FOREWORD
--Chris Wayan

In 1976-8, I had a series of warning dreams that urged me to leave a brilliant but abusive lover. But I dithered for three years, and it nearly killed me. Soon after, I read Kathleen Jenks's spiritual autobiography Journey of a Dream Animal. It showed me why I'd delayed. In 1961-63, she too had a series of dreams warning that her boyfriend Rob was bad for her and she needed to break free; but it took her several years. Like me.

Writing a decade later, she's caustic toward her own complicity--she obsessed, romanticized, projected and overlooked--but her dreams show no such delusions. The relationship wasn't all bad--she explored sex, literature, the arts, and the occult--but years later, her ex, Rob, confessed it wasn't just misunderstanding; he hurt her intentionally, out of a sort of spiritual envy.

In Journey of a Dream Animal, the Rob dreams are scattered through the book, and not all in chronological order. Here I've posted them in a straight timeline. Indents are her raw dream-journal (early 1960s); the rest, summary and comments (1974).

So then he hadn't just told me, I thought. After that I was afraid to ask about the other things. Then something very weird happened:

They had to be sure that all had the "mark." They held up their hands and I was puzzled. I looked at them and was shown diagonal cuts across one or two of each girl's fingers. I felt like a spy in their midst and also a little cheated because he had never given me this mark. I said I didn't have this and one of them took my hand and looked at it closely. The cuts were there--very small and slight. Then I remembered that he had scratched my hand one night and I hadn't understood why.

I awoke before I could announce my plans.

I refused to take the dream seriously in 1961. I felt it was a normal "anxiety dream." I had been deeply hurt by Rob's affairs that summer... But I felt such things were in the past by then because Rob had sworn that summer of 1961 that I was the only woman he loved. ("Trust me," he said quietly, his powerful eyes staring into mine. And I did...)

I had never heard of the "witch's mark" in 1961... but my memory of the strange scar remained clear--it had been on my left ring-finger, just above the mid-joint. Some years later I was startled to read an exact description of just such a 'seal' in Robert Graves' The White Goddess:

From the confessions of the members of these covens at their trial in 1664, it appears that the chief, or god, of these witches was known as Robin and that he sealed initiates with a prick from a needle made between the upper and middle joints of the physic-finger...

[Some pages later, Jenks considers Jung's "collective unconscious" as an explanation, but has her doubts.--Wayan]

...The witch's or Devil's mark on a finger between specific joints was evidently rare; I have only found mention of it in Robert Graves, that master of obscurities. Other writers on the subject place the mark where it more generally was found: on breasts or belly, or within vagina or rectum. If my dreaming mind were indeed dipping into a universal substratum of knowledge, as Jung would claim, why did it emerge with a unique little tidbit, accurate even to the joints on the proper finger, which one might more properly expect to find within a highly personal unconscious?

[Jenks concludes reincarnation explains such detailed "far memories" more plausibly than a collective unconscious; see her Turkish Flag for an example.]

It was the first dream about Rob I could remember since my arrival in New York. For that reason alone it would be important. But there was much more.

Rob and I were in it. Also a girl from our acting classes whom I shall call Gail. First the three of us were talking in a restaurant but then suddenly the scene shifted to my bed in my apartment. I was telling Gail about an incident concerning Rob. (She did not know our relationship in the dream.) I was very tired and at one point I mistakenly referred to Rob as "Pluto." I corrected myself at once and went on with the story.

Rob seemed to be daydreaming at the time and I assumed he had not noticed. "Did I tell the story correctly?", I asked, laughing, as I finished. He replied that I had except that it had been Pluto, and not himself, who had done whatever it was I had mentioned at that point.

I was delighted. What I had taken to be a slip of the tongue had turned out to be a genuine display of ESP. "Score one for me!" I cried. "Now we're quits for the peacock feathers!"

Poor Gail could make no sense of the conversation and looked at me as if she thought me crazy. (She did not know that Rob loved peacock feathers in real life and that I had once planned to make him a surprise gift of them. That had been two years earlier in Michigan. I had phoned the local zoo and asked them to save some feathers for me.

But one night, before I got them, as we were sleeping together, Rob suddenly jerked awake and then asked sleepily, "What is that about the peacock feathers?" It was my first experience with telepathy. I was startled and impressed. But my psychic fluke with Pluto evened the score.)

