Just as I was beginning in a Jungian therapy I had a big dream. I was at Uluru in central Australia. I read somewhere, where it was said, it is important the dreams you have at the beginning of an analysis, and this dream has always held a deep fascination for me.
I dream that I am at Uluru in central Australia. There is an old Aboriginal man playing a song on a guitar. There is a young woman in a bath next to him. I am struck by the colors. The blue of the sky, the red of the earth, the green of the vegetation. The song he is singing is a simple song that is beautiful. It is like he is hearing the song and then playing it with simple chords. I am enchanted by the beauty of the song.
The dream makes me sit bolt upright. I know it is a big dream but what is this dream wanting to say? The first thing I have to say about Uluru, is that it is our natural Cathedral in the centre of Australia. It is our Church here. And whilst England might have Westminster Abbey and the French have Chartres Cathedral, we have Uluru in central Australia(and I might not be that religious in any Christian sense, but Uluru is sacred to me).
It is full of memory and calling for me this dream. It reminds of the Aboriginal dreaming in the beginnings of this land. It reminds of something ageless and timeless(and of a deep past). I heard somewhere there are ‘songlines’ that come out from Uluru. And those songlines, or dreaming tracks as they are sometimes called crisscross the vast Australian continent in Aboriginal dreaming, connecting land, sky, and water. It was said that ancestral beings traveled these songlines, leaving their wisdom and knowledge behind.
It reminds me of ancestors this dream. And maybe of ancestral wisdom(there is a ancestral wisdom behind us here singing our land). The old Aboriginal man reminds of the 2 million year old man in Jung. The ‘wise old man’, maybe. The first Adam in Jung, the one who was made out of clay. There is a ‘Songman’ in Australian Aboriginal culture(and they teach through song and myth and dance). It reminds me of David Page the Aboriginal composer from the Bangarra Dance Company who was called a ‘Songman’(where he drew on the old ‘language’ and culture and put that magic into contemporary dance).
The ‘'old man’’ of this dream is connected to the divine of the sky, but he is also firmly rooted in the earth. Maybe, the old man speaks to something old or indigenous in ourselves. Recently when I met Jungian Tayria Ward she spoke about Reawakening Indigenous Sensibilities in the Western Psyche, and I can get that. Maybe there is an archaic or indigenous aspect of the ‘psyche’ that needs to be reawakened? Somewhere I also heard later that in indigenous culture it was thought everyone was born with their own song.
It is the ‘Ánima Mundi’ that might need to be reawakened in Jung language(the soul of the world. the world that is alive, and the ensouled world). Man(or woman) has become isolated from the cosmos said Jung. Maybe that is where so much of the modern dis-enchantment comes from, because we have forgotten this consciousness. The world no longer speaks to us like that. It is no longer alive like that. We are no longer connected to the world like indigenous people. One idea i get from the song of this dream is that the main thing could be to become attuned to a World Soul(the anima mundi). In Aboriginal culture there is a word 'dadirri' which means to have a deep listening.
And there is an important detail for me in this dream. The ‘old man’ is in between, the wide blue sky of the spirit, and the red of the earth, lets say, He is in the middle of the world of the spirit and the earth, and the body and nature. And it is the soul that is between spirit and the earth(and that is how I would see the soul). And this dream also speaks towards some kind of an orientation towards life. To be open and receptive to let the soul come through. To approach life by getting out of the way, to let the soul come through.
I remember growing up with Aboriginal kids in country Western Australia. I saw one kid listen to a song on the radio one day and then play around on the guitar and then slowly begin to play it by ear. That is what this ‘'old man’’ is doing, playing by ear. It is like he is hearing the music, or catching the music from the divine world and bringing it into a song. To sing is to enchant, I read. The Aboriginal people are our first poets who sing the spirit of the land here. And maybe even in the modern world there is a song hidden behind things.
I have been to Uluru, I went after this dream(and it was sacred, and maybe I belong to the Church of Uluru). There was also something cool there called ‘Dinner under the Stars’(where tables with white table cloth’s were set up in the desert under the stars and an Aboriginal woman told stories about Astrology). She spoke of how Aboriginal people saw the different constellations. It was wrong when the Europeans first came here and said ‘terra nullius’(this land belongs to no-one). Because it had belonged to Aboriginals for hundreds of thousands of years and they had their own view of the stars and of the constellations.
What a wonderful dream, Jon. And 'reawakening Western indigenous sensibilities' is certainly what I began to do with my first nonfiction book, 'If Women Rose Rooted', writing about all the old Irish and British myths that have women as guardians and protectors of the land, as well as the voices of the Otherworld/ Anima Mundi. I think the world DOES continue to speak to us like that, but we've forgotten how to listen!
And what of the woman in the bath?