It is said that the first half of life belongs to Freud, the second half to Jung. Our first forty years are dedicated to channeling our sexual and aggressive drives to the aims of family, community and economy, heroic efforts--the life instinct versus the death instinct. At midlife the darkness becomes visible as William Styron documented in his account of depression. Lurking in the darkness is all we left behind in our heroic quest, all that detracted from our destiny like the ruins of an earlier civilization buried under the new. For the remainder of life we excavate the buried ruins for the treasures of life's second half. We still fear the darkness but appreciate what can be reclaimed before we ourselves are reclaimed. This is the time for Jung's archetypes of the collective unconscious, the shadow of our heroic ego, our opposite-sex soul or spirit that we have neglected, the mystical which made Freud so uncomfortable.
The darkness also contains the madness that we found overwhelming as vulnerable children in the face of the inevitable traumas of birth and growth. Winnicott believed that our human authenticity hides in that madness and must be recovered, cautiously, when we are ready, no matter how painful the reencounter with the darkness. Winnicott called the madness “creatice chaos”, the area of formless play, the infinite sea of quantum energy out of which reality emerges.
Darkness is reencountered in dream. Both Freud and Jung had midlife dream journeys that resulted in Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams and Jung's encounter with the collective unconscious. Jung described his encounter in his Memories, Dreams, Reflections as a steep descent into a dangerous inferno reminiscent of Dante's midlife journey. For seven years Jung dreamt of Salome, Elijah, Philemon, Ka and other creatures of the lost civilization that embodied spirit and soul as well as madness. But like Odysseus, another midlife voyager, Jung returned from the underworld destined for home and his journey's end.
Shakespeare encountered the darkness in The Tempest and reminded us that "we are such stuff as dreams are made on and our little life is rounded with a sleep." Like Jung, Shakespeare envisions a magical old man and soulful young woman, Prospero and Miranda, who guide him through the storm and a reencounter with his madness, to his own vision of home.
Home is in the darkness. It is where we started and where we're going. Home is our madness, both ecstasy and pain. There the opposites reunite that were torn apart in heroic quest. Like Plato's divided creatures we find our missing half in the embrace of Yin and Yang.
Freud was more reluctant than Jung in embracing his missing half at midlife. Perhaps the heroic drive was more compelling, or else the fear of the darkness was stronger, but, for whatever reason, Freud remained, like his hero Moses, excluded from the promised land. Of course, Freud offered the hero Oedipus as his guide in his dream book, another wanderer in the desert longing for the promised land. Both Oedipus and Moses are patriarchal heroes superimposed on the ruins of the matriarchal civilizations buried in the darkness. They are part of the "archaic heritage" that Freud cites for dreams that originate beyond the experience of the dreamer, similar to Jung's collective unconscious.
Just as the mythological heroes who descended to the underworld, Jung had his guides to the collective unconscious in his dream journey. Winnicott calls therapy “two people playing together”, with the therapist as guide as the mother was for the child at play. I had a midlife dream journey with an eighty-year-old woman as my therapist and guide. She was trained by the anthropologists Roheim and was well equipped for my descent into the archaic past. Together we experienced Winnicott’s formless play in midlife transitional space.
The next four posts will explore the phases of my midlife dream journey with my guide: the descent, the quest, illumination, and the ascent, similar to the ones presented at the Mythic Journey workshop at the Washington Association for the Study of Dreams annual conference related in an earlier post.
Thursday, October 22, 2009
Monday, October 19, 2009
Dream Play with the Dead
After the annual conference of The Association for the Study of Dreams in Santa Cruz, I had treatment for my prostate cancer the week of the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center, and felt under attack myself. At the conference I had told Sven Doerner that I would come to his dream-sharing retreat in Oaxaca, Mexico during Day of the dead festivities the end of October. Local curanderos(healers) participated in the dream sharing and were available for individual healings, which sealed the deal for me.
The retreat was at Sven’s hacienda in the sacred valley of Monte Alban, which my wife and I had explored thirty years earlier. It was like going back to college to get my Triumph Spitfire. Sven’s dream-sharing approach is for the group to reenter a dream hypnagogically as in Jung’s active imagination, intensifying the bodily sensations and “cooking” them alchemically in the retort of the group. The goal is to free blocked or channeling diffuse impulse, especially opposing impulses. Blocked impulse would be earth or body bound, while diffuse would be air-borne, intellectually or spiritually. The alchemical retort of the group is transitional space between body and mind, earth and air, like the water in my Washington dream, a medium of flow versus being stuck or all over the place. Yet another imaginal space for dreamplay, but a living, human space.
After three flights from New York during post-9/11 security, I arrived in Oaxaca after dark and was driven to the hacienda wondering what I had gotten myself into. The next morning the sun lit the bougainvilla outside my window and reassured me.
In the first dream I shared with the group there is a primitive shower with a pull chain which I don’t use. I go out into the hall in my terry cloth bathrobe where my father passes me with his eyes closed as if he doesn’t want to wake up, and he’s wearing a robe like mine. The night before I had placed his watch chain on the alter for dead loved ones who may visit us during the Day of the Dead, and it served its purpose well. He had died of cancer when just a little older than I, and I was determined not to follow him. But my father was no more engaged with me in death than he had been in life. Some in the group wept for me but I remained dry-eyed until someone said, “Pull the chain!” referring to the primitive shower. Once again I was resisting the water, blocking the flow.
The next night I dreamed of two college friends in a dorm room. The larger of the two learns that his father doesn’t love him and acts out self-destructively with alcohol and cars, then dances dangerously on the balcony ledge until he falls. The smaller reluctantly goes to his assistance, taking him in his arms down on the ground. The larger one gets the smaller in a rageful grip until the smaller reassures him, “I can help you.” Next the smaller jumps down from the balcony himself, lands safely on his legs and joins the larger who is waiting with a guitar to make music together.
In sharing the dream I felt the rageful grip and the joy of making music, opposing impulses in the alchemical method. The acknowledgment, “I can help you,” allows the two to make music together rather than act out self-destructively. “The tomb is empty,” one of the local healers said, cryptically.
Later in the week on the Day of the Dead, the group spent the night in a local cemetery, where the townspeople covered the graves with marigolds and lit candles.
That day we built a sweat lodge and purified ourselves for our spirit encounters.
