This was an excruciatingly difficult dream to experience and reflect on. I was a new medical student. I and others like me were, with supervision, doing autopsies on patients who had just died in the hospital. The patients run the full range of diseases and were a broad range of age, ethnicity and background. They had died of every imaginable and horrible disease common to humanity. The autopsy scenes were graphic and horrible things to view for me. That was bad enough but the most painful part of the dream was my total frustration. I was not able to adapt, to participate or to learn. I was not able to figure out the rules of the situation. I did not know how and when to respond and to gather for a new autopsy. I did not have any grasp of the strange terminology. And I could not understand what any of the 'foreign' doctors were saying. Neither could I understand the conversation of my peers. To make it worse the other students seemed to know exactly what they were doing and began to take leading roles in the processes. I was extremely embarrassed. Here I had a chance to become a doctor, with its likely prestige and wealth, but I felt completely stupid and incompetent. At one point my brother Gene arrived and was also a Doctor. He began to work with the same competencies as the others. I could sense he was worried that I might not make the grade to become a doctor. He said out of concern, 'Now Jimmy, stick with me on this. You can get it.' (This parallels an actual interest Gene had in me in early adulthood as he helped me to prepare to enter dental school. He likely was concerned when I left Dental School and returned to his Christian College to 'prepare to preach.' Just recently he said he still thought of me as his 'little brother.')
There was a place in the hospital that was the headquarters of this program of autopsy. I was completely disoriented. I could not find my way back to this place or any other place that seemed familiar. For a moment I was fully naked in the open view of others. Somehow that did not seem to bother anyone, like they did not see. Early on in this I lost my pager so could not be notified of the next assignment. This dream persisted and though I felt I was awake at times I could not shake it from my mind. Near the end I was back at the headquarters office. It was a high ceiling with medium shaded fine brown wood walls and florescent lighting. Sort of contemporary 1950's environment. It would have been considered 'modern' then. There was no one there but me. A old man who was very alive and alert came into the office. He asked to speak to whoever was in charge. I told him no one was here but me. He was nice to me but expressed his irritation with grumbling words like, " I have a very important message for them and wouldn't you know they are not even present to listen."
There was a place in the hospital that was the headquarters of this program of autopsy. I was completely disoriented. I could not find my way back to this place or any other place that seemed familiar. For a moment I was fully naked in the open view of others. Somehow that did not seem to bother anyone, like they did not see. Early on in this I lost my pager so could not be notified of the next assignment. This dream persisted and though I felt I was awake at times I could not shake it from my mind. Near the end I was back at the headquarters office. It was a high ceiling with medium shaded fine brown wood walls and florescent lighting. Sort of contemporary 1950's environment. It would have been considered 'modern' then. There was no one there but me. A old man who was very alive and alert came into the office. He asked to speak to whoever was in charge. I told him no one was here but me. He was nice to me but expressed his irritation with grumbling words like, " I have a very important message for them and wouldn't you know they are not even present to listen."
REFLECTION: For anyone who has read of my 'frustrated teacher' dreams you see a similar frustration here but here I am a student, a student of what is considered the highest caliber, a Medical Student. After looking at this the only way I can constructively handle it, without severe damage to my own sense of self and esteem, is to also take this as I finally did the 'out of control class room' dreams. *This must be another self revealing dream of the level of frustration that the Sacred Itself experiences. This is another 'confession of God' dream, otherwise it is to me senseless. It is significant that here God is not 'the teacher' but has humbled the God Self and become a 'student', a learner with the very brightest of His creation. This dream depicts God, as in the Christian teaching, incarnating as a real human person. The human students seem able to embrace this task of looking at the horrible results of 'disease and illness' that have always plagued humanity since God created the world. They simply have come to accept at some irrational level, ' Well this must be God's will for it is here and it has never subsided, even with the religious revelations that have come.' This includes the 'incarnational revelation' of 'God in Christ.' There Jesus is clearly aware of the senselessness of disease and implies that this is going to change..''the sick healed, the lame walk."
But after 2000 years every day people experience their loved ones taken down by all manner of disease. Used as the god image for the dream's effect on me I am shown as unable to take it as 'matter of fact' or 'how it simply has to be.' That is why I cannot calmly participate. Rather the dream shows the Sacred frustrated 'I' as Sacred image for the dream's sake, seems to know 'this is not right.' This is part of the flaw and trouble within the Sacred Godhead. All is not yet resolved and at peace there. A trouble for which, Jung's work describes and that I have written about elsewhere, the Sacred has initiated a healing through the cooperative suffering of God and Human.** I experience some of that mental suffering in such a dream as this time and again. This process results in increased consciousness for both the Human and God. This dream gives a hopeful view of that 'process in progress.' Here God, but pictured as me for the dream to drive home its point, is completely conscious of 'what is wrong' and is moved by the horrible frustration to move toward a solution to the ' Disease Problem' embedded in Itself and thus in Humanity.
