In this edition, I try to reflect on one approach to dream images — influenced by my reading of the archetypal psychology of Patricia Berry and James Hillman. By way of an admittedly crude set-up, I’m interested in a view of images, and their interrelations in a dream, as sufficient in themselves. There is no right or wrong in dreams. There is no repression. There is no mechanically wrought compensation either.
As I see it, “sticking with the image” tries to meet the dream image on its own level. You could visualise this as the levels used to find horizontal lines of sight, for every dream image has its own orientation. However, one image that should occasionally be held in abeyance is the attitude of the dream ego, which is closer to our daytime ego attitude. This approach, sometimes known as Layard’s Rule, states: “Everything in the dream is right except, perhaps, the dream ego1.”
Hermes enters my thinking here, too. This god of dreams and much besides guides us past the dualism and oppositionalism that is our Cartesian cultural inheritance. We often feel we need something else — the opposite of what we have — to remedy a problem. Hermes removes all of that, and we find that what we have, is often more than what we think.
Does an eagle need a toad?
A hypothetical patient dreams of an eagle taking flight. An equally made-up analyst, steeped in alchemical imagery, recalls an image of an eagle tied to a toad and introduces this move into an interpretation of the dream. After all, the flightiness of the eagle needs to be grounded, right? And what could be more down to earth than our toad? Let us assume that our analyst has already decided that the patient is an irresponsible, reckless type — not needing more vim and wind. Our analyst explains that, for the alchemists, volatility needed fixity, and vice versa: the eagle being a likeness of volatility, the toad, fixity. A discussion ensues, and our patient and analyst begin mulling recent experiences in this light.
An eagle needs a toad like a fish needs a bicycle. The fish and the bicycle bit references a 1970s feminist slogan: “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle”. The point is: A woman is self-sufficient. So, with self-sufficiency and independence in mind, what do we know of the eagle or the toad?
An eagle circles — it circumambulates. Interesting. It may fly up to six hours in the thermals, but it does not fly most of the day. That is, it is more or less fixed. Some bald eagles mate for life. That is very, very fixed. Just as Hades, the god of the underworld, shares this animal emblem with his sky brother Zeus, we could say that grounding in verticality is within the eagle.
In a relatively short span, toads have diversified into hundreds of types and spread to every continent save Antarctica. Does this not cast our toad as a world traveller? And not fixed? Some, the Colorado River toad, contain a toxin considered the most febrile hallucinogenic in the world. That is volatile. Indeed, it is the essence of flying! To say nothing of that rare meteorological phenomenon in which flightless animals fall from the sky.
Why Hermes knows a thing or three …
In a well-known story about Hermes, the precocious god, following his cattle rustling, invents a lyre after sizing up a tortoise. As Karl Kerényi, in his Hermes: Guide of Souls, points out: Hermes can “see through” the hermit-like tortoise to a party animal. In him, Hermes, finding and losing are reconciled. Apollo loses his cattle and also gains the lyre. The tortoise dies and also lives on as music and, for that matter, sonic speed. Good things come from bad things, and the other way around.
A Hermes-type psychology dissolves binaries and, thereby, pleases at the same time the gods of the upper and lower regions. “Is it possible that there is a part of you that feels, or thinks, otherwise?” That is a good question for a therapist. One that can build a bridge between black-and-white thoughts or non-matching affects. Another strategy is to conceive of the possibility that the symptom is in sympathy with what the patient seeks: Someone works compulsively to avoid working on what they should be working on. Someone talks incessantly so as not to say anything revealing. Someone appears weak but is flexing their muscle.
Like Hermes, this is all counter-intuitive. It requires an eye for shadow, which isn’t the grafting of compensations2, but a co-emergence or conjunction inherent in all life forms. Everything has everything in it, but it has it specifically. The flighty patient with whom we began might find, in such an interpretation, that flying comes with a sure homing instinct. Their eagle dream doesn’t need to be landed necessarily but is understood as possessed of its own instinctual groundedness — its own spirit level — and it is this that makes flying possible3.
The necessity of frustration
Dreamwork stretches our imaginative capacities to the limit. Hermes’ vision isn’t easy, and sometimes it seems nigh impossible to find the psychic value of difficult dreams with their dark, unnatural images. And, yet, provided we can accept more than a measure of frustration, this is where the best work resides. Earlier, I mentioned that the dream ego’s perspective is the least reliable point of view in the dream — Michael Ortiz Hill writes in Dreaming The End of the World:
Just as we falsely imagine, in our day-to-day lives, that all things revolve around us, so also in dreams do we miss the richness of meaning by over identifying with the dream ego at the expense of other personae. Ultimately, dreams show us that “who one is” is, in fact, plural, a vast community. In entering the dream, the ego enters this community as a member and participant no more important or “real” than the rest.
Dreamwork requires loosening the self as ordinarily constituted to glean the self-world of the other. Thinking of animals in particular, we need to let them out of the cages we keep them in. Ideas have their place — anthropology, mythology, zoology — but in our amplification, we must not forget the phenomenal world of the image. Where is that flaxen eagle? What are those flaming toads doing? This spark of adverbial action and adjectival colour is just one reminder of the particularity of images. In other words, we are forgoing the known — egocentricity, information, meaning — for the unknown: eccentricity, imagination, and presence. To reprise our eagle and toad from the perspective of the unconscious: “What is their need, their reason for coming into our sleep?4” Asking such a question from images, as indeed neuroses and symptoms, makes us responsive to the unconscious.
I therefore maintain that when our dream says “eagle” it means an eagle ~ Jung, CW 13, par. 469
Not always, though. In Rules of Thumb Toward an Archetypal Psychology Practice, Berry stresses: “In some cases — for example, when support or stabilization is a priority — moving against the ego’s perspective is not smart therapeutically.”
Following Hillman, I distinguish between Jung’s compensatory view of dreams and oppositionalism. The former connotes the organic nature of the particular, what we could term: the compendium (“what is weighed together”); the latter, seeing only one-sidedness, necessitates correcting the ego attitude and the dream: “Elements that the dream does not have must be introduced as compensation to the one-sided picture, much as if one were hearing a brass band and asked, ‘but where are the violins?’” (Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld). The difference is not unlike that between homoeopathy’s “like cures like” and opposites treating opposites.
As Michael Vannoy Adams puts it in his discussion of Pegasus in The Mythological Unconscious: “The issue is not ‘flying’ per se but extremism, or high flying.” To which we might add: The issue with humanity’s extremism — eagles are never extreme — is that it is devoid of ecological instinct. “Loss of instinct is the source of endless error and confusion,” counsels Jung (CW 12, par. 174). Thomas Moore provides an example of the spirit level, in a personal reflection, in Ageless Soul: “The paradox was that … it was only later, when I anchored my work in a serious role in society, that my puer spirit soared … at the same time [this spirit] connected me more directly to the world and grounded my life.”
Hillman, Dream Animals.