I'm a classroom.  A school teacher, a middle-aged woman, sitting at her desk.  An iron chalice resembling half an egg stands next to her.  I approach the chalice and pee in it.  The other students in the class seem to understand what I’m really trying to do but the teacher, after smelling the vapors rising from the chalice, orders me to leave.  I am humiliated

 

This deceptively simple little dream could easily be taken as a regurgitation of shadow content, perhaps  childish rebellion, contempt for authority.  But I think it is actually a statement about my ego’s reaction to the ‘alchemical process’ that has been at the center of my life for the last twenty odd years.  The ‘alchemical process’ is a process of self-study and transformation.  Here’s a likely interpretation.  

 

In the classroom of life I, the alchemist, pour my ‘base metals,’ i.e. subconscious impurities, into the crucible where they are to be transformed into gold i.e. sublimated into spiritual energy, the vapors. One of my egos, the socialized prudish school-marmy part of me, is offended by this and orders me to leave, humiliating me.    The order to leave and the humiliation is the ego reaction to shadow content, the impurities that are being transformed by my spiritual work so that growth can happen.  Spiritual work is a process of offering one’s dysfunctional psychological ‘stuff’ to the Self.  The crucible is a circle, a symbol of the innermost Self, the Philosopher's Stone, the Lapis, without which the alchemical transformation will not take place to use.  In this case it is an ‘iron’ crucible.  Iron is an obvious Self symbol because it is very hard, meaning unchanging.  The things in it change but it does not.  The people in the class who know what's ‘really’ happening symbolize consciousness of the process.