Therapy Duo

Psychotherapy & Counselling for Individuals & Couples

Category: Soul & Dream

Articles on Soul and Dream

  • Support from the Inner Realm

    Support from the Inner Realm

    Our Inner Struggles & the Inner Realm

    These are difficult times for us all with the coronavirus. We all feel the need for support, at many levels, when so many certainties about our world have dropped away. Many rely on the internet for much of this support.

    And while there are practical suggestions and community groups that are doing a wonderful job, at another level people may also feel the lack of internal support – support that is available in moments of solitude, moments of family pressure, or during long sleepless nights.

    So here are some ideas for internal support, that occur to us, and that we ourselves use. They are ideas to support your inner, psychological, realm; to help find ways through dark times. We hope they’re useful.

    The Nekyia

    In Jungian thought and in the work of James Hillman the idea of a nekyia or katabasis is explored as a initiatory rite in which the individual is invited (or compelled) to undergo difficult passages or processes that are associated with the underworld, with darkness and with great difficulties.

    Examples from mythology abound: Jonah in the belly of the whale, Persephone’s time in the underworld, Psyche’s descent into the underworld to be re-united with Eros.

    Hillman says (in his book The Dream and the Underworld, p47):

    Being in the underworld means psychic being … where soul comes first.

    So there is perhaps a way to revision these dark, difficult times as invitations to travel into the dark places within ourselves, and to explore these places. To question, What is soul for us? What resides there?

    What can sustain us and what can we learn from this period in which we may not be able to get our outer world needs met – connection, control, money, desire? What can replace partying, travel, shopping or eating out in our favourite restaurant?

    Traditionally, the nekyia is an initiatory experience, a process that differs significantly from a heroic conquest. Although the person undertaking the underworld journey returns, they return as a different person (with perhaps more understanding of the idea of soul). One foot may forever after remain in the underworld. Their psychological world has deepened permanently.

    Ram Dass and the Witness

    The witness place inside you is simple awareness, the part of you that is aware of everything — just noticing, watching, not judging, just being present, being here now. – Ram Dass, Polishing the Mirror.

    The witness is another layer of consciousness, one untroubled by our incessant anxious thinking layer. It is an awareness of our own thoughts, feelings, and emotions. For some, staying as the witness can be a powerful practice, a way out of the maze of attachments to worldly concerns.

    Although there are many awareness and mindfulness practices on the web, Ram Dass’s own Cultivating the Witness can be one of the most powerful.

    G.K. Chesterton and Allowing Mystery

    An approach that may have power for some is to reflect upon the fact that we are all surrounded by mysteries – ones far greater than those of which we can be aware.

    There is no need for religious or spiritual beliefs here (though these are not excluded): our senses detect only a small proportion of the energy systems within which we are immersed. Although our scientific instruments vastly extend these ranges, they are merely devices for converting these extra-sensory ranges into what is amenable to the human.

    We use, for example, sonar, radar, and wifi for these purposes. Dogs hear way more than we do! And telepathic experiments leads us to believe we may be interconnected at very subtle levels.

    For some, to know that day and night we are surrounded by mystery, is a solace.

    dies noctesque mysteria circumdata
    dies noctesque mysteria circumdata (day and night surrounded by mysteries) **

    G.K. Chesterton wrote about this in his 1908 book Orthodoxy:

    As long as you have mystery you have health.

    The morbid logician seeks to make everything lucid, and succeeds in making everything mysterious. The mystic allows one thing to be mysterious, and everything else becomes lucid.

    (You can read the full quote here.)

    As an analogy, Chesterton speaks of the sun:

    The one created thing which we cannot look at is the one thing in the light of which we look at everything.

    (All quotations are from G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy.)

    Whatever difficulties we experience in the outer world, all of this rests on a far greater mystery than we can possibly envision.

    Easwaran and the Mantram

    The mantram (or mantra) is a tried-and-true device for drowning out the incessant chatter of a troubled mind. Traditionally, spiritual gurus gave specific mantras to their students. However, it can sometimes be a powerful practice to take our own short phrase or sentence that provides comfort, and to repeat this quietly in times of stress. Our anxious mind takes a break, as we rest into words that soothe.

