Capturing the Lightnings Shadow: Dreams 1986-2000

I dreamt that I was to see a school play in a place supposed to be my Primary School Library. Looking down out of the window I see in the twilight an area covered with playground equipment that looks like a clothesline and there are children playing. One girl I notice lifts her dress and a couple of boys look up her, she leans back and a gush of water streams from between her legs, wetting the two boys.

Now there are children in costume crawling around the rooftop and upstairs, they are crawling out of the windows. They appear to be in a combination of black and white dress and there is red also, around the eyes? Standing in a courtyard I look over into an area fenced off with wire, topped with barbed wire. Is this to keep people out or in?

This is the most significant part of the dream, in the compound on a large blue pedestal is a giant Sikh head that is preaching or telling me something that I cannot remember. Growing out of the peak of the turban is a naked dark haired woman. To the left of the head on a pedestal is the Hindu god Ganesha. I think that he looks a lot more pleasant in reality than in those colorful Indian pictures. To the right and I can’t be sure but I think that it is the goddess Kali, however I am more attracted to the two severed heads on the ground that are conversing. Is there a sword? In the front of the pedestal is an animal, it is a jaguar/giraffe with two men inside it. (Commentary here).

We are invited to a party that I presume will be in a train. The rectangular yellow form I fill out in acceptance indicates that some sort of donation will be made after the dinner, I question who is running this function. Heather, a woman I work with indicates that it may be the Seventh Day Adventist. At this time I am living with Sue and two other beautiful women who I am having affairs with, both of them a girl I know called Cecily, one has blonde hair and the other black. The black haired Cecily has a boyfriend that passively disapproves of our affair.

On the night of the party a large group of us that includes my cat Vishnu go to a house where we meet the people that will take us to the party. There we meet a smaller group of people that includes the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (Osho) whom I have wanted to meet in person. He is of smaller statue than I thought and with him are two bodyguards, one a man with long blonde hair and wearing round glasses and the other a blonde haired woman. I get up the nerve to go and talk to him and he responds in a way that leaves me unimpressed as if he has no time for me and walks off with his sidekicks.

All of us now approach a giant pond that seems to be enclosed, the waters are dark and we in a strange orange twilight. Expecting a boat I ask where the party is, someone points out into the pond and says we have to swim. As we enter the water I look slightly to the left and in the middle of the pond in another rectangular pond, its walls rising to just below the surface, in it are at least one hundred crocodiles and this frightens me but we must continue. Swimming out I see the silhouettes of two people diving into this pond, they swim through and over the wall to rejoin the group. In the crocodile pond also is a chain hanging from the ceiling that wraps itself around the tail of one of the crocodiles lifting it into the air and then releasing it.

As we get closer to the ‘other side’ I feel a nudging at my side under the water, I fear it is a croc but remain calm and keep swimming, approaching a cement pylon. I’m not just nudged but bitten as well and as I reach up to grab the edge of the pylon a dog flies up from under the water and over me. This happens again and it scares my cat who is being carried on Sues back. We climb out of the water and on to what looks like a room from a stage play, it has only three walls, down the right hand end is a table and chairs, the other end has a partition with lounge chairs.

The atmosphere is thick and dark, lit only by television monitors and I am seated at a table with blonde Cecily to my right. I notice more people sitting in the lounge section. The TV monitors are showing scenes of Nazi Germany[1], troops marching, swastikas and banners waving and of course Hitler. These scenes are backed up by 1980's commercial rock music, each monitor playing something different. The meal is served and it is really just a half-cooked carcass that everyone tears pieces off. I too tear a piece off of what looks like chicken but are revolted and do not eat it.

The images on the monitors are still the same but the songs now change to rousing nationalistic Nazi songs. Looking up on a screen I see Hitler, elbow bent swinging his right arm and singing away with the troops. A man is sitting at the head of the table to my left and he looks just like Hitler, but I know he isn’t. Now the table is empty and I want to go, everyone is down in the darkness of the lounge. I go down to get Sue but cannot awaken her or another girl for they both seem drugged and so does everyone else.

[1] The residual nature the collective unconscious is no more apparent that in the images of Nazi Germany that have manifest themselves several times in my dreams between Tuesday 27th January 1987 and Tuesday 5th December 1989. These can also be viewed as eruptions of the collective shadow. Around 1990 I began to investigate my biological past as I was adopted as a baby. This led to a first meeting with my birth mother in December of 1992. Since then I have learnt a lot about her family history which is also my genetic history. Born in Germany she immigrated to Australia after the end of the Second World War. Here father, an Officer in the SS never returned from the war. Wounded and abandoned in a hospital on the Eastern Front as the German Army hastily retreated from the advancing Russians in 1944.

As a related issue the concept of synchronicity is at play here. Neither my birth mother nor myself had seen each since my separation from within hours of my birth in Melbourne. Thirty years later and 4000kms away I was informed of her whereabouts by the mediator, conditional on my agreeing to a meeting. I was amazed to discover she lived not just in the same city on the other side of Australia but in the same suburb. Only a kilometre from where my wife and I had recently bought a house. I would note also that since the meeting with my birth mother and the discovery of a separate family history these dark images have not re occurred. The second journal begins five months after this meeting (see introduction). This is not an insight into the meaning these dreams but is a profound illustration of how the collective unconscious can draw on ‘root images’ to convey a message.