~ Welcome to The Oracle, a monthly divination to open the archetypal field through a blend of tarot and dreamwork ~
Without an archetypal backdrop, the experience of nightmares is nothing short of overwhelming, intense, fear-inducing, horrific. When they plague us overtime, these dark companions that arise from the depths, the indwelling sense of our psychic landscape becomes hostile. We may no longer feel at home or held within the psyche, in fact, the unrelenting dreams (often felt as an attack) creates resistance to going deeper within.
Jungian psychology, however, reminds us that the psyche moves with purpose towards equilibrium and wholeness. Even the images, symptoms, behaviors, etc that we find most intolerable serve this greater goal.
“The more one-sided his conscious attitude is, and the further it deviates from the optimum, the greater becomes the possibility that vivid dreams with a strongly contrasting but purposive content will appear as an expression of the self-regulation of the psyche. Just as the body reacts purposively to injuries or infections or any abnormal conditions, so the psychic functions react to unnatural or dangerous disturbances with purposive defence-mechanisms.”
— C.G. Jung, Structure & Dynamics of the Psyche (CW 8)
What does it mean for the conscious attitude to become one-sided? It is when the personality creates adaptations and makes maneuvers that severs off the full richness of psychic life. And by fullness, I mean all that fate sends our way — the troubled family home and belittling parents, the unacknowledged creative spirit that wants to explore, the stabbing heartache from the loss of a first love. Whether we lack the resource or capacity to hold these experiences or were forced to deny and suppress them, the outcome is the same: the psyche becomes lopsided, the split off psychic energy gathers in power and autonomy, and symptoms develop.
We often think of alchemy at its end goal, of a legendary Philosopher’s Stone that heals and transmutes, of the sun at its zenith and all the power we feel at the rubedo stage. But alchemy says, the opus begins in darkness, the crucial first achievement of the work is for the prima materia to blacken, to utilize operations that kill, destroy, dissolve, pulverize it.
With this comes a darkening of our inner images and moods, dreams of graveyards and being stalked, spontaneous fantasies of decay and rot, heavy depressions and symptoms that just won’t lift. Nightmares and all their haunting qualities belong to this stage too. And if we can reframe these nightly visitors as an achievement, as an integral step along psychic evolution, then the inner work of the alchemist can truly begin. We unlock curious experimentation, a loving acceptance of our lowly material, and open the field to bring forth redemption and transformation.
Such is the goal for our inner work this month in Nightmares & Nigredo, where we’ll uncover the creative potential of psychic darkness as we weave Jungian dreamwork and alchemy in one vessel.
And now, let us turn towards The Oracle’s words as guidance for the weeks ahead…