Thread: Dream in the form of a cross

Although it would usually be best to have current background information about you in order to provide a more accurate attempt at an interpretation, it’s safe to say that the dream is an important one because of the strong emotions in it, the presence in the poems of the mentioning of God, along with the poem being in the shape of a crucifix.

In the Jungian approach to dream analysis, it’s always best to know the dreamer’s background in detail and to have the dreamer’s own associations with each image and event in the dream. These would consist of spontaneous memories, thoughts, bodily sensations, intuitions and so on.

For example, these would be especially useful to gather regarding the unusual name of the poet. However, although it might sound unusual, the original roots of words can often shed light on their intrinsic meaning and on what the dream is trying to say. In this case, the root of the name “Jay” is actually the Roman name Gaius. The latter means “to rejoice”. On the other hand, the name of the bird itself, jay, is sometimes used in connection with a person in a negative way, i.e. as being “a simple-minded or gullible person” (Random House Dictionary of the English Language).

“Vanesser” might possibly suggest the female name Vanessa which has various spellings according to the the country involved. In Greek the name is a reference to the goddess Phanessa who is Pandora's daughter and who had a fascination for butterflies. (Vanessa in general has also been said to mean "butterfly" and is also the name of a specific butterfly genus).

When dealing with the unconscious in general, it’s best to accept that it speaks its own symbolic language in order to express what it means and that this might not agree with our conscious and “rational” viewpoint of how words and images etc. should be used. So this exploration of the poet’s name might seem a little off the wall, as it were.

To tie these ideas together in some way, first it’s important to note the strong emotions involved, how you’re powerfully moved by the words of the poems and feel deeply connected with the poet. Psychologically, this points to the dream showing how you’re mostly unconscious about the central meaning of the subject of the poems and about your identification so to speak with the poet (“almost like we were one”).

That is, you appear to be mesmerized by the concept of a “beautiful” God just like the poet apparently is.

To explain further, from your other posts it looks like you’re probably in the age range of 35-45 or beyond. In the Jungian approach, mid-life has been passed and a decline has begun. The first half of life generally concentrates on the building of financial security and the raising of a family. This usually necessitates focusing on the use of certain faculties and so on to the detriment of other innate parts of the personality. Jung’s profoundly deep study of the psyche revealed to him that the overall goal of life if to try as much as is practicable to reach the elusive condition of a wholeness of the personality. This process he termed “individuation”. There exists no stable end-point of such a process but only an approximation of it which allows for a solid ability to “hold together” in times of high stress, danger and other challenges. That is, a person doesn’t “fall apart” and is “unable to be divided” as the word individuation expresses. He or she is also able to stabilize the emotions of others in difficulties and to provide a sense of comfort and hope.

So usually in the second half of life, there is a natural urging by the psyche to complete the personality by developing additional personality traits, ways of orientating oneself and to develop a deepening a sense of meaning in life, all this involving working at inborn potentials for talents and skills which had to be left behind or which were never developed at all. This “change in direction” in life is very often encouraged by the appearance of one or more dreams.

As mentioned, without knowing anything much about you, a thorough and accurate interpretation of your dream isn’t possible. However, this dream is possibly an archetypal one, that is, one from the deeper layers of the psyche. These usually appear at important transition points or other challenging periods in a person’s life. In your case, it could a memento mori dream (“Remember that you will die”), an attempt to remind you that, while you might consider yourself to be young, the psyche is pointing out that an arc has been reached and a gradual decline has begun, so action should be taken to round out your personality.

For me, it looks like this particular dream could possibly be focusing on your concept of God which might be emphasizing the “good and beautiful” side while not taking into account another important aspect, namely, the subject of evil. This is an extra touchy subject especially because I don’t know if you’re a member of an organized religion which chiefly views God as the summum bonum (the highest good) which contains no evil. Jung’s in-depth scholarship and all-encompassing experience of life, partly in dealing with thousands of patients who were suffering, convinced him that the latter in some degree occurred because they could not unite within themselves good and evil. Instead, the largely ignored “evil” side within is projected unconsciously onto others, causing all sorts of conflicts from the petty to the catastrophic. He felt that this dangerous situation could be lessened by accepting the idea that “God”, however we see this entity, contains both good and evil all mixed together.

So it’s possible that “Jay Jay” contains these opposites. That is to say one Jay is to be rejoiced in (seeing “God’s” good side) while the other Jay could by viewed as representing not accepting evil as part of “God” and therefore perhaps being a little “simple-minded” from the psyche’s point of view. That is, the psyche doesn’t see this state of mind as being consistent with a genuinely “wise” and “mature” outlook suitable for the second half of life.

As mentioned, the poet’s surname is possibly related to the symbol of the butterfly for which the Greek word is “psyche”. One of the main symbols of the butterfly is of the soul reborn from the observations over millennia of its forming a chrysalis as a caterpillar and its emergence from it as a beautiful butterfly.

Regarding the poem which is shaped like a cross, an outline of the Jungian interpretation of the cross or crucifix is as follows: The cross is another symbol of “wholeness”. The image of a cross can carry (in addition to traditional Christian ideas) various meanings derived from an in-depth study of world symbolism. For example, the mandala (circle) implied by the four cardinal points of the cross again suggests the idea of completeness, roundedness and wholeness as related to an individual’s personality, as does the number “four” itself. The vertical and horizontal components of the cross relate to the opposites in life, e.g. love/hate, kindness/cruelty, ease/toil, contentedness/bitterness and so on. They also picture the union of the spiritual (the vertical) with the earth-bound (the horizontal). This can also be expressed as a union with the “spiritual” centre of the personality (the vertical) with the ego which is “material” (the horizontal). The suffering related to the crucifix expresses the pain and ordeal of having to experience the opposites embedded in life itself.

So it’s possible that the dream is encouraging a closer look at what the cross really symbolizes instead of viewing it as perhaps a kind of clever manipulation of words, as it were, instead of experiencing its deeper meaning and challenge.

If you haven’t looked into Jung’s ideas, an easy place to start is Man and His Symbols for which he wrote the opening chapter. The rest of the book he entrusted to his senior colleagues.

If you want to explore the idea of making the best of the second half of life, Jungian analyst James Hollis has written various approachable and enlightening books on the subject.

Anyway, I hope this tentative interpretation of your dream can be helpful in some way.