Wind Talkers

In the 2002 movie, Windtalkers, Navajo marines used their native tongue to communicate military strategies and information to their units without betraying information to the enemy. I’m reminded of this movie today as I write about the codes we must use and decipher if we’re to understand communications sent from the parts of ourselves that are not consciously perceived by the ego. While I have a bit of time, I thought I’d comment about how this works by using a recent dream I had to illustrate.

You handful of readers still hardy enough to read this blog will recall that I mentioned a week or so ago a dream I had in which I had a dying child. The image was disturbing, to say the least. Of course I hesitated to share it, being a rather private person by nature, for which I like to thank  the influence of Saturn in the 12th house at the time of my birth–no mistake, for I am “fearfully and wonderfully made” by a God who sets all things in motion and even, according to the Scriptures, uses the stars and planets to influence seasons and events. In spite of (or because of) this secrecy or need for privacy I feel from whatever source or for whatever reason, I am also fascinated by mysteries and the unconscious, and like the good depth psychologist I aspire to be, I follow the tradition of my elders and am willing to demonstrate my own inner tomfoolery and skullduggery for purposes of instruction.

the way it works

The way it works is this: an image appears in a dream. In my dream, the image of a small, black, female child around age seven to ten years, emaciated and dying, her eyes rolling back into her head. She is panting with the sort of pants that dying people have, the sort of breathing that my daughter had for hours before she died. This child in my dream was not my daughter, and not intended to be my daughter. I didn’t know her, but I knew she was my child. In the dream, I had laid her out in the yard to die, and eventually went and fetched her and was carrying her off-handedly in the crook of my left arm, while with my right hand I was drinking tea from a mug and idly chatting with some other vaguely defined adult female figures in my home. I have the impression this was in the great room of my house, where kitchen, dining area, and sitting area before the fireplace all run together and where we spend most of our time at home.

After waking up, I felt sorry that this image had come up from my unconscious, and I fretted, wondering what part of my self was on the verge of death, and being treated in such a cavalier manner by my dream ego. I felt discomforted that the girl was dying, uneasy that my dream ego hadn’t felt or acted like someone whose child was dying in her arms.

Because this is my dream, what it means is not open to interpretation by anyone else. While we could all speculate about the meanings of a dream, and while many universal symbols can and do appear in our dreams, the bottom line is that every dream is unique to every dreamer. I can research what a symbol means when I dream it, and discover what different cultures and times have said or taught about that symbol, but in the end the code my sleeping self is giving my waking ego is a special code that is finally mostly decipherable by me.

the dream in analysis

If I shared this dream image with another analyst, he or she would help me outline the setting, actors, images, development, and action of the dream, and ask what my associations are with the elements of the dream. He or she would ask what my feeling was upon awakening, what the general, overriding impression was. We would begin to decipher the code by associating everything, every element of the dream. Because it would take too long to decipher every single element of this particular dream of mine (weeks, actually), I will choose only one element, the one that raises the most emotion in me and probably in others: the  image of the dying child.

What does a dying child mean to me? It reminds me of my daughter, Olivia. Was the child Olivia? No. Well, what else, then? I would associate every single thing I have that connects to a dying little black girl of that age: my own daughter, the African children we tried to adopt, children I have seen on television, a film I recently watched on refugees in north Africa, sisters who were the first African American children to attend my grade school and about whom a school assembly was held when I was in first or second grade, and my memory of talking with the little girl who was about my age (that age of 7-10 years old); who I was in first and second grade; that I decided to become a writer in second grade; how I felt as a girl among other girls at that age (different, isolated, other-worldly, unfit in my own body, a stranger in a strange land).

At this point, my feeling would begin to erupt, and I would somehow stumble over that feeling of different, isolated, other-worldly, unfit in my own body, a stranger in a strange land, for this is just exactly what the two little black girls were in our white, suburban world: different, isolated, other-worldly, unfit in their own bodies in a white culture, strangers in a strange land. I recall how beautiful and exotic they were, how black their skin, how curly and braided and beribboned their hair, and how they, unlike we white girls, wore fabulous party dresses to their first day of school, huge petticoats underneath and the dresses as vibrant and gorgeous as Easter eggs. I remember sidling up to the girl who was my age as we rode on the merry-go-round, which I never otherwise rode on but braved the perils of just to talk with her, and I remember telling her, “I like your dress, it’s beautiful.” I remember her liquid brown eyes, and I remember how she said, “Thank you,” and how her younger sister hid behind her. And we were spinning.

I remember feeling that way throughout my school years: as if I could hide, as if I should be wearing a beautiful dress and twirling, as if only I could see that I did not fit into this world of white bobby socks and loafers and plaid jumpers and pressed white shirts. As if I didn’t have blonde hair and blue eyes and freckles on my nose.

