This Jungian Life Podcast Joseph Lee, Lisa Marchiano, & Deb Stewart

Schools have existed across cultures and throughout time; the knowledge they transmit leads us out of childhood, shapes our values and world view, and grooms us for citizenship. Schools help us build ego strength and adapt to cultural norms, the goal of the first half of life and the first stage of individuation. School experiences also wound us, as Jung recalled in his memoir. Collective schooling instills the uniformity needed for a cohesive culture, but individual uniqueness may be lost. Individualized education—including home life--can enhance personal uniqueness or compensate for special needs, but lacks universal principles and methods. Education by example allows the influence of the unconscious to be most openly included—whereas in other methods its power may be unacknowledged or denied. Jung says, “I would say, in the light of my own experience, that an understanding heart is everything in a teacher, and cannot be esteemed highly enough.”
Here's the dream we analyzed:
“I am participating in some sort of arts class where most of the students are younger and less experienced than me. We are assigned a project where two art works are placed on each of the four walls. The teacher/facilitator puts on some very interesting music that I like and the students/participants are to dance around the space and interact with the art works in a semi-choreographed dance. There are art materials available if they choose to add to the works, or they can choose to just interact through semi-choreographed dance (pointing, touching, etc.) I make a conscious and intentional choice to sit to one side and observe and absorb rather than to actively participate. During the dance, only one of the participants, a black female, chooses to use the art materials to make changes to one of the paintings. She is frustrated when her colored pencil breaks almost immediately so all she can manage to do is sign her name to the painting. The song ends and the teacher/facilitator immediately expresses her frustration that I did not actively participate. She treats me as though I am a hostile, unwilling participant who chose not to participate out of fear, which is simply not true. She refuses to understand or believe that I had made a conscious and intentional choice. I offer multiple times to explain myself and she refuses to hear me, saying instead that we will move on to the next activity and I better participate this time. I become quite agitated and angry that she won’t listen to me, and say so: “Since you aren’t listening to me, I’m going to FORCE YOU TO!!” I then tell my story angrily in such a way that she and the class have no choice but to listen. I tell how in my readings and studies, I’ve come across two stories that are the reason I’ve done what I’ve done. The first is a story of a man who lived in Greenwich Village in the 70s or 80s who would throw huge, elaborate parties in his apartment, inviting 20-40 intentionally cultivated younger men. He would provide the food and the drugs and the music. Decades later, multiple people who had attended these legendary parties would all describe the scene the same way: that this man would never actively participate, but only sit in the middle and observe and absorb the goings-on. “Don’t you understand,” I scream to my classmates/participants and the teacher/facilitator, “You can’t observe and absorb if you’re focused on participating!!! There was a second illustrative story but I’m too worked up right now to remember what it was!” 
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Guest Machiel Klerk has worked with dreams and healing traditions worldwide; his new book is Dream Guidance: Connection to the Soul through Dream Incubation. Religions, shamanic practices, and depth psychology have recognized the significance of dreams and sought their aid. Dreams open into a deeply intelligent source Jung called the two-million-year-old man. This inner companion is interested in our development and life purpose, and he transports us nightly to worlds of vivid images, fulsome feeling, and embodied experience. Dream incubation invites these encounters into consciousness through a well-defined process: identify a problem, develop a question, and create a ritual of receptivity. Questions related to life direction are especially likely to elicit response. Record the dream immediately upon waking, reflect, and relate its wisdom to waking life. Everyone dreams, everyone is connected to this mysterious source, and everyone has something meaningful to live and give. Our dreams are willing to help us. 
Lisa’s Dream Incubation Question: What is the most important thing I should bring forward for this podcast?
