Quick, what does the word daisy make you think of?
Great. That’s your association. And you can run with that if you’d like until you create another Finnegan’s Wake, that literary masterpiece of free association (Ever see the index cards Joyce used?)
The idea I’d like to introduce here is that which Jung propounded as away of understanding dream images and symbols. It is the idea of amplification. Whereas one association can lead to another and yet another ad infinitum in free association, amplification is a method that purposely prevents the train of free association from leaving the station. It always cycles back to the point of origin in an attempt to shed some insight on the original image or symbol.
Let’s break it down. The process of amplification starts with an image or symbol, perhaps one that confounds you, leaves you wondering what it could mean. The first step is to reach for an association. Then ask, what does that association say about the original symbol? Once we have answered that question, we start the process over again. Returning to the original image we develop a second association and again it is linked back to the original image. The process continues until it is exhausted, creating a daisy petal like pattern of meaningful amplifications of the original image.
(Digression: If dream and symbol dictionaries are to be useful it is in this process, not in providing the interpretation of the dream.)
The value of amplification of any given image is that it can develop a broadened sense of context to the image which in turn can clarify and lead to an effective interpretation of the dream.
Dream: A fire raging on the ground floor of a skyscraper and I’m in the fire department and rushing in with my unit. As we enter a balcony comes crashing down and it seems like some men were under there. We back out of the building quickly. Then watching four men perform a dance marking out a square with their patterns.
Amplification:
Strong affect destroying the ground floor, the effects lethal to some, the building compromised. This frightening image gives way to the geometric dance of the four men, each moving over and over to a different corner in patterns simultaneously replicated by each. Their energy level intense, almost furious. Years ago, I saw an avant garde performance of a piece by Samuel Beckett that had a similar dance in it. Here the idea that comes through: the dance pattern defines a new square for the next building or field of action. I’m reminded of Jung’s quote: “No psychic value can disappear without being replaced by another of equivalent intensity.”
Dream: It’s early on a Saturday morning and I’m standing outside my car along a park in a city. A woman recognizes me and comes over. What are you doing here at this hour? I explain that one of my firms partners tends to tie one on each Friday night and they send me over to help him navigate the last few blocks to his home. While I’m talking she lays across my hood in an awkward way, trying to get the attention of someone across the a park. Looking in that direction I see that construction workers are already on the job fixing fire damage in the top floor of a building on the other side of the park. I then get in the car and drive around the block looking for the senior partner I supposed to help. I get out of the car again and need to violently chop at a substance around my feet with a shovel.
Amplification:
There’s a great deal going on in this dream: the expectation of the wayward senior partner, the woman at the park, the construction workers and the muck at the end. Much of it seems to relate to the experience emerging from this illness. Both the reconstruction and the chopping of the insulation type material at the end clearly relate to the experience of and recovery from the infection. The scenario where I’m up early and sent to be on the lookout for the returning senior partner is an odd one. It’s as if the firm recognizes the risk involved but chooses to let what will be, be. It almost as if the strategy is so they will be able to say down the road, it was such a problem we went so far as to…I sense the woman is somehow signaling to the senior partner who does not want me to see his return, so I decide to take a drive around the block to get out of the way.
Dream- Like a movie watching of a guy on the road, perhaps a trucker, and he’s been separated form his loved one for a few years. It’s clear that the few times they have spoken keeps his spirits up. He tells me “The last time we spoke, about six month’s ago, she said she was fixing the place up real nice…”
Amplification-
The dream speaks of a heroic acceptance of the separation from the loved one, similar to the kind that occurs with soldiers and their families. As I’m not in that situation, the dream seems to be pointing to the inner realm, and the slowing down of dream imagery that has been underway gradually since embracing this medium.
There’s an attitude of resolve to the endurance of the road which this dream is emphasizing, pointing out the hidden cracks in my own resolve as things continue to progress.
The Fix Is In
Tormentor, Evacuation
Give me those dice...
Accessibility and Thirst