Chapter 1 |
Chapter 10 (Excerpt)
Healing the Shadow
If Healing Dreams open us to a greater vision of reality, that vision must inevitably includes the dark as well as the light, the Below as well as the Above. Any revelation would be incomplete which shows us only what we most aspire to, and omits what we dearly wish to avoid. Jung used the term "shadow" for those repressed aspects of the self that do not fit our ego ideal---shameful wants, embarrassing lacks; our venom and our vanity. The shadow appears in our dreams in the guise of the characters and predicaments we most fear and despise. We know we've had a shadow dream when we find ourselves describing it in telltale vocabulary----outrageous, horrifying, hateful, idiotic; cheap, digesting, shameful. Yet such dreams, in their refusal to kowtow to the idealized self, offer us a deeper knowing of ourselves and world we live in. They dig up buried truths and lay them at our feet like reeking, dirt-clotted bones. It is our tragic loss that we usually strive, upon awakening, to sweep these "gifts" under the rug, for the shadow images in our dreams, Jung suggested, represent our undeveloped "potentialities"---those parts of the personality which are still "becoming;" inner places where "we are unfinished; we are growing and changing." These aspects of the psyche take on a negative cast only because they have been so thoroughly disowned. Shadow dreams force us to face not only our own unresolved inner contradictions, but the most pressing questions of human existence: What do we do with our hatred, greed, lust, and avarice? With that bifurcated heart that so often puts us midway between heaven and hell? The shadow comes to us in our dreams like some dark fallen angel, demanding we wrestle it for an answer.... |
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