Dream Analysis: The Sphinx

A few weeks ago, I wrote about peacemaking and touched on a conflict I’d had with a loved one. Though the situation was resolved in the conscious realm, it wasn’t resolved in my personal unconscious. Like many (if not most) conflicts, the conflict arose out of the deep ore of our respective undergrounds.

The encounter with my loved one generated a lot of energy in me. I felt a lot of emotion, while my loved one seemed unmoved. At one point in the day, when I confronted her, she turned a face of horrifying blankness and impassivity toward me. In the moment of feeling that horror, I knew I had some work to do.

Fascinated

I found myself fascinated with my own level of horror, because strong emotion is always an indicator of strong meaning, and often of a large opportunity to do more inner work. I appreciate my emotions; they are friends, guides, and John the Baptists, crying out, “Prepare ye the way!” So, when I felt this shock of horror in myself, as I said, I became fascinated with it.

The word “fascinate” comes from the Latin, fascinare, meaning to cast a spell on. Its root is fascinum, which is an evil spell or a phallic-shaped amulet. The symbolism alone is worth noting: the phallus is creativity, it is reproduction, it is also rather ugly and frightening. When we use the word “fascinate,” or see someone caught in the thrall of an event or behavior, we can be sure that something creative is happening in the inner kindgom, regardless of what appears to be true. I think that the possibility that the real, alive self is manifesting through the fascinum ought to be kept in mind whenever we see energetically driven, repetetive behavior.

The day I felt that horror wash over me, if I had screamed out in horror like a person in a spook house, or shrieked as one watching a horror movie, it would have perfectly expressed my feelings at that moment of seeing her frozen, blank face.

The Dream

A week later, I dreamed about this blankness. I dreamed that I had been away from home and returned to discover that one of my prized heirlooms, a rare vase inherited from my grandmother, had been broken as our children ran through the house playing. In the room with me, staring at the shattered vase, were three of my adult daughters, Ivy, Larkspur, and Marigold*.

“Who did this?!” I demanded. “Who broke this vase?!” Lark and Mari pointed at Ivy. “We just got here; she was babysitting and this happened while she was babysitting.”

I leveled an angry glare at Ivy. “What was going on? Why were the kids allowed to run through the house like that?” I demanded. But Ivy turned away from me and showed her back. This aggravated me even more, and I grabbed her shoulder with an insistent hand to stop her from walking away.

“Ivy!” I cried, trying to get her attention. She turned toward me and I saw that her face was a frozen mask, inhuman and impassive in the way of the Sphinx. Her eyes were an ethereal gold, nearly without pupils. Her entire look was that of a person in a trance or one possessed.

I felt angry, but immediately began to pretend that I didn’t feel angry. I began to say, “Something’s wrong,” trying to get the cooperation of my other daughters to help this sudden victim. My real anger and outrage at having left the other children in charge of one who was so unaware was there still, but I shoved it down like pie in a pie-eating contest, willing myself not to vomit it back up. I didn’t want to feel the horror, the rage, the sadness, and the disappointment. I didn’t want to see what was true or real. I immediately went into “helper” mode and began to help, at the expense of my own soul.

I woke up feeling horrified at myself; I carried that dream around for several days. I knew that I would be helped to understand the dream when I was ripe to be helped. So I waited.

While waiting, I continued to ruminate on the contents of the dream. Finally, I was able to get someone who has been helpful in the past to listen to my dream, along with two other dreams I’d had this week. My interpreter for the consciousness impaired was a big help by pointing out what I have hidden from myself and asking me to decipher my own code. This type of honesty and help is priceless, and I don’t take it for granted.

Dream analysis is about finding what we have hidden from ourselves. I can best illustrate how this is done by showing you how it works with the dreams of actual people; in this case, myself. How do I find the hidden, lost things within myself? I try to remain aware every day of the location of the clues that will lead me to the truth inside me. Like the rest of us, I dream about what is unconscious; I project my stuff onto others through blame (the pointing “you!” finger); and sometimes I somaticize truth I don’t want to see. I work at finding truth, because the truth will set me free. And I get help finding it, because I need the help. No one is conscious or aware about his or her unconscious contents, by definition. “Ye have eyes, but ye cannot see.” It’s like that.

I believe that this life is (in part, anyway) about finding what is lost, hidden, and in the darkness. This is what Jesus Christ taught, and it’s what Buddha and every other great spiritual example has taught, as far as I know. They came to seek and to save that which is lost, and to help us seek and save that which is lost. And sister or brother, let me tell you, it is human and normal to lose ourselves and to have to work a lifetime to find ourselves again.

Making Darkness Conscious

One of my favorite quotes of Carl Jung is this one:

One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making darkness conscious. The latter procedure, however, is disagreeable and therefore not popular. (C. G. Jung, Collected Works 13, para. 335).

What Jung meant by this, among other things, was that we’re not likely to look out there into the everyday world and find many people, if any, who are making darkness conscious. It’s so disagreeable, this work, that we would much prefer to keep it unconscious by projecting it onto others or somaticizing it, which I’ve written about before here and there.

