Darth Vader

I had this recurrent nightmare three times…

I am dreaming Darth Vader is on the back porch of the house. It is night. He is dressed in his typical manner in black with the helmet. I awake and feel extreme threat. The hair on the back of my neck is up. I am frightened. I go over and over it in my mind. What is the threat? Does it have to do my wife? My marriage? Is it from my house? The nightmare was never about me.

Six months after the first nightmare I was diagnosed with rectal carcinoidcancer. I had a surgical cure. They found the cancer (which was not otherwise amenable to treatment) over half way through the rectum.

(This was the nightmare of a then forty-seven year psychologist and close friend.)

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Darth Vader, the figure from George Lucas Star Wars saga, has become a stable figure in scary dreams. With his dark armor, dark visor, and black cape, he epitomizes the dangerous bogeyman for many people…. The similarity between the word death and the name Darth is registered by the movie watcher, perhaps only subliminally.

The Universal Dream Key, Patricia Garfield, Page 13

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I don’t think my friend talked to me about this nightmare at the time, although I do remember him telling me of dreaming of alligators that were out to get him during that time period. He also did not consult anyone about this recurrent nightmare or tell his doctor. (Similarly, I did not take my dream, in the first blog, about the crashing red airplane seriously enough.)

It is not a particularly obscure symbolic leap to see the connection between the back porch and the rectum, or death and Darth Vader.

Repetitive dreams are particularly important; the Unconscious is trying to get the message through, but the information is being ignored and needs to be repeated, often in scary terms.

This reminds me of the line from Ghostbusters -- When you have a nightmare, Who you gonna call?

Actually, you can call the Nightmare Hotline:

1-866-drms-911

(1-866-376-7911)

This is a twenty-four hour service run by the good people of Cyberdreamwork. These trained people are not going to do therapy or interpret the dream for you, but they will listen generously to you and help you debrief from it.

www.cyberdreamwork.com/nat.nightmarehotline.html

That Gnawing Feeling

A forty-year old man who had a recurrent dream about a rat gnawing in the lower part of his abdomen was eventually diagnosed as having a duodenal ulcer. After a successful operation for the ulcer, this dream no longer occurred.

Our Dreaming Mind, Robert Van de Castle, Ph.D. p368 (Citing E. Mitchell, "The Physiological Diagnostic Dream, New York Medical Journal 118, 1923, p417)

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Physical health appeared to be the most frequently incorporated waking life characteristic in people’s dreams. Those with lower levels of physical health and physical functioning reported more of the following in their dreams:

-- Bodily misfortunes and injury
-- Injuries and illness
-- Medical themes
-- Body parts
-- More mentions of the head

This list of items is evocative of a preoccupation during dreamtime with the physical body and its weakening or deterioration….

The finding that individuals with more pain displayed more animals in their dreams reflects no known previous research. It is speculated that the experience of pain may result in more primitive dreams involving animals.

The Relationship Between Dream Content and Physical Health, Mood, and Self-Construal, David King and Teresa DeCicco, Dreaming, Vol. 7 No. 3 127 –139.

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So far in this blog series we have come across a minute mastodon, a horse jumping out of a window, and a gnawing rat. (On a positive note, Asclepius had his healing snakes.) It seems that one needs to pay careful attention as to just what animals are up to in ones dreams.

You may well ask, How often does the average person dream of animals? The ground-breaking classic work in categorizing dreams is The Content Analysis of Dreams by Calvin Hall and Robert Van de Castle, published in 1966. (The average male has animals in 6% of his dreams; the average female has animals in 4% of their dreams.)

There is a vast literature on the symbolic meaning of animals in dreams. Although these links provide some initial suggestions about what the symbols may mean, always keep in mind that the meaning of each dream and each symbol is an individual one.

Web Links

Animals in Dreams

www.easy-dream-interpretation.com/dream-animals.html

www.dreamhawk.com/animald.htm

www.dreammoods.com/dreamthemes/animals.htm

www.maljonicsdreams.com/Dream_Themes/Dreaming_of_Animals.htm

Calvin Hall

http://www.dreamresearch.net/About/calvin.html

A Horse Jumps out the Window

A seventeen year old girl dreams:

I was coming home at night. Everything is as quiet as death. The door into the living room is half open, and I see my mother hanging from the chandelier, swinging to and fro in the cold wind that blows in through the at night. I get up and discover that a frightened horse is tearing through the rooms. At last it finds the door into the hall, and jumps through the hall window from the fourth floor into the street below. I was terrified when I saw it lying there, all mangled.

