Dreaming a Second Coming

The dream opens at full compass, touting some big, important book that I sensed was the bible, though that term was not explicit. At first the essence of the dream seemed to be about grammar, usage, punctuation as well as revising and upgrading old lines, meaning and prophecies. These items weren’t laid out formally but that was the sense.

This seemed to be a big project, and I wonder in the dream who would help me accomplish the task. I did notice in passing a restoration team came through the dream space, moving quotation marks around as well as commands like “Though Shalt Not” so that bad things that happen, such as storms and pestilence, came less frequently. The team kept hammering at this task for decades, perhaps centuries, until their ranks thinned and those who were left couldn’t really say whether they were better off.

At some time or in some millennium the various parties meet at some historical intersection with instruments at the ready. It was as if they were taking down and building a house at the same time. In the dream I heard all sorts of indistinguishable chants, like a dead language fighting for space and prominence. Words like “Father” and “Son” seem to devour each other while a vast crowd walk over words like “devil” and “darkness” until the words were one with the tundra. Then there appears nestled in some semantic glen the words “Love and Peace” and with that the noisy crowd shrank and shriveled, then slipping into the darkness, mumbling something about adverbs and adjectives that do not receive proper recognition. This contingent light fires and sends projectiles at the farthest horizon points where nouns lived unadorned, undisturbed and close to the earth.

The language for this piece is almost verbatim from my dream journal entry May 20, 2022. I have made a few adjustments for flow and clarity. I knew immediately on waking this dream seemed different from what I usually experience in terms of symbol, imaginative leaps, and the philosophical and religious overtones.

I have been studying Jungian psychology for thirty years and have recorded dreams for most of this period. In their simplest form I have found that studying my dreams helps me better understand what I repress, project and deflect. I grew up in an Irish Catholic family where psychology was in short supply. My father delivered his pedagogy to his three sons with the buckle end of a belt. I’ll never forget my mother’s plea: “Jimmy, mind the buckle end.” It rarely worked. He died when I was fifteen. She rarely spoke about him again. He retreated into the family’s collective shadow where my mother’s first husband, who died from wounds suffered in World War I, remained.

I came to realize my mother buried her past because she was ashamed of putting three children from her first marriage in the orphanage, having a child out of wedlock and misleading my father. Her seven children have all taken in part of her burden, forgiven her, and tried to capture what she suffered. My upcoming novel, “When War Becomes Us” is a dream-rich descent into the family’s shadow. This seems the project of my adult life.

Jung wrote on so many occasions our task in life to become psychological, to “individuate,” that is, to find and live our true Self in an age and culture that seem designed to thwart that ambition. Certainly, psychoanalysis can be very helpful, as I have discovered. Dreams still serve as a daily worksheet, a way for me to remain aware of my psyche and what challenges it poses.

The dream described earlier in this piece is remarkably different from the hundreds of dreams I’ve recorded in scope, language, movement and tone. I sense right away this is a big project and look around for help. This feels religious from the very beginning and the language has a religious sense. This feel is also tempered by the restoration team that seems to lessen the threat of storms and pestilence. The dreamer has the sense that he needs to upgrade old language and the structure of words. The current grammar does not seem appropriate to the task. On waking I thought of the poet Auden’s words: “New styles of architecture, a change of heart.” I also reflected on Yeats “The Second Coming” written in 1919 after World War 1. Yeats imagines a dark future.

A central thrust of my poem is a movement away from words like “Father” and “Son.” People are walking away from words like “devil” and “darkness” to the direction of “Love” and “Peace.” There are outliers, of course, walking away from these virtues, slipping into the darkness, complaining their language is not receiving enough recognition. They light fires and send projectiles in protest.

From the beginning the poem has a religious feel but not quite in the biblical sense. There is a definite shift away from orthodoxy and the masculine world of Father and Son, words that seem to devour each other. And words like ‘devil” and “darkness” are run into the ground.

I can’t really say exactly why the various parts of speech seem to convey so much meaning in the dream. As a writer, teacher, and professor of English, language is central to my very being. That I would dream syntax and word flow is not surprising. But the dream pushed raw language into art and transformation.

In my opinion biography, carefully balanced, is a lens through which the context of dreams can be considered. I have long held suspect a masculine theology that doesn’t give the feminine full stature in the pantheon. I wrote my PhD dissertation on the “Catholic Imagination,” examining this theme in a number of Catholic authors. My first book of poems was “That Kingdom Coming Business.” A recent novel, “Chanting the Feminine Down,” about the need for women priests, contains dozens of dreams about the masculine Church and related matters. I think movement away from a masculine hierarchy is central to our survival. It is central to my personal theology. It seems central to the dream.

The dream seems to have captured the present state of my psyche and rendered it in poetic, archetypal form.

And that is a blessing.