The Double Refuge ☯️ Herr Jung
Lust For Life
~ Victoria, July 29, 2026 ~
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If you find some shady figure looming, lurking, scavenging in your dream, let it be. Let it wander back into whatever back alley it came from.
If it's got a knife at your throat, appeal to Krishna, Christ, Mary, Saint Michael, or whatever form of metaphysical power you think might be effective against a homicidal dream-wandering thug.
If it tries to punch you, block the punch and punch it back several yards. If you have to fight it to the death, fight it to the death. If you kill part of yourself, let it die.
You don’t have to call this knife-wielding maniac your Shadow or your Anima. Avoid the possessive. You don’t have to think it’s even some part of you; it could be a manifestation of one of the endless horrible people, acts, or situations in the world. Those horrors come in many forms — News, Net, Neighbours, Nazis, Nihilists, Narcissists, etc. On Telegram I accidentally saw a video of a man stabbing people, an image I wish that I never saw. Such an image is a sense impression that joins the neural networks inside you. In dreams it becomes real, because your sleeping brain isn’t aware of its status. Your dreaming brain can’t tell if it’s real or not.
And you certainly don’t need to convince yourself that the man with a knife will take yet another form, and follow you like a live albatross around your neck.
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The dream-figure is a sense impression which may become a symbol of your fear, yet it has no essence. It can’t raise its head in yet another form, like Sauron or Voldemort from the Deep. It’s very unlikely that it came from some other realm, murky in meaning and evasive in shadow. It’s more likely to be a momentary expression of something you fear or something that frustrates you.
Or, if it really seems to come from some alien shore, some monstrous realm of the Deep, raise the holy icon as a shield, the Word against all slander. Invoke a God that knows how to deal with such a threat. Take Elrond’s counsel: don’t try to enter into an occult battle with it. Rather, find the most innocent intention within you, that Hobbit trailing Gandalf’s robes, and toss it in the fiery deep.
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In all likelihood, this figure is a neurological concoction, part of yourself, but in a nasty disguise. In this way it’s an inverse image of that other figment: your self as epic hero on an epic journey, in that never-ending tall tale you tell yourself, as you habitually go from glorious battle to the arms of Calypso. Such is your fear, and such is your greediness, your lust for life!
In your dreams, as in your waking life, you’re neither the dark villain nor the bright hero. You’re a bit of either, and a bit of both. Most of the time, however, you’re somewhere in between.
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If your dreaming mind is a stage, the actors are your thoughts and feelings. They’re brave or fearful, lustful or angelic, celestial or mundane. On this stage you play different roles: sometimes you’re a college teacher in front of a class of reluctant students who are staring bewildered at their copies of Hamlet on the Fraser; sometimes you’re on a ocean liner flying full-speed down a canal (watch out on the docks!); and sometimes you’re just trying to get a zipper unstuck.
No one completely understands the complexities of the waking mind, let alone the dreaming mind. But it seems that dreaming is the way the mind has found to rejuvenate itself, to help you deal with the sense-impressions of the past, and with all the violent things you don’t want, and with all the tempting things you do.
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Of course, there’s plenty to be angry about, plenty to bubble up from the depths in warlike form, switchblade in hand.
Trump, Putin, and the destruction in Ukraine. Gaza and Iran. Billionaires. Religious extremists. Famine, disease, and death. Your senile mother in the hospice, unable to die. Memories of your 92-year-old father in a care-home for the violently insane.
Fires in Ontario, la Gironde, Castilla-La Mancha. Refineries and Wildberries up in smoke. The tensions of the world can’t help but creep into your dreams.
Even petty things make their way into your dreams, especially if there’s no way to fix them in real life. For instance, two days ago I was golfing with my nephew when another golfer walked up to our tee box and continued walking, dragging his cart with him till he was three yards from where I was about to tee off. He stopped, and looked at his phone as if he were in his driveway. Teed-off, my ball went flailing into the trees.
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Frustrations, fears, and desires also pop up in our dreams, often in strange and distorted ways. One of the things I miss most in my present sexagenarian life is being on the badminton court. But will my dream grant me that? No. Perhaps because there was no trauma there, only satisfaction, only release of frustration as I smashed the bird down the centre line. Or made that cross-court drop of which I was more proud than anything else in my adolescent life. All the frustrations I had at the time — parents, rules, homework, girls girls girls always out of reach! and if in arm’s reach, again there were rules and that hideous line I wasn’t allowed to cross…. — all of these frustrations went over the net, till the leather head of the bird blasted noiselessly downward to the lacquered floor, straight down onto the thick white dividing line.
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All sorts of things spring up in our dreams, sometimes in terror, sometimes in bliss. Sometimes from real experience, other times from pure fantasy. But never in error. It’s a neurological balancing process, a way to bring our brain and body back into homeostasis, whatever else it might be.
Just as in our waking hours we create scenarios inside our heads about strangers, loved ones, enemies, and our Odyssean self, so in the imagination factory of our unconscious dreaming brain we fabricate visions of danger and adventure, fantasies of love and sex.