Jung’s comments:

The gruesome character of the dreams is alone sufficient to make one pause. All the same other people have anxiety dreams now and then. We most therefore look more closely into the meaning of the two main symbols, “mother” and “horse”. They must be equivalents, for they both do the same thing, they commit suicide. “Mother" is an archetype and refers to the place of origin, to nature, to that which passively creates…. It also means the unconscious, our natural and instinctive life… The word “mother" which sounds so familiar, apparently points to the best-known, the individual mother, to “my mother.” But the mother-symbol points to a darker background which eludes conceptual form…

If we apply our findings to the dream, its interpretation will be, “The unconscious life is destroying itself.”

It is evident that “horse” is an equivalent of “mother,” with a slight shift of meaning. The mother stands for life at its origin, the horse for the merely animal life of the body. If we apply this meaning to the text of our dream, its interpretation will be, “The animal life is destroying itself.”

Both dreams point to a grave organic disease with a fatal outcome. This prognosis was soon confirmed.

Dreams, C.G. Jung, pages 106 – 109.

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Similar to the dream of the minute mastodon in an earlier blog, Jung predicts a serious organic problem that becomes confirmed at a later time (although in this case there is no indication of what the disease actually was).

The interpretation of this dream is not as obscure as the one about the mastodon; both, however involved symbolic animals that were in trouble. The images of a mother hanging herself and a horse jumping out a window do not forebode well, whether or not one does a detailed analysis of the dream.

What is particularly interesting and valuable about Jung’s method of interpretation is that he goes far beyond the individual idea of the individual mother, and relates the dream to the archetypal level of the mother -- the origin of life which is destroying itself.

Again, I find these dreams that are diagnostic of medical conditions quite astounding, and continue to wonder why dreams are not more part of the medical model of working with patients. Is there something missing in the model?

The Curative Chamber of Aesclepius

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[300 B.C.]

N.N. from Argos, epileptic. The man during sleep in the curative chamber saw a vision: he dreamed that the god approached him and pressed his ring upon his mouth, nostrils, and ears – and he recovered.
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Cited in The Falling Sickness, Tempkin 1971

Commentary by Adrienne Richards:

The afflicted man has brought himself from Argos to the healing temple at Epidaurus, the most famous of the day. There he has undergone rites and purifications, herbal emetics and physics, preparatory to his night in the curative chamber. When he is deemed ready, he sleeps in the sacred place, and there he dreams of Asklepious, the presiding god of both patients and physicians. Asklepious presses his ring against N.N.’s mouth, his nostrils, and his ears, the three openings where evil is most likely to enter. The ring itself is remarkable. Greek gods, to my knowledge, did not wear rings. It is possible that the ring arose spontaneously form the depths of N.N.’s being, when it was most needed, as an archetypal image of wholeness. It seems almost redundant, “and he recovered.”

The Fiery Wheel: Image and Experiences of Epilepsy; Adrienne Richard, Psychological Perspectives, Fall 1977, pages 349-361.

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How is it that someone can be healed on the basis of a dream?

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For a thousand years before Christ, pilgrims would go to the temples of Asclepious in search of healing. The supplicants woud travel long distances to go these temples, which were always in a poweful natural setting. Once there, they would eat well, see theatre, go through purification rites. When the time was right, they would be directed to a small chamber in order to have a dream that would guide the priests and the patients in what needed to be done to be cured. Given that this system lasted for a thousand years, they had to be doing something right.

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The caduceus, the image of modern medicine with the snakes and staff, was developed from the cult of Asklepious. (Snakes, since they shed their skin, were associated with renewal and healing.)

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The original Hippocratic Oath begins,

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I swear by Apollo the Physician and by Aesclepius and by Hygieia and Panacea and by all the gods...

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In the dream mentioned at the beginning of the blog, the epileptic profoundly experiences an image that apparently heals him: How does this happen?

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Time to build a Curative Chamber.

The Red Sun

I would paint the wind...

Arthur Dove

An artist friend, Barbara Tudor, told me last year that the drawings I had done after my heart attack reminded her of the work of Arthur Dove, the first American abstract painter.

