by Anita Doyle

When our firstborn was an infant and very young child, I thought she was the most holistically intelligent person I had ever encountered. It was not so much a question of overblown parental pride. My observation of Lila led me to extrapolate - unscientifically, I will admit - this awesome intelligence to all new human beings. It was clear to me that as a teacher for her in those early years, I could best serve her by not interfering with her natural learning process. I had the distinct impression that she was in a 360° relationship with everything in her environment. She was interacting with her experience in all directions, not yet a victim of the personal preferences and opinions that eventually overtake us all, greatly narrowing our vision. Everything to which she directed her attention seemed to be equally fascinating to her. She was fully awake and engaged.

Then, when she was three years old, a little sister arrived. And suddenly, the mother-companion who had been so available, trustworthy and loving, was not so. I was cranky from chronic sleep deprivation and the now doubled responsibilities of parenting on top of transient but significant financial anxieties, and - despite my best intentions - I responded to Lila's need for my attention with impatience more frequently than I wish had been the case. Gradually, I could see her openness begin to shut down while she struggled with new and difficult emotions. As my need for control went from nil to fairly high, she found that the world was not as safe a place as she had assumed it to be. A dream that she had at this time struck me as such a vivid portrayal of her inner struggle that I wrote it down in my journal in her words:

There was a big, big bird and it had an enormous head, and it was at Disney World and I was riding it. But then it was a little bird and its mommy was dead. But its daddy was still there and he killed the enormous dragon, and put a tree on its tail so it couldn't get away.

On the face of it, the motherless little bird is Lila, and the enormous dragon is what has become of her "dead" mother, namely me. At a deeper level, the powerful and benevolent big bird can be seen as a symbol of the unified consciousness which Lila had prior to the birth of her sibling - a consciousness that had carried her through a world in which no "bad" thing could happen, a Disney-like world. But with the onset of this primal insecurity, the big bird has split itself into a little bird who is suddenly quite vulnerable, and a dangerous dragon who must be killed and put away. In the little bird we see the beginning of the adaptive personality, or the Persona as we named it in Part 3 of this series. In the enormous dragon we see the birth of Lila's Shadow.

We all trails shadows, have dragons breathing down our necks. In our efforts to conform our personalities to what we imagine will be pleasing to others (and, hopefully, rewarding to us), we unconsciously "stuff" a lot of who we are, not allowing it to see the light of day. The beginning, we have seen, happens early in life, as we internalize our parents' injunctions about what is OK and what is not OK. But it is a process that continues throughout our lives until we awaken to it and confront it.

If the dragon were content to slumber peacefully in the dark, there wouldn't be a problem. But those parts of us that we name "not-me" and relegate to a deep inner cave demand expression, and do make themselves troublesome to is in waking and sleeping.

In waking we may begin to see the outline of the shadow dragon in the strong negative reactions we have to certain other people. This isn't to say that those people toward whom we experience irritation or anger are entirely without the qualities we find aggravating. The tip off is in the intensity of our reactions, in comparison to the reactions of other people to the same individual or event. Who or what pushes my buttons? When I project negative traits onto another person or group of persons, I protect myself from having to acknowledge that I, too, have or am capable of thoses traits. The collective experience of The Enemy is usually an example of shadow projection at the political level.

In dreams, we can become aware that shadow elements are stirring in our psyches in a general sort of way simply by paying attention to the feeling tone and the quality of light present. Is a particular scene dimly lit or does it take place in the dark? Is there a sense of fear or anxiety? The opening scene from this dream is illustrative:

I am moving through the upper level of my house, a cool, dark medieval castle which has been converted, with my assent, to a home for the dying. I am feeling anxious and isolated.

The dreamer was someone wanting understand the roots of recent-onset anxiety. She learned much about it just from this brief, opening fragment of her dream. It let her know that the state of consciousness that she was inhabiting as she entered middle age (her "medieval" "house"), was in a certain sense highly developed ("a castle "), but also lacking in enthusiasm and warmth (it was gray and cold) - she no longer felt engaged with life (she was living in "a home for the dying.") Like many people entering middle age, she had the need to confront the shadow of her abandoned passion for life. Where had she let it go, and why?

So, the shadowy atmosphere of a dream speaks to underlying feelings of dread or anxiety. But when Jungians speak of the Shadow, they're generally referring to a specific personal entity in the dream - typically a person of the same gender as the dreamer and unfamiliar to them, whose presence is perceived as threatening, repulsive, or otherwise negative. In the continuation of the dream above, such a figure appears:

There is a rather severe-looking nun there, wearing a long, black habit. She is silently tending to the needs of the hospice patients. I ask her to help me, but she casts me a withering look and returns to her work.

In dreamwork, our task is to summon the courage necessary to face the shadow figure, to discover what part of ourselves it is holding in escrow for us, waiting for the time in which we'd be ready to reintegrate it and reclaim the power of our original wholeness. Mythologically, the dragon is not only a horrifying adversary, it is also the guardian of treasures. In the case of this particular dream, the dreamer entered into a conversation with the nun through a process of active imagination, and discovered that it was a part of herself that she hated to admit was there: a deadly serious "creature of habit", who was intolerant of psychological needs and thought she should be ashamed for having them. "After all," the nun said, "these hospice patients are really dying; my job is to take care of them." Yet as the conversation continued, the dreamer gently pressed the nun with the question, "But who takes care of you?," and the nun suddenly softened and began to weep. All this feeling, deep, deep feeling, locked up in admirable dedication to others' needs, which however was too rigid and habitual, cutting her off from her capacity to feel and therefore respond to what she herself needed.

The entry into early middle age is a classic time, developmentally, for the appearance of the shadow in dreams. It's as though an inner clock has registered the need to shed, for the second half of life, the restrictive social conditioning that chokes our highest potential. When I myself reached my mid-thirties, I had this shadow dream:

I am attending a conference in a very remote jungle setting. I return to my temporary dwelling, a little house on stilts in a grassy clearing. I want to freshen up; I'm feeling drained and vaguely irritable. As I am changing my clothes, a large Amazon-type woman bursts through the door and comes toward me grinning in a friendly but overbearing way. She is very big, dark and hairy, and her dress - which looks like mine, is several sizes too small. I don't know who she is or why she is there, but I tell her to leave. She does. Then I go into the bathroom, and the Amazon goes around to the side of the house and presses her still-grinning face against the window of the bathroom. I'm really annoyed! I take a piece of shit out of the toilet and put it between my lips and make a mock scarey face at her. She stops smiling and goes away.

I awakened feeling a bit ashamed of the "crappy" way I had dismissed this woman from my dream. I was fairly certain that her intentions were friendly, and yet she was threatening to me. Why? In my ungrounded, mental orientation (the house on stilts) in her landscape (the jungle), I judged her huge, earthy vitality as inferior and intrusive, and so sent her back away before she could reveal the treasure which, as Shadow, she surely held for me.

Fortunately for us, the Shadow is not easily dissuaded from its mission. Over ensuing months and years, I had many opportunities to learn my manners! And as I grew in my ability to welcome her appearances, she evolved from the primitive jungle woman of this dream to a Native American wise woman who taught me a dance and chant through which I was able to bring a dead dream bird back to life.

I like to think it was Lila's bird.

© Anita Doyle, 1988 [Slightly edited from the original, which appeared in the Summer 1988 issue of Life Scribes.]

Other articles in the "Awakening Through Dreams" Series:
Part One: Dreams and Change
Part Two: Elements of Dreams
Part Three: The Persona

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