    Eknath Easwaran wrote a beautiful book called The Mantram Handbook which discusses in detail how one can arrive at a mantram that is personal and powerful.

    In the introduction to this book, the neuroscientist Daniel H. Lowenstein says:

    From studies using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), we know that concentrating on a short phrase will activate specific areas in the front and side of the brain. These areas, the frontal and parietal lobes, are involved in selective attention – the capacity to maintain a single focus despite the presence of distracting stimuli. In this way, the mental repetition of a simple phrase like a mantram can provide a guidewire to move your attention away from a troubling stream of thoughts. It is as though the mantram provides access to a peaceful, grounded center that puts our cravings, drives, and other immediate needs in perspective.

    We recommend Easwaran’s book as a practical guide for choosing a mantram. Easwaran also gives examples of mantra from Eastern and Western spiritual disciplines, and advice on how to make the mantram you choose go deep into your subconscious, replacing anxiety-creating thoughts and energies.

    Serenity Prayer

    Sometimes simple is best!

    God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
    courage to change the things I can,
    and wisdom to know the difference.

    See more on the serenity prayer on the Serenity Prayer wikipedia page.

    Gratitude Practice

    It is easy to miss what we can still be grateful for in troubled times. We are all an integral part of nature and respond deeply to other parts of nature – such as ever-changing clouds in a blue or a dark sky; to the beauty of rain falling, leaves on a tree (even when seen only from our window).

    We can be grateful for our loved ones, for the abilities of our bodies, for the food we can still eat, for the legions of essential service personnel who are putting themselves on the line every day at the moment, to help us be safer. We can be grateful for art and for music. We can be grateful for our breath.

    We can reflect on how grateful we are for these things, to not let them go unnoticed. And we can also choose to share our gratitude with others.

    * From Ron’s folio Notes to a Nekyia.
    ** From Ron’s folio postcards from cerebria.

  • Couples Work and “The Third”

    Couples Work and “The Third”

    Couples Work as More than Conflict Resolution

    At Therapy Duo, in Couples therapy, we often take a psycho-educational role and offer very practical tips for resolving couple conflicts. But we are also always aware of another level operating in the couple relationships we see.

    This level can be hard to pin down and define, and yet we as therapists often have a real sense of its presence and how it might be accessed further to transform a relationship. In this blog post we will try to say a little about this other level (“the third”).

    The Legacy of Scientific Thinking

    Culturally and educationally, society is swayed by a scientific view of things. The rise of science since the end of the seventeenth century has been extraordinary, and no-one would deny the tremendous gains that have come from this.

    Science is an exacting lens on nature, a champion of the “cause and effect” paradigm (i.e. that all effects have causes, which are previous to them in time). Science has brought about amazing devices such as our computers and smartphones.

    It’s interesting to note though, that at about the time of the beginning of the rise of science, another world view was dying out in the West. This was the world of (Western) alchemy, and it works in an opposite direction to science.

    While science was starting to become a study of material life, and how matter changes over time (by a disembodied subject), alchemy was always a science of the soul.  Although some still see alchemy as just a primitive version of chemistry, other current thinking is that in fact they were diametrically opposed disciplines, in their intended goals, operating within two markedly different paradigms.

    Science wants to (and has been very successful at) demarcating a split between subject and object. It enables subjects (people) to successfully manipulate objects (nature). Yet, with science we are at a crossroads now: this process cannot continue unabated without destroying the earth, through climate change and species extinction. We could say that science has been a victim of its extraordinary success.

    Alchemy: The Other Discipline

    Some commentators are now starting to look closely at Western alchemy again, and to wonder whether in fact we threw too much out when we assigned it to the dustbin of history.

    For what was it trying to do? Alchemy insisted that subject and object are always linked (evidence that quantum physics is now corroborating); that soul exists as an inner life that moves by its own rules, independent of cause and effect, independent of time. That synchronicities exist, and that they order reality. And that this discipline is a proper subject for psychology (for psyche, soul).

