Dreams: Another Example
Author: Christopher Chayban
I will amplify a dream of mine with the dramatic schema of locale, exposition, peripeteia and lysis and the method of amplification.
I am with my wife walking around a black lake and it is a sandstorm. I have red safety goggles on and a backpack. There is a building helps cross over a part of the lake. I walk around the lake on both sides a few times but only going about half the distance each time. On my last trip, I see a wild naked man tackle a tan bull by the neck into the water. There are two other men trying to hold down the bull/sacrifice the bull. I am conflicted about stopping them. I try to go inside the building and meet
a man who I think will help me with this situation, but before I do that, the naked wild man runs past me with a bloody knife. He gets in a red truck and whips out of the scene in a crazy manner.”
The Locale: Place: Black lake, sandstorm. Dramatis Personae: wife, four unknown men and a bull.
The Exposition (problem): Men attacking a bull and either killing or sacrificing it.
The Peripeteia (transformation, reversal): I look for help but a man with a knife impedes my motion.
The Lysis (result): The men who killed/sacrificed the bull peel out in a getaway car.
The black lake draws reference to the prima materia and original chaos. The lake I associate with Onondaga lake, near where I live. In Edinger’s alchemical method, the prima materia indicates a dark mood or other painful material that needs to be separated out in order to create the philosopher’s stone. It shows up later in the dream as a conflict over the bull which may represent the material world. The sacrifice of the bull is an obvious allusion to the mythological and archetypal
image of Mithras slaying the bull, a spiritual rite of initiation. The Persian/Roman origin of Mithraism connects to my Mediterranean heritage (prima materia/origin).
But ultimately, I think this dream represents the aggressivity of my thinking function in pursuing the meaning in life at the expense of my natural self (the Bull), of which I also associate to my Taurus ascendant (body/self) in Vedic Astrology. The result is, my aggressive thinking (knife man) gets nowhere/escapes (red getaway car)
and doesn’t helps me in my individuation.
Leave a Reply