 Lisa’s Dream
“There is a guy who is maybe on a skateboard; I am maybe on a bike and with Deb. We are following him. He is enjoying the speed bumps and the twists and turns in the road. I have a somewhat superior attitude. I am going very straight. I think that we are exactly the wrong people to be following him because we have such different approaches. He seems to really be enjoying himself. When we stop, he comes over and is speaking to me. It is clear he is attracted to me, flirting and telling me I’m beautiful. It is hard for me to hear, but I make myself stay with it. I make myself continue to meet his eye. I make myself say “thank you” and accept the compliment. I know he is totally sincere. He says he knows that one day I will be tucking him into bed. I respond that I don’t think that is going to happen, and he says he knows it will happen. I know that our lives are very different and he can’t really understand mine. I mention something about almost having gone to college in the South, but there were no gothic universities. This man asks me what that means, and I am noticing how “out of his league” I am. Still, I can feel his real sincerity and my own surprising attraction to him.” 
REFERENCES:
Machiel Klerk. Dream Guidance: Connection to the Soul Through Dream Incubation. Hayhouse, 2022. https://www.amazon.com/dp/1401968198/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_8EYVRAMB69SR8HFWQSJA or at: https://machielklerk.com/dream-book/#order
Book Depository: Free worldwide delivery of Machiel’s book: https://www.bookdepository.com
Jung Platform Free Online Dream Summit, https://jungplatform.com, June 23-26, 9:00 am PT – 12 pm ET. Click Summit, Dreams & Your Personal Journey.
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Awareness of death can help us create an intentional life—one that serves the movement of soul toward wholeness. Jung realized that although we experience death as “a fearful piece of brutality,” the unconscious images death as celebration. On a night train, after his mother died, Jung reported that “during the entire journey I continually heard dance music, laughter, and jollity, as though a wedding were being celebrated.” Our limited capacities and the conditions of earthly life preclude certainty about life after death, but Jung’s recognition of universal mythic patterns led to his theory of archetypes and a psychic reality beyond our grasp. We glimpse it in dreams, visions, precognitions, and synchronicities, and it can inspire connection with the infinite, which Jung considered life’s decisive question. For Jung, death was “an archetype rich in secret life, which seeks to add itself to our own individual life in order to make it whole.”
REFERENCES:
C.G. Jung. Memories, Dreams, Reflections.  https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004X19L3E/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_BZYJF184D3ZSXT9WR3ZF
C.G. Jung. Collected Works, Vol. 8: The Soul & Death. https://www.amazon.com/dp/0691097747/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_38HYESF2JQ13FB49H0E9
Von Franz, Marie Louise. On Dreams and Death. https://www.amazon.com/dp/0812693671/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_ND8DQF0VKRXW8GQ9P9R7
Joseph Campbell with Bill Moyers. The Power of Myth.  https://www.amazon.com/dp/0385418868/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_SB4EJWY02WJ8XGWCRF42
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While many of Hans Christian Andersen’s 19th-century stories have moralizing motifs, their universality and depth places them among ageless fairy tales. Although The Princess and the Pea and The Emperor’s New Clothes are social satire, they also depict psychic dynamics. A young prince searches but cannot find a mate—until a princess arrives one stormy night, soaking wet and mind-blowingly over-sensitive. Do opposites attract, or are they only contrasting representations of superficiality and entitlement? Andersen’s pen next delivers the famous emperor an even more pointed jab: a child, innocent of the contrivances of social status, blurts truth: he has no clothes! Perhaps each of us has an inner emperor whose shadow is on unwitting public display—and a wise child. If Andersen has little regard for self-aggrandizing conceits, The Ugly Duckling depicts compassion for suffering and the downtrodden. Despite abuse and exile, the ugly duckling responds to springtime’s jubilant beauty. He takes wing, answering the call to transcendence—which reveals his transformation. Swans are the divine bird—a royalty we may rightly aspire to. 
Here’s The Dream We Analyze:
“I am walking and see a headlight lying on the road (on a bridge) and a baby crawling beside it--the baby narrowly escapes from being hit by cars. I see a black and red Bugatti parked (owner of the headlight) and denounce the driver to my football coach, who is also a policeman. I remember the car’s number plate. I get a lot of attention due to this, and I greatly enjoy this. I start murdering people to get more attention. The first murder is with a pistol, the second with a revolver. I try to steal a gun from the football cafeteria for the third one, but I fear being found out by my trainer/policeman, so I end up throwing the gun into the changing room. I confess to him that I am the murderer. My trainer accompanies me to a field nearby where some of my classmates from school are celebrating my birthday. There is a pool. On our way there, I explain to my trainer that I committed those murders because I had become addicted to the attention and adrenaline. It is dark, and suddenly my trainer starts walking faster. There is a donkey chasing us. We manage to evade it and climb the fence. The donkey jumps over the fence and attacks me. I crawl underneath the fence and arrive at the spot where my classmates are.”