But after 2000 years every day people experience their loved ones taken down by all manner of disease. Used as the god image for the dream's effect on me I am shown as unable to take it as 'matter of fact' or 'how it simply has to be.' That is why I cannot calmly participate. Rather the dream shows the Sacred frustrated 'I' as Sacred image for the dream's sake, seems to know 'this is not right.' This is part of the flaw and trouble within the Sacred Godhead. All is not yet resolved and at peace there. A trouble for which, Jung's work describes and that I have written about elsewhere, the Sacred has initiated a healing through the cooperative suffering of God and Human.** I experience some of that mental suffering in such a dream as this time and again. This process results in increased consciousness for both the Human and God. This dream gives a hopeful view of that 'process in progress.' Here God, but pictured as me for the dream to drive home its point, is completely conscious of 'what is wrong' and is moved by the horrible frustration to move toward a solution to the ' Disease Problem' embedded in Itself and thus in Humanity.
The dream shows itself as in the 'fifties'. This decade represents the beginning of a significant shift in Human and Sacred Consciousness. We had seen what horrors human technology can produce in the dropping of the Atomic Bomb on fellow humans. As kids we crouched under our desks as if that would protect us from our own human technology's destructiveness. And it was primarily our nation's technology that let this threat loose in the world. The world could never be the same for humans everywhere. We had now totally lost our innocence and nearly our basis for seeing ourselves as a moral human culture. And we had managed to do so with a cold hard scientific demeanor and a nationally coerced image of heroic innocence. The Unconscious will not accept such posturing and denial in anyone forever. We in the West by the fifties,on one hand, felt we were about ready to take full control over the earth and its resources for our own consumption and self interests. The sixties was truly a decade of unprecedented ferment in Human , and no less, Sacred consciousness. It was the age of 'free sexuality' and 'free love' where human responsibility and mutuality seemed now unnecessary disciplines. We were on the verge of technological gadgetry and global communications that promised to make the world our puppet. But, on the other hand, through all this progress 'diseases' like cancer and heart disease and broken marriages were on the increase.
This is where we are now but maybe with a much raised and responsible consciousness being experienced by a relatively larger part of the the human race. We are more conscious to the mystery of the horribleness of illness and of our human capacity to destroy ourselves and our world. And the dream is now assuring that the Sacred is even more conscious of the 'problem with disease' than the brightest of Humans. This is very encouraging regarding the future. Once the Sacred is conscious of any aspect of its own flaw, disease being a flaw in itSelf, it can and no doubt will move, with Human cooperation, to cure the flaw in very significant ways. Disease will no longer be considered a 'necessary evil' but something that needs the involvement of both the Sacred and Human to transcend present understanding in ways that can only come from new perspectives offered up to consciousness by the Collective Unconscious.
The old man who brings 'an important message' to humans in charge of working on disease must represent the voice of timeless Wisdom. This aspect of the Sacred is referred as Wisdom or Sophia in the Old Testament wisdom literature and often called the 'Wise Old Man' in other mythologies. It is the voice of the Collective Unconscious. But the old man finds those who need to 'hear' his
message have closed their ears. Worse, they are not even spirituality/psychologically present to hear this message most needed. But who is there to potentially hear the message and thus be made more conscious? It is not less than the 'god image ' of the dream. 'I Am' is present to hear the voice of Wisdom. The dream strikes a most hopeful image of what the present dynamic within the Sacred is; the highest Sacred we humans can presently imagine, is now able to receive an 'important message' regarding the the timeless 'problem of disease' among humans. Interestingly, even the Voice of Wisdom has not yet noticed that the aspect of 'The Sacred' which is capable of increases in consciousness is present in that room. Wisdom's Message has, the image says, been heard by that which is Humanity's, however frustrated, Sacred or God.
** http://jhibbett.blogspot.com/2011/08/cooperative-suffering-of-god-and-human.html
* It is most uncomfortable for me to be presented as a 'god image' in the dream. I realize it is so up for misunderstanding and viewing my dream as claiming something for myself that I do not also see in others. That is the opposite of my truth. The dream does this for the most effect in can have on me and my capacity for raised consciousness regarding this issue. By using my mortal image for the Sacred Image in my dream, it makes me take seriously what the actual Sacred is wrestling with and how it suffers for Our and Its own Sake. It makes that suffering my own. I do not have to 'wonder' , 'read about' or 'project' my archetypal image of God regarding this matter. I experience it directly in the dream. This is how dreams effectively work to bring about strong changes in our conscious perceptions. Dreams offer a human a continuous experience of metanoia, in the Bible translated 'repentance or change in perception.'
This dream also shows the very close and mutual connection between Human and Sacred, far more strongly than we have learned from present orthodox religion. God and Human in the end are so close and so mutual that eventually every human will see him/her self and every other as incarnations of the Ultimate Sacred, of God. This is another case of the Macrocosm(Sacred) being fully present in the Microcosm(Human). This raised level of consciousness that is emerging will fit the images that Jesus gave as he prayed, 'that they all be one' and when he asked for 'mutual friendship rather than being Master to his fellow humans' and what he meant when he said, " Ye also are Gods.' Jim
This dream also shows the very close and mutual connection between Human and Sacred, far more strongly than we have learned from present orthodox religion. God and Human in the end are so close and so mutual that eventually every human will see him/her self and every other as incarnations of the Ultimate Sacred, of God. This is another case of the Macrocosm(Sacred) being fully present in the Microcosm(Human). This raised level of consciousness that is emerging will fit the images that Jesus gave as he prayed, 'that they all be one' and when he asked for 'mutual friendship rather than being Master to his fellow humans' and what he meant when he said, " Ye also are Gods.' Jim
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