I am in beautiful, spacious, clean Japanese temple/outhouse constructed of clean worn light-giving wood.  It is dark outside but the interior of the outhouse is suffused in peaceful light.  I open the perfectly round lid on the elevated toilet seat and peer into the hole where I see a uniform sheet of pre-chewed meat flowing slowly, inching its way across a plain board in the center of the hole. The massive flow stops and instantly turns into a small carefully sculpted turd lying on its side like a small conscious animal with a little tail neatly curled around on top of itself.

 

As I watch a beautiful woman comes out of the background and picks up the small turd in a devotional way, saying, “We must save this for your brother."  I can see she thinks it is quite valuable. Then a second board, equally plain but carrying a pure and worn vibration, appears in the space above the original board and hovers there unsupported. I somehow know that it is an altar.  On it I see four Vedic gods finely crafted of pure excrement.  They do not smell.  One of the gods is actually two, a male and a female intertwined.

 

I love this dream.  It carries an amazing aura of sanctity.  The Japanese temple/outhouse is the spiritual side of the Unconscious. The Unconscious carries both the sacred and profane impressions from one’s past.  The Self illumines the ‘interior’ of the temple.  This means the subject of the dream is spiritual practice.  A Japanese temple is a place of spiritual work.  It also means that the only way one can access the Unconscious, since it is ‘in the dark’ i.e. unavailable for perception is through dreams…which are illumined by the ever shining Awareness, the Self.  The peering into the hole represents my dreamwork, the tool by which I can access the Unconscious.  The Unconscious is often portrayed as a cave or a basement or a hole in the ground.  The mass of ‘prechewed meat’ is all the experiences lying dormant in the Unconscious.   When an experience is completed in waking reality the essence of it is stored in the Unconscious.  The Unconscious is often symbolized in dreams as a warehouse or a storeroom or a cluttered basement.  The meat symbol is particularly interesting.  The Unconscious is making a pun.  It means essence, as in the ‘meat’ of the matter.  So dreamwork is a way of looking at the essence of one’s experience. 

 

Under the watchful eye of the dreamer the amorphous mass of experience becomes a conscious animal.  This means that dream analysis ‘consciousizes’ the unconscious.  The beautiful woman is the Anima, my intuitive feminine nature.  Although she also appears as a ravenous demonic force when she is symbolizing negative content, in this form she represents the Self as a guide.  She informs me that subconscious content is valuable spiritually.  The spiritual value is signified by the second board which is an altar.  In the final scene the animal has become four Gods.  ‘Vedic’ means knowledge.  This indicates the transformation of the profane into the sacred by wisdom.  Four indicates perfection or the completing of the a process.  The final image, intertwined male and female gods, shows that the conflicts that had been disturbing me unconsciously have been purified.