At the end of the week in Oaxaca I had a healing session with the curandero who made the cryptic observation. He felt my prostate cancer was a lower back problem, and I told him the dream image of being draped backwards between the bull’s horns and my back going out afterwards. He said I had undigested anger down there, and, after my dream encounter with the rageful roommate, I had to agree. The healer gave me a limpio or cleansing with sacred water blown from his mouth onto my heart and the back of my neck, and sent me back to New York with baths and pills and a medicine pouch which I carry in my pocket as.
Was it the spirit of my father who visited me in my dream on Day of the Dead, or was it a masochistic Freudian wish fulfillment, a judgemental superego, or a Jungian compensation for my spiritual inflation in the sacred valley of Oaxaca? Perhaps I, the dreamer, was encountering Winnicott’s “not me” other—a ghostly playmate. The encounter did lead to dreamplay the next night with my grief and rage that surfaced in the dream character represented by my college roommate. Our play evolved into music-making, as the grief and rage became song.
The retreat was at Sven’s hacienda in the sacred valley of Monte Alban, which my wife and I had explored thirty years earlier. It was like going back to college to get my Triumph Spitfire. Sven’s dream-sharing approach is for the group to reenter a dream hypnagogically as in Jung’s active imagination, intensifying the bodily sensations and “cooking” them alchemically in the retort of the group. The goal is to free blocked or channeling diffuse impulse, especially opposing impulses. Blocked impulse would be earth or body bound, while diffuse would be air-borne, intellectually or spiritually. The alchemical retort of the group is transitional space between body and mind, earth and air, like the water in my Washington dream, a medium of flow versus being stuck or all over the place. Yet another imaginal space for dreamplay, but a living, human space.
After three flights from New York during post-9/11 security, I arrived in Oaxaca after dark and was driven to the hacienda wondering what I had gotten myself into. The next morning the sun lit the bougainvilla outside my window and reassured me.
In the first dream I shared with the group there is a primitive shower with a pull chain which I don’t use. I go out into the hall in my terry cloth bathrobe where my father passes me with his eyes closed as if he doesn’t want to wake up, and he’s wearing a robe like mine. The night before I had placed his watch chain on the alter for dead loved ones who may visit us during the Day of the Dead, and it served its purpose well. He had died of cancer when just a little older than I, and I was determined not to follow him. But my father was no more engaged with me in death than he had been in life. Some in the group wept for me but I remained dry-eyed until someone said, “Pull the chain!” referring to the primitive shower. Once again I was resisting the water, blocking the flow.
The next night I dreamed of two college friends in a dorm room. The larger of the two learns that his father doesn’t love him and acts out self-destructively with alcohol and cars, then dances dangerously on the balcony ledge until he falls. The smaller reluctantly goes to his assistance, taking him in his arms down on the ground. The larger one gets the smaller in a rageful grip until the smaller reassures him, “I can help you.” Next the smaller jumps down from the balcony himself, lands safely on his legs and joins the larger who is waiting with a guitar to make music together.
In sharing the dream I felt the rageful grip and the joy of making music, opposing impulses in the alchemical method. The acknowledgment, “I can help you,” allows the two to make music together rather than act out self-destructively. “The tomb is empty,” one of the local healers said, cryptically.
Later in the week on the Day of the Dead, the group spent the night in a local cemetery, where the townspeople covered the graves with marigolds and lit candles.
That day we built a sweat lodge and purified ourselves for our spirit encounters.
At the end of the week in Oaxaca I had a healing session with the curandero who made the cryptic observation. He felt my prostate cancer was a lower back problem, and I told him the dream image of being draped backwards between the bull’s horns and my back going out afterwards. He said I had undigested anger down there, and, after my dream encounter with the rageful roommate, I had to agree. The healer gave me a limpio or cleansing with sacred water blown from his mouth onto my heart and the back of my neck, and sent me back to New York with baths and pills and a medicine pouch which I carry in my pocket as.
Was it the spirit of my father who visited me in my dream on Day of the Dead, or was it a masochistic Freudian wish fulfillment, a judgemental superego, or a Jungian compensation for my spiritual inflation in the sacred valley of Oaxaca? Perhaps I, the dreamer, was encountering Winnicott’s “not me” other—a ghostly playmate. The encounter did lead to dreamplay the next night with my grief and rage that surfaced in the dream character represented by my college roommate. Our play evolved into music-making, as the grief and rage became song.
Sunday, October 11, 2009
Playing With the Divine
During the third annual conference that I attended of the Association for the Study of Dreams, there was a shamanic dream-incubation ceremony. At the previous two conferences, I had been drawn to the shamanic sessions to heal a low-grade prostate cancer and wanted to continue. The dream association is a group of therapists, researchers, teachers and practitioners that provides the communal energy of both intention and attention required for dream incubation.
At the evening ceremony, we chose quartz crystals from the sacred stones and feathers in the center of our circle. I associated crystals with superficial New Age practices and, as we danced to the drum around the circle, having our crystals blessed, I was skeptical, but, like at the previous two conferences, I suspended my disbelief. I maintained my determination as we sat down for the guided visualization in which we wound up at an underground spring to ask our crystal a question to be answered in our dreams that night. We were told that the energy of our crystal would enhance our intent, and out of nowhere came my question, “How can I be faithful?” Then I repeated it slowly, “How can I be faith-full?” Full of faith.
Back in my dormitory room, I held my crystal in my left hand, the receiving hand, as instructed and asked the question three times before holding it under my pillow and closing my eyes. With such intention, my attention didn’t last long as I was immediately bombarded by hypnagogic images and words as soon as my eyes were closed. Where were the words coming from? I wondered in my liminal state. First, I heard “take the 1:30 bus” and recalled that I had signed up for a bus trip to the Field of Dreams, an Indian dig where dreams had led anthropologists to major finds. The next morning I checked the departure time for the bus. It left at 1:30. Next, I heard the words “white light,” which reminded me of the light in my crystals. Then I heard “don’t talk,” and tried to still my racing mind and focus my attention. “Filling stations,” I heard next.
The year before at the conference, I had my first healing dream of going back to college and retrieving my red Triumph Spitfire with old gas, which concerned me. Now I’m told by whomever that to be faith-full I must be a filling station, providing gas for myself and others. I thought of stations of the cross; filling stations are service stations. Recovery programs and spiritual disciplines emphasize selfless service to be faith-full.
