Dreamtiger Journal
In the Footsteps of Jung
Introduction - Dream Worlds - Being and Meaning
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Introduction
In the first chapter (🍷 Bubbles Winking at the Brim) I suggested that the open refuge is like wine. It takes us away from our normal sober state, where we want everything to go according to our vision of life, hoping to square our personal designs with the curves, loops, and arabesques of the world around us. Sip by sip, we slip into a less certain framework. The edges get blurry and we start to let loose of our definitions and guardrails. Whether some idea is true or untrue becomes less an argument than an invitation. We stop worrying about what we used to think, and let ourselves flow, perhaps even merge with other ideas, people, realities. The wine may not take us as far as the mystic poets of Persia, and we may not clutch at the moon like Li Po, yet we each in our own way explore further, dipping our toes or diving head first, into the intoxicating flow of discovery.
In the second chapter (🍏 Agnosticism) I looked at the open refuge in terms of religion, science, and philosophy. I noted that open agnosticism, with its hold on tradition on one hand, and its reach for new ideas and experiences on the other, is complementary to open theism. Both are willing to grab onto new things without tightening the grasp so much that it becomes impossible to change. Neither is an aimless drift, for neither insists on drifting for the sake of drifting. Nor does either think that others must follow in their wake, as Dante so elegantly does:
O voi che siete in piccioletta barca, / O you, eager to hear more,
desiderosi d'ascoltar, seguiti / who have followed in your little bark [boat]
dietro al mio legno che cantando varca, / my ship that singing makes its way,
tornate a riveder li vostri liti: / turn back if you would see your shores again.
non vi mettete in pelago, ché forse, / Do not set forth upon the deep,
perdendo me, rimarreste smarriti. / for, losing sight of me, you would be lost.
(Paradiso, 2.1-6)
Dante’s right to warn his reader about embarking on the high seas, yet open theists, just as much as open agnostics, question whether we really need to follow in Dante’s particular wake. They’re more likely to heed the warning of Byron, who cautions that if we float “in a Sea of Speculation” we may well capsize our little boat (Don Juan Canto 9.18). Byron doesn’t tell his readers that they must follow him or they’ll be lost.
Open refugees see the danger. Indeed, what I mean by refugee is that existential and metaphysical winds can blow very rough. We often need a safe port, a refuge from the storm. Yet, to borrow from Shakespeare’s well-known “Sonnet 116,” the star to the sailor’s wandering bark is the pole star. By extension, the star is love in general. Love
it is an ever-fixèd mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand'ring bark* * boat
Whose worth's unknown, although his* height be taken. * its
Shakespeare’s love isn’t a particular form of love. It could be the love of a mother, a lover, a sister, or God. It could be the Neoplatonic love which urges us toward the transcendent Good or the Christian love of Christ that redeems humanity. It could be the Hindu love of Krishna and Radha, or the Sufi love that annihilates the self and opens the tavern door to the intoxication of God. It’s certainly not restricted to Dante’s Medieval version of Christianity. To borrow from Dante’s mentor, the pagan Virgil, it’s the love that conquers all. Before Christ was born, Virgil writes, Omnia vincit amor, et nos cedamus amori; "Love conquers all things; let us yield to this love."
We don’t have to reject Dante’s theological ideas or his nautical imagery here. Instead, we can work through it to reach a greater flexibility. Of course we can follow safely in the wake of a larger ship, while the sea thrashes on either side. None of us can pretend to be the captain of Columbus’ Santa Maria or Darwin’s Beagle. But this doesn’t mean that we can’t choose which ship to follow, or that we don’t have the right to ask, “Does it have to be Dante’s wake?” Of course, it doesn’t have to be, but it still can be Dante’s wake — as long as we’re willing to contend with a great deal of Medieval politics and theology. But even here, we don’t have to take everything literally. So why not follow in Dante’s wake? And — rather than but — and why not follow in the wake of other ships that criss-cross the dangerous seas? There are many ships on the oceans of science and religion, just as there are many mansions in the house of God.
We can take to the open sea and take our chances, struggling like Melville’s Ahab with the leviathan of blind chance in the ocean of doubt. We don’t know if in the depths of the ocean we’ll find a black abyss or redemption. Nobody really knows, although we believe this way and that. Or we can enter a tavern with a keen sense that the wine will flow, that it’s always done so and will always do so. Or we can stand on the door sill, looking out at the turbulent winds blowing up from the Strait of Hormuz, and looking in at the bartender pouring a sparkling shiraz into the glass of a beautiful woman, her ruby lips touching the lip of the glass as the wine flows over her tongue.
We go in and out of the tavern, always stopping for a second at the door, examining its hinges and the strange fact that it exists in two worlds. The door divide the worlds at times, and connects them at others. We wonder about Plato and his world of Ideal Forms. What is this door, this gate between two worlds? And who is the Gatekeeper?
