Mythopoetics & Dream

Dream, Self & Ego in Psyche: About States of Consciousness & "Rain Herds" -Stephanie Pope


Neptune's Horses 1892 -Walter Crane

Over this past winter, 2005 I worked two essays and a pair of poems; one essay and the poem pair had to do with a dream question, "What is the sparrow to borrow and to marry?" The second essay explores an image complex belonging to and dealing with a difficult memory from childhood. The memory, a rough beast whose hour comes round (at last), has found its way into metaphor as the rr's of sparrow and the image of rain herds, and is, in so appearing, pointing to its own self-existence as representational of another "imperishable sound". As such, this image pair can be regarded as an image of psyche. This means this set of twins somehow show and tell the mythopoetic story the way my psyche insists is an accurate representational expression of a truth as is. (see my essays, The Virtue of Belonging To "Rain Herds" and Mythopoetics and Dream: So What Is a Sparrow To Borrow and To Marry, Anyway?)

Ego and self in Edinger's Ego-Self may be a defensive move on the part of consciousness as some say. If so, the "I am IT there is no other before me" is pretense to not having the experience with or to avoiding contact with the savage senses of ego-Self, the "rough beast" sense(s) of EROS once possible in the ancestral soul of past antiquity.

Dreaming may provide the appropriate reappropriating psychic motion necessary to return ego to depth experiences and revivify it with the deep self's own interior senses and shades of meaning. To approach this notion of another and competing representation for divine expression of 'consciousness', I want you to consider this otherness as if made out of roughly stitched-together little bits of sound, say, for example, the sounds for "c", "a" and "t." Now this sound-set of 'others' loosely tied travel together like bits of sound will travel in a 'wave' to the ear to achieve representation as an image created in the mind and of the mind's substance, ...."cat."

The image your mind will have called to mind will actually have no material existence. My image appears on the left. Does your image look like this? (See what I mean?) The image created in the mind is of the mind's substance. Images have substantial existence. And, I suspect, images require more than one kind of state of mental consciousness to achieve representation. In fact, images probably require at least three, an egoic component, an awakening/expansivity of depth-heights, and a medial dream ground of interchange.

If you want another archetypal take on contact with the rough beast, EROS in psyche-making see James Hillman's comment on Eris and Ananke in the Appendix of David Miller's New Polytheism. I'm going to follow Joseph Campbell's image for and mode of explanation regarding images and likenesses in self-expressions.

Campbell takes the sound/image/word complex from the Māndūkya Upanishads. The sound-word image is OM. (pronounced ah/oo/mmm) OM requires the existences of not one but three states of consciousnesses. These three "I" archai are actually three
in-formed informational and interpenetrative fields of consciousnesses (meaning loosely woven). It can be any state of consciousness--the "state" doesn't have to be conscious of itself or feel connected and integrated and belonging to a self to feel itself or experience itself i.e. its own aliveness as alive, nor to feel its 'self' and experience its 'self' as real.

Campbell describes this self as an imperishable sound; being as not any one thing for being does not need thingness to express itself. Yet, it is perhaps that being does really need more than one kind of statement of representation to express itself as being without materiality, but with substantiality.

At any rate, Campbell sets our thinking here not in terms of visibles but in terms of what can be found nowhere, already having impregnated the cup of our own ear; not needing our ego eyes to hold it together. (I'm thinking just now of my dream sparrow's value found in the sound pair, "rr" and that belonging-together of those herd/heards.) What holds the dream's image together for me is SURPRISE. SURPRISE is an/other pair of eyes, for making manifest, images! Are not these other eyes really a kind of as if bit of I's?

So let's look through the way Campbell looks at the soul of a word through its sound-sense. We are considering Om. One statement of imperishable mind supporting the word, OM is called Waking Consciousness or simply, ego. It is invoked by the saying-sound, "ah" in saying OM. Another is dream consciousness and is invoked, Campbell says, in the saying-sound "oo" in saying OM. The third is deep dreamless states. These states are alive by no image of aliveness, no consciousness is doing the experiencing and the feeling.) This state is meant in the invocation of the "mmm" sounding the word, OM. It is the statement of what you really are, what I really am. Just being.