REFERENCES:
Hans Christian Andersen. The Complete Fairy Tales & Stories. https://www.amazon.com/dp/1626860998/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_86034741H5DFNZAHMH8D
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 LISTEN: https://thisjungianlife.com/episode-215-poison/

Pharmakon, the ancient Greek word for drug, can mean both “remedy” and “poison.” There is a close connection between poison and cure. Poison is stealthy, and takes us by surprise, whether through an unseen snake’s venomous bite or a ripe apple’s alluring disguise. Psychological poison glides past our defenses, pervades our being, and wounds us where we are most vulnerable. We participate in our poisoning through our own unknowing, from toxic cognitions and rigid fixations to self-doubt and self-sabotage. Poison can transform us by stinging us into building the immunity of increased consciousness and insight. Reason and objectivity can act as antidotes, allowing old attitudes to dissolve and new awareness to arise. Whether a poison is injected or ingested, we can use it for cure.
Here’s The Dream We Analyze:
“I am "cooking up" a batch of Xenomorphs (from the movie Alien) for a "client" in an underground lab. I'm mixing chemicals in a vat, and realize I missed a step...I call the client and am reassured it will still work, it will just take some extra time. The chemicals coagulate into a pink goo. The next day, I return to the lab and see swimming in a pool of water four adolescent xenomorphs. A male lab assistant tells me "This shouldn't have worked. They mutated and can only breath flesh." I see the adolescent aliens all have a caul of pink ectoplasm over their faces. The next day, I return to the lab and there is only one xenomorph, an adult, chained as if crucified to the back wall of a cell, wreathed in shadow. I peer at it from across the cell, and a white dove appears and flies across it. The alien's claw shoots out and snatches the dove from the air and crams it into its mouth. There is a great sucking sound, and I realize the alien is breathing the dove's flesh. My vision zooms in to the alien’s face. It regurgitates the dove's carcass, which inverts into a black cage of bone, and the alien screams. I am shocked awake.”
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From Homer’s Odyssey to the Wizard of Oz our native soil draws us home, whether home is a small Greek island or a simple Kansas farm. The soul has a natural longing to return to the place of its beginning and belonging. Home is a state of safety and changelessness; it is our foundational experience of original completeness, containment and care. As we mourn the loss of the familiar and face the unknown, homesickness generates neural activity similar to physical pain. Its underlying intent is to spur us into detaching from the familiar and investing in the foreign. Homesickness asks that we bear leave-taking and loneliness in service to belonging to a wider world, building new relationships, and the eventual realization that the soul’s true home is a transcendent source of personal being.
Here’s The Dream We Analyzed:
“I am walking up the street toward my apartment at night. Near my building I see a man with a small dog on a leash. The dog is a tiny Yorkshire terrier and the man is very large. He is wearing a long, dark trench coat and has wild black hair. He looks a bit threatening. The dog is on one side of the sidewalk, the man is on the other, and the leash is between them, blocking my path. I try to step out into the street to go around, but as I do, the man swings around and the dog runs around my legs. I get all bound up in the leash and am pressed up against the man. He puts his face right up to mine, like he might try to kiss me, and I see that he is the Devil from the Rider-Waite Tarot deck. He begins to blow some kind of smoke into my mouth. I think he is trying to get inside of me--to possess me or steal my soul. I blow the smoke back into his mouth and it forms a kind of ring that circles between his mouth and mine. I know that I won't have the strength to keep him out for very long.”
REFERENCES:
John Hill. At Home in the World: Signs and Symmetries of Belonging. https://www.amazon.com/dp/1685030211/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_VBGPAMVEX5X2DA2XB3HQ
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