It’s great that you’ve provided some important background information about yourself because that can result in a more accurate interpretation. Also useful are the mythologies, stories and beliefs etc. of people over the centuries regarding some images in your dream such as circles, monks, coffins/death, “supernatural forces” and the apparent presence of a Japanese Miko or female shaman. That’s because your dream is what Carl Jung termed “archetypal”. That is, it came from the deepest layers of your psyche at this important transitional period of your life (early 20’s) in order to show your objective situation at this time along with some advice on what to do next. It uses various deeply important symbols which are more “collective” in nature instead of “personal”. In addition, this dream appears go be connected with your earlier one from over a year ago about the attacking myna bird.
Just to let you know that, although I’m looking at your dreams from the point of view of Jungian psychology (which I’m assuming you’re not familiar with), for the sake of simplicity I won’t be going into long detailed descriptions which could tend to put you off. Unfortunately, this might lend the interpretations too much of an arbitrary tone, so if you’d like to explore Jung’s basic ideas more fully, I’d recommend Man and His Symbols which Jung edited and for which he wrote the first long chapter on symbols and dreams.
In the current dream, the location of an open field late at night suggests, instead of the presence of religious monks per se for the funeral ritual, the presence of “pagan forces” that also create an inescapable circle in the centre of which you find yourself along with the coffin which you sense is empty. The presence of the coffin, of course, suggests your unfortunate phobia about death, while the darkness suggests how you’re unaware (unconscious) of the causes of the phobia, as are other members of your family. The force which keeps you “confined” in the phobia is very powerful, possibly the fear that appears on the scene when anything directly or indirectly related to death appears on the scene.
The twelve seated and chanting monks probably represent your inner so-called “masculine” side (termed the “animus” by Jung), which is usually characterized by such attributes as “mind”, the intellect, opinions, beliefs, focus, and being target-orientated etc. As with all inner figures and symbols, the animus is two-sided, one being positive while the other is negative.
In this case, certain overly rigid beliefs and opinions might be tending to maintain the phobia (e.g. you can’t escape from the circle of monks). A ritual circle in dreams usually is a symbol of an overall potential wholeness of the mind and body where all innate potentials are developed as well as possible over a lifetime. In this case, the phobia is shown as interfering with the fulfilling of some potentials (i.e. you are “confined” by the circle instead of feeling “fulfilled”).
A voice in your head then says you can escape if you jump over the coffin three times. Especially if the voice was female, it would be providing a “way out” of the phobia by probably in effect advising you to adhere to and believe in yourself as a unique person instead of, say, sticking too much with certain conventional attitudes and goals etc. which don’t really fit your own personality deep down. This inner figure was termed the “Self” by Jung, here possibly symbolized by a Japanese Miko, a description of whom you probably came into contact with earlier in your life but which faded easily into your unconscious.
Just briefly researching this figure provided some interesting parallels. For example, in the distant past, a Miko was a female shaman who interpreted messages from the dead (that is, messages from the unconscious), and she wore a white shroud (white sleeve in your dream?) to signify she was married and in service to a “god”, i.e. to an inner psychological energy of high value (probably symbolizing the animus in his role as a vital link for a woman to her unconscious). So if you yourself have a phobia regarding anything about “death”, then this apparently could interfere with some kind of ability related to, for example, comforting people or yourself who are facing “death” literally or in terms of a difficult psychological “transition” (i.e. related to the painful “death” of old habits and ways of thinking etc.)
For various reasons, the role of the Miko has diminished to the point of such young women being merely hostesses at Shinto shrines, as it were. The fact that the dream has created a link to this “back story” might possibly mean that an important potential within you is tending to be “demeaned” for whatever reason.
It’s likely that you’re great-grandma, whom you still love so much, in some way symbolizes your inner Self figure. Maybe because of some innate nearness to the type of person she was and how close you felt to her, her death was extra traumatic for you at such a young age. The problem is that the fear of death which appeared at that time might still actually be disguising a fear of life. This is always totally understandable is such situations when the pain felt was so excruciating. It’s as if an unconscious thought or belief was formed which said something like “If this horrible pain is what life is going to give me, I don’t want any part of it”. So while you’ve probably succeeded very well in many areas of your life, some areas might tend to be excluded which relate to darker emotions and experiences. Without these though, we often can’t grow as totally well-rounded as is potentially within us.
