NOTE: I apologize for any formatting issues. The website wasn’t cooperating with me.
Hello everyone! I hope you felt peace in your dreams this past week. This week we are going to use Jungian psychology and literary tools to analyze a dream of mine that is haunting enough that I will always remember it.
Onto the dream!
Bloom
I stand at the edge of a forest— one from my childhood, Elson Glen. The light is leaking through the trees, the leaves casting sharp shadows on my face. It is completely silent except for a thin stream trickling to my left. There is nobody around and I do not see any animals. I do not know why I am here, but I feel a sense of purpose and calm. My heart is beating slowly, like the ticking of a warped clock. I look down at my toes, which are bare, and see how my blanched skin shines in the light next to the dark grass.
The grass begins to crawl up the arch of my foot. I do not move, calmly watching as one blade of grass sinuously twists over the top of my foot and around my ankle. The grass comes from all sides, inching up my toes and curling around my feet, encasing them. The grass crawls up my legs, wiring its way up my calves and thighs.
I sigh. A tiger lily blooms from the grass that is working its way up my thigh. Another lily blooms from the grass that has made its way up to my stomach and around my back. Another from the grass that is fastening my arm firmly to my side. More lilies begin to bloom all along the grass that is crawling up my body.
The grass continues growing until it reaches my face, where it works its way into my mouth. I open my mouth willingly, peacefully, and it grows down into my lungs, wrapping around my organs and squeezing shut my blood vessels. This is where the dream ends.
The Analysis
Taken at the literal level, this is a dream about plants invading my body and me being more than willing to let it happen. At a symbolic level, this dream is about the creative process creating a death of the ego, or the growth of an idea and how it overtakes the individual.
Plants, in the literary world, are a symbol of creation and fertility. In this dream, plants function as an emblem for the idea, that which we create. I encounter the plants not knowing why I am around them or how the encounter will go but with a sense of purpose, much like what occurs when one is creating a piece of art. The idea then begins to interact with my physical body and overtake it, which is analogous to how an idea starts off as a small seed during the creative process and grows into a dominant force that overtakes the psyche, especially when you are creating something large like a novel.
The creative process can cause an ego death, as exhibited in this dream. Carl Jung defines the ego as the conscious mind. It is responsible for our individual identities. When creating something, one may revert to a more unconscious than conscious state, relying on free associations and instinct rather than conscious thought. This is analogous to what happened when the grass and lilies entered my mouth, thereby entering my unconscious.
It is noteworthy that I felt a sense of peace while the plants overtook my body. When one experiences an ego death or an idea overtaking them, they are allowing themselves to feel one of the most profoundly human sensations: creative satisfaction. Wouldn’t you, too, feel peace at your most human? Stay loose and dream lucid!
Vocabulary: ego
Nice pictures to illustrate what you were talking about! Also, I’ve never heard of “ego death” before, so it was interesting to read about it. It’s also interesting to note the progression of your dreams – the last post I read was “Dream #1,” which definitely is different than this one.