Book #22 of 2020: The Eternal Drama by Edward F. Edinger

Edinger has marinated himself in Jung's works and has added many worthy volumes to the Jungian literature. I've read a few over the past half-decade and would recommend all of them. This short volume is no exception. Its utility as a reference for psychoanalysis I'm sure is obvious, but it serves multiple other purposes for the Humanities freak: a quick refresher of salient myths and bios of Gods and Goddesses, a useful primer on the recurrence of mythic themes and symbols in dreams and current events for analysis of literature or the news, a valuable resource for Tarot readers who need to deepen their card and client reading skills...

Edinger's loose and comfortable familiarity with Jung's oeuvre and his experience distilling down works like Mysterium Conjunctionis for average human intellects makes his writing rigorous and compelling, but non-threatening and accessible. There is some Jung jargon, but if you are familiar with the basics (Archetypes and their roles, the structure of the Self/Psyche, synchronicity and dream and symbol analysis, perhaps some basic awareness of Freud and Adler) you will be able to more than stay afloat here. I particularly enjoyed the Jungian analysis of the Perseus myth and had not considered how the feminine is repressed and eventually undoes that hero. The readings of the Iliad and Odyssey are also top-notch, with asides about the sorts of people and stages of life bits and pieces of the epics are bound to speak to (or manifest via).

Highly recommended.

Quarantine Dreams

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The first couple of weeks of lock down, when I first started teaching online from home, all my dreams were work anxiety dreams of the typical sort, like those I have at the beginning of every school year. Those were often variations of dreams I had when I was a school student.

The last 9 weeks of lock down have been different. My dreams are complex, thick, dark, mysterious. They seem pregnant with meaning, almost prophetic. I've read some articles online that this is a growing phenomenon.

Here's an example from early this morning:

I am out in downtown somewhere, perhaps traveling, perhaps in my home city, but I can't tell. I'm trying to get back to some place which is either a travel agent's or a shop of some sort. I know the proprietor is a woman and in the dream I knew her name but I can't remember it now.

As I'm walking home the roads are dark and decrepit, almost as if there were a fire, earthquake, or maybe a war. Walls are down, streets are busted up, pipes hang out. The streets are narrow and there are small row homes around me. Then I'm slowly driven to the left and off my intended path by rising flood waters. I have to carefully step from block to block and crumbling walls sticking above the flood to avoid getting swept away as the current gets faster. I end up at a highway and the northbound lanes heading my way are flooded and cars are swirling in the water, but I manage somehow to get across to the southbound lanes. I am moving between the cars which are moving slowly and are packed in. Somehow I get a taxi, the driver of which rather painfully finds a way to back and forth his vehicle into the other direction when I tell him where I'm going.

We are driving around the neighborhood I'd just been walking in before the flood. There is rain, water, dripping, sloshing and splashing all about. I'm confounded that the driver does not know where he's taking me, as the destination is well-known and famous. Curiously, the anger I feel is not internal to me but is being shouted by Tom Cruise's voice outside of the vehicle behind my left ear. He is screaming about how it's unbelievable nobody can ever find this place because (woman's name) and her business are well-known.

Suddenly we are in the parking lot of a strip-mall, but the parking lot BEHIND the strip mall, not the front lot where the entrances are. This is my destination, but the taxi took me to the rear. The driver turns to me and says "If you knock on the door, she will let you in." I nod and while gathering my belongings to get out of the taxi some drunk young men are climbing in. They are stepping on my belongings which have spilled out in the taxi and onto the pavement, and include shoes and bags. I'm trying to pull everything out without conflict but I think I might have to fight these men. I think there were three or four but it's hard to remember. Then I wake.

Context

I'd been reading a psychoanalytic manual about the ongoing psychological primacy of Greek myths, heroes, and gods yesterday, and in particular about the Anima and challenges faced by Perseus with the feminine, and how the feminine eventually derails Perseus because of a lack of caution and what that story portends for those who encounter the Anima unprepared. I woke at 2 am, and unable to sleep started listening to a YouTube recording of a lecture about neoPlatonist philosophy and its mandates for developing self-control and the true purpose of religion. I recall the line "at a certain point of life the soul requires one to stop seeking things that are harmful to Self and others, and one must learn to sit quietly and develop self-control in order to..." After about an hour of this lecture I drifted into sleep, but the earbuds were still in my ears and the lecture was still playing. Later the earbuds fell out and I was awakened by a large insect buzzing by me and banging into a wall in the darkness,  and then I fell asleep again before having the above dream, which was dripping with Anima and religious and Quest symbolism.

Just moments ago my wife saw the insect fly out from behind the TV--it is a huge fly of some sort, perhaps 2 inches long. I was unable to catch it and it disappeared.