The day I had the conflict with my loved one, I perceived layers of reality because (thank God in heaven) I’ve suffered and learned enough by now that I can be aware most of the time that nothing is as it seems. There are multitudes of layers and nuances of meaning in every single human interaction. We are as fascinating as the day is long, but most of us don’t know it because we’re so dead to so much of ourselves.

The day of my conflict, I saw deadness on the face of someone I love. It horrified me because I saw that she had chosen deadness and impassivity as her solution to suffering. I knew she was suffering; but it took lengthy discussion, sprinkled with love, before she could admit to her suffering. But I knew it was there, because I Know Things ^TM. I know that impassive also means “not subject to suffering,” and that people only go dead and impassive when they are working like crazy to avoid their pain.

I also know that any time, any time my own passion and energy rise, I too am a contributing member of the conflict or situation. I have hidden stuff that needs to be outed; I have shadow contents that are vibrantly alive and enthusiastically trying to get my attention. I, too, was part of this drama. So I asked my self, “What’s up with you? What do you have to say to me?”

Most people, I’ve learned, don’t know how to talk to themselves, and really don’t know how to listen when their selves answer. They don’t practice solitude the way Buddhists practice, or the way the ancient desert fathers practiced. They “do” meditation, they “do” yoga, they “do” journaling, they “do” tai chi, they “do” prayer, they “do” sitting under a tree, thinking. By this I mean that we do all sorts of activities that lead to nothing more than an egotistical pat on the back (yay, me!) that supports the illusion that we’ve done something real to get in touch with a real self, when in fact we’ve merely supported the persona in its attempts to look good. Once again, we’ve lied to and tricked ourselves.

Realness

We know we fool ourselves because when Jesus really and intentionally went out into the the wilderness alone, in solitude he met the devil, he was fed by angels, and he came back to the world and changed it. When Buddha really and intentionally sat under the bodhi tree, he insisted that he wouldn’t budge until he was enlightened, and so it happened. Buddha came back to the world and changed it. Real solitude with the real self creates real change. If you think that your so-called practice is doing anything real, ask for a reality check from the people who know you best. Ask them if they are catching a more or less real vibe from you; ask them if they intuit or feel the real you, or a sad substitute. Ask them. They’ll not lie, if you’ve collected any sort of honest, alive people around you (and if you haven’t, love yourself and get thee hence to an analyst).

Realness is self-evident. Depth psychologists tell us that realness it is always accompanied by humility, unpredictability, vibrancy, numinosity, and what I call “the magic.” It is not something we can fully contain or control, which is why we say we have this treasure in earthen vessels. I use this Bible verse in my sidebar because I need a constant reminder that this treasure is confounding, it’s not something one expects to find in people like us, or even in this world. But it’s here.

The Shadow Knows

During the conflict with my loved one, I knew that the degree of horror I felt at her appearance of impassivity, her unconsciousness and deadness of the moment, was directly proportional to my own level of unconsciousness and deadness about the issue she was heralding. The conflict was only useful to whoever was alive and present enough to make use of it. Conflict is a treasure like gold ore, mined out of the deep, rocky places of the earth but also sometimes found glittering in streams.

It didn’t matter whether the other person would become awake, or would see what was happening to her. I can do nothing about another person’s process and progress along their path unless I am invited. And hard knocks have taught me that such invitations are often suspect and may conceal traps or land mines. I, however, may issue an invitation to another person by asking a question; by observing; by sharing my own process. This I have done, and it has led to fruitful discussion and pondering.

What mattered in the moment–before I knew whether my partner in crime would see or not–was that I was awake and alive, and my passionate shadow self, the one who is not controlled or controllable, the one who has rage, fear, horror, laughs hysterically, puts her foot in her mouth, and belches at the table, that self was trying to tell me something.

I’m grateful to be at a point where I can tolerate the intrusions of my shadowy self into my conscious world. Thank you, shadow self; I appreciate your pain-in-the-ass-ness (which in the original language is translated more like, “F*** you, I love you”).

I asked my shadow self for help understanding the drama. And she helped me, because later that week I dreamed this dream of the Sphinx face. Just as the Sphinx of the Greek myth devoured anyone who could not rightly perceive the riddle of human development, so this Sphinx face I saw in reality, and the one in me, is a devourer. She will destroy anyone who will not answer her riddles correctly, and there is only one correct answer.

Interpretations

The day of my conflict, I speculated that my loved one had only one answer she was willing to hear from me. Whenever I fail to give her the correct answer to her riddle, she turns her destructive face toward me. This same destructiveness is at work within me. Though I can do nothing about anyone else’s immovable, destructive Sphinx, I can certainly do something about mine. Rather than reject it in horror, I must move toward it, or at the very least stand my ground in front of it. I must be willing to engage the Sphinx and attempt to answer the riddle. I must be courageous enough to risk destruction, and whole enough to offer answers, like the heroic but anguished Oedipus.

In my dream, two daughters represented the trustworthy, alive, and growing parts of me that are fertile, productive, energetic, and engaging. Another daughter represented the parts that are in a blind trance, the part that uses illness to deflect large emotions. Then there is the shadow part represented by the angry me that is so dishonest that it will feign concern when in reality it is feeling horror and rage. These latter dream symbols represented aspects of my self that are false, cold, willful, expendable, and as needy as a vampire.

