Death – The Dark Knight of the Soul

Posted on September 28, 2022 by The Book of Dreams blog

A Dream Metaphor for Death

The Dream: I’m in a room crushed against many people waiting for my number to be called. Some people with numbers behind me are being called. “That’s not fair!” I complain in my mind.

The Interpretation: I’ve been thinking a lot lately about all those family and friends who have died, some were younger than me.

I really hate this whole death thing and usually avoid thinking about it but once in a while a dream will come along and insist that I pay it some attention. It’s as though my soul wants to say something and uses the medium of the dream to express itself. It’s funny what happens when I let go of my resistance to the awful thought of personal death and allow myself to sink down into it and to feel its pull.

the fear,

the grief,

the anger,

the loss,

the sadness,

the unknown,

the not knowing,

the mystery,

the wonder,

the curiosity,

the what’s next?

And down here it doesn’t seem so awful.

Posted on July 24, 2022 by The Book of Dreams blog

Death in dreams: not so ominous as you might think

Philosophy and religion on the surface look like opposites where on one side one operates on faith and belief while the other critiques and challenges belief. One espouses the rational while the other embraces the irrational.

However, both are of one mind regarding death in that both welcome the mysteries of death because it speaks to the mysteries of life.

When life and death are seen as opposites separated at birth death becomes real. But when death is seen as the continued transition of the soul’s migration through reality the separation and opposition disappear into a mystical unity.

In Jungian philosophy a goal of life is the reunion of opposites called the coniunctio.

In this vision of life’s purpose death takes on a new meaning shifting from an ending to an element in the soul’s journey toward unity and becomes about change and transition from one way of being to another. This point of view is also reflected in one’s dreams where death can be a symbol for change, an end from one way of being to another. Thus, the image of death becomes an archetype for transition. To embrace it is to partially fulfill the purpose of life i.e., to bring all of life’s opposites (life/death, male/female, the conscious/unconscious) into unity.

After doing a little research on the meaning of death psychologically I put down my laptop and ambled down the hall to bed. During the night I had a dream where I sat before a desk with others standing around me and I placed a small beaker upon the desk and concentrated my focus upon it. When I did it correctly a transition from one place of being would become a new one i.e., we would all sort of “portal jump” from one place to another. I was elated with each successful transition.

Upon awakening the dream seemed significant though a mystery as to how. As I continued my research later that morning the dream’s meaning began to clear. The portal jump from one reality to another was an archetype of death. It’s a focus that I find I often think about these days as life gets closer and closer to this transition period. A shift in focus from an ‘ending’ of life, or place of being, to one of a ‘change’ of place of being seems important to me and gives me a new sense of purpose. As with my earlier life my purpose was to prepare myself through all of life’s transitions to live my life as fully as possible, I now can create another purpose that of preparing myself for this next transition. As a soul it’s all my life.

Posted on December 11, 2019 by The Book of Dreams blog

Death, Yours, Mine, Ours (excerpt from The Dragon’s Treasure Ch XIV)*

“Tell me not, in mournful numbers, life

is but an empty dream! For the soul is

dead that slumbers, and things are

not what they seem. Life is real! Life is

earnest! And the grave is not its goal.

Dust thou art; to dust returnest was not

spoken of the soul.”

—HenryWadsworth Longfellow

THE EGO DIES, BUT THE SPIRIT LIVES ON

Doesn’t this vision of death that says when the ego dies

the spirit lives on reinforce the incorrect notion that they are

separate?

I like what James Hillman in The Force of Character49

had to say about death and aging. He suggested that when

we substitute “leaving for dying and …preparing for aging,

then what we go through in our last years is preparation for

departure.”

He didn’t like this idea because he thought that to focus

in this way was to distract a person from life. He wanted to

focus not on what is leaving this world and goes on to some

metaphysical reality, but on what is left behind—the character

images and “force of character” that is left in the lives of the

living. He sees these images as sometimes independent voices

that continue to inspire and advise. In this way, the death of the

body does not mean that the character of he who lived in that

body has ever left. He or she is still here in memories, and not

just the fond recall associated with the person who has died,

but the fact that memories that impact and interact with those

whose bodies are still functional.