    For soul, cause and effect are irrelevant. What is deeply relevant to soul is relationships, and the quality of relationships. (These relationships can be between parts of a single person, between people, or between a person and the so-called material realm – the environment.)

    For this reason Western alchemy talked at length about opposites, their combinations and their resolutions as transformative processes.

    The Subtle Body in Alchemy

    Alchemy liked to keep this idea of relationship living by considering the subtle body. This was the third element, the realm between two opposites (such as matter and soul, subject and object, two people in a relationship) and it had a reality as an intermediate realm.

    While this may sound obscure and unlikely, it is good to remember the words of Claude Levi-Strauss on the dangers of dominant thought systems:

    Every civilisation tends to overestimate the objective orientation of its thought and this tendency is never absent. (The Savage Mind, p3.)

    Relationship as “The Third”

    We have written on this blog in the past about the value in seeing that any couple have the relationship itself as “The Third”. (Here, for example, on The Life of The Relationship as a third entity. Or here, in relation to neurobiology: relationship itself is a third reality.)

    We are suggesting again in this post that there is good evidence for taking the concept of “The Third” very seriously in couples work. We see this play out in the therapy room sometimes when two people, who have been attacking each other (and continually defending themselves), are able to “stand aside” and watch the life of “The Third”, in the room, at that moment – and for them to realise that they have this important Third on which mutually to work – which is the Relationship itself!

    We in the therapy room can then sometimes all detect a change that happens; there is a sense of rightness and of hope for transformation. Which, of course, was what alchemy was all about, the transformation of opposites to form a higher state, neither inner nor outer (which science would insist be one or the other!) but of a third realm: the “subtle body” of the relationship.

    …they have this important Third on which mutually to work – which is the Relationship itself!

    Relationships Under Duress

    We could argue that due to our very scientifically-oriented culture we are sometimes doing relationships under duress. There is potentially a large part of the world of relationships for which an effective language of discourse no longer exists. And the right words are often needed before the deeper experience can be had.

    It may be better to stand back in couples work, from love vs hate, attack vs defense, good vs evil, mind vs body, left-brain vs right-brain, love vs power, and sit with the alchemical idea of essence, something that pervades all of reality and connects the opposites; something that can have real presence in couples work if it is allowed in.

    Couples work could then be a microcosm of what we must also do collectively in the outer world, as we find new paradigms to save the planet from destruction; paradigms that see ourselves as part of the one subtle body of nature, rather than as subjects exploiting nature.

    Schwartz-Salant on the Alchemical Paradigm

    Here are two quotations from Nathan Schwartz-Salant’s The Mystery of Human Relationships, speaking of the alchemical attitude in relational therapy:

    …one becomes focused upon relations, on the nature of the ‘third realm’ between people, and not on what people are doing to one another. …A major principle of the alchemical attitude is that it is not hierarchical. No matter how much one person seems to be doing something negative or objectionable to another, one still looks for the ‘unconscious couple’ the two people share. (p17)

    Another major feature of the alchemical attitude is the respect for chaos. In a sense alchemical thinking parallels the recent discoveries in Chaos Theory in science….chaos has always been central to alchemy. The alchemical attitude learns to embrace and suffer chaos without reaching into reason to dispel and dissociate from it. Moreover, the alchemical attitude recognises a transcendent dimension of existence without which the process of transformation cannot proceed. (p17)

    (We plan to tease out these ideas further, in future pages on the site, when we discuss the alchemical work Rosarium Philosophorum.)

    The Image: Plate 2 of the Rosarium Philosophorum

    The image at the top of this post is Plate 2 of the Rosarium Philosophorum, an alchemical text that was a favourite of C.G. Jung, and that describes stages in a relational alchemical process (either between two people, or between two parts of an individual).

    Plate 2 shows the start of the process. (There are 20 plates.) The image is sometimes referred to as the “Left-handed Contact”, because the couple hold hands with their left hand: they are unconscious of much of their connection (a situation which can be fraught with difficulties).

