Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall

I was dreaming. I was driving a fire truck around the block and trying to park it in my home’s garage.  Inside the house, I am now in bed, not with my wife, who is sitting in a chair beside the bed, but snuggling a mountain lion with the covers over both of us.  At that moment my son enters the room and discovers his pet under the covers with me.  As the father I address him saying, “Your mom cooked dinner for you”.  He replies, “I’m going to bed now.”  Stunned I respond, “but it’s only 4 PM.  Your mom will be disappointed.”  He went off to bed and the scene changes.

I find myself in a new setting, sort of a waiting area of a doctor’s office in a Victorian home.   A woman enters.  She is wearing a long black dress.  Looking up I am startled when I notice her face is blue.   In a strange, heavy foreign accent she announces, “I sit here” as she sits down opposite me.  I look past her into the back room, where three men were doing some sort of energetic chiropractic procedure, two are dressed in blue and one in black.  I couldn’t tell who was the doctor and who the patient.  Then I noticed the woman was putting on blue rubber gloves.  She got up, and as she passed by me, said, “Remember you don’t have to play with the young dream.”  She had suddenly become human (no longer blue) and aged, a wise old woman.  I said, “Thank you” and began to wonder what that meant.  Do I work here?

So what’s this dream reflecting?  What is it communicating?

The dreamer is acting like a child.  He’s driving his fire truck around the block, sleeping with his pet, married to his mother, and is father to himself.  That’s how my childhood was.  I slept with my dogs until I was fifteen years old.  My dad approved; they were warm and affectionate.  Growing up in Idaho, I got home from school around 4PM every day.  When I was young enough to play fireman, I would take a nap while mom prepared dinner for me and my younger brother.  Why the doctor’s office?  Another fantasy.  I wanted to be a doctor when I grew up.

The dream house was so familiar that it must have been mine.  I knew where the light switches were.  But when turned on, the light was very subdued, sort of like dawn, but inside.  I had a sense ownership of the house, or at least a partnership with the doctors and technicians.  The Blue Lady was confident, kind, and direct as she morphed from alien to human.  She was an ancient, archetypal form of woman.  She was the great mother, the grandmother of humanity.  She was informing me: I didn’t have to play with the young dream.

Playing with the young dream?  What does that mean?  Well that’s what children do.  We play.  And what or with whom am I playing?  It’s not another human evidently, as much as it might look that way to the dreamer.  The Old Woman is playing the role of the magic mirror on the wall.  She is reflecting, picturing my behavior pattern calling it playing with the young dream, like many older men I am playing with “a dream” of youth.  I took this to mean that I have been acting out the unfinished business of my youth.

And what was unfinished?  I didn’t have much of a childhood, between caring for the emotional needs of my mom and younger brother when my dad was “away on business” and starting a part-time job at 13, all I had time for was school work and an occasional ski day in the winter.  At that time the only sexual exploration possible was with my best boyfriend.  After a seduction by an older woman, I married, had a family and continued the parenting pattern which started when I was about 4.  Actually that’s the fire truck phase.

When I divorced after 30 years of marriage, I was back to sleeping with big cats, being irresponsible and foolish.  I was experimenting with risky people.  I was acting like a child and enjoying it.  But the ancient feminine (in Jungian terms, the anima) reminds me that I don’t have to do this.  I am grateful. Her words ring true.  In waking I realized it was a choice to either continue “playing with the young dream” or embody the elder whom I have become.  From age 56 (my second Saturn return) through age 66 I was enjoying breaking boundaries.  I had become aware of my Shadow, how I was like Coyote of Native American mythology and Hermes of Greek mythology.  That is the young dream.  Hermes and Coyote are sexual initiators, balancing the opposites in themselves and in others.  The dream was telling me that I need no longer play that role.  It is a choice.  Perhaps before now it wasn’t a choice, but rather an unconscious acting out of and by the archetype.  We call this “possession by an archetype” or in medieval language “possession by a demon”.  This phase has come to an end.  Now it is up to me to make it conscious, to choose not to play with the young dream anymore.  It is my  choice.

As in most dreams, all the parts reflect the dreamer.  The house is me and all those people are me too.  My feminine is very old, wise (and blue like and East Indian Goddess).  She gets to work and tells me the truth.  Her changing image means that she is archetypal, she’s not scary, just different and helpful.  The men are aspects of my Shadow, my neglected aspects, the doctor, his client, the technicians who assist.  These are all parts of the healer’s Shadow, the spiritual counselor’s assistants, his knowledge of myth, patterns, forms of the masculine and the feminine, and his inner child (who is driving the fire truck and sleeping with the puma).  All are accurately portrayed.  The dreamer is in relationship with them all.

Interestingly that is how I feel consciously, that my fragmented, dissociated parts are finally together.  I feel relieved.  I no longer have to play with the young dream.  It is no longer necessary.  I am a mature man.  My emotional age has finally caught up with my intellectual and physical age.  I feel calm and happy.  Like the light in the house, the new day is gentle, subtle, dawning slowly.

Mirror, mirror, on the Wall,

how am I doing,

one and all?