“When we are dead, seek not our tomb in

the earth, but find it in the hearts of men.”

— Rumi’s tomb, the Tomb of Mavlanain

Konya, Turkey

I agree with Hillman when he implies that this idea of the

soul leaving the body (ego) behind only serves to reinforce the

concept that there is a dichotomy, a separation between body

and soul. Just because the body has left does not mean that ego

has left. I would go even further and say that the soul hasn’t

gone anywhere either in that, as essence, there is no other

place to go. This essence continues to advise those who are

still living. Every thought or image of them interacts with your

thoughts and has impact.

Though I may like the idea that the character images of

those who have died continue to interact with me, I miss the

physical character and my relationship with it. It’s hard to have

a dynamic relationship with a memory; it’s so one-sided. In this

idea, the influence of the dead may live on, but the soul and its

projected ego representative with all its flaws and brilliance has

moved on too, leaving a rather poor two-dimensional substitute.

Better than nothing, I guess, especially for a melancholy junkie

like me.

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*I’ve explored death in dreams in a a number of postings over the years e.g.,

•March 9, 2017

•October 3, 2018

•January 18, 2018

Posted on July 29, 2019 by The Book of Dreams blog

Death and the Dead in Dreams

Death images in dreams are probably the most frequent of all the dreams I receive, making up easily 30%. Some are simply an image of a dead person, or a visit from a beloved family member, a killing or being killed but some dreams are much more complex and speak to a much broader spectrum of issues dealing with death. Such is the dream I share below.

The following is a dream sent to me with names and places redacted. For flow, I’ve also made some grammatical changes.

The Dream:

Hi Bob, let’s just get straight to the Dream…I had this dream that my eldest Daughter (31 yrs) died. I was working in some kind of huge factory type job and anytime something big happened that ends-up on the front page of the newspaper, my job showed it on a very large screen, it showed my daughters name in French, then slowly the picture came of my daughter, a side view picture of her, dead. Her hair was tied up in a bun and she was wearing a blue denim jacket. She wasn’t lying down in the picture but kind of propped-up and entangled in ropes, no cuts or bruises, nothing, and her eyes were closed. She seemed to be in a container of some sort with a glass front lid, and either my other daughter ____________ or her own daughter _______ was with her but I couldn’t see them, I just knew that she wasn’t alone. There was no talking at all in this dream either. I saw her being lifted up out of the water in this container and could see the water pouring down over her face even though she was in this container, then someone’s voice which sounded strong and demanding said to me ”_________ never under-estimate the power of your Psychic abilities”. End of dream…I woke myself up from the dream by my own screaming and crying-out for my Daughter at 6:19am Friday morning last. When I tried to go back to sleep later-on the same dream just started off again same as before, I stayed awake, didn’t want to sleep then. Most of that day I felt really distressed about it all and cried a lot. I really felt in some way that I should have been mourning!!! Even though this was just a dream. I felt drained all day and real upset. My Daughter lives in __________. we talk often on the phone. I phoned her that Friday night and she was fine. In the past I have been known to dream of events that have actually happened to non-family and family members in real life!!!! My relationship with my Partner is strained, he almost died 2 years ago, and was in hospital for 3 months, I looked after him 24/7, he is 58 yrs old, and seems happy he never has to work again in his life, he has no zest for life at all… four months before this, my Sister died in hospital, and the 8 years before that again was a very difficult time too with deaths and cancer in my family. My Daughter __________ (25 yrs old) is talking about leaving to live in ___________, she works hard in a tough job. That’s it Bob, please fill me in on it all, I await eagerly.

The Interpretation:

You have certainly experienced a number of deaths over time! Death of those close to us is very traumatic and often forces us to confront the reality of death head on, especially our own. Death tends to focus the mind as does anything associated with it.

Parents tend to worry a lot about their children and their safety regardless of their age (I have a daughter who is 47 and I still worry). When recent death is still being worked through in the psyche, the fear associated with it can get attached to events and people in the waking world.

There is also a sense of loss, great loss, or potential loss, and/or huge change associated with death, so it can also represent the loss of someone, especially if they are moving far away from us. Death can also represent a traumatic change in circumstances or relationship, or an ending.