Sometimes we imagine that disturbing dreams are the result of a bad conscience, of things we’ve done and regret. And sometimes we imagine that we should do something about these dreams, that we should root out the causes which reside in our waking thoughts and actions. While I’m sure we do create many of our own dream predicaments, the state of the world probably gives rise to many of our fearful and frustrating dream scenarios.
Sometimes we take dreams as omens or as warnings, or as signs that we ought to change the way we think or act. Even worse, we imagine that our dreams contain some symbolic message that we need to decode, or some figure that means something profound in a legendary, mythic, or religious sense. Yet even God doesn't hate our dream concoctions. Even the most heavenly muses don’t despise the angers and lusts that surface in our dreams. And if they don’t object, why should we?
We can call our dreaming angers and lusts evil if we want, and we can give them names and identities, like shadow or demon. Yet if we have to talk in religious terms it would be more accurate to call them elements of our own sinful human nature, that is, elements of the very thing that religion understands and forgives.
We might even say that God loves the sin itself, given that it’s an integral part of the humanity He created. Theologians like Robert Farrar Capon argue that God not only tolerates, but also delights in the worst of evil and destruction. They’re part of the chaotic Chance He set free, part of the freedom He gave the universe. They’re also a crucial part of the revolutions and evolutions that lead to redemption.
The nasty figments and transient shadows of our dreaming anger and lust aren't going to make Him lose any sleep. Nor should we.
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I suggest that we let the dark and light aspects have their moment on the stage of our minds — that shifting stage that travels with our thoughts and feelings, impulses and desires, joys, and fears.
Just as God watches the thunder crash down upon the trees, and just as lighting incinerates the forests from Bordeaux to Madrid, let’s watch the lightning strike the mental ground within us.
Let’s not be dismayed that there are violent and lustful forces within us. We’re not angels.
Instead, let’s watch, if we can, with Mother Nature's eye, the clashing elements and the calm sea. Let’s see Neptune in his rage and also in his quieter moments, when the hero washes onto the shore, up to the white feet of Nausicaa.
Ulysses and Nausicaa, 1888, by Jean Veber (Wikimedia Commons)
Let’s refuse to be dismayed that part of us fought the wolves of the forest, or cascaded down from the hills into the ancient cities of Sumer and Akkad, or waited in craft in the wooden horse of Troy.
Let’s refuse to be ashamed that we stopped our ears with beeswax, not to keep away the sirens of evil, but so that we could hear their song.
Let’s not be afraid, because God sees all of this. God sees through all of this, and sees that it is good — not in the sense that suffering means nothing to Him, or that the earthquake of Lisbon in 1755 is His delight, but in the sense that it’s all part of the cosmic play of dark and light.
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He created the light to see the dark
to see the light
the burnishing everlasting light
that shines within His incandescent heart
the causes of which lie scattered in the stars
the souls of which gathered in the ark
two by two we marched into his mighty galleon
and sailed over the seas of Chance
for forty million days and forty million nights
of rain and storm
only to find ourselves back again
in our old lament, accusing the captain
of not building the ark with the stickiest pitch
that would have held together
the 120 cubits of Sumerian cedar
We accuse Him of having left us
at the mercy of the elements
when the timber split apart
and we found ourselves tempest-tossed
and washing up once more upon the shore
and yet the life within us still stirred
although we breathed heavily
till the lungs were clear of water once again
and we breathed in the sweet smell of hyacinth
on the salty fringes of life
and we crawled up the sand
to the white and marble toes of Nausicaa
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God doesn't care that we lusted after Circe and Calypso, or that we stared for minutes together without end at those perfect alabaster legs and still wanted to try the open sea. He knows that our love for Penelope is true and that we can't help from tying ourselves to the mast.
The life He made so fierce within us, and the craft which brought down the topless towers of Ilium, the whole story, the face that launched a thousand ships, was His finest creation.
The beauty that set the whole story in motion — the green apple of Eden, the golden apple on Mount Ida, the judgment of Paris — are to Him as necessary as the wise words of Solomon. They lead to knowledge and experience, and to the sad meeting of Priam and Achilles.
What drama these apples create! Without them there would be no question, Was this the face that launch’d a thousand ships / And burnt the topless towers of Ilium? Without them there would be no Odysseus, no Ilium. There would only be an untilled guess at ruined stones on the Anatolian hillside.
The passion of these stories are the reason He created it all — to glory in the beauty, to instill in our hearts such a burning desire that we'd set on fire everything that civilization has to offer just to taste one moment of her ruby lips; to fashion wine so potent that the priest can't remember if he's saying mass or drunk among the roses of the field.
This isn't a mess, a misstep, a mistake. All these things are the very extension of the Word, of the tongue moving before the body ever existed, of the spiritual and existential fact that Something came from Nothing, and that this Something could extend so far that the finest mathematicians of Baghdad gave up the count, and called the endless galaxies the playground of the Lord.
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Next: Butterflies Landing: 🦋 A Positive-Sum Philosophy