Peter Pan and a Fat Guy on Rope Swings
I will begin by drawing a large and startling figure: Governor Chris Christie is twisting on a rope swing, one hand on a diaper, the other on the cable, staying in a very limited sphere. The other bloke in the scene is also on a rope swing, looking more like a circus acrobat, working hard to kiss the ground. He appears to be showing off. The two swingers don’t cross each other’s orbit, but stay locked within their circuit and concerns.
If I now report that this is a dream I had, does that revelation close down the conversation? I know many psychologists and psychiatrists would say that I, the dreamer, was experiencing a case of “neural dumping,” influenced perhaps by scenes from the late-night comedy shows that have been known to put the Governor in diapers or in some ungodly state of undress. The advice from the experts, while they might acknowledge that the dreamer seems to be acting heady and superior, would be to reject and discard the burnt-out ends of smoky days. The dream is mental evacuation and a way to get rid of some daytime ticks. Period! Go to sleep.
Of course, I could go medieval and see this as a Morality Play, capital letters and all. We have the Governor (or the Man), presented as big baby in diapers, infantile, out of his element, swinging above the ground and holding on for dear life while the Villager, who he probably repressed, glides in his vacant space like a circus entertainer. If I stop here we have the outlines of a Good and Evil allegory, waiting for some machine god to appear with the final Word.
I could give my allegory flesh and blood by presenting it as an example of full-bodied Personifying; that is, recognizing that “words, like angels, are powers that have invisible power over us.” This quote is from psychologist James Hillman in “Revisioning Psychology” in which he suggests “A new angelology of words is needed so that we may once again have faith in them. Without the inherence of the angel in the word—and angel means originally “emissary,” “message-bearer,” how can we utter anything but personal opinions, things made up in our subjective minds?”
This is an invitation from Hillman, a post-Jungian psychologist, to go back to our roots, especially mythology, when wrestling with words. Hillman reminds us that the Greeks and Romans personified such “psychic powers as Mercy, Modesty and Forgetfulness” and provided altars where these real daemons would be worshipped.”
Freud suggested that dreams largely reflected sexual trauma. Carl Jung saw dreams as compensation. Perhaps the Christie dream is a response to an overweight governor, made famous by “Bridgegate,” who is now hogging all the headlines and late-night joke lines. The dream pits this portly man in diapers, swinging out of his element. The dreamer seems to be something of a high-flier, a Peter Pan, a Puer type and perhaps a circus clown. There might be more than one baby in this dream space.
The itch is always to personalize the dream, make it part of my repertoire, tight enough for cocktail talk. Jung suggested we “dream the dream forward,” as if we were engaged in a continuous conversation with the psyche. He called this “active imagination,” which refers to working with the image.
Hillman sharpens our understanding. He writes that active imagination is not a spiritual tradition, an artistic endeavor, a mystical activity, nor a psychological activity merely in the personal sense. In “Healing Fiction” he states that the primary aim of active imagination is healing the psyche that has fallen into literalism. This self-understanding is “like a painting, a lyric poem, biography thoroughly gone into an imaginative act.”
I will try not to think of the original dream as representing a fat politician and a Peter Pan on competing rope swings, comfortable in their conceit. Hard as it might be, I will dream that dream forward and not let my political leanings get in the way of that blank canvas.
