(a reproduction of the incipit on a psychology web forum)
By Brother Harmonius
Elsewhere on this forum I posted examples of dream images that corresponded to physical disease. This theory can be extended also to anatomical distress (in a well known dream, the dreamer sees himself approaching the guillotine, and feels the guillotine blade come down on his neck. He awakes to find the headboard of his bed has fallen on him).
The first example I gave was another well-known dream, that of a woman who dreamed of a German shepherd and a red car, and later was diagnosed with German measles (rubella).
The second was my own dream, of a pig eating a carrot from a bunch of carrots, and shortly after I experienced a flare up of gout in my big toe.
In my response to another forum member who seems to have taken (an unfounded) dispute with the concept of psychosomatic dream analysis, I reminded him that dream symbols have an eternal nature, such that what we dreamt last night might not be revealed on the somatic level for days or weeks to come.
Another example comes from Jung, himself, that lends support to my statement. In his essay “A Study in the Process of Individuation” from Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (CW 9i) Jung analyzed a series of paintings by a “Miss X”. In painting 10, Miss X added images of crabs. An explanation of the crab symbol occupies a significant portion of Jung’s analysis of this painting (par. 604-608), and would be too cumbersome to reproduce the entirety of the section here. But, Jung finishes the section by saying,
“This is the psychological moment when, as the consensus gentium has established since ancient times, synchronistic phenomena occur—that is, when the far appears near: 16 years later, Miss X became fatally ill with cancer of the breast.”
Here’s another “cancer” dream that was told to me quite a few years ago, by a man who was eventually diagnosed with lung cancer, and has since passed on because of it:
As he told it to me, he dreamed of being getting on a chair lift, like the kind used at ski resorts. But in this case, the chair lift did not take him up a snowy mountain. Instead, it took him around a shallow pond, and very close to the surface of the water.
The chair picked him up under what he likened to an old covered bridge, painted red. A wooden shed type building. Instead of moving him up, the chair conveyed him horizontally. As it emerged from the building, a stagnant pond was just under his feet. It was filled with red colored algae and growth, like the kind one sees in de-oxygenated stagnant pools. But there was something else in the water. They looked like platelets, but they were crab shaped. He had a hard time explaining their precise shape, saying “crustacean-like” but irregularly shaped. The bottom of the shallow pond seemed crowded with moving, translucent shapes, which he alternately referred to as crustaceans and platelets (he told me to watch the 60s science fiction film “Fantastic Voyage” for an example of what they looked like). The subject said he did not want to fall out of the chair into the water, and was afraid the chair was getting lower and lower, closer and closer to the water as the chair conveyed him eventually to the end of his ride on the other side of the pond.
Two things struck me as significant about this dream. One was the obvious cancer-crab connection. The other was that this poor man was not diagnosed with cancer until far too late. In fact, he had undergone all manner of other diagnoses, including pneumonia, before the last diagnosis, only about six months before he passed on. It seems the stagnant pond, filled with red algae or anaerobic bacteria formations corresponds to the pneumonia component of his malady, while lurking below that, at the bottom of the water, was the cancer.
...
..
.
..
.
No comments:
Post a Comment