Dream Bibliography

Tags

Dreams, Dreamwork

I offer below a bibliography of books recommended by The Haden Institute (hadeninstitute.com) to help with your dreamwork:

I. Achroyd, Eric—A Dictionary of Dream Symbols **

II. Bosnak, Robert—A Little Course in Dream

III. Brook, Stephen—The Oxford Book of Dreams

IV. Bryant, Dorothy—The Kin of Atta are Waiting for You

V. Campbell, Joseph, ed.—Myths, Dreams and Religion

VI. Cirlot, J.E.—A Dictionary of Symbols **/***

VII. Clift, Jean and Wallace—Symbols of Transformation in Dreams

VIII. Fontana, David—The Secret Language of Dreams **

IX. Freud, Sigmund—The Interpretation of Dreams

X. Gongloff, Robert—Dream Exploration

XI. Haden, Robert—Unopened Letters from God *

XII. Hall, James—Jungian Dream Interpretation

XIII. Hoss, Robert—Dream Language

XIV. Hudson, Joyce Rockwood—Natural Spirituality */***

XV. Johnson, Robert A.—Inner Work ***

XVI. Jung, Carl—Dreams ***

XVII. Jung, Carl—Memories, Dreams and Reflections */***

XVIII. Jung, Carl—Psychology and Religion

XIX. Jung, Carl—Man and His Symbols **/***

XX. Kelsey, Morton—Dreams: A Way to Listen to God

XXI. Kelsey, Morton—God, Dreams and Revelation

XXII. Kutz, Ilan—Dreamland Comparison

XXIII. Lyons, Tallulah—Dream Prayers

XXIV. Maurer, Sue—God Has Been Whispering in My Ear

XXV. Moore, Thomas—The Care of the Soul

XXVI. Moore, Thomas—Soul Mates

XXVII. Sanford, John—Dreams: God’s Forgotten Language */***

XXVIII. Sanford, John—Dreams and Healing

XXIX. Sanford, John—Healing and Wholeness

XXX. Sanford, John—Invisible Partners

XXXI. Sanford, John—The Kingdom Within ***

XXXII. Sanford, John—The Man Who Wrestled With God

XXXIII. Savary, Louise—Dreams and Spiritual Growth: A Christian Approach to Dreamwork

XXXIV. Singer, June—Boundaries of the Soul

XXXV. Stein, Murray, ed.—Jungian Analysis

XXXVI. Stevens, Anthony—Archetypes

XXXVII. Taylor, Jeremy—The Wisdom of the Dream *

XXXVIII. Taylor, Jeremy—Dream Work ***

XXXIX. Van De Castle, Robert L.—Our Dreaming Mind

XL. Von Franz, Marie-Louise—Animus and Anima

XLI. Von Franz, Marie-Louise—On Dreams and Death

XLII. Von Franz, Marie-Louise—Projection and Re-Collection

* Good Beginning Books

** Good Books to Explore Symbols

*** Books I own

Transformation: The Conclusion

Tags

Carl Jung, Inner Work, Robert A. Johnson

Rocinante

Presently the evidence of four-dimensional consciousness is not some form of perfection but rather the ability to tap in to that psychological space when needed

From the two-dimensional Don Quixote to the three-dimensional Hamlet, in which most of us reside, we can finally try to find our way to the fourth-dimension embodied by Faust.

“Almost all of us in Western society are Hamlets,” Robert A. Johnson writes. “Compulsory eduction, our social structure, the dictates of our lifestyle have obliterated the two-dimensional man from American life.”

We only experience that second dimension for a brief time in adolescence. So, how does man survive the Hamlet dilemma?

According to Johnson, the more intelligent he is, the more profound will be his suffering. But, there are two avenues of solace: We can maintain a bit of primitive behavior in our lives such as jogging, camping, or gardening. We can even, Johnson says, “have an array of adolescent equipment, including that which is most dear to every man’s heart, his car (every car should be named Rocinante).”

The second avenue of solace is much darker–vandalism, gang behavior and other types of juvenile delinquency, including drug and alcohol abuse.

“It is a bitter indictment of some of our attitudes that the only ‘juice’ left for many of our youth is in destructive behavior,” he says.

