Scene I

A woman says to me very affectionately, “Come lie down with me, sleep with me.” I don’t want to do it, I really don’t. I feel guilty about this. The woman is dying. She is my mother.

Scene II

I am in my parents’ bedroom and they are sleeping. I am trying to do something that would impress them: mount a ladder. I want the ladder to stand straight up. The exercise is closely associated with doing yoga, particularly the pose of standing on one foot with one arm stretched upward toward the ceiling. In the dream, I have to mount the ladder in my parents’ bedroom. There are two foam rubber ear plugs that I am supposed to wear while I do this [much like the ear plugs I’ve actually used in doing yoga], but they keep popping out.

Will-power is an element in the exercise: I have to keep the ladder erect, get it to stand straight up—but it keeps lapsing back. At one point, I have to do this from an impossible position, one in which the ladder is slanted on an acute angle with the floor and I am clinging to a rung with my back hanging down.

But I actually do get the ladder to straighten out. This is a paranormal event, a transcendental accomplishment, and I start to feel tremendous energy surging up in me, as if I am going to levitate. Then I stop myself. Yet I do want to impress my sleeping parents—especially my mother. I want her to see me levitate; if she sees this, she’ll be proud of me.

Scene III

I am lying on my back sleeping deeply, and my mother comes into my room and is approaching my bed. She is in a stage of half dress, wearing a long black slip and matching black top, as if she is getting dressed up to go somewhere. As she draws near to me, I panic and am attempting to pull myself out of the dream, to wake myself up by moaning.

*          *          *

I believe this dream uniquely maps my process of individuation. In scene I, I’m under my mother’s sway, feeling her strong gravitational pull. She wants me to lie with her, to sleep with her, and I feebly resist.

The next scene has me projecting myself out of the feminine orbit into an upright posture, a phallic thrust intended to impress mother with my power to do the impossible. Through force of will, I am to levitate, to stay erect in defiance of the laws of gravity. After having great difficulty maintaining my “transcendental erection,” I am on the verge of success. Through this colossal feat, I will make my mother proud of me. And I will win motherly approval on my own terms—not by succumbing to her influence but by breaking free, projecting myself outward and upward, projecting my ego into the infinite.

There is obviously an aspect of ego inflation here, the fantasy of soaring beyond the earthly sphere of mother’s body to attain supernal bliss. But I suspect there is more to this dream. For just when I am about to levitate, I stop myself. Why do I do that? Do I not want my mother to witness my paranormal accomplishment? Is that not the whole purpose of my efforts to defy gravity? It is. And yet—feeling a great surge of energy well up in me in advance of levitating—I shut the process down. Why? I propose it is because the energy surge short-circuits my egoic fantasy of realizing the infinite and confronts me with its electrifying actuality.

When I had the dream in 1991, I didn’t recognize its connection to an experience had 23 years earlier. On a night in 1968, I turned off the light beside my bed and drifted into a hypnagogic vision of moving on a sled across a large field of snow. Gliding soundlessly through the soft whiteness, a sense of serenity enveloped me. The sled then began to rise into the air, to levitate. As this happened, I was seized by a feeling of exhilaration that quickly built into the sense that every cell in my body was about to explode in unbearable ecstasy! The painful bliss became so excruciating that, by a conscious effort of will, I shut the experience down—just as I shut down the levitation experience in the dream had many years later.

I have come to understand my hypnagogic vision of 1968 as a spontaneous kundalini encounter — the encounter that started me on my long journey to the writing of this book. In chapter 7, kundalini energy plays a central role, and we see its intimate relationship to the uroboros, for the kundalini phenomenon is traditionally personified as a coiled serpent that swallows its own tail. Bearing in mind Erich Neumann’s association of the uroboros with the feminine archetype of the Great Mother, what conclusions am I led to in my attempt to understand the dream?

The dream can be related to Neumann’s synoptic take on the individuation process: “The same uroboric symbolism that stands at the beginning, before ego development starts, reappears at the end, when ego development is replaced by the development of the self, or individuation.” The dream begins in the presence of the uroboric Mother. I then seek to project myself above and beyond the Motherly realm. And yet, just when I seem on the threshold of achieving my goal of phallic freedom, the uroboros makes her presence felt again, heralded by an upsurgence of kundalini energy. I am not prepared for this. I am not yet ready to drop the egoic ideal of transcendental fulfillment for the actuality of the embodied Self. So I stop the process. Unable to accept the demise of my insular ego and to embrace the uroboros, in the final scene I retreat into deep sleep, only to react with panic when She approaches me. What Neumann says of individuation in general applies to the dream: the same uroboric symbolism that stands at the beginning reappears at the end. But I must embrace the uroboric Mother if individuation is to proceed, and this is something I have not yet fully done.