The Dream Popes in Service to a Feminist Novel
I have dreamed of the Michelin Man, Edgar Allen Poe, Sylvester the Cat, and women in every state of dress and undress. I also went through a period when I was dreaming a lot about popes. Freud, who seemed to adhere to the theory of sex saturated dreams, has not been a great deal of help. Carl Jung is more provident, reminding us that dreams are usually about compensation, meaning, I suppose, that I have a thing for the Michelin Man and a cat named Sylvester. But, all kidding aside, for Jung this is not play. No matter how playful dreams might appear, they can take us very close to a neurosis, a place where I can suffer and learn. I’ll get to the popes.
Psychologist James Hillman in his “Revisioning Psychology,” building on the work of Jung and Freud, suggests that we see dreams as theater, rich with images of masks, mirrors, costumes, stylized language and the like. I suppose as a writer and ex-university literature instructor, this would be my natural bias. For me, Hillman’s intuition is supported by my own experience of keeping a detailed dream journal for the last twenty-five years. Of course, anyone who has kept a dream journal will likely acknowledge that the finished product often reads as a surreal document moored to a shifting narrative. Hillman might say that is the nature of material from the collective unconscious where dream images, symbols and rhetoric reside and collide.
The views of Jung and Hillman on dreams are complementary. Compensation figures prominently in dreams as the night introduces us to what we want to hide or are afraid of. This is when we wear Hillman’s mask and become actors in a drama. Let me offer a recent dream as an example of these themes. I take the language directly from my dream journal, with adjustments for grammar and style.
“I am watching a beautiful woman at a podium giving a lecture on how to interpret a woman’s eye movements, shrugs, smiles, winks, pauses and gasps. I am now looking at a long line of emotionless women who might have appeared in Cosmopolitan magazine over the years. I remain fixed to the spot, anchored in a way, unable to move as the women seem to hold me in place. I begin to reflect in the dream how I might have missed the mark in my novel “Chanting the Feminine Down,” written from a woman’s perspective. I wait for the speaker at the podium to turn her attention to this failure in “Chanting.”
Instead, she welcomes a young woman to the stage who she referred to as the bride, dressed as if she were ready for the wedding ceremony. I saw this as my chance to slip away, almost into the woodwork, turning my attention to a glass case which held figurines, mainly dancers and a few babushka dolls.
I make notes after recording the dream about my misreading of the feminine, idealizing her, projecting my internal images on her. I miss the true meaning, the wedding and retreat into the woodwork where I examine figurines until the dream faded.
My dream journal is filled with question marks after almost every entry, a reminder that the dream is metaphor and symbol and shifts in meaning, like phases of the moon. If I look at the dream script tomorrow I might see something else. Nonetheless, I can’t avoid the anxiety in the dream and a feeling that the feminine and Anima herself remains elusive.
As mentioned earlier, dreams often explore our inferior side and where neurosis and uncertainty reside. The glue that holds “Chanting the Feminine Down” is the dream and the psychology of the dream. In effect “Chanting” began with a dream about Pope John Paul II, now a saint, sinking into Mother Earth. In the background of the dream is a scene in which a young woman, standing in front of an altar, is turned away by a priest before the Communion service. The woman interrupts the liturgy, demanding that women have a voice in this ritual. The dream became an outline for the novel.
I don’t know why this dream appeared when it did. I have always been interested in the history of Catholicism and Christianity. I wrote a PhD dissertation on the Catholic Imagination in a number of religious authors. My first book of poetry, “That Kingdom Coming Business,” was about my service with the Navy on an ammunition ship off Vietnam and the tonnage of bombs that we dropped on that land. This wound festered.
Jung spoke often about man discovering his anima or feminine side during the second half of his life. He said don’t look to find your feminine side in women; find it in yourself. To be sure man frequently has anima dreams and might be able to use this material to form a more balanced psyche. I take the Pope John Paul dream as a blessing, gift and responsibility. In the feel of the dream I was that woman in front of the altar demanding that women be a part of the service. I might say the dream was calling me to account.
I dream a lot but never as relentlessly as during the years I was writing “Chanting.” In retrospect I might say the dreams were taking me to another aspect of my inferior side and my uneasy relationship with religion. During the daylight I can be full of bombast but at night I let my guard down. That’s when dreams rush in.
Pope Francis showed up often, once emerging from the heavens or a star cluster asking, rhetorically, “Don’t you know where the text comes from?” Then the scene shifted to a line of girls in Catholic school uniforms waiting to receive Communion. Within the narrative the protagonist Colette wonders why Pope Francis appeared in the dream on the same day as the feast of the Immaculate Conception. The raw theology is never far away from the dream’s surface.
Pope Francis at times appears to be a guide. Here is an entry from the novel where the dream serves as narrative, image and a moral center.
“She dreamed she was back in another ante-room, a dreamscape, watching a scene that might be in a Vatican or a more modest space. Francis and another man were with two nuns who appeared to be guides or interlocutors. All stood outside the building, waiting to enter. There was humor in the air, and Colette felt she could be seeing a ‘Who’s on First’ routine. It somehow became clear that the two men were about to enter a monastery to learn who would be the next pope. The men pointed to each other and asked the nuns, but they seemed uninterested. Once inside, the men were supposed to receive a sign regarding who would be the anointed one.”
“As soon as he entered, the unnamed man felt a change come over him, a sign. He felt pumped up, inflated, full of himself. He imagined he had been hit with a thunderbolt which moved him sideways. The man believed he was the anointed one. Power already radiated from him.
“Then this inflated man traveled underground with Francis and watched him in silence as he administered to the poor and people who looked like gargoyles. The pretender then announced through his tears and anguish to everyone that his companion was the true pope, but no one would listen,
“An authority figure searched for the pope’s name but couldn’t find it. His companion wept some more and begged the official to look deeper. Finally, on the last page of the book, the official found the name of Pope Francis in small letters. The other man dropped to his knees, kissed the pope’s ring and, still underground, experienced the fullness of the holy man.
“The nuns clapped in unison, but this small sound was drowned out by the movements of heavy, embroidered vestments and brocade shoes worn by the Princes of the Church who stepped high over chapel stones on the way to a coronation.”
Jung has written that the psyche is a source of great riches and distress. I told an audience in New York City a month ago that I thought I was going out of my mind, given the torrent of dreams, while writing the novel. With hindsight, I realize that I couldn’t have written a novel about the urgent need for the feminine in religion if it wasn’t for the raw material from dozens of dreams that are stories in miniature and present the images and symbols of religion as part of a fictional narrative and not the final truth. Within the dream, within this fiction, is tension and unresolved issues. Accordingly, in a novel, dogma is just another fiction.
Since publishing “Chanting the Feminine Down” I have been pleasantly surprised by the number of organizations including Roman Catholic Women Priests, Women’s Ordination Conference, and countless others, many under the #MeToo Movement banner, advocating for full equality for women in the church.
More details about these movement at www.chantingthefemininedown.com