Then came the only dream of the night when I drifted off to sleep after the onslaught of hypnagogic answers to my question. In it, I am on a low dock on the beach with a wet, naked woman pressed against my back. I can feel her belly in the small of my back and feel her breasts higher up my back. She feels wonderful, but I wonder if I’m being faithful. At the convention two years before, before I got the prostate cancer diagnosis, I attended my first shamanic journeying session and dreamed that a large black man pursued me and dragged me down to the beach towards the sea. I realized that if I resisted him I would be anally raped in the sand. Now the sea was rewarding me with a healing image, a wet mermaid pressed against my lower back, near my precarious prostate, where the black man had threatened to violate me two years before. I must have been faithful, because my faith was being rewarded.
At 1:30 the next afternoon, I went to find the bus to the Field of Dreams. The leaders of the crystal ceremony the night before joined us to perform a ceremony of atonement with the Indians and their land. I learned that the site was a quarry for stones used in their ceremonies thousands of years ago. Quartz was one of the stones and, fortunately, I had brought along my crystal. It was then I knew the purpose of the words “take the 1:30 bus” from the night before.
Where do those words come from? James Grotstein, in his incredible book Who Is the Dreamer Who Dreams the Dream?, implies that there is an “ineffable subject of the unconscious” who is, in fact, divine. Grotstein offers both a dreamer who dreams and a dreamer who understands -- the ineffable subject and the manifest, personal audience, like the hero and chorus in Greek tragedy.
Freud’s id, the source of primitive desire, possesses the “phylogenic heritage” of mankind, much like Jung’s collective unconscious. Part of our phylogenic heritage is, of course, everything divine, from nature and spirit to a monotheistic God. Jung’s Self is one of the archetypes of the collective unconscious. Both Freud’s id and Jung’s Self, as we mentioned earlier, are possible sources of the words I heard in response to my question “How can I be faith-full?”
The British pediatrician, D.W. Winnicott, observed the play of his young patients and proposed transitional phenomena like play such as creativity and religion, that magical area between what he called the me and the not-me which is neither created nor discovered but emerges like a dream. Winnicott’s not-me could be like Freud’s id and Jung’s Self at play with the ego in transitional space and dream.
Like children’s play, dreams can be curative and instructive, but they are play -- dreamplay. Play can be serious; life and death can be the stakes, but it’s only play, only a dream. Children confront the trauma of otherness and duality in play. Birth can be painful, separation from the divine, a loss of completeness. Play seeks to heal the separation, to reconcile the split and the loss. It is a dance with the divine, which has become alien, utilizing both the concrete and the imaginal and the overlap between the two, the transitional space. There, ego and id or Self, me and not-me, play “on the seashore of endless worlds,” to quote Winnicott and Tagore.
The separation from divinity has resulted in an emphasis on individualism versus the shared myth, ritual and community of the earlier cultures. Individualism has heightened the trauma of otherness and duality and the resulting narcissism and addiction to fill the “God-shaped hole.” While the traditional myths and rituals have faded, dreamplay with the divine remains as a cure for the traumatic separation from the whole.
Freud considered dreams fulfillment of infantile unconscious wishes, which is what play is all about. And, in emerging from the unconscious, the ego finds the id primitive and alien and must heal the split between consciousness and the unconscious with dreamplay. In a similar process, the conscious ego finds Jung’s archetypes of the collective unconscious, including the Self, alien and overwhelming. Jung’s individuation is a transitional phenomenon achieved through play between the ego and the Self, the me and not-me of Winnicott.
At the evening ceremony, we chose quartz crystals from the sacred stones and feathers in the center of our circle. I associated crystals with superficial New Age practices and, as we danced to the drum around the circle, having our crystals blessed, I was skeptical, but, like at the previous two conferences, I suspended my disbelief. I maintained my determination as we sat down for the guided visualization in which we wound up at an underground spring to ask our crystal a question to be answered in our dreams that night. We were told that the energy of our crystal would enhance our intent, and out of nowhere came my question, “How can I be faithful?” Then I repeated it slowly, “How can I be faith-full?” Full of faith.
Back in my dormitory room, I held my crystal in my left hand, the receiving hand, as instructed and asked the question three times before holding it under my pillow and closing my eyes. With such intention, my attention didn’t last long as I was immediately bombarded by hypnagogic images and words as soon as my eyes were closed. Where were the words coming from? I wondered in my liminal state. First, I heard “take the 1:30 bus” and recalled that I had signed up for a bus trip to the Field of Dreams, an Indian dig where dreams had led anthropologists to major finds. The next morning I checked the departure time for the bus. It left at 1:30. Next, I heard the words “white light,” which reminded me of the light in my crystals. Then I heard “don’t talk,” and tried to still my racing mind and focus my attention. “Filling stations,” I heard next.
The year before at the conference, I had my first healing dream of going back to college and retrieving my red Triumph Spitfire with old gas, which concerned me. Now I’m told by whomever that to be faith-full I must be a filling station, providing gas for myself and others. I thought of stations of the cross; filling stations are service stations. Recovery programs and spiritual disciplines emphasize selfless service to be faith-full.
Then came the only dream of the night when I drifted off to sleep after the onslaught of hypnagogic answers to my question. In it, I am on a low dock on the beach with a wet, naked woman pressed against my back. I can feel her belly in the small of my back and feel her breasts higher up my back. She feels wonderful, but I wonder if I’m being faithful. At the convention two years before, before I got the prostate cancer diagnosis, I attended my first shamanic journeying session and dreamed that a large black man pursued me and dragged me down to the beach towards the sea. I realized that if I resisted him I would be anally raped in the sand. Now the sea was rewarding me with a healing image, a wet mermaid pressed against my lower back, near my precarious prostate, where the black man had threatened to violate me two years before. I must have been faithful, because my faith was being rewarded.
At 1:30 the next afternoon, I went to find the bus to the Field of Dreams. The leaders of the crystal ceremony the night before joined us to perform a ceremony of atonement with the Indians and their land. I learned that the site was a quarry for stones used in their ceremonies thousands of years ago. Quartz was one of the stones and, fortunately, I had brought along my crystal. It was then I knew the purpose of the words “take the 1:30 bus” from the night before.
Where do those words come from? James Grotstein, in his incredible book Who Is the Dreamer Who Dreams the Dream?, implies that there is an “ineffable subject of the unconscious” who is, in fact, divine. Grotstein offers both a dreamer who dreams and a dreamer who understands -- the ineffable subject and the manifest, personal audience, like the hero and chorus in Greek tragedy.
