the fire bit

[Guest guest]

Thank you all so very much for your responses. I can tell from the depth

and love behind your replies that my mother is very blessed to know you all.

It is such a marvelous thing to have others care about my dream and its

possible meanings. To hear from you makes me feel most supported by those

of my parents' generation and beyond. This is something that has always

been extremely valuable to me for as long as I can remember. I think the

death of the old woman in my dream was not related to a wish to eliminate

the voice of the old wise woman, but rather some of the negative things

about women of my grandmother's generation. But the fire bit--that was so

powerful to me -- as I witnessed it and even after I woke. It was not so

much that the girl was walking through fire, though she was moving left to

right, but rather that she stopped and stood in the fire as I the observer

nearly felt her anguish in compassion. I had been thinking before the

dream, just in my everyday conscious appraisals of my experience, that fire

strengthens one, that fire tempers one.

The day before I had this dream, I had been speaking to a counselor and

something very unusual happened. I never do this. She was just letting me

talk and I said that I was tired, but that I had been strong. I said, " I

have been strong, like a phoenix from the flame... " And then I couldn't

control my tears. I just broke down and it wasn't like tears streaming

alone, no, it was an eruption. It was a very intense moment for me when I

shared that pain, that weakness below. I danced ballet from childhood to

early college. I had always believed in posture and reserve. In all my

years at school I had never cried before anyone (save my physics teacher

when I was sick in class). It was just a rare and very moving moment, and

it is important background to the dream.

The fire too reminds me of standing in, dwelling in a painful situation too

long without allowing an instinct to pull you out. It is a situation the

girl chooses to endure--she walks into it. It reminds me too well of the

ways I let the controlling side of myself, the side of myself so busy with

plans and goals that she neglects to hear her instinctive side, her body

crying out that what she believed was so reasonable is destructive when

allowed complete authority.

My mother had every reason to not have me. Like many people, I came at a

'bad time.' But she listened to something other than pragmatism and here I

am. How I marveled today to think that the product of faith in instinct, of

faith in the unknown, is so afraid to live.

To stand in the fire too long, to keep doing it, is like something forced.

The girl proclaims to the boy, her animus, her twin: " I am not going to

walk through fire anymore. " She has had it with forcing herself into pain

with the faith that it will strengthen her. She is strong without forcing

herself. She doesn't need to prove herself to her animus. She doesn't need

to suffer anymore to be with the animus. Her suffering does not bring her

nearer to her animus, it only perpetuates the duration of her time in the

hell of fear, the hell of isolation. Perhaps she thinks her suffering will

bring her to her animus -- to wholeness -- but it really leads her nowhere.

The dream ended in such a beautiful way to me and I am in awe of it, of this

underwater resolution. It is an utterly gorgeous moment for any individual.

She recognizes that standing in the stagnation of fear is something she can

control. It so reminds me of that most wonderful moment in the movie

'Labyrinth,' in which the girl says [to Bowie] " You have no power over

me. " And the walls of her nightmare shatter with her declaration, her

remembering the line she could never remember because it was the most

difficult to swear with genuine conviction.