Gathering a Dream Series

My posture of late has been very forward leaning, as if permanently poised at that place where the barrel gets pulled over the falls.  It’s time to pull to the side of the stream and recollect, to gather a view of the recent series of dream images and attempt to see what patterns they render.

The value of looking at a series of dreams was brought to my attention in Carl Jung’s  Seminar on Dream Analysis.  It’s not a very well know work, but it’s perhaps the best resource I’ve come across to get a handle on the art.  It’s also fabulous because the transcripts of the lectures show Jung in his conversational manner, and in that regard his character emerges from the pages in a both an entertaining and accessible way.

So, a dream series, getting at the unfolding narrative and discovering how the unconscious makes adjustments to its position depending on the moves consciousness makes.  It’s where the regulating aspect, the compensatory action of the dreams truly becomes evident.

So let’s give a go.  The six dreams between “Clearing the Inbox” and “Reviews” that cover December make a series.  The series opens by breaking apart an image of the masculine, putting two extremes in opposition that I recognize as polar to my own.  Through these figures, as if emerging through the space created between them, the main theme of the series emerges:  it is generations. In “Walking to Grandparents House,” “Dining in Seoul” and “Antique Car,” the   The learning from this series gets summed up with the strange car that has one model on the inside and another on the outside.  It’s an image, like the outdoor market within a modern city in ,  which shows how older forms co-exists amidst and within the modern.  Notice that even the bi-plane has me flying in an older form.

So the rouge wave of this series has delivered it’s message, cast up a new understanding into consciousness:  The inner is older than the outer, it’s form progressing at a rate that is in sync with earlier generations.  In that compensatory message, a pull to connect with those patterns, attitudes and approaches.  Within these dreams, along with all the messages I culled from them individually, as a series I hear a call to again walk with my grandfather’s walking stick.