Campbell calls into existence another, a fourth state. This one is "the is-not"existence itself experiencing existence. You can think of it as an existent non-existence experiencing itself through you i.e. an image of you expressing through likenesses this dark interior of being, a light unto its own illumination. It is the expression of experience transcendant all image-ideas of IT. IT is; is that state which has no existence but is not a negation of presence i.e. what "image" is!

Every image's first characteristic of being i.e. its primal archai is ambiguity. The image both "is not", that is, it expresses an existent non-existence, and every image is representational, like my dream sparrows and my rain herds. Every image of psyche expresses this statement of recognition, or it is not an "image" of psyche.

So what is this 'is not' existent non-existence? It is a 'whatness' that has awareness of no where-ness to its meaning. It is where all the image existences come from and where they point back toward. The "is-not' is their space of belonging!(khora) IT is THAT.

I continue to think of the "is not" statement as our non-being which is the same thing as saying "our aliveness" in which, as Campbell says, "the reference to being a being
(our em-ness)--the veil that shadows us as an us, has fallen aside; the veil itself having masked an expression beyond a partic being in which these states of experience arise and are experienced as isnesses." (ix)

This ambiguity, this space of belonging to the is and the is not is what we are calling soul. It is an aliveness that has been likened to the veil of the goddess. Only metaphors get close to saying it. This veil that shadows us as an us (this mm-sound within which the celebrity syllable within OM represents) can be lifted. But, the other veil cannot. We can only say this other is like a veil. We can only talk in terms of likenesses to shape the images that describe the existent non-existence and what IT is like. And, Campbell says, "No one has lifted ITS veil."

This means psyche-making is against our own images of ego-self. This means soul-making is contra naturam. Cosmos itself is a vale of soul-making said Eliot. It is the awareness-place of that space our cloth is made, the place Psyche's tulle is made; tulle being the "white stuff" of veils.

The dream's question participates in the three terms ego, dream and self as does the word-sound OM. Dream is that interstice in between ego-self states and deep-self states; these three having risen from a wave rolling in from an even farther out murmur. This farther space is the eco-cosmic anima-mundi where, as Hillman says "psychic reality is omnipresent. There is no palpable distinction between soul and the vale-of-the-world anima mundi." (134) What Campbell calls this fourth word-sound in the celebrity word OM, Hillman calls theophanic consciousness or the imagistic mode of the eye. Hillman affirms, "...not only is psyche in us as a set of dynamisms, but we are in the psyche." And, "soul-making is making psyche of the event." This mode/cosmos holds the world sacra. This is the psychic container from which all being emanates and immigrates.

Finally, I continue to consider dream as a mirror of Dionysos. I mean by this dream is a fragmenting expression of conscious-stating existences. Dreams do not express a consistency in image expression. You cannot make dream into a single myth. You cannot myth-match, as Hillman says. (Hillman calls this attempt on the part of ego, inflation.) If you do proceed this way, you may have come to the expression of a mythology operating, but you will not have come to its mythopoetry.

To get deeper into the dream and the mythopoetry it is expressing and values, one must ask of dream, "What is this dreaming like?" What is the likeness of the like IT is imitating in me? What is the likeness IT is constantly repeating in my ear?

In my sparrow self, if she has her eye on marrying and she is borrowing something (most probably something blue!), my sparrow self is getting ready for a wedding of depth. Who is the rough beast, the one that keeps repeating itself in the wind and the rain and the water of these images? Who belongs the voice in the hour's round mirror of saying things OM? My dream-sparrow, whose value cannot be told, whose value can only be found by going between sounds toward a far-thing, is getting ready for a bridegroom living down inside the word in the flesh of the dream in the flesh; the one that is somehow irrepeatable here.

Work Cited

Campbell, Joseph. Atlas of World Mythology vol.1, pt. 2. New York: Harper & Row, 1988.

Hillman, James. Re-Visioning Psychology. New York: Harper Perennial, 1997.

Miller, David Leroy. New Polytheism. Dallas: Spring, 1981.