Dreams & The Future

The Edge Dweller

by Anita Doyle

Through attuning ourselves to the prophetic intelligence displayed in certain dreams, we may gain insight and
courage for the arduous and sometimes frightening travail
of birthing a new world.

As I awakened and lay with open eyes in the dark, I could hear the University bell tower two blocks away tolling one, two, three, four. What had I been dreaming? I was filled with a mixture of horror and gladness, but it wasn't until I closed my eyes again that the images of the dream returned.

I had been in a restaurant, in the company of other people. The setting had an Old World, European feel. People around me were engaged in conversation. Gazing out the window, I observed the following scene:

A disheveled man - apparently a street person - was leaning from a window at the top of a tall stone tower, the most prominent feature in the view framed by the restaurant's window. The man was reaching toward the ground until, finally, he reached too far and fell from the tower.

Horrified, I quickly left the restaurant to go for help. I entered a municipal building and told a clerk what had happened, but she ignored me.

I made my way to the scene of the disaster. The tower was several stories high, originating, I could now see, in a sunken square plaza below the street level on which I stood. I looked over the chest-high wall in front of me, expecting to see the crumpled remains of the man at the base of the tower. Instead I found an emergency team gathered there with an ambulance.

From my vantage point I could see only the man's legs. Beneath and between them protruded the small chubby legs of a baby. As the emergency techs lifted the man into a seated position, I saw with relief that he was alive and not too badly hurt. But he was not the same unkempt man I'd seen fall: this one was a bespectacled Asian wearing a simple blue suit.

The ancient role of dreams as cultural auguries has been virtually lost in the present time. Contemporary Western psychology interprets dreams in terms which relate almost exclusively to the individual psyche and its past. What interests me, however, is the relationship of dreams and dreaming to the transformation of culture. In some traditional societies dreams have been understood to serve a prophetic function. This they do by imagining future possibilities that transcend the limitations imposed by the prevailing world view.

Here the term "prophetic" means that quality of intuition which perceives the intention of the future, and the necessary realignments of the present attitude that would permit that intention to take form. But what does intention signify in this context? Not a predetermined outcome. Rather, what the word itself suggests, taken to its Latin root: a stretching toward - as the man in the dream stretched himself from the tower toward the ground.

We exist in an era that can be understood as a time of breakdown versus breakthrough. The evidence of breakdown has long since become inescapable. The accelerating physical and spiritual deterioration of the world has created a condition of enormous anxiety in the collective psyche. Rare is the person who remains capable of fully ignoring the dread that accompanies the experience of being alive in these chaotic times. We sense, accurately and with no little sorrow, that we have reached the end of something, and we suspect that that something is the very end of the world.

However, when the world's woundedness, its sorrow, is actively entered into, when the behaviors and patterns of thought which block awareness of sorrow are allowed to drop away, the capacity to actually see what is attempting to come to form begins to awaken.

Women who have given birth without the well-meaning but deadening influence of anesthesia , have experienced directly and bodily a phenomenon which has particular meaning for us now, because it relates to the breakthrough which may be attempting to mke itself felt in this time of breakdown. The tremendous labor to give birth, when experienced consciously and with full exposure to its accompanying pain and fear, is an initiatory event of great significance, not only for the individual woman, but also for culture. Of special relevance is the period during labor known as "transition."

This period, of unpredictable duration, corresponds to the physiological event of nearly compete dilation of the cervix, the gateway through which the child must pass in order to enter the world. This is the period of greatest danger to both mother and child, since premature pushing of the child through an incompletely dilated crevix may result in the child's entrapment and suffocation. Inwardly , the transition may be experienced by the mother as black chaos and utterly engulfing fear, the sense that one is very close to death, and the loss of will to continue laboring. What words are able to surface from the depths of this experience are usually: "I can't go on!" Fortunately this isn't an option. The process will inevitably be seen to completion of some kind.

One wonders if the prevention of this initiation in generations of women - by blocking the experience of legitimate suffering - has resulted in a loss of collective imaginal awareness of the transitional nature of the times in which we leave. Not understanding this, we run the risk of losing our will and entrapping and suffocating the new world that would be born.

As we attune ourselves to the prohetic intelligence displayed in certain dreams, we may gain insight and courage for the arduous and somtimes frightening travail of birthing a new world.

What has all this to do with dream men falling from dream towers?

The setting of the dream, a public restaurant in the "Old World" may have something to do with old in relation to new, the passing age in relation to the coming age.

What the dreaming self sees through its window onto the old world is a scene dominated by an ancient, but well-maintained stone tower. There is a sense of long-established masculine order and tradition in this image. Yet those familiar with the major arcana of the Tarot will be reminded of the sixteenth card: the Tower of Destruction, depicting a stone tower struck by lightning while its inhabitants tumble from an open window to the earth below. Like the Tower of Babel, the tower of the Tarot is an image of humanity's hubristic striving to elevate itself above the concerns of earth. One need only observe the distinguishing architectural feature of the contemporary cityscape, the skyscraper, to see how far beyond ancient Mesopotamia we have taken our psychological and spiritual separation from Earth. In the Tarot's Tower of Destruction we witness the natural consequences of ambition unchecked by regard for the whole.

In the dream, the man's appearance as a homeless street person reveals his marginal identification with the established order. He is an "edge-dweller", as all prophets are; those whose awakened awareness pushes the edge of consciousness for the culture at large. Here the edge-dweller reaches so far beyond the limits of the status quo that it can no longer contain him, and he falls.

When I reach the scene of this apparent tragedy and peer beyond the 'wall' in front of my heart, I see what I had not been able to see previously. The tower originates in a square - alchemical symbol of the earth. Had the man been stretching toward the earth in order to restore collective attention to it - and to the feminine principle - as the necessary foundation for the building of culture?

The fact that the bureaucrat to whom I appealed for help was disinterested lets me know that the emergency team of the dream is acting outside the purview of the established order. Are there elements in the spiritual worlds prepared to act in support of the fallen man, now lying in the realm of the feminine? The position of the baby's legs beneath his own suggests that he is giving birth to a new being. At the same time, he is clearly on top of the baby, indicating that he precedes it evolutionarily - that the birth would not be possible without his fall.

The fall to earth affects a startling transformation. No longer the raggedy man of the first scene, the man lying at the base of the tower wears a simple blue suit. Although the idea of suit harks back to establishment values, we see that those values have changed: this particular suit is unpretentious - not a "power suit" that proclaims affluence and influence. And he is an Asian, wearing glasses. In this image there is a sense that here, where tower joins earth, is the place at which East and West shall finally meet, and that the spiritual vision that results may make it possible for a new world to be born.