    We say in this situation that the Family of Origin issues that the two people have brought into the relationship are alive and activated (and are often out of the awareness of both people).

    Yet, some kind of structure is already in place (the crossed branches), and a holy dove is shown descending: some kind of illumination is possible, but is not yet in effect between the persons of the relationship. There is hope!

  • What is Soul? … and Does it Matter?

    What is Soul? … and Does it Matter?

    The Material World – Where and What is Soul?

    Ours is said to be an age predominantly of materialism. We’ve deconstructed so many stories and beliefs and, with the aid of science, have commonly settled on the view that the world is dead matter and available for use in almost any way.

    A problem is that this “use” knows no limits – it is not sustainable. It has been proposed that in forty years there will be more plastic in the ocean than fish.

    What about the idea of soul? Is it an outmoded idea or one that still has value? This post offers some views on soul as an antidote to materialism, and as highly relevant to contemporary life.

    Myth

    We are used to hearing the word “myth” as synonymous for “commonly held erroneous belief” and are in danger of losing an older, possibly less comfortable view of the word. We meet this older view when we talk about, and dialogue with, the Greek and other ancient myths.

    We can think of this older view of “myth” as non-material fact – as living fact, as what takes place outside of the material realm. This realm is the psychic, the poetic.

    Clothed in facts
    truth feels oppressed,
    in the garb of poetry
    it moves easy and free. (Rabindranath Tagore)

    Terrible things can happen in myths, and it’s understandable that we might want to defend against the dark worlds they can present. Materialism can be seen as a defense against these realms, a way to live without fear.

    There is a view that we ignore myths at our peril, because they speak of a largely non-rational, unconscious side of ourselves that leaves us ungrounded if we do not explore it. We can see soulmaking for what we do when we inquire into this side of ourselves, so that no longer “truth feels oppressed”.

    Myth is story, and story can be lived through, can be a way in which soul finds and nurtures itself in chaotic life. As James Hillman says:

    Platonists long ago and Jung more recently pointed out the therapeutic value of the great myths for bringing order to the chaotic, fragmented aspect of fantasy. The main body of biblical and classical tales directs fantasy into organized, deeply life-giving psychological patterns…(from A Note on Story, in Loose Ends)

    The Storyteller & Trauma

    Donald Kalsched, in his book Trauma and the Soul, speaks of the image at the top of this post: an Inuit bone carving of The Storyteller. Kalsched says about The Storyteller (relating to how we can work with trauma):

    With one eye closed, focused on the inner worlds of dreams and the mytho-poetic images of the imagination, and one eye open, focused outwardly on the hard edges of material reality… [the carving] gives dramatic expression to the two worlds that I feel must be kept in view if a genuine and compelling story of trauma is to be told.

    This reverence for the mytho-poetic realm, in the service of healing trauma, is Kalsched’s way of talking about and working with soul.

    Reverie

    Gaston Bachelard in his Poetics of Reverie (in the chapter Reveries Toward Childhood) makes the distinction between soul and mind:

    As soon as the past is situated within a network of human values, within the inner values of a person who does not forget, it appears with the double force of the mind that remembers and the soul that feasts upon its faithfulness. The soul and the mind do not have the same memory… It is only when the soul and the mind are united in a reverie by the reverie that we benefit from the union of imagination and memory. In such a union we can say that we are reliving our past. Our past being imagines itself living again.

    Bachelard argues for an imaginative basis for our lives and for the relationship to our memories. Soul is like a fabric woven from these memories into a living reverie that eschews the material, that becomes a safeguard against it – a “soul that feasts”.

    Hillman and the Soul Perspective

    James Hillman was a strong advocate for the recovery of a soul perspective in contemporary psychotherapy. He defined soul as follows:

    By soul I mean, first of all, a perspective rather than a substance, a viewpoint toward things rather than a thing itself. This perspective is reflective; it mediates events and make differences between ourselves and everything that happens. Between us and events, between the doer and the deed, there is a reflective moment—and soulmaking means differentiating the middle ground. (Re-visioning Psychology)

    Hillman’s middle ground lies between the mystery of ourselves and the material realm. This is the “reflective moment”, that is captured in all creative acts, no matter how humble. (And later in his career, Hillman also spoke more about anima mundi, “soul in the world”; that matter is itself ensouled.)

