“Fish frequently occur as symbols of the unconscious contents.” Carl Jung, CW VIII, par. 827
“The ambivalent attitude towards the fish is an indication of its double nature. It is unclean on the one hand, but on the other it is an object of veneration. It seems to have been regarded as a symbol for the soul…” Carl Jung, CW IXii, Par. 187.
Fish find themselves swimming through the Gospels and if you pay attention, you might notice them in your dreams as well. Or perhaps you’ll find yourself with fish like qualities, speeding through the depths while mysteriously siphoning oxygen out of the water. And then there’s the whole posture and process that goes with hooking and netting what dwells beneath the surface.
When I’m asked “how do you remember your dreams?” I often respond with the analogy of fishing. Remembering dreams is a bit like catching a fish. You certainly do not catch a fish on every cast, nor on every fishing excursion for that matter. And you’ll never catch a fish if you do not cast a line into the water.
So find a good fishing hole, bring a boat load of patience with some unwavering intent. Then see what happens…the dreams will come, I promise.
What about lures or bait for dreams?
With our attention turned (tropos) toward the dreams there opens a beautiful space of reverie, we again have time to ponder, just as one does while fishing. Question the waters. What’s going on down there? What do the waters have for me tonight? What will my nets drag up?
Indeed, each dream that manages come over the rail of my small boat (crossing the threshold of consciousness) is piece of the soul mystery unfolding through my life. And as the dreams pile up like sardines in my dream journals, it dawns on me that I’m actually the bait.
The regressive draw of the unconscious is a powerful reality. Call it the devouring mother. Call it entropy… I call it the quicksand.
The value of standing amidst the reality that our own psychic system has a tendency toward devouring gets portrayed quite literally in the gospel story of Jesus walking on the water. In the end, stripped of logic and confidence amidst the swirling forces greater than the ego’s ability to control, two simple words become the mantra of perseverance: just believe.
That our conscious lives mirror the unconscious is a fertile idea, if also an elusive one. I gain some insight into the implications when I consider how different people handle similar situations.
For example…the train is late. One person, after an annoyed glance at his watch, gets on his iPhone and begins getting things done. Another woman looks to a fellow commuter and busts out laughing. Down the platform, one guy is so torqued off, that between curses he’s just kicked a steel beam.
While we might attribute the variety of these reactions to styles of consciousness, we might also see in these an indication of the way the unconscious rides each of them. The unconscious is like an unseen partner in the unfolding of our lives. Much of the coloring in the stream of attitudes we live is but a reflection of how the unconscious participates through the prism of our attention.
The Sufi Ibn ‘Arabi developed an extended ocular analogy. The eye absorbs and transmits a mirror image of the world just as the soul relates to the divine. The poet Charles Olson picks up on this theme when he lauds the “eye view” – that particularly human scale of processing reality. While the projective tends to encompass unconscious factors which extend beyond the human frame, the preciousness of consciousness brings a wide variety of psychic factors to our door, all wanting to be known.
The word imaginal was coined by the French philosopher and theologian Henry Corbin last century. It continues to find currency in Jungian as well as poetic circles. While the implications of the world view that admit an imaginal are wide ranging, for the individual it always comes down to the issue of encounter. How do we get in touch with the imaginal?
The biggest impediment seems to be living from a perspective that discredits the existence of the imaginal. Indeed, the current educational system has done a pretty good job removing the imaginal from our world view. While we exercise the faculty of imagination, it remains solely a tool of the ego to posit possibilities.
Encountering the Imaginal
The encounter with the imaginal on the other hand is like stepping into a mythic landscape, walking into a dream, stepping across a spiritual threshold. It relates to the experience of the shaman, each taste fulfilling a deep longing in the human soul for the “Other.”
A wonderful text, both because it’s easy to comprehend and it’s full of useful suggestions is Robert Johnson’s Inner Work: Using dreams and active imagination for personal growth. In it Johnson writes:
“The unconscious is a marvelous universe of unseen energies, forces, forms of intelligence – even distinct personalities – that live within us. It is a much larger realm than most of us realize,one that has a complete life of its own running parallel to the ordinary life we live day to day. The unconscious is the secret source of much of our thought, feeling and behavior. It influences us in ways that are all the more powerful because unexpected.” Robert Johnson, Inner Work, pg. 3
“Fish frequently occur as symbols of the unconscious contents.” Carl Jung, CW VIII, par. 827
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