Essentially, I’m detecting great emotions of fear and anxiety in this dream, fear of endings, of being out of control over what happens based upon recent and past events. I think that you are probably still working through and dealing with the death of your loved ones, even the severe trauma experienced by your boyfriend and the toll that sickness always takes on the caretaker (which is immense because you have to give up so much of yourself to give to them).

Because people in dreams are most often representative of the dreamer themselves, it is possible that there are aspects of your daughters (or their lives) that you recognize in yourself, or wish you had for yourself. Being in a box could be a metaphor for feeling ‘boxed in’ with some relationship or circumstance, while entangled in ropes could also be a metaphor for being ‘all tied up’, or entangled (trapped).

I am not a believer (but not a hard and fast disbeliever as well) in precognition (it kind of turns the whole concept of cause and effect on its head), though I do believe that the subconscious sees a lot that our conscious mind does not and as it puts two and two together during the dreaming process it can “see” what the waking mind cannot. Some people are very good at this. Your quote, ”_________ never under-estimate the power of your Psychic abilities” may be saying what it says, but it could also be telling you to trust in your feelings, or trust in your intuitive sense. The dream itself is of the Psyche (from which the word psychic comes), which includes the larger unconscious part of the Psyche and thus the quote can be an enjoinder to trust in this part of your self as well.

Posted on May 22, 2019 by The Book of Dreams blog · 7 Comments

The soul’s dark night dream

After several weeks of inanities spewing from the mouths of the Lords of Political and Economic Darkness, inflated egotistical bombasts of the small minded ultra right, several killings by people who should never have had access to guns, rabid “Orc soldiers of ISIS” killing, pillaging, and destroying all in their path in the name of a twisted understanding of their religion or maybe it was just the greed of wanting everything to be the way they think it should be, I had a nightmare that woke me panting and literally sweating in the darkness.

The story went like this:

The winged dark dragons were on the move swooping down on the villages of the world and laying waste to all hope and beauty. Their fiery breath spread fear even amongst the brave who stood their ground and paid with their lives. The land turned black with the dragon’s putrid breath of intolerance and hatred, even heroes cowered at the fierceness of their incessant destruction.

Soon the people in their helplessness turned on one another and the Dragon Lords laughed in delight for now their plan of death and destruction had turned inward causing the people to destroy themselves from within.

Fear ruled the heart of humankind and its unrelenting intensity withered and sapped the vitality of what was God’s experiment on Earth. This light of God began to flicker and sputter as the winds of many little wars, political onslaughts, false accusations, and intolerances caused a guttering of the candles of peace and threatened to blow their light out.

Who will lead the fractured peoples of the world into a new light? This time it cannot be just one man or woman, this time the collective wisdom of the many must be drawn upon. But how to martial them, how to wake the sleeping warriors of the True Peace?

No religion could save us for they all had been corrupted by the dragons of intolerance and no longer represented the love of God and humankind falling as they had into bastions of hatred, fear, intolerance, or massive indifference preferring to exclude what wasn’t them or making safe and minor moves toward some vague concept of peace but rarely putting their lives on the line in the name of love.

I woke up wondering what do we actually mean when we say we want peace? What does that look like? Is it the absence of conflict or a collaboration with it? Is it the rejection of that which seems un peaceful, but un peaceful by whose standard, whose definition?

This time the dragons of old cannot be slayed by just the swing of the sword. These dragons cannot be subdued at all for these dragons thrive on the cutting edge of the blade and the blood it spills upon the land. I believe that we need to learn a new way to be with this dragon that has always lived among us or we shall perish.

The dragons employ many a toady to spread their destruction. These parasites are trained to infect every ones heart with fear, hatred and misinformation e.g. that “guns are good, science is bad, my religion is good– theirs is bad, I’m right– they’re wrong, compromise is bad, it’s my way or the highway, and building walls against what we fear will protect us are just a few of the erroneous beliefs that the fifth columnists have snuck into the collective psyche through various political Trojan Horses and the people have welcomed the horse into the city.

We now have more than fear itself to fear for we have raised our ignorance to a whole new level by wrapping ourselves within its mind-numbing cocoon. The dragons rejoice in this because they know that when we embrace our ignorance with pride as we are beginning to do, we are near the end that they seek.