Freud’s id, the source of primitive desire, possesses the “phylogenic heritage” of mankind, much like Jung’s collective unconscious. Part of our phylogenic heritage is, of course, everything divine, from nature and spirit to a monotheistic God. Jung’s Self is one of the archetypes of the collective unconscious. Both Freud’s id and Jung’s Self, as we mentioned earlier, are possible sources of the words I heard in response to my question “How can I be faith-full?”
The British pediatrician, D.W. Winnicott, observed the play of his young patients and proposed transitional phenomena like play such as creativity and religion, that magical area between what he called the me and the not-me which is neither created nor discovered but emerges like a dream. Winnicott’s not-me could be like Freud’s id and Jung’s Self at play with the ego in transitional space and dream.
Like children’s play, dreams can be curative and instructive, but they are play -- dreamplay. Play can be serious; life and death can be the stakes, but it’s only play, only a dream. Children confront the trauma of otherness and duality in play. Birth can be painful, separation from the divine, a loss of completeness. Play seeks to heal the separation, to reconcile the split and the loss. It is a dance with the divine, which has become alien, utilizing both the concrete and the imaginal and the overlap between the two, the transitional space. There, ego and id or Self, me and not-me, play “on the seashore of endless worlds,” to quote Winnicott and Tagore.
The separation from divinity has resulted in an emphasis on individualism versus the shared myth, ritual and community of the earlier cultures. Individualism has heightened the trauma of otherness and duality and the resulting narcissism and addiction to fill the “God-shaped hole.” While the traditional myths and rituals have faded, dreamplay with the divine remains as a cure for the traumatic separation from the whole.
Freud considered dreams fulfillment of infantile unconscious wishes, which is what play is all about. And, in emerging from the unconscious, the ego finds the id primitive and alien and must heal the split between consciousness and the unconscious with dreamplay. In a similar process, the conscious ego finds Jung’s archetypes of the collective unconscious, including the Self, alien and overwhelming. Jung’s individuation is a transitional phenomenon achieved through play between the ego and the Self, the me and not-me of Winnicott.
Friday, October 9, 2009
Divine Dream Play
Dreams were once divine. In early Greek and Biblical times, mortals received inspiration, guidance and healing from the divine in their dreams. Before the philosophical and religious establishment became the exclusive voice of the divine, gods and their emissaries intervened nocturnally in the lives of mortals. Those Greeks seeking healing would go to sacred sites of the demigod Asclepius and incubate a dream and wait for a sign from the god that a healing dream was imminent, then retire to the dormitory to be visited by the god or his assistants in dream. At Epidaurus, those assembled would experience the catharsis of tragedy performed in the open amphitheater where the communal chorus would bemoan the fate of heroes. The combination of communal catharsis and divine dream intervention was healing. Then Plato declared that dreams were not divine, just as later Catholic leadership determined that the divine no longer communicated with mortals but was confined to official texts, interpreted by their priests.
Freud, like Plato before him, wanted to rescue dreams from the caprices of the divine and give them a mortal rationale, like the enlightened scientist that he was. Uncomfortable with the irrational divine, Freud gave dreams a human determinism and a personal unconscious source, later called the id, the mysterious “it” that took on the primitive and mythological aspects of the divine, even appropriating the Greek tragedy, seen often at Epidaurus, with its hero Oedipus Rex.
Jung, unlike his mentor Freud, was more comfortable with the mystical, but found the Eastern concept of the Self more acceptable than the Western divinity and gave it the status of Freud’s id or “it.” Just as dreams were the unconscious desires of the id to Freud, they were the Self’s unconscious compensations to the ego’s unbalanced conscious position to Jung. In both cases, dreams are interventions from sources once considered divine.
The Greek tragic hero had the communal chorus for human reflexion and Jung’s conscious ego had the collective unconscious of shared humanity for compensation. Freud’s was a single-person psychology like his science was Newtonian isolated particle physics, while Jung learned from Wolfgang Pauli and quantum theory that no particle is isolated but goes back and forth from the communal mist of potential. Some quantum physicists associate the infinite mist of potential with the divine.
Freud and Jung worked one on one with the dreamer, interpreting the dream, while dream-sharing groups return the isolated ego to the communal that the Greek chorus provided the tragic hero. In a group, the dream is not interpreted but resonated to by the listeners as the Greek chorus did long ago. Montague Ullman has compared dream-sharing groups with the quantum mist of potential interacting with the isolated dreamer.
Greek dream incubation was part of the shamanic tradition that included Tibetan dream yoga, a practice to prepare for the sleep of death, and indigenous dream practices around the world. The quantum mist of potential has been compared to the dreamtime of indigenous cultures, the spirit world from which waking reality is manifest like a particle from the quantum mist.
And what is dream incubation that brings divine intervention to shamanic practitioners like the ancient Greeks? It is a combination of two spiritual practices -- prayer and meditation. Prayer asks for divine intervention and meditation is the receiving state. Prayer requires intention and meditation requires attention, two additional disciplines that involve energy management. First, intention focuses the energy of the request and attention is an attunement to the divine in a receptive mode. Shamanic practices, like Greek tragedy, are communal activities. The divine is summoned ultimately for the good of the group, and the two energy applications, intention and attention, are enhanced by group participation to recreate the mist of infinite potential out of which the manifest emerges from the divine. That’s why the Greeks would gather at sacred sites and participate in performance and incubation communally. The energy at the sacred sites either from the god or from the timeless practices of intention and attention enhanced practices as did the ritual.
Freud, like Plato before him, wanted to rescue dreams from the caprices of the divine and give them a mortal rationale, like the enlightened scientist that he was. Uncomfortable with the irrational divine, Freud gave dreams a human determinism and a personal unconscious source, later called the id, the mysterious “it” that took on the primitive and mythological aspects of the divine, even appropriating the Greek tragedy, seen often at Epidaurus, with its hero Oedipus Rex.
Jung, unlike his mentor Freud, was more comfortable with the mystical, but found the Eastern concept of the Self more acceptable than the Western divinity and gave it the status of Freud’s id or “it.” Just as dreams were the unconscious desires of the id to Freud, they were the Self’s unconscious compensations to the ego’s unbalanced conscious position to Jung. In both cases, dreams are interventions from sources once considered divine.
