Posted by tate on March 25, 1999 at 05:23:56:
In Reply to: Dead Guy posted by Theodore Kaczynski AKA CartoonMan on March 23, 1999 at 17:04:08:
Oddly enough I held a seminar yesterday on dreams and death.
I worked off James Hillman's ideas on dreams and death which I copy here for you should some of the text jog an insight.
DREAMS AND DEATH Timothy Tate, psychotherapist, 406.586.8158
ãI have come to believe that the entire procedure of dream interpretation aiming at more consciousness about living is radically wrong. And I mean Îwrongâ in all its fullness: harmful, twisted, deceptive, inadequate, mistaken, and exegetically insulting to its material, the dream. When we wrong the dream, we wrong the soul, and if the soul has the intimate connection with death that tradition has always supposed, then mistaken dream interpretation deceives our dying.ä
James Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld, pp. 2
ãAs we know, sleep and death are twin brothers; to sleep is to enter deathâs kingdom, perchance to dream, and to be filled with psyche.ä
Ibid, pp. 86
ãThe last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.ä
1 Corinthians 15: 26
ãChrist was thus greater than the greatest of Man-Gods, Hercules, who might have driven Hades from his Throne but had not, like Christ, actually wiped out the entire kingdom, including death itself.
The Christian image of Hell was thus a projection of a hellish image in Christianism. It must have been in raging despair over the bad exchange it had made. It had lost soul, depth, underworld, and the personifications of the imagination in exchange for idealized spiritualizations in high heaven.ä
Hillman, op.cit., pp. 87-88
ãAniela Jaffe, whose sympathetic and scholarly understanding of Jungâs ideas is unsurpassed among his followers, has written that the Îpsychological path of individuation is ultimately a preparation for death.â If this is the ultimate intent of Jungâs fundamental therapeutic principle, then the soulâs process of individuation moves toward the underworld. Then every resurrection fantasy of theology may be a defense against depth, every rebirth fantasy in psychology may be a defense against depth, and every dream interpretation that translates images into daily life and its concerns a defense against soul.ä
Hillman, op.cit., pp 89-90
ãWe may also understand our resistance to dreaming as a resistance in our Înaturalâ nature to Hades. We Îcanât remember,â go vague, forget to jot it down, or scribble it beyond deciphering, and excuse ourselves by pointing to the obvious slipperiness of dreams. Yet if each dream is a step into the underworld, then remembering a dream is a recollection of death and opens a frightening crevice under our feet. The other alternative--loving oneâs dreams, not being able to wait for the next one, such as we find in enthusiastic puer psychology, shows to what extent this archetype is in love with easeful death and blind to what is below.ä
Hillman, op.cit., pp 131
ãIn other words: to Îsleepâ places us in touch with the Îdead,â the eidola, essences, images; to be Îawakeâ is to be in touch with the sleeper, the ego-consciousness personality...during sleep we are awake and alive; in life, asleep.ä pp. 133