Dream 15 -
The Persona and the Shadow
This
dream came to me completed in January 1962. It was a bright sunny day and I
found myself with a fashionably dressed lady in a horse drawncarriage. We sat
side by side in the carriage, and she was dressed in clothes of another era, not
in the present. As the carriage slowly went along the path in the park past the
railings, there was a succession of large eggs alternating with stone tombs with
displaced lids.
The
carriage was drawn by one horse and driven by a coachman who was an enigmatic
red cloaked and hooded figure.
Then
we came to a large animal like a rhino, but with a crawfish like tall. There
were three horns on the end of the tail, and a large spike had been driven
through it into the ground so that it was impaled to the spot. The beast was
crying, and to me had love and anguish, although the others could not see this
because of its outlandish appearance. The lady held up her shade and was
completely indifferent to its suffering. I stroked its head as we passed it and
it muzzled up to me appealingly. My own appearance was almost like a skeleton,
no clothes and no flesh. Just a dark figure sitting next to the fashionable
lady.
So
the dream represents life itself, the succession of eggs and tombs being birth
and death in succession along the road. The woman sitting beside the figure,
which I took to be myself, I concluded is the persona, the false personality we
all display, while I represent the shadow side, that which has compassion on the
impaled animal. The animal represents the life force, never given real freedom
but subject to all sorts of restrictions and repressions.
A
most important aspect, which came to me when I painted the scene out, was that
while the woman assumed she was totally in charge, in fact she was not. It was
the enigmatic coachman who was driving the carriage and deciding upon its
destination. The fact that he is clothed in red is symbolic of the third stage
of the Hermetic transformation process. So the coachman represents Higher Mind,
which is in charge of it all.
