Next week, I’m leaving the province that’s been my home for 25 years in hopes of integrating something that I’ve been dreaming about, or rather, the representation of a person I’ve been dreaming about. There are many other reasons I’m leaving, a lot of moving parts went into this, but my dreams created a bit of an obsession tornado inside me, and that has been a major cog in the relocating wheel that started turning a while ago. Three years ago, I started having dreams about someone I went to elementary school with. I contacted them, I went to visit them, I craved them, I felt like I was in their mind and they were in mine, I was electrified by them, but I couldn’t find the reason for the dreams, and connecting in waking life wasn’t making anything clearer, in fact, it was frustrating. I labored over the puzzle for three years, berating myself for not being able to understand something spiritual when I have access to so many great tools- astrology, tarot, horary, the Enneagram, and eventually a Jungian dream analyst. I really went through a hard time with the embarassment of it all, going toward it, moving away from it, trying anything to make the portal I sensed between us close. I told my therapist I didn’t like my dreams because if it’s correct that we dream about what we need to integrate, about what we’re lacking, it felt like my dreams dangled my craving in front of me to tease me and I didn’t know what I was supposed to go toward to make it stop. I don’t believe in the Christian god, but I prayed and even at times cried to the gods of wisdom out there for meaning to my suffering.
In early 2024, I started looking at my life through the lens of astrocartography, which is locational astrology- the idea that we can bring out different aspects of our astrological charts if we move laterally around the world; moving is like turning the dial on our charts. The field is still relatively new, but people who have moved because of it have tended to move for career (10th house), love (5th or 7th house), money (2nd or 11th house), or health (6th house). Nobody moves for the third house. The third house in astrology represents pretty mundane things: the people and situations in our immediate surroundings- our siblings, cousins, neighbors, colleagues at work, and classmates. Because the third house is ruled by Mercury, it also stands for communication, writing, skills, and the interactions we have on our errands and around our city. I slowly started understanding my life in my current city as having been a failure of my third house. I couldn’t manifest anything out of it where I was; it took a whopping two and a haf decades to develop a transferrable skill, and I wasn’t close with my siblings or classmates, and yet I craved my third house- I wanted a skill so badly, and I longed for a better relationship with my third house people. As I studied astrocartography, I realized I needed to find a place I could develop my third house.
I started seeing a Jungian analyst in 2024 as well. In one particular session, I was referencing the dreams about the classmate, and she told me that we have recurring dreams about something or someone because we’re ready to integrate what they represent. This revelation acted like the popping off of a cork of emotion. The tears bottled up from three years of believing the cosmos were just teasing me ran down my face. I came to concede that the portal through which I felt so connected to my crush was not to the person in my dreams; they were just my unconscious disguised as a personified association of my mind. Knowing I wasn’t being judged by the gods felt like the hug I longed for. Eventually through another course of realizations in 2025, I finally saw the portal snap shut one day: I came to see that what my crush represented was the development of a particular skill that I had put on the backburner all my adult life. Meanwhile, a third thread ultimately brought everything home: difficult events were happening at work that came to a head and I sold my house and packed up my things.
Before I pulled the trigger, I bought a little jungian classic that my therapist recommended: Inner Work: Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth. The author is a Jungian analyst who, on the one hand grates on my nerves with his insistence on inserting Christianity unnecessarily into Jung’s views, but otherwise gracefully summarizes the densely wordy and repetitive psychotherapist and makes his work relevant and crisp to the modern reader. Reading Jung’s understanding of the unconscious makes me wonder what I’d have done differently with my dreams if I was still a Christian; after all, in the eyes of a Christian, the dark, tempting contents of the unconscious are seen as seduction from the devil. How Christianity approaches the unconscious is the subject of other books, but ultimately I believe it fails to allow its adherents to reach the full fence of the human experience of touching the unconscious by erecting a smaller fence within the outer one, putting a deceptively graceful bowtie of a narrative of falleness and redemption within the artificially small enclosure while smiling smugly on at the world. The unconscious with its shadow contents are seen as coming from outside the integrity of the redemption story.
Christianity, I argue, is like an aparatus that blocks us from accessing or even facing the psychic shadow, but to ease the resulting tension, directs us to project our darkness onto others, which automatically sets us up as victims. Christianity in the west depends on the fracturing of the egoic self into smaller parts rather than integrating them into a whole. It has made a taboo of dialoguing with “Satan”, their equivalent of going within and asking the crush or obsession what it’s trying to integrate within you. This blocking off of our shadow ensures that we’ll be chased and pursued by whatever shadow contents our psyche craves to integrate in the dream state or in the unconscious. Being fenced off from contact with the darkeness has made Christians antsy in their bodies for war in America because their religion creates physical, bodily tension from all the resisting they do of the shadow’s advances. Ironically, today’s Christians are going to war against the wrong enemy- their own shadow. When you see your shadow coming at you from other people you see as “evil”, you are more gullible to the lie that you’re a victim.