Dream Animals

Excerpt-James Hillman/Margot McLean Artist

Animals wake up the imagination. You see a deer by the side of the road, or geese flying in formation, and you become hyperalert. I’ve found that animal dreams can do this too. They really wake people up. Animal dreams provoke their feelings, get them thinking, interested, and curious. As we get more into imagining, we become more animal-like. Not bestial, but more/instinctually alive, and with more savvy, a keener nose and a sharper ear. As Jung said, the old wise man is an ape, really. So, perhaps I have a therapeutic intention with this book. I want to do something for the animals, but I also want to affect people: I want them to be closer to that ape—though it may not be so therapeutic for the ape! You know, people come to therapy really for blessing. Not so much to fix what’s broken as to get what’s broken blessed. In many cultures animals do the blessing since they are the divinities. That’s why parts of animals are used in medicines and healing rites. Blessing by the animal still goes on in our cjvilized lives, too. Let’s say you have a quick and clever side to your personality.) You sometimes lie, you tend to shoplift, fires excite you, you’re hard to track and hard to trap; you have such a sharp nose that people are shy of doing business with you for fear of being outfoxed. Then you dream of a fox! Now that fox isn’t merely an image of your “shadow problem,” your propensity to stealth. That fox also gives an archetypal backing to your behavioral traits, placing them more deeply in the nature of things.\The fox comes into your dream as a kind of teacher, a doctor animal, who knows lots more than you do about these traits of yours. And that’s a blessing. Instead of a symptom or a character disorder, you now have a fox to live with, and you need to keep an eye on each other.

…….