Dreaming Demons

My dreams have drifted away from school and students the past few nights, perhaps because we are on 'spring break' now. But 'spring break' will be spent inside the same apartment where we sit for quarantine lock down, and from where we teach our students.

The other night I was sound asleep when I was awakened by a profound dark buzzing energy welling up from deep within. The sensation was pre-lingual and beyond rational coping or description. I can only equate this feeling to what a dog must experience when it jumps up, hackles raised, and stares at the corner or out the window at something we can't see.

I jumped up, immediately fully awake and aware in the darkness, but the buzzing feeling was still pulsing throughout my body. I became convinced there was something moving in the room, something heavy and powerful but incorporeal. There were several LED lights from devices plugged in so I had plenty of light to scan the room. Nothing. Nothing visible.

It's not the first time I've had this experience. Once when I was 10 years old I was awakened similarly and felt a heavy force sitting on my chest pressing down to the point I couldn't breathe. Then, the force vanished and I started doing violent and uncontrollable sit-ups over and over, seizing and screaming all the while until my Dad made his way to my basement bedroom. Similar things have happened from time to time--I think the most recent was in Ireland the night before our boat to Skellig Michael? That was in 1999.

Deep energies are awakening in in the Earth.

Quarantine Dreams

The stress of teaching online has manifested in my dreams. Daily (nightly) I have bizarre and complicated dreams about school and my students.

Often the classroom has been destroyed and we are trying out new settings only to have students get lost or fall into crevasses, or I spend the dream encountering small groups of my students and I can't find the rest and when I do find others I lose the students I'd found previously.

The current project my students are working on will get a ridiculous additional requirement that nobody can accomplish, and I awake multiple times thinking "That's not part of the assignment" only to fall asleep again and have another anxiety dream about it again and again.

Yesterday I dreamt that my class somehow woke five monstrous giants from the distant past. These began systematically destroying civilization with cudgels the size of train cars. I guided my students to an ancient thick-walled fortification atop a system of caverns and we all got separated in deep catacombs. At one point I thought "well at least the giants can't get us here," only to see through a hole in the wall that human soldiers and police in allegiance with the giants were forming up outside to invade our bunker. I rushed around trying to find my students to guide them out before it was too late.

Sometimes the dreams are of a sort I used to have in high school: can't find my classroom, my schedule is printed in symbols I can't read, my locker with all my work is sealed shut or the combo no longer works, etc.

Strangely, however, I'm sleeping more than I have in years--somewhere around 8 hours a night. This is unheard of. I typically get 3-4 hours. Is it healthier to sleep 3-4 hours without waking, or to sleep 8 waking 3-4 times a night in a panic at some imagined stressor?

And how many more weeks/months of this will we have?

dream

I'm a trainee on a police force. Members of my unit include a woman, a robot, and Dirty Harry. There's a long involved narrative with an evil scientist villain which I can't recall. I am in the office restroom which is ungendered. As I use the urinal the woman is telling me how astonished she is that Dirty Harry has been so nice of late. I agree with her, though I never really knew him when he was not nice. I tell her something which I don't think of as a betrayal, but moments after she leaves Dirty Harry breaks the door off its hinges and yells at me. I get the sense that she told him what I said, and that he interpreted it as a betrayal of trust. I think he is against all robots and that my comment led him to believe that I don't think all robots are bad. His exertions have hurt him and he is kneeling on the floor. I realize how old he is, and comfort him by putting my arm around his shoulders.

Our mission is to infiltrate the mad scientist's lair and destroy his robot. I am given a small weapon which is made of two discs with holes around the circumference on one and small dents on the other. Long plastic tubes go through the holes and fit into the dents, joining the two discs together. All of this must be lined up for firing, but as nothing is permenantly attached I am having trouble getting the weapon ready. Finally it works. I destroy the scientist's robot, and then to appease Dirty Harry I destroy our robot too. He walks me up onto a hill in the desert. There is a monstrous man with a gun on his hip there who is the scientist's sidekick, but he tells us we can't arrest him for lack of evidence and starts walking away. Dirty Harry says "What can I do? He's a lawyer!" but then he wrestles the man to the ground. The man wails pitifully, becomes a buffalo and jumps up. The buffalo runs over to a circular dug-out area on the cliff, and a wolf and bull arrive at the same time. As the two bovines charge each other the wolf is caught between them, snarling. The impact sends the bull flying over the cliff and I wake up.

Dreaming again

I've never, to my knowledge, had recurring dreams. I do, however, have dreams in the same settings. Last night I dreamt for the billionth time that I was in my paternal grandparents' house in Stewartstown, PA. I'm not sure why my unconscious needs regularly to return there. I almost never dream of houses I actually lived in as a child, but for some reason this house--where I spent a lot of time--gets repeated work-overs.

