dreamingwithfairies

I didn't think it would happen, really happen, but I'm here. My history is a dissolved dream. It's no longer a wish.

For as long as I can remember, I've lived a double life with my psychic twin. A dream-self made out of dreams, fantasies, longings that could not be satisfied nor spoken of in real life. I nurtured them, I hid them from the world the way a dragon hoards gold. It was my companion, this subconscious dream version of me that walked beside me since childhood, meeting me at a depth that nothing and no one else could come close to. It was the thing that held my existential loneliness, fed my imagination, made me feel otherworldly instead of mundane, whispered stories I needed to believe in, the thing that kept my inner world alive when the outer one was lifeless and disappointing. The thing that shaped my identity, the one I never got to embody. It kept my spirit alive.

And now, I have outgrown it. And I feel grief, the kind of grief that comes with the loss of a lifelong companion.

All these years, it carried the parts of me that weren't allowed to exist. My real desires, my real personality, the person I couldn't be in my life. It was my childhood refuge, my adolescent sanctuary, my identity-layer. Leaving my dream-self behind is like leaving my birthplace forever. We made worlds together, it protected me, lifted me, filled me up, devoured me. Made me feel at home in a life I didn't recognise as my own.

I've gone through a lot within the Active Imagination world. Journeys, characters, creations, stories and archetypes. I've built buildings, gardens, groves, rooms, forests, castles etc. I've used places from my actual dreams, like a cliffside domicile of an ancient vampire, who was no more. Jung cautioned against bringing real people into this inner space, so I never did. Everything was a symbol, mostly completely unrelated and subconscious.

The dissolution of this Primordial Dream-Self was preceded by another cataclysmic event from a few weeks ago - the total collapse of the world I had built in my Jungian Active Imagination project for the past three years. Everything is gone. In one fell swoop, without any warning or reason. There was no way I could resist it, I had to let it play out. This was important. Whatever happened in Active Imagination always manifested in reality. Whether it was a prediction or a self-fulfilling prophecy is not for me to say.

The whole point for me has always been to get to a city off in the distance, that only occasionally appeared, like a mirage. A city like a metropolis, like something out of Cyberpunk 2077. I associated that with home, I knew I had to get there, that's where truth lived, that's where connection to the stream of life was. Not the desert I always returned to or the chapel I often prayed in.

Over the years I have tried to imagine various ways to get there. That's what the journey was about – getting to the city was my ultimate goal, I knew that's where the real story was, where I would truly start to live and find the answers I was searching for all this time. I knew I wasn't where I was supposed to be, only where I needed to be, what comforted me.

Today, I was home.

Deep underground, in a place apparently designed by the ghost of H.R. Giger, with metallic pipes, valves, grids, knobs, grimy, alien, post-apocalyptic and biomechanical - my sanctum. Faint light filtered from high above, giving the space an almost oceanic ambience. Tubes carried bright green liquid. The place was cool and airy, smelled of oil, metal and incense.

I was hovering inside a glass tube, and despite how narrow it was, I did not feel claustrophobic. I was totally nude. I felt aroused, excited, happy all at once. I kissed and licked the glass that contained me. I waited. Then I experienced something graphically sexual, ecstatic, which I cannot describe here without blushing, but it felt amazing. The definition of desire and love and warmth - it was my welcoming ceremony. I was then released onto a water bed, surrounded by ornate incense holders that hung from the ceiling on chains. I observed the space. There was a huge carving of an entity I identified as Shiva. The walls reminded me of the massive Hindu temple I visited earlier this year - full of geometric patterns, mandalas, figures and stories carved into the walls and ceilings. The wall around Shiva seemed to glow like embers at times. I stepped off of the water bed and a white silk robe manifested, invisible hands dressed me, covered me up. I walked a little distance on these metallic catwalks when suddenly I fell through, down into the darkness, where a green light manifested and swallowed me up, inside which was a honey-like amber that in turn swallowed me up more, and in the core was a yellow glowing gem. I felt like I was encased in thick jelly but I could breathe perfectly fine. I embraced this glowing object that was as big as my body - then I woke up.

And now, I don't know how to feel, but H.R. Giger's works keep flashing in my mind. That and the music video "Stinkfist" by Tool, though not as ominous. The art gallery I went to last year that had these otherworldly biomechanical post-apocalyptic themes too. Clay figurines held by electric wires, plugged into an unknown matrix. I wish I still had those pictures. Something profound is developing. Something neither wild nor civilised, neither of the hells nor of the heavens, but a secret new thing. The seed I held dormant in my heart has received the electric spark.

Attempt at Jungian analysis:

In Jungian terms, my underground sanctum represents the Collective Shadow + the Deep Unconscious Matrix.

It’s the place where instinct meets machinery, ancient meets futuristic, flesh meets metal, the erotic meets the spiritual, the human meets the inhuman.

My erotic welcoming ceremony symbolises of the union of unconscious and conscious, eros as a psychic ignition and the Self “touching” me to wake me up. In Jung’s terms, this is the coniunctio, the inner marriage. My unconscious is not threatening me - it is claiming me.

Shiva is the God of destruction and creation, dissolution and rebirth, cycles, cosmic transformation.

The white robe manifesting to clothe me is part of the initiation. White is purification. My unconscious is placing me in a new role.

Me falling through the floor is my ego self surrendering.

The yellow glowing gem - something underived from my past. It is the “new seed” Jung described - the thing that wakes when the old psychic structure collapses.

Finally - Giger's aesthetic is the perfect symbol of the psyche growing beyond human categories.

Something is about to sprout. Not the realisation of the dream - the one who dreamed it.