It was an invitation to "trip out," permanently, on fantasy. It was a call to madness, to death-in-life. Never before had that voice, deep in my blood, seemed so utterly beautiful and ravishing. On December 2 it sang out of a splendid but deadly dream.

It began in the alley behind my childhood home in Michigan. I was with my mother, one brother, my sister Anne, and my cat "Kleina." [Her full name is Kleines Mädchen, "Little Girl" in German. I named her when she was born in 1955. She died in August 1974.]

In the dream, Kleina was larger than life and sitting on the fence close to the spot where I used to hide among the pines as a child. Kleina was talking to me, which I found somewhat surprising as I had not known she could talk. Then she--that regal, arrogant, lovely, angora beast--actually reached out and put her "arms" around me.

...For Kleina, that's something! Mama's always saying she's her cat now that I've left home. Yet it was to me, her long-lost first mistress, that Kleina offered love. I was deeply touched.

. . . The sky was darkening and misty. Clouds, like liquid egg whites, blurred a dazzling sun. On its left was a black moon with a nimbus all around it, the way a moon is when it eclipses the sun. "Look!" I said. "A sky with a full moon in it right next to the sun! That's a strange one."

The moon kept swelling and then shrinking, and then swelling again, getting closer all the time until it exploded over the vacant lot directly in front of us. Out of the mists, a troop of antlered reindeer came galloping toward us. There were three pair followed by a single magnificent stag.

...The very air was sinister and fearful and yet wildly beautiful. Mama was terrified, yet calm and protective of her children. She put her arms around the others. I was a few feet away.

"Don't look at them, Honey," she said quietly to me. I sensed the mounting power and danger around us.

Then they were heading back to the mists. I could hear my mother's deep sigh of relief behind me. Suddenly a wildness came over me, and I flung out my arms and cried,

. . . "My stag! Come back!" Back out of the mists wheeled the stag, coming to bear me away! I felt my power. "Go back," I cried gently and waved my hand. He wheeled and vanished. But I was left with the knowledge that if ever I were too unhappy, the stag, my stag, could be summoned and we'd ride together through the mists to the black moon. I can't describe the feeling of comfort and power and being loved this knowledge gave me. I was free. I could leave at any time and escape forever from whatever pain might lurk elsewhere.

Instead, the dream haunted me and I regretted not going with the stag, despite the danger.

I was so torn. I felt there was some chilling magic in the words I had spoken in the dream: "My stag! Come back!"--and for several days afterward I was careful never to say them aloud due to an ancient fear of the forces I might unleash. It was the return of a childhood terror of a Faustian pact. I longed to speak those potent words, and yet something held me back and forbid it.

Kleina, and the loyalty to myself that she symbolized, struggled against the stag's spell. Her love in the midst of a contradicting family had given me:

...the extravagant spiritual warmth necessary to wave the stag back. She is that feminine part of me which has long leaned on Mama for inspiration, but she has now returned to trust me alone.

I could surrender neither to her nor to the stag.

...That's what Kleina's love means: a part of me has come home--a part with the strength to withstand both Mama and the black moon.

I must of course clarify that it was not my mother, as a person, that I had to withstand, but my mother as a force. In other words, I could not knuckle under to substitute values from the past; I had to break free of a Weltanschauung [worldview] that could only undermine me as a woman. Through Kleina, I saw I could be "my own woman." Without that seminal faith, I would have had no chance against the stag.

In the moon-stag, I had met a Death-Wish-Lover, a negative life force whose genesis was a black Eucharist eclipsing the true sun and leading to madness, not healing.

From the beginning, I had accepted the fact that dreams were wombed in psychic darkness. They were influenced by emotions, memories, terrors. Some, perhaps, came from what Jung termed the "collective unconscious," a type of race memory. I believed others were shaped by karmic forces from earlier reincarnations.