Rob only smiled rather vacantly and gently in the dream. The three of us Iay down then. I held Rob in my arms as he slept. I felt ill at ease because of Gail's presence. If she hadn't heard rumors about us before, I thought, she knows for sure now that Rob and I must be lovers. Yet I could not have endured further pretense so it was all right. I was clothed as we lay there and I felt very warm. Rob had taken off his shirt and lay half-naked and damp in my arms. After a while he awoke and I held his head in my hands. I was laughing-happy and glad that Gail saw my love, because now I could again be open and free.

Then something suddenly dawned on me:

His head, although it was Rob, was the head of a golden collie. It didn't seem a bit odd to me that he had the long, graceful, bcautiful nose and magnificent eyes of a collie. His mouth was open and he too was laughing. I wanted to say, "If I kissed you, you would suddenly turn into a prince!" But I did not say that because I often think he is annoyed by my fantasies. While we lay laughing, I awoke.

...I love dogs, especially collies. Therefore it will come as no surprise that I considered that dream a good omen. But it was not a "good" omen at all... "All you really long for is a man who is loving and laughing and very much there. But for Rob, don't you see, that's impossible. He's a splendid beast, I grant you that, but that's all he is. You would indeed have to change him, magically, into a 'prince' for him to become loving. He can't be what he isn't. At his very, very best, he is only a magnificent golden collie. Your 'secret love' is out in the open now for Gail and all the world to see--and what do you see? A beautiful animal. Face facts, kid."

But I could not--and perhaps the reasons lay more deeply in the textures of that dream. Perhaps the reasons had their root in a mythos springing out of what Jung would call the "collective unconscious."

In reevaluating that dream recently, I rather tardily grasped that it was not important that Rob turned into a collie--that specific breed was dictated by a localized personal preference. What is important is that Rob was turned into a dog, and that the dog-man was involved with Pluto, the god of death.

When I called Rob by the name of Pluto in the dream, it had felt "right" in that first split second. But of course that was impossible, so I immediately corrected myself. When I subsequently learned that I had been accurate the first time, there was a curious, pleasant dilation in my mind.

I felt quite strange because I could still feel just how I had slipped into the level where one can find another's thoughts. I realized there was no searching involved in it--just acceptance and forgetting what one was looking for.

But I had not just been tuning into someone else's thoughts, as I believed at the time. The Pluto archetype had emerged from deep within my own psyche in that flash. The dream was warning me in the most lucid way possible that I was confusing Rob with a potentially deadly animus proiection. I longed wistfully to break Rob's spell with a kiss, but it was I, not Rob, who was spellbound. The dog-man who seemed to be my lover was, in reality, my guard. Through any ruse necessary, he would prevent my escape from hell. He took his orders, in a sense, directly from the Pluto substratum within me. The dog is Cerberus, guardian of Hades.

From ancient times dogs have been associated with death. In Egypt they were benign and played an important role in the resurrection process. But a negative aspect of the dog appears in the myths of Greece. In ancient Greece, it was the three-headed Cerberus who guarded the underworld. Each head had a mane of fire; his tail was a serpent's; his very saliva was the deadliest venom. He was, it is clear, a frightful creature. He prevented the entry of the living--and the escape of the dead.

COMMENT

The dream Pluto haunted me--two aspects explored recurring dreams of mine.

1. The two experiences of ESP--Kathleen's, only valid inside the dream, and Rob's, two years earlier, apparently quite real. Does Kathleen invent one to match his because she has ESP envy? My own dreams Humble Three-Eyed Girl and Half-Elf express much the same idea.
2. Jenks realizes Rob is a collie, not a man, and interprets this in light of Greek myth. Since at the time (and now) I had plenty of dreams of animals (and animal lovers) who seemed positive (and still do) I found this frightening--was I misinterpreting my own animal anima? Yet my dreams stayed full of animal friends and lovers, more in the traditions of Native American shamans (Jung conceded that animals do seem friendlier in American dreams than European ones).

But she may generalize too far--and in a distinctly Jungian way, looking to Greco-Roman traditions as if they're mythology itself, not a regional branch. There's a simpler link between Pluto and dogs, after all--Walt Disney's Pluto the Pup, named for the newfound planet (in turn named for the god, but partly and sneakily for P(ercival) L(owell), vainest astronomer ever). Jenks, like all Americans of her generation, certainly saw those cartoons. Occam's Razor would surely say a simpler explanation than a Collective Unconscious is... Disney.

How serious am I about Pluto? Well, my dreams happily express serious issues through puns and kids' cartoons; it happens. I project my own style on Jenks. But doesn't Jung seem to project his love of Classical myths on others too?