And what did it mean to me, being black? To me at that time, it meant being free and having a culture, paradoxically during a time when black Americans were not free at all, really, and when they were alienated from the larger culture and just being ordered into white schools in the south, and where white people like me continued to grow up in all-white schools and neighborhoods, well until we were in high school, for the most part.  I would also associate the image to what it currently means to me, black-girl-who-is-seven-to-ten-years-old-and-dying. I would make lists or draw a sunburst with rays of meaning radiating out.

Returning to the meaning that holds the most affect for me, I would see that I identified with the desire to be free as well as the alienation from the culture and what was commonplace and commonly accepted as “right” back in the day when I was seven or eight years old. And now in this  recent dream, my black child was dying. Had I lost a part of my self? Or was it just the opposite, a sign that part of my shadowy and thus unlived life (the Shadow is always about the unlived life) had ceased being projected and was now free to be let go of, and not impregnated with value the way it had been before? So much so that I would be merely indifferent to it? That I had finally lived that unconscious material and stopped projecting it, stopped identifying with it, and its life was ended, and my ego was so indifferent to all it had taken to get me there that she would drink tea off-handedly while that image-carrier slowly died in her arms?

Yes, that does say something about my ego. She can be such a cold bitch, so much worse for being truly cold and not just cold in the theatrical way that sells box office tickets. But really cold. That part of my self that turned away from my own suffering for so many years: still alive and well, and sipping tea. Look out, my witness warns, she’s still there, like your mother, indifferent and cold to your suffering going on right under her nose. Be careful. Full of care; don’t neglect all you’ve gone through and all the manifestations of self and all your various incarnations who got you here. There is something cold as steel and darker than ore here. Watch out. Don’t look away.

deciphering the code

So this is how we begin to unravel it, what it means. And I pray for guidance and I watch for it, “watching daily at your gates” as the prophet wrote, waiting for the messenger from God. I do my conscious work with the unconscious contents, coaxing the message out and working on the code like an archaeologist might carefully and gently labor to clean and restore an ancient bit of pottery or an old manuscript.

Bits and pieces of meaning come up here and there, and I know when I am on the right track when this piece says, “Aha!” and that piece suddenly causes me to well up with tears, and another piece makes me laugh out loud. I know, then, that I’m a wind talker. And I watch my conscious ego with a raised eyebrow, for I know she can be a cold bitch drinking tea with a dying child in her arms. I see her perspective is I-can’t-be-bothered and I-don’t-have-time-for-this and I’m-interested-in-what-I-want-now and perhaps Aren’t-you-dead-yet? (Almost.)

sex and the city and saint john the baptist

Another week goes by and I am watching Sex and the City: The Movie, which I don’t like much because the naked sex scenes are just too much, and not erotic or beautiful at all, just showing what our culture is like and it is not different than the dog humping the pillow we see through the third part of that movie. But other parts of it, the parts that show Manhattan and the haute couture, and four friends surviving their middle age together, appeals to me. Though it is unlike me to continue to watch a movie that is so blatantly vulgar, I watch it to the end because of that something in it, and at the very end as they are toasting Samantha on her 50th birthday, suddenly I find myself in tears. I am in tears because I love New York City, it is my favorite city in the world and I haven’t been there in over 10 years now, and I long to go there. I’m in tears because of all the friends I’ve left behind, and because of who I am, because of my Saturn-in-the-12th-houseness which makes me, in part, colder than a November moon, and aloof like that, constant and luminous but above everything and everyone that is mortal, but not so aloof as to be anything greater than a moon dependent on heavenly bodies greater and warmer than I.

I am rocking with tears and heaving because of who I am, the who I always knew I was and left, just to be popular and liked (and I was) and successful (and I was) and admired, liked and perhaps loved, only to find that only the real, authentic me was ever truly lovable and that there was no good reason to abandon her, to put her out in the yard to die, and to wait until she was near death to show her the least bit of compassion. But she lived anyway, or perhaps she died and rose again on the third day and, like my favorite icon of Saint John the Baptist, holds her own head on a platter, wings of glory and transcendence trailing out behind her, a sober look on her face that means, “I am alive again, but I had to die to get here.”

ash wednesday

And on the eve of Ash Wednesday, all I can say to God is, “Thank you, God, for who I am. And I’m sorry for who I am. And thank you.”

I slide another piece of the puzzle into place, and I gaze at it, sober. I feel very sad, but also proud of myself. I feel very solid with God and with my self. I neither particularly love or hate my self, neither particularly loathe or appreciate the aspects of that self that I see, or even the parts that I only see “through a glass darkly.”

And if I identify with anything today, I can identify with the ashes smudged on my forehead, and with what Father said when he put them there this morning, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”