But my soul’s dark night provided another image, an image of hope amongst the despair for it also suggested that there will be a small number of brave souls who will seek, find and apply the answers needed to tame the dragons and that we will learn to live with them and use their immense energy toward the service of us all. Will you join this band of brothers and sisters and learn to wield what it will really take to subdue the human beast? It’s a quest fraught with danger and we might not make it home for quite some time, but if not us, who?

Posted on March 19, 2019 by The Book of Dreams blog

Conflict can be a gift of redemption

The world of opposites exhibits many ups and downs. There’s feminine and masculine, love and hate, left and right, light and dark, oh yes, and you and me.

The light and dark opposition is interesting in that we often use them as metaphors for our behaviors and emotions.

There’s also the strange world of color. Colored lights are additive in nature in that when we add the three colors of red, blue, and green that you and I can see we get white light whereas if we were to add the same colors in pigment that is subtractive in nature we would get black. Apparently light begets light while pigment absorbs it and gives us blackness. This is not unlike our emotions. Positive lighthearted thinking brings even more light into our experience whereas negative and subtractive thinking brings us heavy darkness.

The world of conflicting opposition can be found in all the world’s religions as well in the form of death and resurrection, punishment and forgiveness, heaven and hell (whether as an earthly experience or one after death), and gods and goddesses. Creation mythology has a something-from-nothing nature and death is just a part of life. In the Christian Bible the old God is in stark contrast to the new God of the New Testament whereas in the Hindu Bagavad -Gita the variety of aspects of the one god often display creation aspects as well as destruction aspects there is also being and non-being, immortality and death. In the Tao there is the yin and yang. This union of opposites seems to play out across the human milieu.

In life, in stories, theater, and in myth there are heroes and adversaries, destruction and redemption, and endings that morph into beginnings. Mirrors whether in our waking lives or dreams often reflect our opposites whether it be the right/left switch of a reflection or the real us that has been hiding behind the mask of who we pretend to be removed in front of the mirror in our dreams.

Some of Jesus’ parables exhibit a perplexing juxtaposition of opposites also for example, as presented in Mathew’s quote from Jesus, “whosoever seeks to save his life will lose it, and whosoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” This seems to flaunt human common sense.

In our dreams opposites can reign supreme and even images that appear positive may actually be speaking to a lack of said aspect for example, an image of love and caring can suggest a desire for or a loss of love and caring. Death in dreams is often the first step toward life i.e. the end of one way of being opens the door to a new way of being.

Though we may view a conflict with others as a product of opposing ideas or right versus wrong it may reflect the same idea that resides within us that we want to reject or disavow. Sadness in dreams often reflects the opposite i.e. happiness that may actually point to immense suffering. Also in dreams the soul often shows up as the opposite gender of the dreamer e.g. a woman’s soul is masculine while a man’s is feminine. Dreams are continuously presenting images from the unconscious for the conscious to integrate with itself into a whole. To be fully human the opposites of the conscious mind and unconscious mind need to be united.

Posted on October 3, 2018 by The Book of Dreams blog

Dealing with the emotional and psychological after-effects of violence

On occasion I receive dreams from those who have had family members or boyfriends/girlfriends that have been murdered. Many share seeing them again in their dreams. In some cases the departed will morph into something else. In one case the visiting dead turned into a snake that when in an attempt to catch it the snake slithered away into a hole. In this case it may have been a metaphor for those who had perpetrated the murder having not been caught and the dreamer trying to deal with the betrayal of both the “perp” and the authorities.

Some dreamers experience great helplessness (feeling tied up or trapped) or overwhelm (tsunami waves and/or flooding) as part of the dream. Some escape the symbolic trauma by climbing stairs or mountains toward a higher perspective while others fly free across a meadow or run away from threatening people or monsters.

Others have wondered if the extreme grief they’ve suffered has in someway damaged the soul.

Mostly the dream material of such traumas is about the mind trying to make sense of the loss and to then deal with it i.e. to make peace with it.

I believe that our souls accept trauma long before our conscious minds are able to wrap themselves around it, though the pain can be experienced as being so deep and profound that it feels as though your very essence, your being, the soul of yourself has been irreparably damaged.