    Ultimate Concern

    Another lens on soul is that of Paul Tillich, who wrote of the concept of ultimate concern.

    We can each ask ourselves “What is my ultimate concern?” and sit with the answers that come (or may not immediately come). For Tillich, this question allows a investigation into the dynamics of personal life. To have an ultimate concern was his definition of faith (which he said applied to people who were atheists as well as believers).

    We all (except the very psychologically unwell) have some ultimate concern, and finding out what this is can guide us. We can see his question and the process of exploring the answer as another path to soulmaking.

    Tillich also spoke of the “ecstatic”. This beautiful word encapsulates the idea of standing outside ourselves, yet still being present to ourselves. We are like the Storyteller (the carving above) who can open and close each eye in turn, getting new and different views of himself. We can make soul from both the outer and the inner worlds.

    Creating Our Own Cultures

    We need to create our own, personal cultures of soul. These could inhabit dark, unseen places. As Clark Strand says:

    If someone asked me why I rise and walk at night, I couldn’t answer except to say I do it for its own sake, for the sake of rising and walking and praying in the dark. ..It creates its own culture on the soul. But in the last hundred years, that inner culture – that soul space – has become increasingly well lit. (Waking Up to the Dark)

    We are looking for pointers – meaningful depths, and meaningful to the depths already within ourselves – whatever these might look like or whether they might potentially be judged by others. The place in which we ensoul our lives might be secret, hidden from the light of day.

    Hillman And Suicide

    For James Hillman writing about suicide, the tragedy of a bodily suicide might be the end result of a life in which the person defended against the multiple and progressive symbolic suicides that the psyche yearned to take, in creating a life more dedicated to soul – but was unable to take due to egoic adherences to materialism.

    If these healing, multiple, symbolic suicides had been able to occur over  an extended period, then the tragic, literal, bodily suicide may not have needed to take place.

    The biography of the soul concerns experience. It seems not to follow the one-way direction of the flow of time, and it is reported best by emotions, dreams, and fantasies. (Suicide and the Soul)

    Play

    And we must not forget play. As Hillman says (Suicide and the Soul again) “The soul imagines and plays” and “We cannot get a soul history through a case history.”

    This thought is echoed in a beautiful poem by Rabindranath Tagore:

    On the seashore of endless worlds is the great meeting of children.

    Tempest roams in the pathless sky, ships are wrecked in the trackless water, death is abroad and children play. (From On the Seashore)

    An Undefinable

    Soul is what always remains – after we’ve dealt with the mundane requirements of commerce, with our survival and with our status in the social world.

    It is the experience of ourselves as free creatures, able to turn to what draws us out into the world, into company with others, yet also into inner, possibly hidden, creative worlds – in whatever form they may take.

    In our soulmaking we are attempting to express something related to an essential part of ourselves, that wants to live fully; to express an ineffable sense that we cannot ever really define, but choose nonetheless to label with that old-fashioned word soul.

  • Dogs in Dreams and Reverie

    Dogs in Dreams and Reverie

    The Irrepressible Dog

    Living in the city we see daily the reverence and attention that people give to their dogs. At our nearby harbour-side dog park there’s rich energy – frivolous, wild, serious things happen between the dogs down there (and between their owners!).

    Despite our lives becoming increasing embedded in the infrastructures of the city and technology, dogs seem to draw their owners into another realm.

    We’re deeply connected to dogs in some ways… as James Hillman pointed out: “those incisors in our own mouths are canines”. The dog is a domesticated contemporary of the ancient wolf – yet still sufficiently natural, unrepressed and direct in its action to both please with its licks and shock with its inappropriate sniffs!

    In this post we’d like to explore the dog as symbol and dogs in dreams; in our own dreams, and in the dreams of others. It’s the first post in a new blog category: Soul and Dream. We’ll post more in this category in the future.

