Always Running and Hiding

The Dream of the Feminine and the Hit Man

In a Sopranos-like environment, I am part of a mother-daughter duo and a hit has been put out on us. We are standing together in a white rectangular space made of fabric with zippers for closures--like a make-shift cloth closet. We are, I think, in a warehouse. We know someone is stalking us and we are asking, "Should we hide?" We decide yes, and wrap ourselves in white cloth and prepare to lie on the floor of the closet. I wonder if we will be found. I can picture the gunman in my mind--large, dark, fat, cruel, merciless, pointing a gun at us. 

The scene changes and we are driving in a convertible (white?) down a causeway. We have escaped. We are just out of the danger zone and I feel a surge of relief. I am looking out at the water and the open road, feeling like we might be free. 

This is an entry in my dream journal from February of 2008. It seems worthwhile to share it here because it is a dream about escaping my shadow. It reminds me of an escape dream I had when I was in analysis with a Jungian therapist. In the dream, I fled a dark, decrepit house in upstate New York, full of menacing, semi-retarded people, and drove off to California and felt great. My therapist called me on it, suggesting that these disowned parts of myself might be worth relating to, but I wasn't ready to hear that it might be a good idea to stay in a dark house full of semi-retarded people, much less that it wouldn't be considerably more intelligent to speed off to the Golden West in a convertible. 

Oh, how I've changed! Now I prowl around in my unconscious looking for trouble, which is not to say that I don't also spend a great deal of time in denial. It's just that I am beginning to see that you can run and you can hide, but you can't ever really escape your shadow. 

But how do you work with Mr. Dark, Fat, Merciless, Pointing A Gun? Running and hiding seem the obvious responses. In working with that question of how to relate to the shadow--everything we fear and reject--I have come to different conclusions at different times. In Inner Work, Robert Johnson suggests creating and performing a ritual in honor of a dream as a way of integrating its wisdom. In the case of this dream, I created a mandala that attempted to relate the masculine gun and the feminine mother-daughter element to one another. I will post that drawing in a separate post immediately following this one.