Though the mind is valiantly trying to grasp and deal with the trauma experienced by the violent death of a loved one it can rarely do this alone. What often happens is the mind enters a never-ending spiral with no escape or resolution. Some dreamers experience this never-ending spiral as a vortex in a storm-tossed sea with them or the ship they’re on being pulled down into the darkness below. Some see themselves at the edge of a bottomless abyss.

Such dreams may reflect the dreamer’s difficulty in trying to resolve a great inner conflict generated by loss. This can take the form of anxieties of losing themselves or in facing the hard emotional reality of their own death. These dreams are part of the healing process but sometimes one can get stuck in the process without moving to the next level of dealing with the grief.

The experience of losing someone through a violent death can be similar to the experience of someone with post-traumatic stress (PTSD) with the reliving of the event in dreams or flashbacks, repetitive nightmares, and anxiety symptoms. This can also happen with those who have been physically attacked, witnessed great violence, and/or have been raped. All of these experiences destroy the sense of safety and personal integrity of ones life. They are a violation of the soul.

If these dreams persist over time it might be useful to the dreamer to seek a helper, a guide in the healing process, someone trained in helping others deal with grief.

Organizations such as Goodtherapy.com * can sometimes be useful.

Learning to deal with ones grief in a productive way can be helpful as well and to that end this link to ActiveBeat * as well as the following article in Psychology Today: Grief-isnt-something-get-over* might also be useful.

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* I am not an advocate of these sites and only offer them as examples of resources without endorsing them. You will have to determine whether or not they are useful to you.

Posted on July 24, 2018 by The Book of Dreams blog

Death in Dreams

“Without death, life would be meaningless…limitation enables you to fulfill your being.”

–C. Jung

Basically he’s saying that death is a condition for the meaning of life.

Death in Dreams (The symbolic meaning)

Death often relates to the ending of something. But it can also suggest our relationship, or attitude towards death e.g. how do we feel about it?

As an archetype it can show up as a sunset, crossing a river, twilight, a skeleton, gravestones, a cemetery, blackness, the grim reaper, an old man, or woman, a fallen mirror, a stopped clock, or an empty abyss. Dead animals can also be metaphors for our own demise.

“These are the woods you love where the secret name of every death is life again”

Mary Oliver (Skunk Cabbage)

Associated with death is also rebirth and resurrection. Such things as a cave, or an egg, Spring, dawn, the cross, a snake, a seed, a bird taking flight (though if it were to fly off into the sunset it might suggest death), a Phoenix, flame, a pearl, or the womb.

The body itself is in a constant birth, death and renewal cycle in that individual cells need to die in order to be replaced and renewed without constant injury to the body’s cells, fresh cells could not revitalize. This is the idea of creating by destroying. The Hindu god Shiva is the destroyer of the world (actually the ego—the false identification with form, and the letting go of habits and attachments). Brahma then recreates what has been destroyed. In short, all that has a beginning must also have an end. The only thing that dies according to this concept is the illusion of individuality and separateness. In this way Shiva is the great purifier.

The ancient Greeks believed that a person’s well-being depended on the opposing forces of dissolution and creation. The Caduceus with its entwined snakes and being the symbol of the healer can be symbolically linked with Psyche interacting with matter and transforming both. This idea of the snake representing both death and renewal sheds its old skin to reveal something new and revitalized, thus dying so as to be reborn.

Caduceus

Dead people in Dreams:

In most cases this is about the dreamer trying to deal with the passing of someone close. It’s all a process of letting go and of resurrecting the one you interacted with on a physical level into the memory of that same person. For some the deceased becomes eternally living within the memory of those left behind.

To see a dead person in a dream:

This can represent some area in one’s life that has “died” such as a feeling, a relationship, or situation. Sometimes anger repressed in your waking life can kill ones vitality and satisfaction. It can also represent a part of yourself that you would like to leave behind (to see that part, look at what aspect the dead person may represent).

To see your own death in a dream:

This can suggest a transformation in the way you have been, in thought, in feeling, or in attitude. It can also suggest the transition of one phase of your life into a new one.