I still accept these influences but it now seems absolutely clear to me that a god-force, or call it "Spirit" is also at work in dreams, at least in the overall patterns of growth inherent in the individuation process.

Why then did He permit that magnificent stag access to my mind without also confronting me with as stunningly vivid an image of Jesus?

One dream would have done it--perhaps a tired Jesus reading aloud from Isaiah in the temple. Or Jesus walking toward me along the shore of the Sea of Galilee, studying me with His lucid, wise eyes. One dream. Could not the Spirit have shaped one dream about Him? I puzzled over that for years because it seemed so unfair.

One dream, of course, would not have changed my life overnight. It is absurd to think so. But it might have redirected my steps at a crucial point and spared me years of groping. Was one dream too much to ask from all those hundreds of alchemical explosives mixed nightly?

God, however, as I see it, chose to work within the dense textures of my own psyche. The truth is, within my inner darkness, death and madness were not strangers. I had met the stag in the cleared lot behind my family home. When I was a child, I played alone in that lot for hours, lost in fantasies in which I was both Pegasus and princess, savior and victim. In my lonely adulthood, the moon-stag was only an extreme mutant of Pegasus, and as such, he belonged in that barren lot.

--Kathleen Jenks

SOURCE: Journey of a Dream Animal by Kathleen Jenks (1975), pp. 159-64

EDITOR'S COMMENT

As a shaman, if I dreamed this, I'd see it more simply, as a powerful spirit proposing an alliance. "Help is offered: refusably," as that turtle once said in The Lathe of Heaven. But Jenks is sure the Black Stag is no such thing--he's madness. She complains God sent her no guides or emissaries. Surely they'd look like Jesus...

I'm skeptical. Jung himself made just this mistake. In 1913, he had repeated dreams and visions warning of World War I, but interpreted these as some internal psychosis, even when the dreams themselves insisted they were external and predictive--about societal madness, not his own. His interpretive bias toward internal ills ran deep. Understandable, I guess--he saw mentally ill patients with awful lives, who often did have self-destructive urges; little to live for. That's not uniquely Jungian, of course--consider Freud's death wish! Seeing inner demons is a therapists' job-risk, just as cops often start seeing criminality in everyone.

So Jenks expects inner demons, much as her mentor did. Not just here--in her dream Move Fences? Get Strafed!, Nazi planes shoot at her. She saw them as destructive internal forces; yet she'd just gotten a job at an airline where fliers yelled at her all day! Archetypalism can distract you from simple answers.

I suspect two puns here; she's trying to steer an independent course between 'stag' (the 'horny' bad-boy Sixties promiscuity of Rob and his harem) and "pussy" (mom's suburban, conformist femininity).

So no, I don't think that riding the Black Stag to that dark moon would be deadly. It might indeed mean acting out for a while--some casual affairs (a "stag" sex-life, like that of Rob, her ex: turnabout?), or a Wiccan phase (power animals and women's mysteries--the moon belongs to witches, after all) or both. But a total, permanent flight from reality? Seriously?

However, Jenks is Jungian and Christian, not Taoist, shamanic or Wiccan; she expects demonic (or at least daimonic) temptation, and gets it. Has she learned to say no to bad boys yet, as Jesus declined Satan's offer on the mountaintop? Yes! She passes the test! Yay! But she's not fending off psychosis, just practicing "No means no".

Is fantasy dangerous? Abused people (and Jenks was--see the Rob Dreams) do like escapism. Not a permanent solution, and (especially if drug-fueled) your escape can just become a new prison. But short-term, indulging in candy (whether sex, dreams, fantasy, comedy, bad romance novels...) can sustain you through dark patches like this. (Dark chocolate also helps. Booze, not so much.)

I speak as one who did surrender to the madness. I dreamt repeatedly of a beautiful black nightmare. Reader, I married her.

Worked out fine. I don't regret it. It wasn't dreams I needed to fear.

It's the dreamless I dread.

--Chris Wayan