Inevitably, though, there will come a time in adulthood when you no longer find joy in things like jogging or gardening, and the full distress experienced by Hamlet begins to well up inside you. We have, Johnson says, created many terms for this–midlife crisis, identity crisis, the seven-year itch, the Big Four-Zero, and so on.

Saint John of the Cross says that this period, the “Dark Night of the Soul,” can last anywhere from seven weeks, months, years up to 21 years, depending on when you wake up to the next level of consciousness.

“When the dark night begins to lift,” Johnson writes, one morning there is an unaccountable touch of joy in the air. It is the tiniest trickle of energy, light, and hope, but enough to keep you alive.”

This, he says, is the first contact with the four-dimensional consciousness. “Something of the subtle inner world becomes your center of gravity: poetry, music, a new perceptiveness when you are jogging, a blossoming of philosophic inquiry, a new religious understanding.”

Johnson says that “Enlightenment” is never total or permanent in this lifetime.

“Presently the evidence of four-dimensional consciousness is not some form of perfection but rather the ability to tap in to that psychological space when needed,” he writes.

Humans have the ability to incorporate new things in to their being. For example, we didn’t learn to perceive the color, blue, until about 2,000 years ago; we had to learn how to read silently, also learned within the past 2,000 years; and we didn’t learn to hear the harmonic structure, as opposed to the melodic line, until around the 15th or 16th century.

“Is it consistent to say that a new faculty,” he writes, “four-dimensional consciousness, as we lamely describe it, is only now appearing for ordinary men and women in our new human evolution?”

This would make that faculty extremely rare and fragile when it does appear, and very easily lost.

Johnson closes the book writing, “Dr. Jung spent his old age writing about and contemplating this new evolution of man, the progression from incompleteness to wholeness, from three to four. It is time for all of us to do the same.”

Reclaiming the Land from the Sea

Tags

Inner Work, Robert A. Johnson, Shadow Work

Gretchen argues for Faust’s soul–Ist gerettet

 

Having played Gretchen in a college version of Faust (auf Deutsch, natürlich), this is one of my favorite acts of the play. As the drama nears its end, Faust and Mephistopheles have drawn closer, somewhat tempered each other.

Unfortunately, this causes Mephistopheles to want to regain some of his control over Faust. He is the devil, our shadow, after all. So, he asks Faust if there is anything he would like.

Not as such, Faust replies. This is the man “whom infinity would scarcely satisfy” at the beginning of the book. Mephistopheles offers him the moon, but Faust says he would be content with “a piece of coastline so that he might reclaim land from sea.”

“Water, particularly the ocean, is a universal symbol of the unconscious,” Robert Johnson writes, “and Faust is asking for eternal connection with the depths represented by the sea.”

The true work of man in the latter part of his life, he says, is the cultural process of bringing up some of the contents of the unconscious and integrating them into consciousness.”

Goethe symbolizes this by having Faust reclaim land from the sea–dredging canals, building dikes–taking land from the sea and adding it to the land mass. In this process Faust finds great contentment.

But as we know, nothing is ever that simple. When Faust complains to Mephistopheles that a cottage owned by a couple (Baucis and Philemon), who have lived on his newly acquired property all of their lives, blocks his view, tragedy ensues once again. Mephistopheles frightens the old couple to death and burns their cottage to the ground.

Faust is horrified, particularly as he realizes that he is responsible for the tragic results.  It is now that Faust realizes just what his alliance with Mephistopheles is costing him.

“He learns,” Johnson notes, “that he has power over Mephistopheles and that he is capable of misusing that power.”

As he continues to reclaim land from the sea, he does not notice the approach of the “four gray sisters–Want, Debt, Need and Care.” Johnson says these dark forces are the power of necessity. Because of his wealth, Faust can easily ignore the first three as he has everything he needs. But no man can ignore Dame Care. She is something we all need.

When he doesn’t take her seriously, Dame Care blinds Faust. “This leads me to believe,” Johnson writes, “that the blinding was more an inner exchange of sight for insight, a transformation required of every man as he grows old.”

Faust’s excavation now becomes the digging of his own grave as he can no longer see what he is doing. Johnson says that here you can recognize one of the dangers of old age–digging or hacking away at a project out of inertia and habit rather than any sense of purpose.