I also suspect Jenks dismisses 'collie' too quickly. I hear a pun. Who's the Hindu goddess of creative destruction? Kali. And what's Rob to Jenks but a sex-changed Kali, leading her through a (hellish, I admit) journey of self-discovery. Out of the shallows, into the depths.

It was about a goldfish. It lay in a shallow container filled with mud and dirty water. I was repelled by the fish's reptilian flesh as it lay there, gasping for breath. But I could not let it die. I tried to push back the mud so that the fish would have a clear pool but the mud kept seeping back.

...finally, in exasperation, I let him lie in the shallows. He would either have to die or revitalize himself without any outside help at all--and it was the one time when the little creature most needed that outside help! I went into another room for awhile. At last, I went back to him and found he was still alive--more obviously so than before.

I scooped away the mud and put him back in the water. As he lay in my hand, I could feel breaths sobbing in his gold flesh. I was terribly happy...

Anyway, somehow the creature got into a better fish tank and I was scheming to get a larger one for him when I awoke.

It was July 4, 1963. In Michigan in my childhood, the Fourth of July usually meant fireworks and a happy family picnic with my grandparents in the dunes above Lake Michigan. New York City, by contrast, seemed more desolate than ever.

In the dream, my psyche blocked out the true season and made it the dead of winter.

I was back in Michigan. An unknown man named Sid had iust tried to rape me in my grandparents' bathroom. I fled from the house, running along a narrow path between towering banks of snow. I dashed across a street and then saw a child on a bicycle ahead of me. I caught up to him. The boy had the most hauntingly beautiful face I had ever seen. There was a sunniness and maturity about the fair-haired child that I loved. He turned his bicycle over to me so that I could pedal while he rode behind me on the fender. We took off. "Not too fast, though," he said gently; "the snow, you know."

But he trusted me. That moved me tremendously in the dream. His bicycle was an expensive foreign model and yet the boy trusted me with it. We zoomed along til we reached a curb. The rapist was close behind us by then and I wanted to bump the bike down over the curb and keep on going. But I was afraid that might upset the child and throw his bicycle out of alignment. I hesitated as we reached the brink. Then, as clearly as if he had spoken, I "knew" the serene child was telling me to do what I thought best. Again, he trusted me. So I lurched over the curb, made a right-angle turn, and sped off toward my real-life uncle's house two blocks away.

We arrived safely. I leaped off the bike and ran to my Uncle Roy. I was spilling out my fearful story when the rapist arrived... with his big graying, leering head. Uncle Roy pulled out a gun but Sid wasn't afraid of him. Then the beautiful boy pulled a gun and shot Sid dead.

Despite my relief, I was icy with fear. I was terrified that the light-haired boy might be put into prison or electrocuted for saving my life.

Yet the face of the strange, sunny child haunted me for days, lingering in my memory and consoling me... he had risked his own life for mine... Despite the very real risks involved... my mind trusted me. But I did not yet trust myself. I did not know which way to go. I was powerless to act.

In August... I finally began reading Jung and quickly recognized the identity of the boy in my dreams. He was the archetypal "child-savior"...

Who then was Sid, the rapist? Well, I thought gingerly, he symbolizes "dark forces" gathering around me. "Hah," said another voice within me. "That's too abstract and vague. Let's try it again: Who is Sid, the rapist?" With a sick shaky feeling, I then glimpsed the truth. The rapist was Rob. That had to be the answer. Rob was playing the role of a spiritual rapist in my life--and I was playing into his hands. His mental cruelty, his long silences were designed to ravish and plunder my spirit. This was not on a conscious level, but his superego knew exactly what it was doing. And my own psyche was sounding an urgent SOS.

(Long afterward Rob got drunk one night and admitted to me that he had been trying to destroy me. "You always held something back from me," he muttered. "My god, Rob," I protested, "l gave myself to you totally--body and soul." He stared at me with his intense eyes. "No!' he objected, "not soul. You kept it from me. So I wanted to destroy it. I can't get free of you unless I can destroy you, Kaf." It sent chills through me. We were ill matched for love but brilliantly paired for rituals of pain.)

The Lord's voice shaking the wilderness,
the Lord shakes the wilderness of Kadesh;
the Lord's voice rending the oak tree
and stripping the forest bare.
          --Psalm 28

I had fallen asleep, and then I thought I woke up and that everything was taking place in the immediate present. A shoe floated through the air, the walls in my apartment were moving, wooden figures on a music box came alive as the music started to play on its own. I floated up to my ceiling and then fell--booom--back to the floor at the foot of my bed. Suddenly the wall opened up before my eyes and I saw:

... a forest of beautiful, dark trees that I knew and loved. Then I heard chopping and I ran through the opening.

