Throughout this numinous dream, I am trying to tell a dream. But it isn’t clear what the dream is, or who I want to tell it to.

The dreamscape has a static quality. There is a sense of formal patterning, as if each of the figures has been set in its proper place for a timeless ceremony. Here is a reproduction of the diagram I drew upon awakening:

The diagram shows me standing alongside a building (I’m the figure on the lower right). Some distance along the façade, are two men (sketched above). To my immediate left is a door, and, as it swings open, there is a woman standing at the threshold. She is facing me.

 *          *          *

I wake up with an association to the two men: “yani” (or “yoni”) and “lingum” are the words I write down. I’ve heard these terms before but am not sure what they mean. My vague impression is that they have to do with male sex organs.

Follow-up research tells me that “yoni” is the Sanskrit word for vagina, and “lingam” is related to phallus. In Hindu religion, the terms have spiritual significance, being associated with the goddess Parvati and the god Siva, respectively. In Hindu Goddesses, David Kinsley describes the yoni-lingam relationship as expressing the erotically divine union of opposites.

I look again at my diagram. Recalling from my research that the yoni has been characterized as the “divine passage,” I wonder whether the open doorway can be understood as the vulva. Perhaps then, the male figure facing the doorway could be taken as the lingam or phallus and the two male figures above possibly as testicles.  The dream diagram could then be seen as mapping the primordial rite of sexual union.

(back to Chapter 7)