falling into dream analysis

Part I

An archetypal introduction to dream analysis:

I was introduced to dream analysis several years ago by my Jungian therapist. The first dream I brought into a session, which revealed a trauma connected to my grandfather, Buppa. Here is the dream:

Homeless with Buppa

I am homeless with my grandfather, Buppa. He is as he was at the end of his life--scattered, half there. I am caring for him. We are in a group with two other women I do not know. A nice man takes us in who lives in a nice house on the coast. 

The man turns out to be a serial mutilator. I found pictures in his study, evidence of the mutilation practice. He severs the hands of women by tying plastic bags around their wrists, cutting off the flow of blood.  One of the women is in love with him and convinced we need to stay. I follow my instincts and get us all out of there.

In the next scene, we are homeless again. Buppa does not look well. Guts that look like a placenta or a liver pop up and out of his stomach and he dies. 

When my therapist read the dream, she gasped. She explained that the dream symbolism is powerfully connected to the archetypal fairy tale of The Handless Maiden. In this story, the main character’s father accidentally makes a deal with the devil to cut off her hands. 

19th century illustration of an angel assisting The Handless Maiden as she eats a pear from a tree by Philipp Grot Johann

In Clarissa Pinkola Esté’s book, Women Who Run with the Wolves, Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype, she describes The Handless Maiden myth as a woman's initiation into the mythical underworld. Losing her hands is her first serious loss of innocence and she wanders homeless for years, grieving the loss. Over time, she passes through a rite of endurance and through many unbearable trials, she learns how to heal and how to trust her instincts.

I had never heard this story before dreaming of it, and yet there the Maiden was, bringing to consciousness an archetypal parallel to my experiences at that time. The more I learned about her story, the more the stages of development as an intuitive woman in western culture made sense to me. 

At that time, I was beginning to learn that intuitive women often begin our lives in accordance with our inherent family beliefs, systems, and cultures. However, at some point along the journey, consciously or not, these beliefs become too confining. It becomes necessary to tear down and alchemize the old belief structures into something completely new that is more authentic to the self. This is seen in myths as a metaphor whereby women are first stripped bare and descend deep into the core or the underworld.

Women get to the underworld in different ways. Like the handless maiden, we may be tricked by the devil, like Persephone, we may unwillingly be married off, or like Inanna, we may intentionally descend, stripped of our above-world status and accouterments. Any way we get there, the requirement to go deep into the self in an authentic way initiates the heroine’s journey.

The dream with Buppa was pointing out my particular flavor of journey. I was the handless maiden and the masculine structures in my life that were meant to protect me had unwittingly and innocently sold my creativity and healing ability to the devil (a negative masculine force, patriarchy).

By colliding with the handless maiden archetype in dreams, archetypal myth became an initiation for me into my journey as a dreamer. From that point, I turned toward dreams in a very powerful and intentional way. I remembered and wrote down dreams every night. I drew dreams and constantly reread and thought about them. I incubated dreams by writing down questions for them before bed. I actively imagined dreams and consciously confronted the scenes that my unconscious dream self had deemed too scary or difficult to confront.

Science would love to explain dreams away as a practical form of consolidating memories of our daily events, or regulating emotions, or basic mental housekeeping. They believe that the experiences we have been through in the recent past most likely have created the dream and that the dream is there as a psychological process. It is thought to be an organizational tool, or a way for the subconscious to make meaning out of our daily lives. And perhaps there is some truth in this, but as a dreamer who has seen and experienced remarkable things in my sleeping world, it leaves a lot to be desired.

I would argue that dreams are shining, animate jewels--living, breathing, works of art, created by many levels of our multidimensional self every night. The unimaginably inspired and intelligent high self inhales our everyday physical life experiences, actors on our tv shows, our teacher from the third grade, and exhales them as symbols and metaphors for reflection and guidance, moving-picture glyphs that are meant to guide us and convey messages.