Memories, Dreams, Reflections – A Horse and the Color Red

I dreamed last night that I was in an apartment building or high tower–the window was high–and I dropped some red jelly on a horse. The strange thing about the dream was that this red jelly injured the horse.

Why a dream about a horse? Why the red jelly? Why the injury, and why the uncomfortable sensation that someone had made me hurt the horse?

I don’t have a Jungian therapist handy (though it’s on my list, along with a vegan chef), so I go inside and ask what these dreams mean. Often I get an instantaneous answer.

Speaking of Jung, he had the experience of dropping into another world, where he met a spirit guide named Philemon. Jung wrote in his autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections:

Philemon and other figures of my fantasies brought home to me the crucial insight that there are things in the psyche which I do not produce, but which produce themselves and have their own life. Philemon represented a force which was not myself. In my fantasies I held conversations with him, and he said things which I had not consciously thought. For I observed clearly that it was he who spoke, not I. He said I treated thoughts as if I generated them myself, but in his view thoughts were like animals in the forest, or people in a room, or birds in the air, and added, “If you should see people in a room, you would not think that you had made those people, or that you were responsible for them.” It was he who taught me psychic objectivity, the reality of the psyche. Through him the distinction was clarified between myself and the object of my thought. He confronted me in an objective manner, and I understood that there is something in me which can say things that I do not know and do not intend, things which may even be directed against me.”

When you are a medium–a vessel through which other beings pour their thoughts–the question arises whether the thoughts are internal or external. This quote from Jung makes it clear that Jung was very insistent that psychic phenomenon have an objective reality.

From my perspective, which I articulate in my book, Future Medicine (Univ. of Michigan Press), I take a very pragmatic approach (being much influenced by William James’ works early on). If one is highly functional and can integrate objective psychic material in a creative and positive fashion into daily life, that’s a plus. Problems arise when, like Robin Williams in What Dreams May Come, one gets lost in one’s fantasy projections, or drowns in unconscious content.

But back to the horse. I found myself today at a polo club–beautiful–and there were the horses. Now whether my subconscious knew that I would be visiting this polo club and inserted the horse into my dream to make sense of the day ahead of the day, or whether the space-time continuum presented itself in reverse flow to my mind a la Stephen Hawkings, or whether I had an intuition (or let’s call it spirit guidance) that I would be seeing horses the next day, who is to know.

Oddly, I had selected a shirt which was exactly the color of the reddish jello of the dream–and in the photo, here is a red stripe also representing that red. While I was standing there talking to someone, a horse clomped over the foot-high or so boundary marker. While it was an ordinary dance of the polo game, it felt somewhat violent to me, and I thought of the horses and their well-being. My colleague remarked that there had been deaths at the polo game, and indeed, when I Googled, I learned that this was true–there was a violent element, and perhaps the thought of a polo player being thrown headlong to his death by a tripping horse during deadly horse play was part of the dream’s indication that someone else had been the ultimate cause of the injury.

I should add that the same night, I dreamed that Krishna Das, the kirtan singer, entered my home and started chanting a chant known as the Hanuman Chalisa. He looked at the walls and said that Ram was present, because I had filled the room with good vibrations of chanting and meditation.

Here is Krishna Das–wearing the same color shirt, it turns out–which is also funny, because when I met him at the NYC premier of the film about his life, “One Track Heart,” we were wearing the same checkered-red shirt.

What’s interesting is that a healer friend of mine had written that “facing your symbols can give you back your power. This connects you with unconscious energies…. We experience everything through our consciousness. We are everything.”

And now it all makes perfect sense. “Go right to the source and ask the horse
He’ll give you the answer that you’ll endorse.” Noel v. Travis, 857 A.2d 1283, 1289 (Pa. 2004).