The broken vase? It is a one-of-a-kind treasure and heirloom. It was always present at my grandmother’s house on her sideboard, a house that meant for me home, warmth, and love. The vase is quite beautiful and we have never been able to find another like it. As a vessel, it is also symbolic of the womb, the lotus, or (for Westerners) the rose. Jung wrote that “the vessel motif is an expression of the content, just as Shakti represents the actualization of Shiva,” or as Buddha is depicted sitting in the lotus.  Jung quotes Conrad of Wurzburg as referring to, ”Mary, the flower of the sea in which Christ lies hidden,” and the Virgin Mary is often depicted with a rose in her womb (Archetypes 364). I will have to get past the Sphinx in order to return to the womb of creativity, imagination, and fantasy that germinate the seed of God.

In the dream, I yielded my real passions and self to the unfeeling, insensible, destructive, unaccountable Sphinx part, even though it horrified me to do so. I can be neglectful to the point of fracturing my treasures and my real self, leaving them under the control of a part that I know is destructive and capricious; this Sphinx part of myself is often still that powerful.

But the real self is in there too, telling me the truth, leveling an accusing finger at the Sphinx, waiting and loving me still as I keep casting my pearls before Sphinxes.

This is usually the case with real selves; real selves are in precarious positions, for real selves are seldom wanted or appreciated in everyday life. People want mostly what is fake from us; they don’t particularly care for what is real. If one is accomplished, intelligent, attractive, and successful (as I am, by outward appearances), but the real self becomes known and is obviously flawed, imperfect, unreliable, unpredictable, messy, smelly, ugly, and oh-so-human, it is not wanted any more.

Another Possibility

Another possible interpretation was offered me by my partner-in-conflict, the loved one who later discussed the conflict and my dream contents with me as we drank tea and mused. She reminded me that sphinxes also were tombs, built to cover the final resting place of kings or rich folk. As such, they might be symbols of bones long buried, ancestors, or the fear of mortality. My unconscious is showing me a part that turns away and goes impassive to avoid suffering.

I have reason to suspect myself in the area of ancestral meaning. I have numerous historical threads of religious persecution running in my veins. The collective unconscious of suffering, persecuted, tortured, fleeing people is in there; people who have not only fled, but who have rebelled, are in there. What are they trying to say to me? What changes do I need in my inner life that will open me up to the suffering that transforms? I must not turn away from it. I must see that part of me wants to; I must also see that other parts stand there like a Greek chorus, pointing accusing fingers and saying, “See the truth!” and yet another part puts an angry hand out and demands answers. Yet the very part angry enough to demand answers will shrink back at the impassive face. When I encounter impassivity in myself or others, I’ll let it be a signal and hope that some part of myself, or God, will help me with my self. Coax me along; show me the tomb. Speak to me of the bones of my mothers and fathers.

Growing Up, Again

In our first adulthood, as I’ve indicated, we really think that we can make things perfect and that hard work will be rewarded by our desired outcomes. We think we can improve on just about everything those idiots who came before us did. As James Hollis points out, we haven’t suffered enough disappointment, pain, and disillusionment in the first adulthood. We have to raise children until they are at least 25-30 years old, have our hearts broken, see ourselves fail as parents, spouses, daughters, sons, employees, bosses and children of God, and we have to live a long time and suffer quite a bit before we arrive at the place where we can see clearly enough to see that we were wrong and mistaken. Full of pride, we had a big fall. Some people suffer the fall and are awakened; others lie there and moan for the rest of their lives, blaming others for their pain.

My real self is fecund and alive; it is a brat, running through the house and breaking treasures; it is a Sphinx made of stone, ready to devour anyone who doesn’t get it right; it is a beautiful, rare container with sparkling, reflective facets and etchings. My real self holds life-giving water and is beautiful; she contains oceans, generations, and universes.

When I see within me all that I love and all that horrifies me, I feel tearfully grateful to be alive. I feel so happy to have progressed as far as I have, even though I’m retarded, lame, hateful, beautiful, glorious, inept, and brilliant all at the same time. I’m grateful to be alive, to be awake in some part, and grateful that my inner cast of characters are still willing to appeal to me by whatever means possible. I’m most privileged, too, to live with many people who are difficult, handicapped, loving, and willing, because I think the way would be lonelier and slower if I had disallowed their provocative presence and opted for a solitary life. I’m grateful to know God and to have Him continually with me, even when I am solitary and alone on my inward path.

I hope if you read through this whole post that you will take your night dreams seriously, and value your passionate feelings and conflicts, and let them teach you. What you discover inside yourself will be disgusting, horrifying, impossible to believe, and exhilarating. If you muster up your courage, you can get to a place where few people go, and you’ll have done it while you’re still alive, before you cross over into the next life.

You’ll be the hero you always dreamed of finding.

References

Jung, Carl. The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. Princeton University Press, 1990.

*Names have been changed to protect the actual.