The Greek tragic hero had the communal chorus for human reflexion and Jung’s conscious ego had the collective unconscious of shared humanity for compensation. Freud’s was a single-person psychology like his science was Newtonian isolated particle physics, while Jung learned from Wolfgang Pauli and quantum theory that no particle is isolated but goes back and forth from the communal mist of potential. Some quantum physicists associate the infinite mist of potential with the divine.
Freud and Jung worked one on one with the dreamer, interpreting the dream, while dream-sharing groups return the isolated ego to the communal that the Greek chorus provided the tragic hero. In a group, the dream is not interpreted but resonated to by the listeners as the Greek chorus did long ago. Montague Ullman has compared dream-sharing groups with the quantum mist of potential interacting with the isolated dreamer.
Greek dream incubation was part of the shamanic tradition that included Tibetan dream yoga, a practice to prepare for the sleep of death, and indigenous dream practices around the world. The quantum mist of potential has been compared to the dreamtime of indigenous cultures, the spirit world from which waking reality is manifest like a particle from the quantum mist.
And what is dream incubation that brings divine intervention to shamanic practitioners like the ancient Greeks? It is a combination of two spiritual practices -- prayer and meditation. Prayer asks for divine intervention and meditation is the receiving state. Prayer requires intention and meditation requires attention, two additional disciplines that involve energy management. First, intention focuses the energy of the request and attention is an attunement to the divine in a receptive mode. Shamanic practices, like Greek tragedy, are communal activities. The divine is summoned ultimately for the good of the group, and the two energy applications, intention and attention, are enhanced by group participation to recreate the mist of infinite potential out of which the manifest emerges from the divine. That’s why the Greeks would gather at sacred sites and participate in performance and incubation communally. The energy at the sacred sites either from the god or from the timeless practices of intention and attention enhanced practices as did the ritual.
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
Healing Dream Play
In 2001 I was diagnosed with a low-grade prostate cancer before the annual conference of The Association for the Study of Dreams. Before leaving for Santa Cruz, California, I had a dream of returning to college to get my red Triumph Spitfire sports car that I had left there. The body of the car was in pretty good shape--a few spots of rust, but not bad after all the years. I opened the door and got in, put the key in the ignition but hesitated. I was afraid to start the car for fear the old gas would explode or lock the engine.
I worked on the dream in therapy before the conference. From a Freudian perspective I was worried about my libido. My old Spitfire had old gas. But I also feared an explosion. Old gas can be explosive, not proper fuel. Or there may be engine lock, which sounds like repression to me. Jung would find the Spitfire a compensation for my conscious fearfulness, to fire me up. My college car. The one I drove to New York with my new wife years before. In object relations I have projected my body image, both good and bad, onto my college sports car as do most adolescent boys.
Part of the program at the dream association’s annual conference is early-morning dream-sharing groups for the attendees. My group was composed of less than ten men and women of varied ages. The conference lasts for four days, and I waited until the second morning to share my dream. I didn’t tell them about the cancer diagnosis, but let the dream stand on its own.
It was different telling the dream to a group than to my analyst. I felt more exposed somehow, but my discomfort was relieved by the faces of the group. They said nothing for a moment, but I felt engaged and not so vulnerable. A younger man spoke first, saying that he felt the power of the car. An older man added that he felt in his body what had been lost. A middle-aged woman recalled when she and her ex-husband had rented a convertible in Europe.
There was another pause and a palpable shift in the atmosphere in the circle, as if we had changed levels. A young woman told us of the look in her father’s eyes when he saw a Corvette like the one he had when he was young. Another woman spoke of her first car--a red car that she learned had been owned by a woman who died of cancer. She said that at first she was put off, but soon she was honored to be able to care for the previous owner’s possession. At that point I told them of my cancer diagnosis, reassuring them that it was not serious. They paused again, then said that they were not surprised after hearing the dream.
Afterwards that morning I felt connected to the group members whenever we encountered each other during the conference. They seemed to be different than the other attendees. Whenever I saw them I had to smile. Later in the morning the young woman whose father had a Corvette when he was young came up to me and said that her father called her his spitfire.
At lunch a group member told me of her experience of breast cancer and the value of healing dreams like mine. I didn’t think of my dream as healing until I shared it with the group. Before it had been analytical, but when shared it became a different experience. Then a woman slightly younger than I came over to our table and said that she had dreamed of me before the conference. We had never met before. In her dream I was in the sky wearing a blue robe, which I actually possessed.
That afternoon I went to a session on embodied dreamwork with a different style of dreamshare group leader, Robert Bosnak, a Jungian therapist. His approach is alchemical--isolating opposing feelings induced in the body by a dream and “cooking” them in the alchemical vessel of the group. I realized in my dream, the power of my college Spitfire was opposed to the fear of the old gas, and could definitely be located in my body after the prostate cancer diagnosis. Bosnak compared a dreamsharing group to a pond with water plants as group members, who moved in unison with the movement of the water. The image must have made an impression on me because that night I dreamed I was underwater watching other swimmers on the surface and heard the words “It’s the medium that matters.”
The next morning the group added more dreams of vulnerability, loss and healing. That was “the medium that matters” for that session. After my share the previous morning, I was more open than I was the first day. I had made the plunge into the communal pool.
Later that day at a session in Shamanic dreaming, a lovely female scholar from Russia mentioned the importance of enactment in healing dreams and visions. I remembered that the conferences ended with a Dream Ball where the attendees dress as dream figures and enact their dreams. The past year in Washington, my first at the conference, I had skipped the Ball and gone home early. This year was different; I would enact my healing dream.
Before the Dream Ball I looked through the garbage for my costume. I found a Red Tail Ale box with a bright red hawk on it that would serve as the body of my red Triumph Spitfire. I had brought a red shirt with me, and all that remained was to visit the face painter before the Ball. When the festivities began I had a red “T” painted on my forehead and red flames coming from my mouth. During a break in the live dance music, attendees came up to the microphone and explained their costumes and told their dreams. When my turn came I told the crowd of my Triumph Spitfire, turned on the imaginary ignition, fired up the old gas and made an amplified roar in the speaker system. Then, careful of my Red Tail Ale box, I danced with my dreamshare group, the woman who had dreamed me before the conference, and the lovely scholar from Russia who gave me a red feather from her costume. The young woman who was her father’s spitfire showed me her nails painted bright red and also gave me a red flower from her costume to go with the red feather.