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Dream Worlds
In the first two chapters I introduced the worlds of doubt and belief explored by double refugees. In this third chapter I focus on this strange mind of ours, which goes back and forth between the solid real world of our waking selves and the shifting surreal world of our dreams. I suggest that the open refuge has much in common with Carl Jung’s approach to the unconscious, the realm of dreams. I’ll use Jung’s basic approach, yet I’ll alter and simplify his rather intimidating schema.
🐅 Dreamtiger Journal focuses on a perplexing conundrum about human reality: we’re one person when we’re awake, yet we can feel like we’re another person, or even another thing, when we dream. While our dreams can be fascinating — I once dreamed I was a buzz of green energy, a wired fuzzy caterpillar — they can also morph into disturbing and violent scenarios. The caterpillar can turn into an iron butterfly and crash like a Russian drone into a thousand year-old cathedral and monastery complex in central Kiev, something which happened just yesterday (I am writing this in June, 2026).
The real world with all its beauty and violence can get mixed up in the neuron highways and oceanic waves of our insanely complex brain, creating scenarios over which we have no control. I could, for instance, find myself scrambling through the wreckage that I saw in a Youtube video. But the video is nowhere to be seen. I don’t even remember I saw the video. My mind isn’t operating along the same lines it did when I was awake.
I can’t contextualize the situation. I can’t even move my limbs, and I’m completely unaware that my body’s in fact lying still in my bed. Gamma-aminobutyric acid and glycine are stopping me from running down the aisle to stop a cross-beam from falling on an old woman who is on her knees, prayer-beads in her trembling hands. All I see is broken marble and fallen crosses. Yet somehow I also see the old lady. She’s lying prostrate, somewhere beneath the beams. I’m powerless in a scenario directed by some hidden director.
Over 2000 years ago Zhuangzi wrote about a man who wakes up from his dream of being a butterfly, and then wonders if his waking state is in fact the dream. Are we that person who does so many things we understand during the day, or are we that person who floats in the waves and currents of our dreamworld, who stood paralyzed as the beams fell and the roof collapsed onto the floor?
I suspect that the question forces us into a false dichotomy. From ontological and epistemological points of view, we’re both.
Ontologically (that is, in terms of the experience of our being), we’re both the waking and the dreaming self. When we’re a dive-bombing iron butterfly, that diving seems as real as anything. It’s an empirical fact that we experience the world second-hand. The light that hits our retina is transformed into electrical currents and waves. Everything we feel and think is replayed in the circular setting of our skull. Which is why dreams feel as real as anything, and why we wake up with our heart pounding. In the dream’s moment, the moment is real.
Epistemologically (that is, in terms of meaning), both our waking and our dreaming selves have meaning. Just as our internal thoughts can create meaning, so our dreams can create meaning. The old Ukrainian woman beneath the fallen beams is a scenario I added to the iron butterfly scenario, yet by imagining this woman I created an image that has emotional content. It has meaning. It would have even more meaning if I had actually had such a dream, but still it moves me to tears when I think in such concrete terms about all the old women bombed in all the apartments and buildings across Ukraine. Whether the brain is rearranging video elements of the monastery bombing, or picking up waves of emotion from the prayers of old Ukrainian women, doesn’t matter. The image makes me feel and think deeply in either case.
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Being and Meaning
Each dream seems to have its own register of truth, yet not all dreams are worth analyzing deeply. We can dismiss some dreams as chaotic fantasies, but others seem more like meaningful expressions or dramatic scenarios. They’re like theatrical plays with realistic details and double meanings. When we wake up from a dream we recall the actors and the set, and we suspect it’s all a sort of make-believe. Yet it also represents and connects to our waking lives in deep and enigmatic ways. It suggests possibilities of meaning.
Dreams that merely rehash our waking experience may be helpful neurologically, yet they don’t tell us much about the nature of our being or the meaning of our lives. In this sense they’re different from more complex and meaningful dreams — those that fulfill fantasies, guide us, warn us, enlighten us, or terrify us. These latter types of dreams include the mundane details of the first type of dream, yet they also include deeper content that’s connected to us in intricate and at times puzzling ways. These dreams have much in common with psychological plays like Hamlet or The Glass Menagerie, or absurdist plays like No Exit or Waiting for Godot.
Like the plays of Shakespeare and Sartre, these dreams require interpretation to get at what they mean. It’s here that the double refuge is helpful. If we don’t come to these dream dramas with fixed ideas about the nature of our being or about the nature of our understanding, then we can be open to whatever the dreams may be about. We can be less quick to fit them into convenient categories. For the convenience may be the problem: it may be the habitual way of thinking that created the absurd or frightening dreams in the first place.
By holding off the meaning of our dream experience, we can think deeply about all its possibilities. We can we learn about our obsessions and aversions, our prejudices and limitations, our fearlessness and fearfulness. In this I suggest taking a positive attitude, even to nightmares, so that we can get the most of them. I suggest that we see them less as malevolent dramas that punish us, and more as benevolent dramas that adjust our thoughts, prepare our bodies, and redeem our spirits.
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Next: 🐅 On the I-land of Lesbos