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

Image Source

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.

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?