Fundamentally death in dreams is about change, impending, ongoing, future or past.

“Who made the world? Who made the swan, and the black bear? Who made the grasshopper? This grasshopper, I mean- the one who has flung herself out of the grass, the one who is eating sugar out of my hand, who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down- who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes. Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face. Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away. I don’t know exactly what a prayer is. I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields, which is what I have been doing all day. Tell me, what else should I have done? Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

–Mary Oliver (the Summer Day)

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For more on death and resurrection in dreams go to the Dreaming Wizard website.

http://thedreamingwizard.com/death-and-resurrection-in-dreams_295.html

Posted on April 18, 2018 by The Book of Dreams blog

Possession in dreams

The following is a draft section of a new book to be published later this year, “Morpheus speaks: The Book of Dreams” (RJ Cole, 2018).

Insight: Being possessed is an archetype itself (symbolic meaning that is found across all cultures). Many years ago people would employ priests or even lay mediums to exorcise an individual’s devil that has “possessed” them. But even now the old version of the primitive possessor demon lives within an unexplored psychic phenomena and acts out behaviors that are contrary to a person’s best interest. One only needs to look at how many so-called fearful “conservatives” will vote for the very issues and people who only mean them harm, directly or indirectly, to see the truth of that statement. All too often when we deny our complexes, our demons so to speak, we become possessed by them, we allow another force and energy to take over our lives.

Posted on February 28, 2018 by The Book of Dreams blog

Gunmen in dreams, people shooting at you or others in dreams, killing or being killed in dreams

Gunmen in dreams, people shooting at you or others in dreams, killing or being killed in dreams all very scary, what’s it mean?

Simply put these images suggest anger, fear, aggression, conflict (inner and outer), confrontation, hate, the forcing of ones views/opinions/beliefs and/or feelings of being targeted, or victimized.

Not so coincidentally the same actions and images in ones waking life have the same meaning. The ultimate meaning, however is that the perpetrator(s) are neither expressing or feeling love, or self-worth…no, harassing, hurting, oppressing, enslaving, or killing someone does not enhance self-worth, importance or Godliness. Quite the contrary, it diminishes it. Forcing your ideas on another diminishes you. Living in a society that narrowly defines self-worth by how much money you have, how thin, smart, young, talented and beautiful you are also diminishes the vast majority of its citizens.

Limiting someone’s ability to express their divine self diminishes you, controlling someone for your own gain or to some imagined gain of religious meaning, or political meaning diminishes you. Bottom line, anything that limits the free expression of ones soul diminishes them and no God would ever ask any one to do this, only a confused ego-self would attempt such an affront, only a confused and frightened ego-self would do anything but love.

Love is not a feeling of being gaga over someone or something, it’s an action born of knowing that we are all connected, all children of one God, one Earth, with different ways of worshipping and praying, but all equal and the same in our divinity. Anything else is not love and anything else is not of the soul or the one spirit that enliven us all. Anything else is ONLY of the self-involved, self-serving, greedy, simple-minded, and self-centered ego-self…period!

What you lose when you ‘hate’ is your own self, your own soul, and your own connection with God regardless of what name you give to him or what religion or ideology you follow.

The killing that you see in the world is not love, it is not of God, or the greater spirit of humankind…it is pure and simple fear, hate and an expression of the loss of our connection with the divine and each other and can never bring peace or enhance the well-being of anyone or anything and all the revenge and retribution and misguided religious, or nationalistic, fervor will only drive us deeper into despair and further away from our universal inheritance and this is not just my opinion.

You only need to look at what non-love produces to know that I am right. You only need to look into your own unlimited soul to know it’s right! You don’t need some politician, leader, priest, rabbi, or Imam to tell you what is and isn’t love and what is of the divine and what isn’t.

We can only pray for those stuck in hate and fear that they will wake up from their dream before that hate consumes them, that they will cease to follow the small ‘g’ god of their limited ego-selves and open up to the bigger ‘G’ God that loves us all.

When death is seen in dreams it is often a metaphor for bringing an end to some negative behavior or ineffective way of being. Take heed, your soul is trying to tell you something.

“The tragedy of life is not death but what we let die inside of us while we live.”

–Norman Cousins