Rendezvous with the Dream Women
In his book “Lying with the Heavenly Woman” Robert A. Johnson writes that a man can measure his degree of happiness and well-being by paying attention to the feminine figures in his dreams. “If the women in his dreams are happy and relate well to him, he will be happy. If they are ill or weak or angry, he will have little or no sense of well-being.” In this view, there is no other single element that has so much to do with man’s happiness.
Author Johnson has built on Carl Jung’s work and his lifetime pursuit of the anima or the feminine principle. In effect, Jung saw coming to grips with his feminine side as man’s essential life work. He reminded not to exclusively look for the feminine in women, by the way of projection, but to find the feminine within himself, for only then can he be whole in a marriage or a relationship with a woman. On one occasion Jung analyzed for his students the dream of a gifted man. In one dream a woman walked into a room, put her hands on her head, moaned and left. Jung’s analysis was terse: “Now he will catch it.”
A man “catching it” at the hands of a woman has filled legends, mythology and tale tales for centuries, serving up a kind of primitive psychology. Robert Johnson writes that “if a man’s inner woman disapproves and walks out on him, things will go badly in his feeling life and his sense of worth.” In some respect the behavior of or lack of his inner feminine foreshadows what has or will happen to a man in his daylight relationships with women.
Jung saw man’s search for the feminine or anima as a task best pursued during his second half of life, a view colored by his Swiss background, the patriarchy and the Christian religion. Nonetheless, there is an essential truth in this psychology. Johnson puts it this way: “The anima is so strong that it seems impossible for man to understand her directly in the first part of his life, and he has to assign her reality to some projection — generally onto a real woman — before he can comprehend the profoundly religious experience she brings to him. To project one’s anima onto a real woman is to miss the interior meaning of life and — worse yet — to fail to see his real-life companion in her human dimension. If a man asks his fiancée or wife to be a goddess, he sets the stage for an inevitable tragedy. She fails to be his goddess and, blinded by his great hunger for the divine feminine, he fails to see her as the human being she is.”
The anima itself can takes various forms in a man ‘s life, usually a light and dark side. The light side represents the idealistic and ascetic while the dark side represent the wild, sensuous and chaotic. These forces can cause great suffering in a man’s life. As Johnson notes, some cultures try to address the double nature of anima by condoning multiple wives, mistresses and the like. The chaos that results from a man letting anima rule him bereft of discipline is an ancient and very modern tale. Johnson suggests an “ideal solution is to marry a woman who bears one of man’s anima images and invest the other in an art and creative endeavor in his outer life. It is one of the large cultural tasks facing us in our age to find a creative solution to the double anima in man.”
But whatever the remedy, this is man’s task and it represents a kind of psychological betrayal for him to project these needs, desires and wants solely on a woman. And this is easier said than done. After all, we live in a pulsating age of projection and eternal theater where my mirrors are everywhere, on my various screens, on social media and perhaps in my dreams.
And speaking of dreams! Jung saw that a careful attention to one’s dreams serves as a constant check on ego consciousness and for men, if we are lucky, an ongoing conversation with our anima. This task is neither quick, easy or a guarantee of psychological health. Everyone’s path and motivation are different. I started dreaming anima dreams after my mother’s death. I saw these dreams as a gift, a way to allay my pain and sorrow. I got help from a Jungian psychologist, started taking psychology courses and recording my dreams. That was twenty-five years ago.
I’ll close with a dream I had a few months ago. This is written as I recorded it in my dream journal:
“I seem to be in the middle of a dream, as if it is already underway. There is a woman present and a sense of mystery. I watch her move across the room and the hem of her dress moves slightly, nothing loud or obvious, a lifting of one side of the hem, a fraction, then the other, bringing into focus her thin brown legs, her tight waist, everything at the vertical, no overt sexuality, just a hint, the slightest movement, the rise and rustle of her dress. I feel in the dream that I’m missing something and warm to the experience. It touches me in the slightest way sexually; a small rush, a recognition, a warming of the blood.”
I have found dreams a good source of poetry in that they are anima territory where symbol and metaphor govern, language slows and the ego fades. I also find dream a blessing, a kind of prayer, and a pulling back from my daylight self where my negative anima still holds far too much sway.
My book of poetry “Set Pieces of the Feminine,” based entirely in dreams, is available on Amazon.