The terrain shifts in interesting ways, not atypical of dreams. Extra rooms or wings will appear, typically off the attic or the enclosed back porch. The rarely-visited room where Grandma did her laundry in an open tub with ringer can manifest as anything from a subterranean cavern to a shaman's hut to an opulent ballroom full of tuxedoed politicos scheming. Often I'm seeking something I lost in the house. I go through boxes of old toys I used to play with there: clay miniature bricks, dusty Erector sets, rusty model cars and trucks--only to be frustrated. I can't get into the giant safe and fear what I need is locked inside. The small cabinets behind the fridge yield nothing but spiderwebs and dessicated liquor bottles with faded labels. The fridge itself has cows' eyeballs in brown paper, or piled sausages on plates (Grandpa was a butcher). It holds no answer.

I should go walk around Stewartstown some day. I had the run of it as a child. My friends and I had many secret places. There was a fantastic ancient graveyard with a monument to I believe George Stewart, who founded the town, or after whom the town was named. I think he was an early Postmaster of the US? Can't find anything on Google yet. Missy Jo and I would climb the gravestones, then scramble around under the baseball diamond bleachers, or inside the walls of the ruined recreation center. There were numerous friendly biddies in town with readily available candies, willing to fatten us up. We even had on our property several ancient barns and outbuildings--including an outhouse--that were fun to clamber around, in, and upon. And a big bush the neighborhood children used to congregate beneath on our side yard.

My childhood was often idyllic in a 1950s small-town way. Of course there was the drunken abusive wife-beating father and the divorce, but you can't have everything.

The Secret Sharer

So my niece turned 12 this week, the two boys I used to babysit when I was a teenager are approaching 30 themselves now, my 20th high school reunion is this year, and my father-in-law is telling me that he has no will and he wants Cha to go to a lawyer in case he dies suddenly.

I'm not one to kvetch much about aging or getting old, but I do indeed wish I could slow the ride down. I feel I need a few months to catch up with the pace, to get back on track. New job, new house, new car, new furniture...the center cannot hold.

I dreamed I was in a group of four people and we were supposed to simultaneously BASE jump from a hot-air balloon at 8,000 feet. Before jumping we were supposed to write down secret thoughts about each other to trade after jumping. I didn't know the other three people in the group, but they were old friends to each other. I had therefore no secrets to share. On one envelope I saw someone had written "I hate Jackie." I didn't know which of my companions was Jackie, nor the handwriting on the envelope.

I've known two Jackies in "real" life: a trailer trash aunt who likely had a fling with my father, betraying my mother and my uncle at once; and a tough Jersey girl in the English program at York College. I hated neither of them.

Dream

Been a while since I could recall my dreams. Last night was a doozy.

I'm sitting with Julio and Yo! Adrienne. We're looking at books, and mine is a hefty astronomy tome. There's one of those Magic Eye dealies on the lower left corner of the left page. I look at it and say "I can't do these fucking Magic Eye things," and then some squiggles and lines emerge from a confused daub of colors. There are three rows and three colums of I Ching hexagrams. "Wait--I see something but it's just a bunch of lines!" I say, getting excited.

"Those are what you need to focus together," Julio replied, busting my balls.

I focused more closely and behind the hexagrams was the constellation Sagittarius. I was about to tell Julio what I saw when he said sarcastically "Is it perhaps the constellation Sagittarius?" Then I realized there was a caption above the image that said precisely what it was.

Suddenly I was a teen living in my parents' house. We had an enormous crocodile living with us for some reason. My parents were trying to get it to eat me. Apparently this was some kind of joke, and the crocodile had eaten me before. I was tired of it all, however, and was sick of being eaten and returning to life. As the crocodile chased me around the house, its dreadful toenails clicking on the wood floors, I eluded it by jumping on top of furniture, going upstairs, closing doors. I was about to escape the house. The door was bolted and I was fumbling with the lock. The croc was right behind me when I woke. Immediately after I woke the alarm went off.

Yesterday I dreamed a similar dream about a bear. The bear was just about to eat me when I woke and the alarm went off. The bear lived in my house as well, and so long as he was asleep under the covers in my bedroom all was well. Then he woke.

The last time I dreamed so clearly about a constellation, I was lying on a beach and a crab was biting my left shoulder. The sun was intense but I could see Cancer anyhow. Shortly after that I was diagnosed with melanoma on my left shoulder.

I wonder what a dream about Sagittarius means? I'm developing club foot? Or perhaps my archery skills are improving?