Just before his death, Faust steps back from his labors and sees a utopian vision of a noble band of people inhabiting his newly claimed land, and utters the fatal words–“Linger, thou art so fair!”

Mephistopheles rushes in to claim Faust’s soul, according to the terms of the contract agreed upon 24 years previously. Faust has lost and Mephistopheles has won! What is the point of inner change if only to have it snatched away by a very human error at the end? Is absolute perfection required of us at the gates of heaven?

But then something miraculous happens. Despite everything, Gretchen’s love for Faust has never waned. She appears at the head of a choir of angels and pleads for Faust’s soul. It was a vision of heaven, they say, that made Faust utter those fatal words, not anything that Mephistopheles created. A technicality, perhaps, but it works. Gretchen leads Faust into heaven where grace, not justice, prevails.

“The masculine stuff of law and order and justice are superseded by grace and love,” Johnson writes.

The Fourth Puer–The Boy Angel

“We have seen no redemption of one in a pair of opposites is possible without the same redemption of the other,” Johnson says. Both Faust and Mephistopheles must be redeemed if either is to find wholeness.

While lamenting his loss, Mephistopheles catches sight of a boy angel in the heavenly band and falls in love with him, neglecting to press his partially limited charges against Faust.

“To understand the multitude of forms in which love may touch you is to gain some sense of its great mystery,” Johnson writes. “Mephistopheles has been touched by that form of love that is specific to his need and his transformation.”

Faust is redeemed by the love of Gretchen; Mephistopheles by his first experience of love. “Ego and shadow each finds its own level of redemption and its own appropriate salvation.”

The boy angel, symbolizing love (not unlike Cupid), is the fourth manifestation of the archetype of puer aeternis. To touch the puer is to touch eternity and love and be delivered from the time-space world, Johnson says.

The play ends with the following lines:

All that is perishable
is but an image;
Here the short-reaching
becomes result.
The indescribable–
here it is done;
The Eternal Feminine
draws us on.

This is more than a hint that wholeness is not attained by means of masculine law or contract. It is a gift from the feminine aspect of God.

Next Week: Conclusion

The Second and Third Pueri

Tags

Robert A. Johnson, Self-actualization

The Second Puer–Homunculus

While Faust was away, Wagner has been busy with his alchemy through which he creates a homunculus or a man the size of a thumb. This is the second puer aeternis, and it has the ability to guide Faust back to ancient Greece where there is no real concept of evil. This means there is no real place for Mephistopheles.

He finally comes up with a concept for ugliness, which is the closest he can get to his own nature and comes along with Faust as a hideous old hag with one tooth and one eye.

Once there, the homunculus, as it is a magical creation of man, explodes when it encounters the Greek idea of beauty. None of our human ideas of beauty and nobility hold up in the face of archetypal beauty, Robert Johnson explains.

The Third Puer–Euphorion

Awakening in ancient Greece, Faust once again seeks out Helen of Troy, the ultimate expression of feminine beauty. This time he is more cautious, and he is allowed a brief marriage with Helen in which they produce a full-grown youth, Euphorion, who is the patron of art.

“His energy can produce inspiration and artistic expression,” Johnson writes. This is now the third appearance of the “eternal boy” or puer aeternis in Faust. Euphoric flies up to the heavens in order to acquire the tools of the poet for Faust. But, like Icarus, he flies to close to the sun and hurtles back to earth.

“The puer has again tried to help,” says Johnson, “but his limitations and his vulnerability to inflation and egocentricity are now clear.”

According to Johnson, it is the universal experience of one on the path to self actualization to grasp at the tools of genius when he encounters these sublime realms. He says that pain often compels us to think, “Nothing personal has worked in my life, so I will write. That will be a realm where I can express myself.”

This is essentially true, but in fact the old self, the three-dimensional man, will always go about this in an egocentric way and therefore doom his efforts. This does not mean that one should not express himself through writing or other forms of art while on the path to wholeness, but rather that one should be aware that the first attempts will be contaminated by the ego, and so will “catch fire and fall into the sea like Euphorion.”

Fortunately, Faust has been learning through his experiences, and now a sublime event occurs. As he embraces Helen of Troy, she slips from his grasp and Mephistopheles whispers to him, “Hold onto her garment, which will carry you above the commonplace.”