I found myself in an enormous room. All the trees had been hewn to the earth and then chopped into great discs and polished like petrified wood. I was amazed at such swift destruction and I wept.

On my right, in front of a pile of polished wood, sat a burly woodman going over his accounts at a long table. I rebuked him helplessly with my eyes. He took no notice. I decided to stay around and keep an eye on him lest he sneak into my apartment behind my back and wreck it as he had the forest.

...He was still seated at the table. I started weeping again. I wanted him to notice me and talk to me and like me. Then I could bemoan the fate of the trees and ask him why. I wanted to know who the new master of the room would be too. But the burly woodman paid no attention to my tears.

Suddenly I noticed an entire wall crafted out of the slain trees. It was in dark greens, browns, rusts. The coloring was extremely subtle and different lights brought out new shadings. I stared and stared. The wall stretched as high as a cathedral, and then I saw a second and a third wall done in the same fashion. The design was of trees stretching up into the shadows. They were lofty, "spiritualized', trees. The atmosphere was Zen-pure.

I glanced back at the woodman/artist who had created those walls so swiftly. He went on calmly with his paperwork, continuing to ignore me, forcing me to discover the secrets of that room for myself.

...Everything there was huge, huge, huge ! Many oriental tables made from priceless green lacquer. They were piled around all over. At first I accepted their enormous size. It seemed quite natural. But suddenly I realized that only a GIANT could ever use them. The burly man? No, I decided--too small. It had to be a for-real, goddamn giant about twenty feet tall, for Christ's sake!

With mounting excitement, I examined the great chamber prepared for this giant. Unfortunately, just as I was about to ask the burly man when I could meet his master, my telephone rang and the dream came to an abrupt end.

The identity of my new neighbor, the giant, remained a mystery. Since he had chosen to reside in a realm of artistry, I knew only that he represented a powerful creative force--not "God," certainly, since why would HE ever want to be my neighbor? but a pure force nonetheless. His calm, well-organized servant had chosen silence as his way of dealing with me and I figured the giant would no doubt be even more silent, more benign. But even if he seemed to be unaware of me, his mere presence beyond the secret opening in my wall would give me strength.

The woodman was, in a sense, an idealized "me"--both artist and analyst, going over his records as carefully as I went over my dreams. Our joint purpose was to construct a peaceful temple wherein a mysterious Being might dwell, but the resemblance ended there. His efficiency came from his quiet strength; mine was only a frantic sort of control.

But the dream was remarkable because, despite my weakness, it showed that my mind was reaching upward to something "lofty and Zen-pure." My thoughts no longer revolved exclusively around Rob; the focus had shifted and there was a creative freedom in my thought. A whole new preparatory note had been struck:

...I hope it turns out to be as splendid in potential as it seems at this moment! Of course, you're not completely free. This is only a taste.

It was indeed "only a taste." My unconscious mind was clearly pleading with me: a giant wishes to move in, Kathleen, but your old life has to be hewn to the roots before he can take possession...

I chose to ignore the plea. I was a bruised reed--several green shoots were starting to bud but that was all. Yet I leaned my whole weight on the reed and waited to see if it would bear me. Risking all my newfound strength, I again decided to contact Rob. I left a foolish little note with the receptionist at his acting studio and then settled into the familiar routine of waiting for his phone call. Several endless days passed. I phoned his studio and learned the note had not yet been picked up; it would be several more days before he had another class. "Well," I thought to myself, "I've waited this long, I can wait a little longer."

Looking back, I am appalled by my recklessness and yet, in all honesty, I have to admit there was probably nothing else I could have done at the time. My inner growth was worthless to me unless I could share it with the man I loved...

[Weeks passed. He never answered. In September, the airline Jenks worked for gave her a free air pass, and she flew to California...]

On Friday the 13th, my first night in the sordid hotel in San Francisco, I had dreamed briefly of Rob. He seemed somewhat plumper than in real life but he was in marvelously good spirits and I was aglow with joy. We laughed and chattered and then he asked me to step closer to him.

...I was so full of yearning and gentleness! It came as a shock suddenly to see that it wasn't Rob at alll That I had mistaken someone else for Rob ! I retreated again, cool and indifferent inside, still waiting.