I worked on the dream in therapy before the conference. From a Freudian perspective I was worried about my libido. My old Spitfire had old gas. But I also feared an explosion. Old gas can be explosive, not proper fuel. Or there may be engine lock, which sounds like repression to me. Jung would find the Spitfire a compensation for my conscious fearfulness, to fire me up. My college car. The one I drove to New York with my new wife years before. In object relations I have projected my body image, both good and bad, onto my college sports car as do most adolescent boys.
Part of the program at the dream association’s annual conference is early-morning dream-sharing groups for the attendees. My group was composed of less than ten men and women of varied ages. The conference lasts for four days, and I waited until the second morning to share my dream. I didn’t tell them about the cancer diagnosis, but let the dream stand on its own.
It was different telling the dream to a group than to my analyst. I felt more exposed somehow, but my discomfort was relieved by the faces of the group. They said nothing for a moment, but I felt engaged and not so vulnerable. A younger man spoke first, saying that he felt the power of the car. An older man added that he felt in his body what had been lost. A middle-aged woman recalled when she and her ex-husband had rented a convertible in Europe.
There was another pause and a palpable shift in the atmosphere in the circle, as if we had changed levels. A young woman told us of the look in her father’s eyes when he saw a Corvette like the one he had when he was young. Another woman spoke of her first car--a red car that she learned had been owned by a woman who died of cancer. She said that at first she was put off, but soon she was honored to be able to care for the previous owner’s possession. At that point I told them of my cancer diagnosis, reassuring them that it was not serious. They paused again, then said that they were not surprised after hearing the dream.
Afterwards that morning I felt connected to the group members whenever we encountered each other during the conference. They seemed to be different than the other attendees. Whenever I saw them I had to smile. Later in the morning the young woman whose father had a Corvette when he was young came up to me and said that her father called her his spitfire.
At lunch a group member told me of her experience of breast cancer and the value of healing dreams like mine. I didn’t think of my dream as healing until I shared it with the group. Before it had been analytical, but when shared it became a different experience. Then a woman slightly younger than I came over to our table and said that she had dreamed of me before the conference. We had never met before. In her dream I was in the sky wearing a blue robe, which I actually possessed.
That afternoon I went to a session on embodied dreamwork with a different style of dreamshare group leader, Robert Bosnak, a Jungian therapist. His approach is alchemical--isolating opposing feelings induced in the body by a dream and “cooking” them in the alchemical vessel of the group. I realized in my dream, the power of my college Spitfire was opposed to the fear of the old gas, and could definitely be located in my body after the prostate cancer diagnosis. Bosnak compared a dreamsharing group to a pond with water plants as group members, who moved in unison with the movement of the water. The image must have made an impression on me because that night I dreamed I was underwater watching other swimmers on the surface and heard the words “It’s the medium that matters.”
The next morning the group added more dreams of vulnerability, loss and healing. That was “the medium that matters” for that session. After my share the previous morning, I was more open than I was the first day. I had made the plunge into the communal pool.
Later that day at a session in Shamanic dreaming, a lovely female scholar from Russia mentioned the importance of enactment in healing dreams and visions. I remembered that the conferences ended with a Dream Ball where the attendees dress as dream figures and enact their dreams. The past year in Washington, my first at the conference, I had skipped the Ball and gone home early. This year was different; I would enact my healing dream.
Before the Dream Ball I looked through the garbage for my costume. I found a Red Tail Ale box with a bright red hawk on it that would serve as the body of my red Triumph Spitfire. I had brought a red shirt with me, and all that remained was to visit the face painter before the Ball. When the festivities began I had a red “T” painted on my forehead and red flames coming from my mouth. During a break in the live dance music, attendees came up to the microphone and explained their costumes and told their dreams. When my turn came I told the crowd of my Triumph Spitfire, turned on the imaginary ignition, fired up the old gas and made an amplified roar in the speaker system. Then, careful of my Red Tail Ale box, I danced with my dreamshare group, the woman who had dreamed me before the conference, and the lovely scholar from Russia who gave me a red feather from her costume. The young woman who was her father’s spitfire showed me her nails painted bright red and also gave me a red flower from her costume to go with the red feather.
Friday, September 25, 2009
Quantum Dream Play
Freud’s dreambook, like Newtonian physics, assumed a separate entity, subject to external and internal forces with precise deterministic laws. His book was a result of self-analysis, with the distant Fleiss as his external force. Freud, the classical scientist, distanced his dreamwork from the traditional divine or demonic external forces and turned inward to recent waking impressions and unconscious memories and desire. In this early work, he offered an internal, horizontal split driven by repression and neurotic defense to maintain the sometimes alien unconscious world. The goal of his dreamwork was to make the unconscious conscious by decoding the distorted repressed material.
The result for Freud is an isolated ego beset by threats from without and primitive forces from within--in his dreambook sexual but later aggressive and eventually death itself. Dreams become neurotic symptoms like hysteria and obsession defending against the anxiety and unpleasure that these forces produce in the lonely, vulnerable ego as a result of the fragmentation of mind, body and spirit of the Cartesian world at the turn of the century.
In the 1930’s quantum theorists added uncertainty and fuzziness to classical particle physics. Particles like electrons manifested out of a field of infinite potential when observed, only to return to the wave state. Electrons separated by near-infinite space would respond to each other in instantaneous complementarity, faster than light could ever travel. Particles were no longer alone, and neither were individuals. Melanie Klein, a child therapist, emphasized the two-person interaction of mother/child and therapist/patient. The two-person model relied on splitting and projection just as the quantum model did in the field of particles. Projective and introjective identification paralleled the introduction of complementarity to further fuzzy the Freudian classical model of the horizontal split of repression.
Two followers of Melanie Klein--Bion and Winnicott, furthered the two-person field of dreamwork. Bion offered a process of meaning creation from raw emotional input called dreamwork alpha that is similar to the manifestation of a particle from the underlying wave field and the explicate out of the implicate. In the two-person model of Bion, the mother contains the child’s projections of raw, unprocessed experience and transforms them into meaning before returning them, digested, to the child. In a similar way a dream contains raw experience, transforming it into symbolic meaning for the dreamer, often with the help of an analyst, who facilitates the digestion process rather than decodes and interprets as in the one-person Freudian model. The goal is not just to resolve repression by making what was unconscious conscious, but to integrate split-off, projected aspects of the dreamer and make what was fragmented whole, just as quantum theory added a holistic dimension to fragmented classical science.
