The noise of civilization interferes with the experience of the Unconscious; going into the wilderness can be an opening to those whispers.
This was the dream after ten days of floating a wilderness river that flows into the Yukon in my thirties:
I am lying on a bed of stones next to a river.
Above me is the dome of the sky, covered with deep white clouds.
There are bear tracks deeply embedded in the clouds, going up the left side.
At the top of the sky the bear tracks turn into lynx tracks, and descend down the right side of the sky.
I feel a deep sense of peace.
Around the campfire that evening, my friend spontaneously recited a verse he knew from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam:
And that inverted Bowl we call The Sky,
Where under crawling coop’t we live and die,
Lift not thy hands to it for help — for It
Rolls impotently on as Thou or I.
This, of course, led us to talking about the nature of reality, God, and other similar campfire topics.
In retrospect. It seems to me that this dream was the response of the Unconscious to the poem– that indeed there is a Presence — perhaps you can’t see it, but It leaves tracks.
The dream also presaged the arc of my life — from starting out masculine and bearish like, and in midlife taking a more feminine and lynx like path….
To Dream of Snakes….
C.G. Jung: On Snakes and Instinct From Symbols of Transformation This is what happens to the hero Chiwantopel, who personifies Miss Miller’s otherworldliness: he falls foul of the green snake….
The Serpent and the Cross
The Serpent and The Cross Healing the Split through Active Imagination Katherine Sanford The serious problems of life are never fully solved. If ever they should appear to be so…
Dream: Bitten on the Heel by a Snake
Snake Dream: Bitten on the Heel Aboriginal Rainbow Serpent , Darlene Devery This is a bit of a long read, but it is very informative in terms of how Jung…