Rushing into a relationship with my unconscious Part 4

A Bear cut in Half

Office parking lot, van - night
(I have a camper van that I often slept in when my keycard for the building that had my sleeping nook it wasn’t working.)

Dream: I was at a front desk, one that was similar to the one where I worked everyday, but this desk was outdoors, under a streetlight, in the middle of a brick and concrete town at the dead of night. This town didn’t look like any normal town that I was used to. It looked to be meticulously planned as if it were designed to be streamlining the efficiency of an unobservable production. Like a manufacturing facility, every corner, wall, rail and doorway looked to be built for a specific purpose. Like a curfew was in effect there were very few street lights lit so the town was quite dark and the stillness of the air was noticeable.

I left my post for a patrol and somehow knew that I’d be needing to locate my supervisor somewhere in town. After wandering through darkness I arrived at a lit corner of a brick building. The place stood out from all the rest because snow was moving in the air with almost no direction, no wind, no gravity. I followed the snow around the corner and into an alleyway and then into a great brick roundabout. My supervisors were faceless, but not expressionless men. It was less like the scary or ominous kind of facelessness and more the benign, peripheral kind. They had been carrying a load between them balanced between two staffs like it was the Arc of the Covenant. They had just set down their load to take a break for a second. There load was the front half of a living brown bear stuffed upright into plastic laundry basket. Although seemingly cut in half the bear was still alive, though it acted lethargic and strange as if it were drugged or retarded. The supervisors laughed and took great pride in their imprisonment of the bear. I wasn’t sure anymore if I was being supervised by them. I wasn’t happy that I might be. I didn’t like what they were doing and I could tell they knew that and took joy in it. I turned to continue the patrol and the dream ended.

Interpretation: Being the night-watch for a community that resides in highly organized structures seems to me to be a symbol for the mission/journey that now think I’m on, that is, to read and engage with the great works and ideas that make up the structures of our traditions that give our civilization foundation at a time (a sort of societal night) where not much light is directed towards these topics.

The bear is a puzzling image. I haven’t made it through Neumann’s Origins of Consciousness so I don’t think I’m fluent enough with the archetypes enough to fully interpret a butchered half-bear that is oddly connected in some way to my honor or something like that, but what I did find spending a few minutes searching the internet about bear archetypes did strike me. One source said that the bear represented strength, introspection and the death/rebirth cycle. This seemed relevant tas I found my abilities to exercise or forge the will to work on what was important were becoming more and more hindered by my body’s reaction to my night hours and some of the other pains that surrounded it more and more every day. I could hardly focus long enough for any meaningful introspection, but I also knew I wanted to change or, in other words, let the negative aspects of myself die so that I could be reborn.