My closest friends are gathered with me, visiting me. A terrible thing then happens: my friends are slaughtered by a group of wild animals (lions, tigers, etc.). The group is led by a mysterious black woman. I picture her in an African-style robe and holding a staff.

I am utterly grief-stricken, weeping inconsolably. There is a moment though, when I wonder whether I am so distraught over my friend Jason’s death because he had proven so helpful and supportive in my work. Generally, there is a feeling of loss: How can those so close to me all be destroyed in this way?

In the next sequence, Jason is no longer dead. But then, he’s left alone with his wife and I learn, after it’s too late, that she is the real culprit, that she has killed him.

There’s a sense of a murder mystery about the dream. Who is actually doing all these terrible things? Events run ahead of my awareness. They take place before I know what’s really going on.

I came upon the above dream of mine in searching for a dream of animals (I’ve had many) that might link up with John Dotson’s dream of 3/11/2010. In John’s dream, he is questioning some personal relationships, after which he is engaged “in some sort of ordeal, an arduous labor” in which he is led by an animal “in accomplishing a task.” Here is what I wrote in 2001, right after recording my own dream:

The black woman leading the wild animals seems archetypal: the Black Goddess, an instinctive force of nature mercilessly destroying my domesticated relationships and supports, and leaving me groundless and grief-stricken in the process.

In my current work, I associate the Black Goddess with the apeiron (the spaceless, timeless chaos of primordial nature). As I approach the end of writing this book [in 2001], I am more and more concerned about its publication and about communicating it to an appreciative audience, or at least one that will understand it. Lately I’ve despaired about this. Then is the point of the dream that apeiron will not allow me to write in such a way that I can maintain conventional relationships that will afford me support? Is this work killing all those relationships and leaving me isolated, cut off, as a result?

Post Script: My wife just came across an image of the Black Goddess carrying a staff, the staff being described by Jungian writer Marion Woodman as symbolizing “the incorporation of the masculine, helping the tantric practitioner to understand that in order to be whole we must embody and appreciate both the masculine and the feminine in ourselves.” The staff is what allows the Goddess to stand on her own without external supports, what imbues her with masculine energy. Is this telling me that the book I am completing must stand on its own, without the external support of conventional relationships?