I looked at his work on the Web, and came across his painting of the Red Sun. To me there was an eerie similarity with the Red Sun and something I had drawn and called The Spiral Maze. I read further about him -- He thrived most in the out-of-doors, worked on a farm, lived on a houseboat. He sounded as if he would feel right at home in Alaska. To my astonishment, he made this painting four years before he had a disabling heart attack, in 1939.

A year after I saw this painting, I was visiting the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. I saw one of his works, and proceeded to tell my brother how one of Dove's paintings was somehow similar to a drawing I had done.

I walked up to the next level, and suddenly there was the Red Sun. The Real Thing. I was stunned. I sat down and cried, and cried on and off for the rest of the day. These were not all unhappy tears.

Dreams and art (at its best) both are representations of the Unconscious. This experience for me was a confirmation of Jung’s theory of archetypes, that there are universal, underlying and connecting patterns within all of us.


Web Links

The Phillips Collection: The Red Sun
www.phillipscollection.org/american_art/artwork/Dove-Red_Sun.htm

Wikipedia: Arthur Dove
wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Dove

Wikipedia: Archetypes
wikipedia.org/wiki/Archetype

The Spiral Maze
www.heartak.com/(15)_high_anxiety.html

The Minute Mastodon

Someone beside me kept on asking me something about oiling some machinery. Milk was suggested as the best lubricant. Apparently I thought that oozy slime was preferable. Then a pond was drained, and amid the slime there were two distinct animals. One was a minute mastodon. I forgot what the other one was.

The doctor who heard this dream from a patient sent the dream to Carl Jung:

I thought it would be of interest to submit this dream to Jung to ask him what his interpretation would be. He had no hesitation in saying that it indicated some organic disturbance, and that the illness was not primarily a psychological one… The draining of the pond he interpreted as the damming-up of the cerrebrospinal fluid circulation.


When Jung was asked about this at his Tavistock Lectures in London in 1935, Jung commented:

The doctors of antiquity and of the Middle ages used dreams for their diagnosis…. It is really a matter of special experience…. The dream you mentioned was a dream of a little mastodon. To explain what that mastodon really means in an organic respect and why I must take that dream as an organic symptom would start such an argument that you would start an argument that you would accuse me of the most terrible obscurantism. These things really are obscure. When I speak of archetypal patterns those who are aware of these things understand, but if you are not aware you think, This fellow is absolutely crazy because he talks of mastodons and their difference from snakes and horses. I should have to give you a course of about four semesters about symobology first so that you could appreciate what I said.

(Analytical Psychology in Theory and Practice, page 74.)


When I first came across this dream and interpretation many years ago, I found it absolutely astounding that Jung could distinguish between an organic disturbance and a psychological based on dreams like this. I still do. If this is so, if there is such information available in dreams that could be so important in diagnosis, why is it still so ignored? This was written over eighty-years ago; what kind of progress are we making?

(I would also note that this interpretation is, indeed, obscure. The first two dreams mentioned in this blog were not this obscure; they were symbolically descriptive of bodily processes in a way that would not take years of training in symbolism.)

The Healing Path

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The top of my head has been drilled with three, neat bloody holes. An iron pot filled with red-hot coals has been hung under my chin. My arms are tied with a length of clear plastic tubing. “We are going to boil your brains out”, one of my invisible torturers announces. His voice is flat, matter-of-fact; he is a technician, not a sadist. I feel the heat sear my throat and I scream, the sound becoming hoarser, a raw animal desperation, as the coals gnaw my larynx. “Please God” though I can’t now believe in God—“ Please..." I feel an emotion I have never known in my waking life – complete hopelessness; a black, no-exit despair…..

I have cancer, I blurt out, before I can think about it. I have cancer growing in my throat….

When I told the doctor I had cancer, he looked at me quizzically… I told him of the increasingly weird dreams I had been having... It was then he found the lump…. A few weeks later the tests showed thyroid cancer.

The Healing Path, Marc Ian Barasch

I came across this dream, in the prologue of Barasch's book, a week after I started this blog about dreams and diagnosis. Carl Jung claimed that when he started working on an essay about the aborigines of Australia, he suddenly started all sorts of related material in the mail; this was part of his belief in synchronicity.

There are a lot more dreams in Barasch’s book; it is quite a story about dreams and healing. I am at a loss for words.

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For more in depth material about dreams, go to:

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