Winnicott called the two-person field transitional space--the location of dream and creativity, where meaning and integration emerges from creative chaos. Dreamwork and therapy were two people playing together in transitional space, where things are neither created nor discovered, neither me nor not me, just as in the uncertainty of quantum fields an electron is neither particle nor wave. Like Bion, Winnicott doesn’t interpret as much as facilitate the play of me and not me and the integration of split-off aspects of the patient or dreamer.
Carl Jung was influenced by quantum theory and mysticism and extended the two-person model of dreamwork to the Self and collective unconscious. The Self, an archetype that evolves in dreamwork in what Jung called individuation from the collective, is a sort of transitional object between the personal me and not me of the universal, the manifestation of the explicate from the underlying implicate. Jung acknowledged Freud’s dreamwork as causal explanation but proposed individuation and psychic regulation as the purpose of dreamwork. When the individuation process is overly biased either towards the collective or the personal, dreams emerge from the unconscious to compensate the unbalanced conscious position and integrate the polarities. The archetypes of the collective unconscious contained the infinite potential of the implicate order that required individuation to be manifest in the personal, explicate order.
The collective and its connection to the implicate order has been advanced by Montague Ullman and his dreamsharing groups. As in the two-person model, the group listens to the dreamer and resonates to the material, but rather than interpret or facilitate, the group responds as if the dream were their own, transforming the individual experience into a communal dream. The quantum effects of complementarity, non-locality, holism, and uncertainty that the two-person model demonstrated are even more evident in a group. It’s as if the separate, individual consciousnesses of the group, fragmented and dispersed by the Big Bang of creation, are able to coalesce, overcoming the classical mind-body-spirit split as well. Bohm spoke of the holographic whole where each part contains the timeless essence and the ocean of energy of the implicate order out of which explicate life emerges feeling alone and isolated, vulnerable and afraid. The intersubjective awareness in a group seems to offer a higher state of consciousness as the members evoke the implicate potential of the group. When Jung speaks of the purpose of dreamwork as individuation vs the causal approach of Freud, perhaps the purpose is evolutionary as well.
The result for Freud is an isolated ego beset by threats from without and primitive forces from within--in his dreambook sexual but later aggressive and eventually death itself. Dreams become neurotic symptoms like hysteria and obsession defending against the anxiety and unpleasure that these forces produce in the lonely, vulnerable ego as a result of the fragmentation of mind, body and spirit of the Cartesian world at the turn of the century.
In the 1930’s quantum theorists added uncertainty and fuzziness to classical particle physics. Particles like electrons manifested out of a field of infinite potential when observed, only to return to the wave state. Electrons separated by near-infinite space would respond to each other in instantaneous complementarity, faster than light could ever travel. Particles were no longer alone, and neither were individuals. Melanie Klein, a child therapist, emphasized the two-person interaction of mother/child and therapist/patient. The two-person model relied on splitting and projection just as the quantum model did in the field of particles. Projective and introjective identification paralleled the introduction of complementarity to further fuzzy the Freudian classical model of the horizontal split of repression.
Two followers of Melanie Klein--Bion and Winnicott, furthered the two-person field of dreamwork. Bion offered a process of meaning creation from raw emotional input called dreamwork alpha that is similar to the manifestation of a particle from the underlying wave field and the explicate out of the implicate. In the two-person model of Bion, the mother contains the child’s projections of raw, unprocessed experience and transforms them into meaning before returning them, digested, to the child. In a similar way a dream contains raw experience, transforming it into symbolic meaning for the dreamer, often with the help of an analyst, who facilitates the digestion process rather than decodes and interprets as in the one-person Freudian model. The goal is not just to resolve repression by making what was unconscious conscious, but to integrate split-off, projected aspects of the dreamer and make what was fragmented whole, just as quantum theory added a holistic dimension to fragmented classical science.
Winnicott called the two-person field transitional space--the location of dream and creativity, where meaning and integration emerges from creative chaos. Dreamwork and therapy were two people playing together in transitional space, where things are neither created nor discovered, neither me nor not me, just as in the uncertainty of quantum fields an electron is neither particle nor wave. Like Bion, Winnicott doesn’t interpret as much as facilitate the play of me and not me and the integration of split-off aspects of the patient or dreamer.
Carl Jung was influenced by quantum theory and mysticism and extended the two-person model of dreamwork to the Self and collective unconscious. The Self, an archetype that evolves in dreamwork in what Jung called individuation from the collective, is a sort of transitional object between the personal me and not me of the universal, the manifestation of the explicate from the underlying implicate. Jung acknowledged Freud’s dreamwork as causal explanation but proposed individuation and psychic regulation as the purpose of dreamwork. When the individuation process is overly biased either towards the collective or the personal, dreams emerge from the unconscious to compensate the unbalanced conscious position and integrate the polarities. The archetypes of the collective unconscious contained the infinite potential of the implicate order that required individuation to be manifest in the personal, explicate order.
The collective and its connection to the implicate order has been advanced by Montague Ullman and his dreamsharing groups. As in the two-person model, the group listens to the dreamer and resonates to the material, but rather than interpret or facilitate, the group responds as if the dream were their own, transforming the individual experience into a communal dream. The quantum effects of complementarity, non-locality, holism, and uncertainty that the two-person model demonstrated are even more evident in a group. It’s as if the separate, individual consciousnesses of the group, fragmented and dispersed by the Big Bang of creation, are able to coalesce, overcoming the classical mind-body-spirit split as well. Bohm spoke of the holographic whole where each part contains the timeless essence and the ocean of energy of the implicate order out of which explicate life emerges feeling alone and isolated, vulnerable and afraid. The intersubjective awareness in a group seems to offer a higher state of consciousness as the members evoke the implicate potential of the group. When Jung speaks of the purpose of dreamwork as individuation vs the causal approach of Freud, perhaps the purpose is evolutionary as well.
Monday, September 21, 2009
Dreamplay in Washington
I attended the 2000 Annual Conference of the Association for the Study of Dreams in Washington because of the Mythic Journey Workshop sessions spread over the four days of the conference. Being a Joseph Campbell groupie when younger, I had trained in psychoanalysis to follow my bliss in the second half of life and felt that the Mythic Journey Workshop would combine Campbell and dreamwork. What I was not prepared for was the steady, rhythmic shamanic drumming as I approached the workshop session. The mythic journey was more shamanic than heroic and presented me with something totally new.
