In a dream I saw a cathedral carved from black stone at the peak of a mountain in a cold northern kingdom. The people there made their cathedral both beautiful and inaccessible, to be a pure gift to the glory of God. The king gave up his throne to serve as caretaker for the empty cathedral. I saw him, dressed in a monk's robe, walking in the warm sunlight tinted by colorful stained glass windows. He had my face.That king was close friend to another king, another version of me, who ruled a southern coastal kingdom, noisy and thriving with trade and the activity of its energetic inhabitants. That king wrote his friend letters about how he longed to retreat to that mountaintop cathedral, but his people clamored for constant attention.
Both kings were eager to hear more from their sons who were exploring the world in a two - man boat.
[First two images: A composite of my dream, and sunlight through stained glass.]
When I had that dream in the 1980s, Jung was all the rage. He was central to popular works by mythologist Joseph Campbell and theologian Henri Nouwen, bestselling novels by Robertson Davies, and a unique off - Broadway play by James Lapine, Twelve Dreams. (About Davies, see my reflections 07/23/2010, 04/14/2014 and 03/19/2016)
Jung's salient theories are that the language of dreams is metaphor; that our unconscious minds alert us in dreams to truths that we are too preoccupied to recognize in our waking lives; that the metaphors come, not just from our own experience, but from a great collective unconscious shared with all humanity across millennia; and that the universe also speaks to us through "synchronicity," meaningful coincidence.
The images of the dream encapsulated my sense of my life at that time: a school teacher among eighth graders in Mississippi, I was certainly king among clamorous southerners. An introverted Episcopalian, I've also felt removed from the people and business around me. That mountaintop cathedral was a fine image of how I live "in my head" with music, literature, art, and theology. The two sides meet in that boat, exploring the world, "at sea," moving on to the next place.
This dream urged me to move on to something new. While the fathers were committed to their stations, they felt joy knowing that their two sons were headed off to points unknown in their boat. At the time, while I was committed to teaching English and Drama, I was learning to regret not having majored in music. I'd been discouraged from it by the head of the music department at Duke (on the grounds that the music major was for performers and scholars, not composers), and I lacked the knowledge and facility of my musical friends. So I'd fallen back on two majors that came easily to me, literature and drama. Encouraged by the dream, I initiated private lessons with wonderful composer James Sclater (read about him at my blogpost of 11/02/2105).
The dream came to mind this month because of a story I heard on NPR's Snap Judgment about a modern - day hermit, Christopher Knight. Jung would probably attribute widespread interest in Knight to an unconscious collective need. A quick scan for "hermit" on the internet yields a "hermit" among the deck of Tarot cards, a repository of images that Jungians see as universal, collective archetypes. (About Knight, see my blogpost of 01/20/2019). Evidently, many of us can identify with Knight's yearning to escape the tug of relentless events and obligations.
No comments:
Post a Comment