It was in my mid-life. I was just about to begin a Jungian Analysis and before it began had the following dream:
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. I am enchanted by the beauty of the song. It is like he is hearing the song and then playing it with simple chords.
The dream makes me sit bolt upright. I know it is a big dream, but what is it about? What is it trying to say? I read somewhere, it is important the dreams you have at the beginning of an analysis, and this dream has always held a deep fascination for me. It has stayed with me.
I am in my early forties when I have this dream. It has stayed with me for the rest of my life. It is not like you ever really fully understand them. It can take years to ‘deepen’ into them. But you keep working on them or they keep working on you. Carl Jung said ‘Áre we having the dream or is the dream having us’. Sometimes it feels more like the dream is having us. There is something ancestral this dream that has so much memory and calling.
The first thing I would say about Uluru, is that it is our Cathedral here in the centre of Australia (The Red Centre as they sometimes call it). It is our Natural Cathedral or our Church here. England might have its Westminster Abbey and the French have their Chartres Cathedral, we have our Cathedral at Uluru in central Australia. I grew up an Anglican, but even more that the Catholic or the Anglican Church this feels more like my Church here.
It reminds of the Aboriginal dreaming in the beginnings of this land this dream. It reminds of something ageless and timeless, a deep past, an ancestral past, maybe. The Aboriginal people were the first poets, here, who were ‘’singing’’ the land into being. This is where some of our first stories and myths come from. Mircea Eliade said once in older cultures someone wasn’t considered cultured unless they had been initiated into the first stories and myths.
One thing I get from this dream is how the sacred shows up in unusual places and where you would least expect. I grew up in the Christian tradition, supposedly, in my so-called ‘normal’ world, but this dream of Uluru speaks to me in some deep and mysterious way about the sacred. The sacred is showing up in what is really old and in the red earth.
There is a ‘Songman’ in Australian Aboriginal culture (who teaches through song and myth and dance). David Page from the Bangarra Dance Company was called a ‘Songman’. And he drew on some of those first myths and stories and made them into contemporary dance theatre. When Aboriginal people say that someone has ’language’, it means something like they are initiated into these old ways of knowing. They have been initiated into the first stories and myths. That is the ‘language’ that they have.
I heard much later after this dream that in indigenous culture’s that it was thought everyone was born with their own song. That is another way of looking at ‘índividuation’. That each person is born with a song. Individuation is like finding the song we were born with. There is a word in Aboriginal language ‘dadirri’ which is often translated as a ‘deep listening’. Maybe, individuation is like a deep listening for our own song.
I heard somewhere that ‘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.
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 was once a time when heaven and earth were in harmony. 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 within ourselves. Recently someone spoke about reawakening the 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?
James Hillman said in lament of the dead that Jung opened the mouth of the dead. He opened the mouth of the ancestors, maybe. I read recently where Jung said if someone dreams of the wise old man they need a teacher. Maybe i was embarking on a different kind of teaching. I had been to India so many times when I was younger. It was like going up to the mountain of the spirit, in a way. It was like a taste of the ‘superbia’ of the spirit.
Looking back on it my spiritual journey might have had some puer inclinations and leanings when I was younger. This dream marks a departure from some of those puer leanings. maybe. Hillman said the puer wants to turn everything into spirit or make everything new but this dream points towards what is old and it also includes the sacred ground of the earth.
Peter Kingsley speaking about ancient Greek culture said:
In the language of ancient Greek poetry the word for ‘road’ and the word for ‘song’, oimos and oime, are almost identical. They have the same origin. The poet’s song was quite simply a journey into another world: a world where the past and future are as accessible and real as the present. And his journey was his song. Those were the times when the poet was a shaman. The words shamans use as they enter the state of ecstasy evoke the things they speak about. The poems they sing don’t only describe their journeys; they are what makes the journey happen.
This dream also reminds me of the ‘Ánima Mundi’ in Jung (the soul of the world). Maybe that is where so much of the modern dis-enchantment comes from, we have forgotten about the ensouled world. The world that speaks to us. Modern Man (or Woman) has become isolated from the cosmos said Jung. We are no longer connected to the world like that. It might be a way for re-enchantment for us, to become more attuned to the World soul.
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 speaks towards some kind of an orientation towards life. To be open and receptive to let the soul come through.
I grew up with Aboriginal kids in country Western Australia. I remember one kid listening 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’ in the dream is doing, he is 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. Enchantment was the first medicine said Jung.
I went to Uluru after this dream. It was a powerful experience. They had something cool there called ‘Dinner under the Stars’ (where tables with white tablecloths were set up in the desert under the stars). An old Aboriginal woman told stories about the stars and about the constellations. When the Europeans first came here they said ‘terra nullius’(this land belongs to no-one). But that was wrong because Aboriginals had lived here for hundreds of thousands of years and they had their own astrology and their own view of the stars.
songlines