The interpretation was obvious but I was incapable of handling it. I convinced myself the dream meant I must struggle to discern the "true Rob" when he re-entered my life, as I was sure he would. I must be careful not to mistake his games and images for his true self.

In a sense, this interpretation was valid, but hardly practical with a man whose relationships were kept intact through a bravura display of gamesmanship.

The following morning in San Francisco I dreamed the mate to that dream:

...dreamt of real Rob at last and we were very vibrant and alive and having fun. I was witty and natural with him, and I thought, "Well, this time he's the real Rob for sure and not that fake one from my dream the other night." Now I'm finally capable of being natural with him for once in my life!

The night after I visited Big Sur, a dream exposed another area of my destructiveness. It involved a creek that wound its way down a steep hillside. In places it flowed into clear, lovely lakes; elsewhere, it narrowed to a trickle choked with weeds, insects, long grasses, and dead oak leaves. A handful of children and I were obliged to follow its course down the hill. In places we could swim freely; in other places we had to crawl. The creek finally flowed into an enormous gutter, but at that point, we had to retrace our steps and start all over again. This apparently necessary and yet wasteful repetition was a constant theme in my early dreams.

Suddenly a little man with leering, piercing eyes appears. It seems I am somehow "bound" to him as if to an employer; this Svengali takes delight in upsetting me:

...He came to the creek to point out, with amusement, a special danger: it was a small, thick snake about one finger long and of a yellowish red color.

. . . The little man maliciously held the snake close to me while explaining how to scratch it on its head and make it happy!

. . . The nice, wide, sparkling, clean places I had once loved, I now dread. Who knows how many snakes lurk there? One snake swam near me once but I escaped.

They were all the ugly, judging, poisonous, masculine 'put-down' voices within me. Like my father in the monastery dream, they belittled me and treated me as a joke; like my lover, they made me feel ugly and inadequate, even "sick," They would eat at my confidence and sap my energies. They would not be swept down the gigantic sewers; more would spring up back in the headwaters, and eventually their destructiveness would have to be faced and respected.

With each deadly serpent, I would have to follow the awful little man's advice and "scratch it on its head and make it happy"--that is to say, pay attention to it, gentle it, make friends with it despite my revulsion, and handle it with humor. The soul cannot achieve wholeness without an integration of these energies.

My conscious mind could not begin to cope with such a dream in 1963 and blandly dismissed it as a textbook exposé on the dangers lurking in the unconscious world. And that was it. I was not going any deeper. I wanted to get as far away from that dream as possible.

One of the worst dreams of all dates from my last night in Carmel, and it haunted me all the way back to New York. It was ghastly. It was about Madame Nhu, the manipulative Dragon Lady of South Vietnam. We were in a subway tunnel and at first she was astonishingly lovely. Then, suddenly, she was tall and mannish.

...There was a sinister plot afoot. She was going to pick up a dead body and she wanted help. She was gruesome and a little pitiful.

Madame-Nhu-New was unaware of this. She was excited and absolutely lovely, like a young bride.

...She was being married, she told me, to the dead body she was getting in the subway locker. The body was her lover's.

. . . But have you never heard," I cried, "of a marriage of the spirit? Why do you need his dead body?!"

Puns usually bore me but the two in that dream could not be overlooked. I had believed myself "new," reborn, and yet I was still the same frail, steel-willed and naïvely destructive Dragon Lady I had always been. And I was still dressed in hand-painted, airy fancies of love. I could no longer evade what madame-Knew: my attempt to find Rob was as horrifying to my unconscious mind as a desire for marriage with a dead body.

The days dragged by and my dreams made it unmistakably clear that my spirit, at least, had long outgrown Rob and was demanding a ritual purification.

In one such dream we embraced with great tenderness but then, strangely, I felt compelled to break away from him and douche for ritualist, not hygienic, reasons. He got frustrated and started to put on his silly tennis shoes near a grand, elegant, Roman pool. I took him in my arms to apologize and console him... Suddenly, with a stab of pain, I realized I was rapidly outgrowing him, that time was cruelly short, and that we'd probably never make love again. Time was drawing me so far and farther from him.

Hating myself for it, again I broke away for the purification because I knew somehow it was necessary. In a sense I was "forced" to finish it simply because of the energy moment I had put into orbit by starting it. Yet I feared it would cost me Rob.

I awoke before I could return to him.

Just before awaking from that dream, I dreamed I had already awakened and was already writing down that particular dream. I even began interpreting it, although I was still asleep...

[A year or so later, Rob married someone else.]