Helen vanishes, the great archetypal vision fades, but she has left enough of herself to active the artistic, visionary faculty in Faust. This lesser way of possessing the archetype of beauty is not too much for mortals to bear.

“When you know at what level and in what manner you can relate to the impersonal archetypal world,” Johnson writes, “you are truly safe. Then creation can begin.”

While this may seem but a sliver of your first vision, he says, it is quite enough to bring into the everyday world.

“Many an artist has failed his calling because he refused a limited, less-than-perfect expression of his original vision,” he writes. “A man cannot handle the great artistic tools of boy-god Euphorion, and he many not be able to embrace the superhuman vision of pure beauty, Helen of Troy, but a man can touch Helen’s garment, which is sufficient to bring a small part of his artistic vision into creation. To do more would burn us up in gigantic inflation.”

Next Week: Reclaiming the Land from the Sea

 

The Evolution of Three to Four

Tags

Carl Jung, Inner Work, Robert A. Johnson

Carl Jung spent his final years fascinated by the evolution of consciousness, and more specifically by the number three moving to four. To him, the number three represented a consciousness that was time-dominated, and devoted to acting, doing, processing and accomplishing.

We live in a world, says Robert Johnson, that is dominated by the third level of consciousness, most notably because we live in an age that holds a trinitarian view of theology.

“The doctrine of the Holy Trinity is basic to the Christianity of our time,” he writes, “and the Holy Trinity is an exact model of our modern consciousness.”

The number four, on the other hand, denotes being, eternity, peace, and contemplation. It was Jung’s belief that we live in an age where the collective unconscious is devoted to the evolution from three to four.

Jung thought that nearly every modern person is drawn into this evolution and even dreams of these symbols. He claimed that our dreams involve three turning into four whether or not we have any conscious awareness of the process or of what it means.

“If our civilization is to negotiate the perilous years immediately ahead,” Johnson says, “it will be by virtue of this evolution.”

Jung believed we could make it “if enough people will make the necessary evolution within themselves.”

This, unfortunately, is an incredibly painful experience. It has been called “the dark night of the soul,” “the journey through hell and purgatory (by Dante),” and it was the forty days and forty nights in the desert for Jesus.

“For modern man,” Johnson writes, “it is midlife crisis or, worse, a nervous breakdown; or still worse, physical suicide.”

Basically, Johnson says, the process can be summed up in one sentence: it is the relocating of the center of the personality from the ego to a center greater than one’s self.

“This super personal center has been variously called the Self,” Johnson writes, “the Christ nature, the Buddha nature, superconsciousness, cosmic consciousness, satori, and samadhi.”

It is the death of the ego and the only way for the ego to die is through violent suffering, which is why very few choose to engage this process.

“The relocation of the center of the personality is a form of suicide,” Johnson says, “and it’s best done voluntarily by the ego.”

A very good example of this is found in Shakespeare’s King Lear. The Earl of Gloucester has been blinded as well as shorn of all his worldly possessions, his family and his power. Wandering miserably on the moors, his son, disguised as a peasant boy, arrives to protect him. Gloucester pleads with him to take him to the cliffs of Dover where he might hurl himself into the sea and end his life. Instead, Edgar takes him into the middle of a field, convincing Gloucester in his blindness that he is on the edge of a cliff.

Gloucester throws himself over the “edge” but only falls forward into the field. His suffering was so intense that he truly believed he had fallen. And yet, he lived. He stands, relieved of his suffering and ready to face life anew. According to Johnson, Gloucester did his “suicide” correctly.

After making his journey to the maternal depths, Faust blunders again. Instead of admiring the archetype of femininity in Helen of Troy, Faust attempts to embrace her, have a personal relationship with her. There is a huge explosion and Helen vanishes. Faust is left unconscious on the ground, burned and nearly destroyed.

As Jung put it, if you have an assimilating match with a tiger, you know who will assimilate whom. You might be able to open up the unconscious, but it is incredibly difficult to enter into a relationship with the super personal forces that will be unleashed.

Faust makes a serious mistake. Again.

“Archetypes and archetypal energy are bigger than we are,” Johnson writes. “We cannot try to embrace that energy without causing a psychological explosion.”

Mephistopheles returns to help Faust and carries him back to his study for a bit of ordinariness.