    A Living Presence

    The Gestalt way with the dog as dream figure, as with all dreams figures, is to avoid defining the symbol. There’s no cooky-cutter answer to what a dream dog “means” – it’s your dog (if it’s your dream) and we can choose to see it as a living presence, within the night-time theatrical production that is your dream.

    We can enquire as to why such a presence occurs, and what its part is in the drama that’s playing out.

    Maybe you can role-play (or roll-play) your dream dog, see what s/he wants from you. If we take the dreamer as the holder of day-world consciousness then what other aspects of you are being constellated in your dream dog, and possibly want attention?

    Jung and Dogs

    Let’s also take into account dogs from an archetypal and mythological perspective. Dogs have a rich and ancient history as mythological presence.

    In Wikipedia, the category Mythological Dogs extends to 76 pages, from the well-known three-headed Cerberus to the lesser known but intriguing English Church Grim.

    Here’s Jung, referring to a patient’s mandala, in which three dogs run around a centre:

    The dogs represent consciousness “scenting” or “intuiting” the unconscious…It is as if the dogs were fascinated by the centre although they cannot see it. They seem to represent the fascination felt by the conscious mind.

    Is our dream dog “scenting” something we’re missing? …Tapping in to another way of see our current situation, a way that harks back to our unconscious wolf past, that is still a real part of us (and may be blocked from awareness by the “infrastructure” of either the City, or of our own sense of a constructed identity)?

    And Jung again, on the myth of Diana and Actaeon:

    The appearance of Diana necessarily brings with it her hunting animal the dog, who represents her dark side. Her darkness shows itself in the fact that she is also a goddess of destruction and death, whose arrows never miss.

    She changed the hunter Actaeon, when he secretly watched her bathing, into a stag, and his own hounds, not recognizing him, thereupon tore him to pieces.

    The dark dog brings about the “destruction” of the hunter. In what ways does a “hunter” attitude sometimes have to be be deconstructed, ripped apart, chewed over and assimilated in an unexpected way?

    Hillman & The Naturalistic Fallacy

    James Hillman studied animals in dreams for many years. He found that in most animal dreams the dreamer is trying to eradicate the animal, and/or the dreamer is seeing the animal as more dangerous than it turns out to be.

    We need to remember the potential conflict between a dreamer and his/her dream figures: and wonder what the other dream figures may have to offer us, in the dream production.

    Hillman used the term naturalistic fallacy to indicate the situation where the dreamer, in fight or flight, stands opposed to a natural element (in this case, the dog) in the dream, and believes the dreamer’s position to be correct …

    Or the dreamer sees a dog that looks sick as actually sick, and indicating a bad state of affairs in general.

    (Instead, we could wonder what it would be like to nurture ourselves as such an animal: maybe that’s what the dog part of us needs, to be taken to bed with an easy-to-read book and a food “treat”.)

    A dreamer dreams:

    We are happy in the kitchen, preparing a meal. Then my father-in-law says there’s an unwell dog in the lounge. We go into the lounge and a small fluffy dog is looking sick, lying down, in a huge puddle of very yellow pee. My father-in-law says there is far too much pee, and we have to look after the dog.

    The dreamer’s reflections were that he was surprised that he had a caring father-in-law part of himself (that felt empathy for the dog) and that he had a dog-part at all! A dog that needed some kind of attention, a little fluffy dog that was low to the ground.

    He began to see the pond of pee as a yellow traffic light, alerting him to this dog part of himself that he needed to take more notice of and nurture – a gentle part, non-complaining, but also somewhat lonely.

    Moving the Dream On – Active imagination

    Here’s an example of a dream where the naturalistic fallacy could have blocked a realisation for the dreamer. A fragment of the dream is as follows:

    I’ve been given a gift in some kind of ritual and now have to leave a place like Versailles with the gift held close to my chest and wrapped in a blanket. But as I pass through a vast courtyard there is a huge angry dark dog as high as an apartment block barking at me. Luckily I realise it’s behind a huge plate glass window and it can’t get me. I hurry away.

