Re-alignment through the shadow

Dreams Unfolding

I’m trying to get a story down in my laptop in a hospital room.  I look over and the patient has fallen out of bed.  I rush over and in the sheets I find a guy I grew up with.  He’s in a great deal of pain from an operation, perhaps prostate related.  I pick him up and place him back in the bed.

Then watching a hot air balloon come crashing down to earth, the fabric on fire.  I rush to where the basket landed on the bank of a river.  The guy is unconscious.  He might be dead.  As others arrive I go to call 911.  I find it hard to communicate to the dispatcher the details of the accident.  The words seem to catch in my chest.  I finally say he’s got many broken bones.  I return to the crash site, but the guy is now brushing the dust off, like it was nothing…

Then I’m taking the car into the shop for repairs.  The mechanic says “you know this could take ten days.”

my response:

Entering with this dream back into the zone that Jung calls the shadow.  A few months back in a dream, this same guy from my youth was killed in a car accident and it was followed by a church scene with some profound preaching.  Yet here he emerges again, this time after surgery, wounded in the groin, disorientated, but on the mend.  His reemergence sets the stage for a different figure, one less personal, that crashes in a fiery hot air balloon. Both scenes have a similar pattern of apparent death, then the unexpected revival.  

What’s interesting is how far off I am in my response to the crash.  My response to the archetypal elements is in a sense, too human.  Stress, the type that cripples functioning, interferes with my ability to report what has happened.  Then, returning to the scene it turns out my response completely inappropriate.  Hmm…So let’s try to get at what is being served up here.  It’s a pretty full plate.  The issues of inflation, deflation, resurrection, reanimation, and healing.

Writing about the shadow, Marie von Franz writes “To have the courage to accept a quality which one does not like in oneself, and which one has chosen to repress for many years, is an act of great courage.  But if one does not accept the quality, then it functions behind one’s back.”

Archetypes are not constrained by the limitations of time and space, life and death: the hallmarks of a human life.  To approach these forces with a too human attitude represents an inflation.  The dream shows those forces crashing, coming down too my level.  My sense is that in the dream is trying to demonstrate what is behind my own inflation, showing here the force I identify with.  

The repair shop will be needed to bring about a proper alignment.  The inconvenience of this will be as if the car were stuck in the repair shop for two weeks.  In the language of car repairs, it’s a big job.  The task will focus on the weakness, experienced here when trying to place the 911 call, that emerges in the times of crisis.  If the work moves forward from here, an appropriate relationship to the shadow could develop.