The word, ordinariness, is derived from ordered. And, ordinariness is the perfect remedy for inflation or egocentricity.

“That which is dry, pedestrian, and bookish can have a healing effect at critical moments,” Johnson explains. “An iconoclast needs to learn that a little reason and discipline are not hindrances on his way to heaven.”

Next Week: The Second Puer–The Homunculus

 

 

 

 

 

The Four-Dimensional Man

Tags

Inner Work, Robert A. Johnson, Shadow Work

The Charioteer of Delphi

When Goethe published Part I of Faust in 1808, he was 59 years old, and Faust is left with no solution to his “Faustian” dilemma. And yet, he has become far more aware of his condition than he was at the beginning of the play.

Goethe spent the remainder of his life writing Part II of Faust, and did not allow it to be published until after his death in 1832, nearly a quarter of a century later. Through the character of Faust, Goethe himself was working toward becoming four dimensional.

This is why Part II is “an expression of the symbolic working of man’s soul,” according to Robert Johnson.

“It is written in the language of imagination,” he writes, “a kind of alchemical treatise, a fairy tale, a myth.”

In the beginning of Part II, Faust finds himself in the Emperor’s court where gold is being made. And while we are never certain gold has been produced, there is a lot of heat and fire and energy. Suddenly, a boy charioteer mounts a horse and gallops away, never to be heard from again.

Johnson says this boy charioteer symbolizes the first gift–pure undifferentiated energy–of the inner child or puer of every man.

“When a man consents to begin the interior journey, the symbolic quest,” Johnson writes, “he may expect certain characteristic experiences.”

When one touches a symbol or has a symbolic experience, a great deal of energy is produced–emotions flare, and alternate between fear and exhilaration. Inflations are extremely common.

Symbolically, the Emperor’s court is a place deep in one’s unconscious, and one must have the emotional stability to withstand the intense heat as well as the oddity of the journey. A guide or teacher is inestimably helpful in this regard.

“Since the journey is largely outside the laws of the three-dimensional world of time and space,” Johnson says, “it is not surprising that the archetype of (eternal youth) the puer aeternis is activated.”

The eternal inner child is geared to fantasy and his eye is on heaven rather than any practical endeavor. Many men do not integrate this energy maturely, Johnson says, and go through life as dreamers, but qualities of the eternal child are are also necessary for salvation.

The First Puer–The Charioteer

There are four puer figures in Part II of Faust, according to Jonson, and none of them are very practical, but all are necessary to Faust’s evolution to four-dimensional man. The first puer gallops off at full speed, representative of the fact that any man who embarks on a symbolic quest will be swept into one enthusiasm after another. These enthusiasms may wane and be forgotten but they provide the energy for the mystic vision.

Following this energetic but inconclusive time in the Emperor’s court, Faust demands of Mephistopheles a visit with Helen of Troy–a vision of beauty and femininity. It is in outlining how this request might be fulfilled that Mephistopheles launches Faust’s transformation from time-and-space-bound consciousness to the next level of enlightenment.

Mephistopheles tells Faust that he must go to the place of the Mothers in the eternal depths, insert his key into the tripod, and thus summon Helen of Troy.

“Few sentences in the history of consciousness say so much in few words,” Johnson writes.

Going to the depths indicates that the journey is both profoundly inward and solitary; going to the place of the Mothers is an act of regression, a psychologically incestuous act.

“The place of the Mothers is where consciousness and cultural and spiritual power originate,” he says. “Returning to your origins and generating or regenerating yourself is the act of creating consciousness.”

The third level of consciousness can then be turned into the fourth level by the “insertion of the key into the tripod.” Goethe uses this literary device to indicate the addition of the one to the three. This results in the four, the consciousness that is the true goal of humanity, according to Johnson.

“By working most of a lifetime at the task of civilization,” he writes, “an educated, intelligent man has erected a ‘tripod’ of life.”

Johnson compares this tripod to the Holy Trinity. Both are symbols of a consciously constructed what if chuff, he says, that is cultured and civilized, but inevitably leaves out the fourth element. With Christianity, that element is Satan; with Civilization, that element is the shadow or dark side of one’s self.

“It is the addition of the neglected element that brings an individual or a culture to wholeness,” he writes.

Next Week: The Evolution of Three to Four