    Using Jung’s technique of active imagination to “dream the dream onwards”, the dreamer found that he could imagine, with some trepidation, that plate glass window being removed. He had no idea whether the dog would now annihilate him.

    But instead, the dog began bounding around him, circling him with joy, it’s huge ears flapping and its huge tongue hanging out! A bit like Jeff Koon’s Puppy.

    It had become a joyous god, and the dreamer realised he could be more joyous about the gift he had been given in the palace. He realised that blocking his joy meant it tended to come out as rage.

    Man’s Best Friend

    Of course, dogs have always been known as “man’s best friend”. In fact, for some people, a dog is their one-and-only friend. The dog as pet is loyal, playful, forgiving, holds no grudges, and is always ready for a walk!

    Some people speak of the dog they had as a child as their deepest love, their truest companion. Dogs too are researchers, hunters, investigating the scents of the locale. They are pack animals too, that both lead and follow…

    A woman dreamed as follows:

    I am riding in a small plastic car and suddenly the car turns into a small dog. We are being swallowed up by a cave in the road and it is filled with water. The dog seems to be leading me down and into the cave and I have to hang on. I can hear the voices of other woman down there in the inky water.

    For this woman the dog was a constant companion that was able to lead her somewhere she thought was dangerous, but had the voices of woman she did not yet know (but could meet as other parts of herself, parts conversant with the underworld).

    James Hillman’s 5 Messages about Dogs

    In his paper You Dirty Dog! James Hillman gives us 5 messages about dogs, and these are worth summarising as lenses through which we can learn more about the dogs that appear to us in our dreams. His messages are:

    1 – We Touch Nature via Depression

    Melancholy, the Black Dog, being dog-tired, being thrown to the dogs, continually digging up bones to find the cause of depression… we touch our animal natures in this way; we revert to the pre-verbal. The sad dog may have a treasure to give us.

    2 – Dogs Carry the Ancestors

    The domesticated dog can be a way for us to come to our wild ancestors, to wolves, dingoes, jackals, mad meat-eating ancestral packs. In their realms are held the terrors of childhood, of abuse, of voracious and wild appetites. Dogs in dreams are mediators for and guides into these realms of anarchy and beastly terror. Guardians as well.

    3 – Follow the Ways of Nature

    The dog that eats raw meat, that pisses where it wishes, that knows of no artificiality, no ideologies, no romantic love, that keeps its nose to the ground: a foil to our sometimes haughty human aspirations.

    4 – Nature Loves Bones

    The dog can’t help loving the bones, or anything that looks like it. Burying them, digging them up, dealing in limbs that have been stripped of essentials (flesh). Dogs can take the forensic pathologist’s view, the precise dissection.

    As Hillman says, in ancient Egypt, where the jackal nightly prowled among the tombs, the god of the dead was Anubis, the jackal:

    Imagine! A close relative of Anubis asleep at the foot of your bed. The dog’s delectation with bones ranges far wider than Egypt.

    5 – The Bringer of Death

    As we mentioned above, the dog has always been related to the underworld. Cerberus is the Hound of Hell, and dogs know when death is near.

    In our culture, the division between death and life is very distinct. Life is meant to be clean and pure; hence death is seen as unclean and rotting. The dog can be the modern reminder that death goes on beneath the surface, that ageing and entropy, despite all our expensive attempts to prevent it, is the truth. In what ways are we defending against this truth, and is our dream dog actually speaking this truth?

    To Finish…

    We encourage you to not take fright or flight from your dogs in dreams, irrespective of what they look like and what they do in your dream.

    Instead welcome them as potential bringers of another, possibly more earthy, point of view – a point of view that can extend the range of possibilities of consciousness.

    References

    • C.G. Jung, Collected Works Vol 9 (Part 1): Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious
    • C.G. Jung, Collected Works Vol 14: Mysterium Coniunctionis
    • James Hillman, “Let the Creatures Be: A Conversation with Thomas Moore” in Animal Presences
    • James Hillman, “You Dirty Dog!” in Animal Presences.