In the dream, it looks like the Miko-energy seizes you in an “unconventional” way (i.e. it makes you perform three jumps over the empty coffin, similar to three trials etc. in folk tales and not as related to Christian ideas). The extreme anger of the monks at you doing this and gaining freedom from the circle could mean that any such “leap of faith” in tossing aside your fear about death by following a rush of enthused energy from within (and in dropping old and unhelpful habits and trains of thought) could be followed by guilty thoughts like “I have no right to be happy”, “I must never do anything which might cause another person to be hurt” etc. etc. That’s because a kind of similar opinion tried to get in the way of escaping the monks, i.e. “I was terrified because I thought it would be rude and disrespectful if I did that, even though the coffin was empty”.
Similar ideas appear in the dream about the black myna bird. It’s safe to say that birds and animals in dreams most often symbolize the dreamer’s overall way of handling natural instinctive emotions, vague feelings, intuitions and even cold thoughts and actions that are sometimes needed to defend ourselves in certain situations (just like a quiet mother bear etc. will suddenly turn very savage if her cubs are in danger). A bird has the extra special role of being a “messenger” to the ego about the state of her or his relation to the instinctive side. In your case, the bird is very “angry” with you, aggressively attacking your head.
Without knowing anything about your close friend at the time and the nature of the argument, it’s not really possible to be specific, but Jung’s close colleague Marie-Louise von Franz writes about friends as follows:
… we make friends with people who live out our shadow [a side of ourselves which we’d prefer not to have]. Friends can do the things we cannot do. Tell me who your friends are, and I have the whole panorama of your good and bad qualities. Our bad qualities as well as our good ones hold an attraction, a fascination for us. The friend is often the person whom one envies. The friend is more elegant, or dances better, or can move about better in outer life, or has depth, or has a better mind. So if one hasn’t worked on one’s shadow, there is always a kind of love-hate relationship with the shadow and with one’s friends.
So it’s possible that you and your close friend had some mutual “shadow issues” which might have caused the blow-up. Jungian analyst Daryl Sharp defines the “shadow” in Jung Lexicon as follows:
Before unconscious contents have been differentiated, the shadow is in effect the whole of the unconscious.
It is commonly personified in dreams by persons of the same sex as the dreamer.
The shadow is composed for the most part of repressed desires and uncivilized impulses, morally inferior motives, childish fantasies and resentments, etc. -- all those things about oneself one is not proud of.
The shadow is not, however, only the dark underside of the personality. It also consists of instincts, abilities and positive moral qualities that have long been buried or never been conscious.
Because the myna is black in your dream, it possibly could represent a part of your shadow to which you normally “don’t give a voice”, i.e. the myna doesn’t make any sounds. But the argument was maybe somehow related to something it’s really “angry” about because you might tend to ignore its presence too often, namely, something related to the “head” and “brains”. This leads back to the possibility of “negative opinions” etc. as related to the current dream which appear to be “hurting the instincts” as exemplified by the troubling symptom of the phobia over death-related issues.
The earlier dream apparently also shows you as unwilling to accept the possibility that any message from the unconscious (or perhaps the outer world as well) could or should be negative (e.g. your friendly reaction to the myna in the hallway). But it’s possible that the argument the day before, as upsetting as it was, failed to have you come to see a kind of annoying habit or trait in yourself (as maybe mirrored in your friend), causing the myna to explode in rage, so to speak.
The head and brain often symbolize where the animus lives, as it were. If it tends to be carrying on its activities mostly unconsciously, it can be very annoying to others. If so, such a state of your brain is only valuable as food in the myna’s view since it produces little else of value. “Worms” also suggest the idea of death, i.e. perhaps a need for certain unhelpful habits of thought etc. to be made conscious, to unpleasantly “die” in the process, and therefore to provide “nourishment” for future growth.
“Banging your head against a wall” by firmly sticking to old habits of mind, instead of trying to genuinely accept what the myna is angry about, apparently can temporarily relieve certain outer life situations (e.g. the myna is hurt and flies away). But the area around your third eye is painfully hurt such that cries of confusion and fear are heard. The third eye is one symbol of the Self and from the dream’s point of view, any such injury is very “dangerous”, just like a fractured skull is dangerous in outer life.
Anyway, without knowing much about you, this way of looking at your dreams might not fit your personal circumstances very well, but I hope that these ideas can be helpful in some way. Please feel free to comment on, or to ask any questions about, this particular way of looking at your dreams.
|
|
Bookmarks