I’m working on another symbolism post – this time on the Parrot – but I’ve had some interesting dreams relating to the animus lately so I wanted to write a quick post about it.
I had an incident at work, where I felt a great deal of shame, and like I was a failure. My usual way of dealing with negative feelings is to sit with them and move into them. First off, this allows the emotion to slowly dissipate. But I’ve also found it to be a great method of “firing up” the furnace that burns away the ego. But then, a few days ago, I had the following dream:
Something about a hard world (post-apocalyptic? or just a hard, dangerous world?); it’s a barren wasteland. I wash/rinse myself with water running down a wall or hill or something outside. The water is actually really dirty; it’s toxic, and if the residue stays on me it will make me sick. I think to myself that I need to find some clean water to wash myself with, to rinse off the black, toxic particles but there’s no water anywhere. I try to think of other solutions, maybe find the water in other things (like plants?)
Interpretation:
I think this fragment in particular was speaking to what I’m going through, but I don’t know what else to do other than sit with my feelings. It seems to be saying to try to find the water in other things, but where???
So maybe not all emotions are good, all the time. Right now my dream seems to be saying that there’s good “water” (water that cleanses) and bad water (water that just makes you sick). This may be related to my repeated dreams of bathrooms, urine, and feces. But I don’t know what to do, or where to look. I’ve spent years – decades really – learning these techniques of staying in my emotions. But it seems to be making me sick.
This sounds like the disease of extroverted feeling: excessive judgment. We extroverted feeling types (even though EF is my inferior function) are extremely judgmental, but we're never more judgmental of others than we are of ourselves. Maybe this dream is saying that this aspect of extroverted feeling is harmful and is making me sick. But what is the cure? Does it have to do with the head (the bit about my nice hair, and the fragment about the cat’s head sticking out of the cage)? Maybe what it’s saying is that I need to use my strength (my mind) when I fall into these emotional quagmires?
After a lot of musing the last few days, agonizing even, over this question I had these dreams last night:
A very tall man asks somewhat judgmental, demanding questions. My impression now that I’m awake is that he’s pale and cold. He’s very, very tall, like almost twice as tall as I am. I kind of fob him off, answering with a deflecting answer. I walk away from him. I don’t think he follows, I think my answer was good enough.
And:
I’m with a bunch of women at an exhibition or a counter of some kind. They all have these tiny keys on their key rings and ask me why I don’t have mine. I say I don’t even know what they are. They explain that they’re something that they got from the authorities or the train station or something. All women get them but I don’t have one. The keys are used by women to get into safe rooms when they’re attacked by men. I think I go and try to get a key.
I interpreted these dreams in the following way:
Tall man: Definitely an animus figure. I immediately felt that he was a) related to the negative animus/brute (he seems to be a development of this figure); and b) related to the dirty water from last night’s dream. He’s very judgmental – very lofty – and cold (unemotional). What is the difference between me/J (my aunt) and Grandma (my Italian-American paternal grandmother and J’s mother)? It’s the judgmental, German animus. It’s definitely from Grandpa... or at least his side of the family (probably Great Grandma, from all the stories I’ve heard). Also, this figure may have something to do with giants, particularly frost giants (which are also Germanic!). Giants have no hearts; they kill mercilessly. You have to destroy them by finding and crushing their hearts. It looks like, by not accepting his dirty water judgment, I've escaped him, although this may only be temporary.
Safe room keys: I didn’t think I could get a lot out of this fragment but now that I've re-read it after doing the interpretation I think this may actually be a KEY part of the dream (lol). A large part of this (and last night’s) dream is about dealing with cold, brutal, dangerous men (the Tall Man). This dream is telling me how to do it: go to the safe room. The key to the safe room is received from an authority through... a spiritual authority? It’s related to the train (travel/ journey). Could this be the Self? The Self is the journey’s guide, the (train) conductor so to speak. There are two authorities: the Tall Man, and the train authority. There are two kinds of water: the dirty, toxic water, and the clean water, the water that comes from plants (that I was looking for at the end of the dirty water dream last night). The first authority is the brutal, rigid, righteous, but cruel and destructive (he reminds me of the torturer priest in Berserk). The other authority is quiet, still, natural, dispassionate. I think this may be the train authority. I can get the key to the safe room from him; this is the key that women have to protect themselves from the brutal animus, the Tall Man.
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| Safe house |
The images in this post are from the Japanese manga Berserk. I'd like to do an interpretation of this story - there's a lot of deep symbolism in it - but at the very least I'm going to do a couple of posts on the man (who reminds me of The Tall Man), the priest Mozgus, and the master of the green house in the image above, the nature witch Flora. They shed a lot of light on the themes of this post. In addition, I will be posting an excerpt from Marie Louise von Franz's interpretation of the Giant Who Had No Heart in His Body, which is also related.
See also:
The Giant Who Had No Heart in His Body
Mozgus
Flora
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