The sessions were designed to “disengage the imaginative mind from the rational mind,” which is exactly what the drumming did to me. I tightened my grip on my rational mind when the drummer in a feathered headband began slowly and gradually accelerating the beat while the attendees sat in a circle and visualized a dream image. The image I chose became too menacing as the beat picked up, so I focused on the comforting face of my analyst to soothe my growing anxiety.
Before leaving the workshop for the night, we were asked to stand and move to the drum around the circle, expressing ourselves as the spirit moved us while selecting a dream-incubation stone from the altar in the center. The stone was to be held in our left hand, our receiving side, as we slept that night.
Later I collapsed into bed clutching my smooth, coffee-colored stone, and as soon as I closed my eyes I was bombarded by violent hypnagogic imagery. I knew it would be a rough ride and held on tight. Soon the imagery organized into a dream of running along a path above a beach, arms and legs churning but feet not touching the ground as if I were flying. A powerful black man pursues me, faster than I, and I know he will catch me. He seizes me from behind and forces me off the trail, down onto the beach toward the water. I struggle but realize that my resistance will result in my anal rape there in the sand.
Freud would interpret my dream as an eruption of id impulse from behind me, due to the drumming, of course, that overwhelms me and drags me down to the waters of the unconscious. Jung would identify the black man as my shadow archetype, emerging from the unconscious to compensate for my lack of groundedness. The sea to Jung would not only represent the collective unconscious but the all-inclusive Self. Shamanic practitioners would consider the experience an initiation of my ungrounded rational mind into the quantum sea—an awakening to the imaginal, to dreams.
What is this imaginal sea? The unconscious to Freud was repressed memory and desire, both libidinous and aggressive. Jung included the collective archetypes, our mythological heritage, with the repressed in the unconscious, the most significant archetype being the Self, of which the ego is but a small player. To shamanic practitioners, the imaginal is a reality that parallels the concrete, the realm of soul. The imaginal is inhabited not by memory but by spirits of both the past and the future, outside of concrete time and space. We have a dream body that navigates the imaginal as our physical body occupies the concrete. To the philosophers, the parallel worlds are the phenomenal and the numinous. The imaginal to Winnicott is the transitional space between me and not-me, the area of play and creativity—of dream. Therefore, the sea is the transitional space between the concrete earth and the spiritual sky.
In Winnicott’s terminology, the dream is a conflict of duality, a trauma of otherness. The me running along the trail, feet not touching the earth is arrested by the not-me and dragged, kicking towards the transitional space of the sea where the conflict can be transformed into play. Through this transformation the false self flight along the trail, the manic escape, can encounter the true self in what appears to be a threat. Such is play in transitional space, in the imaginal, in dream.
After a couple of sessions creating our dream staffs from a table full of colorful junk, and expressing our dream in shamanic dance,in the closing session of the Mythic Journey Workshop, we were to present our myth or dream of return from our journey to the group. After more dancing to the drum, I introduced myself as Odysseus washing up onto the beach of Ithaka, home from his long journey on the sea and his encounter with the imaginal inhabitants he found there. There was much play, both aggressive and libidinous, with the inhabitants of the imaginal sea, that allowed Odysseus to return home awake to his true self, wiser than the warrior king who left for Troy.
The sessions were designed to “disengage the imaginative mind from the rational mind,” which is exactly what the drumming did to me. I tightened my grip on my rational mind when the drummer in a feathered headband began slowly and gradually accelerating the beat while the attendees sat in a circle and visualized a dream image. The image I chose became too menacing as the beat picked up, so I focused on the comforting face of my analyst to soothe my growing anxiety.
Before leaving the workshop for the night, we were asked to stand and move to the drum around the circle, expressing ourselves as the spirit moved us while selecting a dream-incubation stone from the altar in the center. The stone was to be held in our left hand, our receiving side, as we slept that night.
Later I collapsed into bed clutching my smooth, coffee-colored stone, and as soon as I closed my eyes I was bombarded by violent hypnagogic imagery. I knew it would be a rough ride and held on tight. Soon the imagery organized into a dream of running along a path above a beach, arms and legs churning but feet not touching the ground as if I were flying. A powerful black man pursues me, faster than I, and I know he will catch me. He seizes me from behind and forces me off the trail, down onto the beach toward the water. I struggle but realize that my resistance will result in my anal rape there in the sand.
Freud would interpret my dream as an eruption of id impulse from behind me, due to the drumming, of course, that overwhelms me and drags me down to the waters of the unconscious. Jung would identify the black man as my shadow archetype, emerging from the unconscious to compensate for my lack of groundedness. The sea to Jung would not only represent the collective unconscious but the all-inclusive Self. Shamanic practitioners would consider the experience an initiation of my ungrounded rational mind into the quantum sea—an awakening to the imaginal, to dreams.
What is this imaginal sea? The unconscious to Freud was repressed memory and desire, both libidinous and aggressive. Jung included the collective archetypes, our mythological heritage, with the repressed in the unconscious, the most significant archetype being the Self, of which the ego is but a small player. To shamanic practitioners, the imaginal is a reality that parallels the concrete, the realm of soul. The imaginal is inhabited not by memory but by spirits of both the past and the future, outside of concrete time and space. We have a dream body that navigates the imaginal as our physical body occupies the concrete. To the philosophers, the parallel worlds are the phenomenal and the numinous. The imaginal to Winnicott is the transitional space between me and not-me, the area of play and creativity—of dream. Therefore, the sea is the transitional space between the concrete earth and the spiritual sky.
In Winnicott’s terminology, the dream is a conflict of duality, a trauma of otherness. The me running along the trail, feet not touching the earth is arrested by the not-me and dragged, kicking towards the transitional space of the sea where the conflict can be transformed into play. Through this transformation the false self flight along the trail, the manic escape, can encounter the true self in what appears to be a threat. Such is play in transitional space, in the imaginal, in dream.
After a couple of sessions creating our dream staffs from a table full of colorful junk, and expressing our dream in shamanic dance,in the closing session of the Mythic Journey Workshop, we were to present our myth or dream of return from our journey to the group. After more dancing to the drum, I introduced myself as Odysseus washing up onto the beach of Ithaka, home from his long journey on the sea and his encounter with the imaginal inhabitants he found there. There was much play, both aggressive and libidinous, with the inhabitants of the imaginal sea, that allowed Odysseus to return home awake to his true self, wiser than the warrior king who left for Troy.
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