Dreams, Carl Jung believed, need to be taken seriously. As an acolyte of the Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, attributed with founding analytical psychology, I pay close attention to dreams.
Jung’s visionary influence extended beyond the field of psychiatry — in which he’s still a thought leader — to philosophy, literature, anthropology and archaeology. Even, to religious studies.
As impressive as all this is, it’s Jungian dream theory that fascinates me — the idea that dreams reveal much more than they hide; that they work to integrate our conscious and unconscious lives.
While I’m sure I have had an active dream life, I’ve had no memory of my nocturnal adventures — not since undergoing brutal chemotherapy treatment for my breast cancer in 2013. No dreams remembered at all.
And so I’m intrigued by the lockdown-specific night-time journeys my mind has taken me on.
Some of the dreamland trips taken have been some pleasant, with a residual warm fuzzy feeling the next morning. Like the dream I had this week about my mother, who’s not visited me in my dreams once in the 20 years she’s been dead. From that dream I woke with warm tears on my pillow — tears of unbridled joy at having seen her, been with her again; tears of sorrow at having to say goodbye. Again.
I wondered at the meaning of that dream in the time of coronavirus, but not too deeply. Seeing her again, and talking rather than arguing with her was enough. I was pre-teen in the dream, and my mother was young and unlined and strong; her hair swept up in a beehive style, pinned at the back of her head with those wonderful bendy hairpins that she twisted into animal shapes to amuse us.
She was asking my opinion (I knew then that it was a dream as my mother never consulted anyone for their thoughts about anything!) on how to persuade my lovely dad that a beach holiday would be good for us all. Durban, my dream-vision mummy (I was 10 or 11) said, would be an excellent place to retreat to, to escape the bitter Ladysmith winter.
Going under
A few days later, I had my scary sea-dream with a dark, bleak ending. For context, growing up Indian, inland, in northern KwaZulu-Natal meant no access to natural water. I never learnt how to swim.
There were no integrated municipal swimming pools and no money to build backyard pools. Bilharzia-infected rivers were out. Land-locked us — unlike our Durban cousins — didn’t swim. Water still scares me: being in small boats; walking along river banks; and, of course, the sea where I remain close to the water at the fringes of sandy beaches. No surprise since anything more than bath deep will drown me.
In my dream I’m with a group of strangers and we are on a beach with water swishing around our ankles. There is no land in sight so no going back to a place of safety. We begin walking towards a rocky outcrop in the ocean, deeper and deeper we go, until I am neck deep, and I know that soon there will be no ground below my feet and water suck me in and make me disappear. I’m not so much afraid as surprised by it all.
A stranger offers to take my hand but I shake my head, resigned to what will happen next.
Before I pass on from this world, there is no doubt that I will have to mourn as I bury people I love. There is no melodrama in that statement, though I wish there were
Water dreams, believed to represent life, death, change and renewal, are said to be symbolic of waking-life emotions seeping out of the deepest recesses of the subconscious mind, of one’s intuition.
I wake from my water dream with a deep sense of regret about what it is we are losing as we wait, uncertain of our fate. I realise at that very moment that in my head, I am preparing to die, made worse by the knowledge that, for once, I’m not being overly dramatic.
This week, Dr Salim Abdool Karim, the renowned epidemiologist, infectious disease specialist and chair of the advisory committee on Covid-19, outlined for us the eight stages our government has laid out in the plan to fight the coronavirus.
It’s a comprehensive strategy to battle this contagious respiratory disease and I have no doubt that we will get off more lightly than the US and some European countries because our government implemented early lockdown measures that appear to have flattened the curve.
But none of it bodes well for people who, like me, are over the age of 60 (and especially those over 70).
We’re supposed to self-isolate until September, when the peak of this horror virus is expected. Realistically though, us oldies should suspend all widespread human contact until there’s a vaccine, and that, by conservative estimates, could take up to two years.
There is a lot of sorrow ahead. Our curve might be flattened, Karim warns, but it is certain that people will die.
Stage seven of his plan is called “bereavement and the aftermath”. In it is listed, as necessary, the expanding of burial capacity, regulations on funerals and, perhaps most importantly, managing the pandemic’s psychological and social impact. There will be so much sadness.
So I’m not being bombastic or excessively sentimental when I say I am preparing to die because death has moved into the realm of the possible; for us all. There is no sugar coating of the pill.
But before I pass on from this world, there is no doubt that I will have to mourn as I bury people I love. There is no melodrama in that statement, though I wish there were. There is the same inevitability as in my water dream; resignation that the ground below my feet will give way and I will be subsumed into the infinite ocean.
I’ve been talking to my friends and it seems that what is missing is something to look forward to, something tangible that we can hold on to.
Our lives are on hold and there is no end date. Everything that was planned has been abruptly halted: a friend’s 70th birthday party, another Christmas in my beloved New York. Bucket list wishes are now hazy possibilities: a Berlin visit to the Bertolt Brecht Brecht-Weigel Memorial; taking in a Richard Wagner opera at the theatre he built in Bayreuth solely to stage his works; walking the Camino de Santiago — that ancient pilgrimage path through Spain, Portugal and France…
For now, all I (all of us?) have to look forward to is the wintry warmth of the sun as it journeys across the southern hemisphere, seen from our apartment windows, or gardens, for the lucky few.
We need to prepare ourselves psychologically for the sorrow that lies ahead.
As the mystic Caroline Myss says, this is the age of the incredible, the unimaginable, the unthinkable. But she says that we, extraordinary beings that we are, have the power to resurrect from any crisis.
I’m clinging to the hope that she’s right.
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