I have been feeling a little out of sorts lately, having strange dark dreams (again!) and waking up tired. There has been a recurrence of the surfing/big wave dreams and I am feeling as though I have really had enough of this particular phase of the journey. But my doctorate requires me to finish the images and the thesis so I remain submerged for the time being.
As it tends to do, the unconscious answered with another image. It was an epic dream of a journey, from a ‘wilderness’, almost desert or sand dune landscape to a more ‘civilised’ one, from dirt tracks that turned into bitumen roads - too steep and wet to walk down normally, so I slid down them in a sitting position. My little dog accompanied me for part of the way. I had taken things with me, some notes on paper, but was leaving them behind the further I went. I was having to retrace my steps sometimes to find these things but then realised I didn’t really need them any more.
Somewhere in the dream, the ‘third person’ uttered the phrase ‘monte verde’ very loudly and distinctly. When I awoke I translated it myself as ‘green mountain’ though I still didn’t know what the significance was.
Then I was back in the water looking towards shore, a metal handle was floating just under the surface and my vision was such that I was seeing above the water but also below it quite clearly at the same time. There were other people in the water too. Looking upwards towards shore I saw the ‘regal’ figure of a man who obviously commanded respect. I waited in the water to be washed up on the beach.
After the dream I went in search of the ‘green mountain’ and remembered Henri Corbin talking about the
Just an aside: the difficulty in doing research is that you discover so many interesting things but in academic research, you have to make sure you stay within certain theoretical frameworks. As you can imagine, there are just so many theories out there and to follow an argument through it has to be coherent. As a theorist yourself you can’t go flipping from one model to another, even though, in truth, this is exactly what I do because it is natural, and I believe, manifests a wholistic view of existence.
Anyway, Corbin is (among other things) an interpreter of ancient Persian and Arabic texts and it is difficult to really grasp that his work belongs within the Western esoteric tradition. In this case Corbin is discussing the ‘visionary tales’ of ‘spiritual initiation’ composed by a young twelfth century writer called Sohravardi. I won’t go into detail about the lengthy journey, suffice to say that it begins in the desert and ends on the
From my understanding this is yet another tale of a journey to the Self, in this case ‘the twelfth man’, the ‘Hidden Imam’. The implication in the tale, and one that struck me quite markedly when I awoke, is that although there is a convoluted journey, one is already there, though there are ‘papers’ and study, these things are ultimately irrelavent. Imam then is the ‘ekstasis itself’ in this case of Islamic consciousness, and ‘one who is not in the same spiritual state cannot see him’ (the Imam).
Western psychologists might interpret my dream quite differently, the male nobleman as an animus/father figure and so on, but as always I trust the images, their context and the way in which they present within my own psyche. I didn’t meet the Imam, but maybe now have some confirmation that he exists. I haven’t been to the ‘green island’ either - but it is reassuring to think that it may be floating around somewhere in the 'white sea' of my imaginal consciousness.
Image: A small old oil painting of mine called A Land Unknown.
