One Foot in the Land of Woo

Dreams, Magic and the Symbolic Realm

For as long as I can recall I have dreamed vividly. As a child I had intense night terrors. I would awake from a nightmare of being chased by a vampiric figure, and in a disoriented hypnopompic  state, I would hallucinate images of spiders and bugs around me. There was such an intensity of unconscious material welling up that I could not ignore it, at the time I was around 4 years old.

In attempts to understand my dreams and find relief, I went to my grandmother. She was a central figure in my childhood, a Sicilian immigrant who spoke broken English, loved her family fiercely and was a devoted Catholic. She seemed in many ways to exist in a different world. When she told me stories of her life or spoke in Sicilian, I felt transported out of our little New York home to a far away place. She practiced folk Italian traditions for healing as readily as she worshipped God; she blended the realms of traditional faith and intuitive ritual with ease. The day I came to her was the day that I felt initiated into something deeper, something higher than myself.

To battle the darkness that crept in at night she taught me to pray. She was certain that building my relationship to God would ease these issues. More importantly, she didn’t discourage me or claim that my night terrors were mere fantasies of a child’s wild imagination. She accepted them as valid and real. As real as the malocchio they warded against with amulets, as real as the practices used to heal a headache or ailment without western medicine. You might say that the old traditions left space for the imaginal realm to be alive in the consciousness of its people and for them to live mythically — seeing dreams as messages and the gods as guiding spirits.

As I whispered the Lord’s Prayer and signed the cross, I would find relief from the images my frightened mind was producing. But more importantly, I felt the power of engaging with a transpersonal source, it lead me down a road of spiritual curiosity that has been a major cornerstone of my life. It reinforced the symbolic lens I viewed the world through and nurtured the religious function of my psyche. To me, the world is alive with mystery and powerful forces I cannot see, yet can sense on a deeper, non-rational level.

Through my life I have investigated more into this realm. I have spent years studying with a shamanic practitioner, I have learned about the subtle energy body through yoga and reiki. I have experienced paranormal phenomenon and worked with a teacher who mentored psychic abilities. Eventually, I found Jung’s work and began to bridge these practices to a philosophy that understood these as a very real experience of the psyche and the unconscious forces that we can barely fathom.

I strive to keep one foot in the mythopoetic space where I can feel the presence of God and hear the whispers of my grandma’s words as I pray. Where the mystic journeys with a wolf familiar as she meditates and dreams of things to come. The other foot is rooted in concrete reality, curious always to understand what is behind these odd experiences, what the psychological explanation is. It doesn’t strip the magic from the symbolic world, if anything I have found that they both reinforce each other. Allowing me to stay grounded without tipping off balance or becoming polarized into an overly materialist point of view or getting lost in the land of woo.

---

For further reflections on the symbolic and religious functions of the psyche, check out our conversation with Jungian Analyst

Jason E. Smith

.