DREAM: ANIMA WOMAN OF THE PALACE ... August 9, 2009

As I began a nap a very vivid dream image, so totally unexpected and so totally not anything I would have consciously developed: A beautiful woman dressed in sheer flowing material with all the colors of the rainbow was gracefully, practically dancing, spreading a rug on the white marble floor of the central large luxurious room of a palace. This looked like an ancient scene from a place like India or Pakistan. The rug was a very large square with concentric squares of all the colors of the rainbow. As she spread it she said, 'It was the most dazzling experience of my life.'  This has the earmarks of being an archetypal dream more than a personal one, thus applies to the whole culture of the dreamer. 

REFLECTION: How can I possibly put words to an image, a symbol like this? I find it better to simply let it soak in and make its own impression on consciousness. It certainly makes a positive mesmerizing impression. The woman reflects the erotic and also the spiritual. Her movement is more than just a physical thing, it is a worshipful dance. She is not this way to get attention or to seduce, she simply is a creation of physical and spiritual beauty. These are common qualities of the 'inner woman' that Jung and others have described as the living 'anima' of the human unconscious. 'She' also appears in many of my dreams in various forms. 

Can you imagine  the disappointing consequences if a man were to project such an image onto a real woman? This woman is an inner woman, the anima. This is a living image  of my, and likely many others', soul. And she seems to have my full attention and serious devotion. If a man were to go out looking for her in the world among human women he would be missing the truth, that she is not 'out there' but 'in here.'   True, if taken seriously, if fully acclimated into one's inner life , it is possible that a real woman could then be 'seen' to be just as amazing and beautiful in her real humanity as the anima figure is in a person's inner realm. But in our day and for the past several centuries men unconsciously have tried to find such an image of woman on the outside and in the process have failed to appreciate actual real women. This has justified men in keeping women inferior and failing to allow them equal rights and power in our cultures. This distortion and failure to differentiate between inner and outer erotic life is usually called 'romance' in Western culture. Real women, without knowing why, have not felt fully adored and loved. They do not know that 'another woman' is present that they were being compared to and found wanting. How terribly unfair and a lousy trick of nature on both the man and the woman. But it is now humanly possible  for us to 'see' our way through this and to arrive at human mutual relationships of a spiritual/psychologically quality that have not been before possible, but only 'dreamed' of. Humanity's capacity to grow in individual and collective consciousness is the key for this potential.

Think of how  commercial industry has exploited this eternal image of the feminine by presenting the 'princess'  to children as 'only' make believe. (I'm not opposed to that.) This is actually a product of the collective adult unconscious and as such it is a Sacred image. And because of its Sacredness carries  the potential  to transform human consciousness, even ushering in part of a new and needed image of God.  Many an adult is likely as mesmerized by  the Disney princesses as the children but the adult has no permission in our restrictive culture to 'see'  it as inner reality to be taken seriously, as even an expression of our personal or collective soul.

She spread a square rug. The square along with the circle is a symbol of wholeness, unity and successful combining of the opposites of human experience. The colors speak for themselves that the spiritual and the physical realities of nature are a unity of harmony and unsurpassed beauty. The rug is 'on the floor'. This pictures the anima as bringing a man finally totally back to earth, to solid ground, to earthy stability after she has perhaps led him to the ethereal heights and the lows of a symbolic, but very real experiences of , heaven and hell.(One outstanding example of this in literature is the Dante Masterpiece of the 14th century The Divine Comedy, especially the third part called Paradise.) She is undoubtedly the Queen of the palace. The palace is a spiritual symbol of the dwelling of the Sacred. It is the inner Temple from which all our physically beautiful  Temples and Sanctuaries have received their templates. The dream shows the woman interested and delighting in creating environments of beauty, peace and safety for others. Should this become a primary way of thinking of  an aspect of God, it would revolutionize what such believers would see as 'God's Will' for the people of the world. The Bible speaks of 'ivory palaces' and the 'throne of God.' This dream reflects these same timeless symbolic descriptions of the Sacred.

Ivory Palaces

Her seemingly ambiguous words leave much, nearly all, to the imagination. To what does she refer when she she says, 'It was the most dazzling experience of my life?' This part human, part goddess woman personality says she has experienced the indescribable, the dazzling, the incomparable. She has been in ecstasy. There is no reference to the male in the dream at all. But that may say more about the male than if he were present. The dream does not tell anything of her ecstatic experience. But whatever it is it must surely be the source of her present grace, her wholeness, contentment and beauty. And her experience of ecstasy must have made her suitable to live in, if not the co-creator of, the heavenly palace. Since this image of the anima is certainly a reflection of the soul of man, if not also of women, her 'dazzling' 'ecstatic' experience must also refer to what the human's soul wishes every human man and woman to be introduced to and perhaps to live in and out of in their daily earthly life. This could be another way to describe finding the 'pearl of great price', the 'treasure hidden in a field', even the very 'Kingdom of God.” It may be a prophecy of a coming evolutionary quantum leap of what it can mean for humans to experience intimately loving and being loved. And for it to be the common  occurrence of humans, like God, actually loving and embracing   the whole  World. Jim Hibbett

*The reader will find another reference to Dante in this post: http://jhibbett.blogspot.com/2016/02/that-dam-pillar-of-salt-february-5-2016.html