I never paid much attention to dreams until 1963. I did not consider them worth remembering. But C. G. Jung was swiftly changing my mind. About four or five days after I began reading him in early August, I dreamed the following significant dream.

...twilight lemons and emeralds and browns--like looking through green-tinted Greyhound windows at fields.

I object: this makes the alley with its ashes, dirt, stones and cars part of our yard. I don't want the intrusion of an ugly world included in our yard. I am the oldest there and so my will makes the fence wave and skim back to original position while I watch from a distance. It was fun and gave me a surrealistic sense of power and joy. I think a car whizzed by as the fence returned home.

My pleasure was short-lived. Suddenly Nazi planes appeared and began strafing us. Everyone dove wildly into the leaves along the fence perimeter. Most of them chose to huddle up against the fence at the far end of the yard--the one that had "sailed" a few moments earlier. But I headed toward a side fence near our lilac trees because I felt instinctively that I would be safer away from the others. Since I also felt selfish and cold blooded for saving only myself, I shouted to the others to separate. Shrapnel was exploding all around us.

The Nazis left as suddenly as they had appeared. Someone cried that my youngest brother James had been hit. Also someone else had been hit. I felt a heartbroken grief mixed with guilt that I had not been able to save my own little brother. If only I had grabbed James first and dragged him with me to "my" fence!

I awoke then, before learning if he had died.

I believe I "felt" though that he had been killed and was lying there, slim and small, in the leaves...

I was frightened for my brother--he was fifteen then, but he had only been nine when I left home in 1957. He had been my father's favorite, but he always seemed like such a thin, sad child to me. I had barely known him during those crucial years. I felt it as a poignant loss and was terrified lest my dream prove prophetic, for then I would never have a chance to know him.

As for the rest of the dream, I felt it indicated that my unconscious trusted me to define boundaries and to keep "earth ugliness" away from me. I had been given a vestige of control over the forces that might split my psyche. But at the same time I was being warned that there was a danger from "above," from "sky ugliness" that was beyond my control. The risks I was running were shatteringly clear.

I did escape, however. And I found the manner of my escape meaningful: I had dashed to the side fence--the "primordial, unmoving fence," as I called it later. That suggested to me that I must lie low in times of danger in the most stable area of my psyche I could find.

I would eventually have to allow the intrusion of "earth ugliness" into my too-pretty childhood world--a world I was seeing through tinted glasses. To continue to keep it at bay would mean the destruction of my James-force--in other words, the destruction of my youngest "self ," my newly emerging hunger for growth. But I could not cope with the full brunt of that interpretation the summer of 1963--nor should I have. I did not want ugliness in my world. I resisted it with all my strength--and with good reason.

EDITOR'S NOTES

Jenks quotes Jung at length on the hazards of overriding resistance--it's "a vitally important defense mechanism against overpowering contents..." as if all danger and stress (and ugliness) is internal! Curiously, she doesn't explore the most alarming dream characters: Nazi pilots strafing the kids. If I were Kathleen...

• Forced to retreat under strafing from planes: Jenks had an airline job taking calls from hurried, angry fliers; she hated it, but needed the cash. She goes Jungian--assuming an assault by the unconscious--when fliers sniped at her all day.
• Child-parts of her want to grow, explore more adult turf, but can't while under attack: I too tend to retreat when under stress. I incorporate heavier insights only when I'm healthy, and have free time. A month later, on vacation in California, Jenks had a flood of major dreams.
• Is this really resistance? Jung assumes conflict in dreams (and resistance in therapy) meant the unconscious may overwhelm the conscious; but he himself had premonitions of World War I and mistook them for some inner psychosis--despite explicit warnings they were literal.
  Don't assume! Threats come from without as well as within. Dream of snipers? Beware snipers! Hunker down, sure--while it's raining lead.