility exists, and it will appear in the manner of an invitation, to journey into the under-world.
Here the above-world skills do not work. We can be sure of that!
Here one is stripped of above-world knowledge and is, as it were, hung like a piece of rotting meat from a hook on the wall.
The possibility of deep inner-personal engagement is there and the work is demanding as it needs to be.
I am purposefully avoiding words like: transformation, enlightenment, bliss as they mis-represent the journey by making it sound romantic and have more than a whiff of ego enhancement.
Another story of the journey: Hercules in the underworld (the house of Hades)
“The dread and resistance which every natural human being experiences when it comes to delving too deeply into himself is, at bottom, the fear of the journey to Hades” (Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, CW 12 #439).
The heroic ego could appropriately be called the Herculean ego.
In our Western culture we love the idea of a successful heroic type maxing out on ego strength (the winner, the grinner, the achiever, the influencer).
In Greek/Roman mythology Hercules was a mythic hero, a Man-God.
Our heroic ego is uninitiated and our nightly descent into dreaming is a mode of initiation.
The initiation of the heroic ego – learning the metaphorical understanding of the dream – is truly mind-blowing.
The story of Hercules’s descent into the underworld is itself a metaphor for soul work.
Hercules, the national hero of ancient Greece was immediately adopted by the Romans as part god, part folk hero and, above all, is loved throughout our Western culture for his particular prowess.
Hercules always got the job done no matter how impossible it may have been judged by the average person.
As a measure of his prowess, just consider the twelve tasks (the labours of Hercules) that he was required to do as a consequence of offending the goddess Hera/Juno. He strangled a huge lion with his hands when his club and arrows were found to be useless. He slaughtered the twelve-headed hydra that was ravaging the countryside. He went on to do battle with a gigantic boar; birds with cruel beaks and sharp talons; the famous Cretan bull and, the unimaginable, flesh-eating horses. He had to travel the length and breadth of the known seas where he fought the Amazons; the bull monster with three bodies and, one of the most difficult of all, was the robbery of the golden apples of the Hesperides.
Hercules’ twelfth exploit was to bring back Cerberus, the three-headed watchdog, the hound of Hades, which guards the entry to the under-world.
What is so different about this twelfth task was that he was not able to use any of his skills and armaments that had proved so successful in the above-world: his bow and arrow, his slingshot, his sword, even his hands. Of course, he initially believed them to be useful and tested each of them against each under-world phantom believing that they were the same sort of reality as found in the above-world.
Hercules’ muscular talents were useless in the underworld. His companion, Hermes/Mercury, the divine guide and go-between, had to remind him that the terrifying face in the realm of shadows was nothing but an empty appearance, an image, and didn’t have a form or substance. This was something Hercules was not used to and for which his above ground prowess was totally unsuited (see Kerényi, 1959).
In Roman/Greek mythology, a journey into the under-world is no Sunday picnic as we are talking about the division of the universe since the beginning of time.
Sword-waving Hercules had to unlearn the ways of the above-world in order to learn the much more subtle ways of the below-world. For it seems, following the ancient texts, that in the realm of the ‘dead,’ only gentle wrestling and stone throwing was of any avail. Hercules so wanted to shed blood but, instead, was challenged to a ghostly wrestle.
The 'gentle wrestling' is a metaphor for the struggles inherent in new learning: the mind-set of looking with new eyes; listening with new ears; exploring the various contexts that give shape to the experience; engaging in new relationships; telling one's stories and; challenging ones taken-for-granted assumptions.
Eventually, after much unlearning, Hades, the king of the under-world, gave Hercules permission to lead the hound with him up into the above-world. The notion of a Cerberus-on-a-leash is suggestive of the interdependency of the two worlds, the two 'orders' of the one system.
How a psychic understanding of a dream is useful in life and in psychotherapy
I’m keen to assert the usefulness of a psychic understanding derived from the psychic experience of a dream. In psychotherapy, it is beneficial to have one eye open to the experiences of being-in-the-world of everyday life and the other eye open to the soul-in-action. Remembering that soul-in-action is a natural human, as it were, every-night experience.
In a real sense we have the capacity to meet the other (the client) on a person-to-person level and on a soul-to-soul level.
The same double-experience is possible, on occasion, in daytime encounters.
The tradition of dream sharing
Dream sharing has been a much-valued experience for family groups and small community gatherings across cultures and across centuries (Tedlock, 1987). In traditional cultures, dreaming and daytime reveries, while distinguished from most daytime experiences, may well not have been sorted out according to the simple oppositional dichotomy of real versus unreal, or reality versus fantasy. Sharing the dream experiences would have helped clarify and maintain a cultural understanding of the nature of reality.
Aliveness
I have canvassed a number of psychological ideas in this presentation and now, in conclusion, I want to focus on experience. There are moments in psychotherapy, in the theatre, in music when we experience an aliveness that is not derived from thinking, from idea but is felt deep in our core, the centre of our being.
This experience of aliveness is what my whole presentation has been working towards. Dwelling in dream imagery whilst doing our best to keep ego interests at bay is the point of all the ideas expressed above.
References
Hillman, J., The Dream and the Underworld, Harper & Row, N.Y., 1979.
Jung, C.G., The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Bollingen Series XX (Vol. 9, #271. Princeton U. Press, Princeton, NJ,
Jung, C.G., The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Bollingen Series XX (Vol. 11, #41. Princeton U. Press, Princeton, NJ,
Jung, C.G., The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Bollingen Series XX (Vol. 12, #439. Princeton U. Press, Princeton, NJ, Kerényi, C., The Greek Heroes: Myth and Man: The Heroes of the Greeks. Thames & Hudson, London, 1959.
Tedlock, B. (Ed.), Dreaming: Anthropological and Psychological Interpretations, U. Cambridge Press, 1987.
Wolkstein D.& Kramer S. N., Harper & Row, N.Y., 1983.
[1] These notes are largely based on my reading of James Hillman’s 1979 book: The Dream and the Underworld.
[2] Hillman, as above.
[3] The term depth psychology bridges two traditions (empirical psychology and psychodynamic psychology) and avoids privileging either one.
