The Journey into Shadow

The following is a highly personal account of my own journey, which may have greater or lesser applicability to you in detail.

Bruce Duncan has written a fascinating book: Pray Your Way: Your Personality and God. He applies Jungian personality typology theories (such as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator) to prayer, with considerable sense and insight (stressing, for example, that there are no rigid "rules" of how your personality type expresses itself; they are tendencies). He also talks about the "shadow", Jung's term for the part of the personality which is hidden from our conscious awareness, and often undeveloped and childish when it appears (under stress, usually). This tends to be our "least preferred" way of dealing with the world, which again Myers-Briggs theory sheds further light on. (I have a digression which explains the basics of this theory.) Among other things, he uses colours to symbolise the different kinds of prayer - yellow for intuitive, blue for thinking, red for feeling, and green for sensing - and I have since incorporated these into prayer beads.

I began thinking about these ideas, and realised that Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings is a very Jungian myth (though Tolkien would probably have resisted this idea vigorously). The home of evil, which threatens the comfortable world of the Shire, is Mordor, "where the shadows are". In order to destroy the threat, a small, weak, rather reluctant but courageous hero has to leave comfort and seeming security and journey into the shadow, carrying a symbol and artefact of the shadow's power - the One Ring - to destroy it. A number of other characters argue against the journey, saying that the power of the Ring should be used against the Shadow directly, but the wise realise that this would only, in the long term, give the Shadow greater power, even if at first it seemed defeated. Direct resistance to the Shadow, though it is offered - partly to distract attention from the Ringbearer's quest - is ultimately futile. Only the seemingly doomed journey into Shadow holds any true hope.

Shortly before I began these reflections, I had been to see the play Shadowlands, based on incidents in the life of C.S. Lewis in which he, a bachelor in middle age, met, married, loved, and lost (to cancer) Joy Gresham. I identify to some extent with Lewis - our personalities are similar - and I therefore was aware that the dangers he faced, of never being able to love, never having the courage for intimacy, were dangers for me also. My own shadow included much of my sexuality.

I was musing on these things at the same time as I was reading Duncan's book, and in this period I had two dreams - which Jung, especially, held up as means of accessing the unconscious.

The first dream was of rings - I was in a tale based on The Lord of the Rings, and I had somehow got hold of a pink ring which was the Ring of Love. I was also wearing three other rings. There were a total of seven rings of power; I held four, and the Dark Lord, the Lord of the Shadow, held three, including the Ruling Ring. With my four rings, I began to oppose his forces; I had magical power, and was able to divert some volcanic eruptions which were occurring to destroy his armies (with some regret, because it was the Ring of Love, after all). When I awoke, I realised that two of the other rings I had been wearing were the rings I actually did wear - a silver signet on the ring finger of my left hand, inscribed with the Unutterable Name YHWH, to symbolise my relationship to God, and a silver-and-jade ring on the middle finger of my right hand, because I like silver and jade. The fourth (on the right ring finger) was misty and undefined. I had worn the pink ring on my left hand, third finger.

The second dream was much more realistic. I was talking to an old friend, and giving him a piece of my mind about faults I saw in him. The four characteristics I identified were arrogance, lust, materialism and selfishness. I actually woke up most of the way through my tirade and continued mentally on with it without a break, so close was it to my waking opinions.

Now, another thing Duncan had said about the shadow is that it's often what upsets us most in other people that is part of our own shadow. Reflecting on all of this, I came to the following dream interpretations. (My personal belief on dream interpretation is that the interpretation you come to is always a useful insight, because even if the dream itself wasn't about what you think it was about, your interpretation still says something about you.)

The two dreams, like Pharaoh's dreams of the fat cows and thin cows and the good grain and poor grain, were (in a sense) one dream (Genesis chapter 41 verse 25). The four rings were the four characteristics I had identified in my friend; all of them had two sides to them, a positive and a negative. They may also be identified with the four Jungian personality aspects, although I have more suspicion of this because I wasn't sure how to assign the four aspects (two of them were assisted by the colours of the rings, but the other two could almost have gone either way round).

I drew up the following table to record my insights. The "weak" row gives the (positive) characteristic that a person afraid of the characteristic in the corresponding "strong" row will tend to lack. For example, a person afraid of arrogance will lack the virtue of confidence.

It was, of course, significant that the Dark Lord in my dream still held three rings, including the Ruling Ring. Since writing this piece originally, I have had another dream which may shed light on what these are.

I had been reading E.R. Eddison's odd book Mistress of Mistresses, which is largely about power of various sorts (and the strange diction of which colours the following paragraphs; I often am influenced in my writing style this way, by what I have been reading most recently). The principal characters mostly have, and exert, power over the opposite sex; the male characters also have military power, and are fighters of personal prowess (there are a number of violent episodes in which they exert power over others by beating them up). The only exception to both of these is a wizard, who has his own kind of power, of course.

In my dream, I was acting like one of these characters: intimidating someone, with my voice and by offering him physical violence. The setting was a public swimming pool (at least, it had become that by the time of the confrontation). I had just used the urinal, and was enraged to be stopped on my way out by an official who tried to charge me money for having done so (though I was wearing swim shorts, and had no money with me). I expressed my rage, and asked how much; he gave an inflated figure (seven dollars, if I remember rightly), and I began to shout in his face and grab him by the ears, demanding to know if he had increased the sum because I was being difficult, browbeating him into confessing this. He was clearly frightened of me. I woke (it was just after three in the morning), and when I had assembled my wits realised that this was part of my Shadow which, as a physically weak and unintimidating person, I had suppressed, striving to be known for gentleness and kindness.

I wondered if this was one of the rings, and then realised that it was the Ruling Ring - the ring of power, "One Ring to rule them all". This led me to wonder if I could now guess the other two also.

Thinking more about the dream, I also recalled that it had a theme which has recurred in my dreams a number of times: When I went to use the men's, it was in an open setting and there were women present, using it also. As far as I can recall, the details of this theme are never the same twice, but the theme itself recurs: I am using a public convenience (the kind of dream which tends to occur when you drink a lot of water, as I do), and it is more public than I would like; there are women in it, from whose eyes I attempt to hide my private parts.

I have associated this theme in the past with the fact that my mother, when I lived at home, had a regrettable tendency to fling open the door of the lavatory without knocking (the door had warped, and was difficult to lock), and the fact that I had had dreams on this theme much less frequently since leaving home seemed to confirm this - perhaps it does. But on reflection, I think it has a deeper meaning. I think it represents my fear of women invading my privacy and discovering my sexual nature through my everyday, irrepressible actions. It is a great point with me not to allow women to know I find them attractive, or even to let them know that I find other women attractive (which has led more than one to think I am homosexual, which I am not). Interestingly, since I married the dream-theme has recurred, but I no longer feel uncomfortable in the situation.

Thinking further back in the dream, I realised that before I visited the public pool I had dressed in what, to my waking mind, was the costume of a clown - striped in pink, baggy, with a bow tie and a large hat which had enormous buttons on it. This prompted the thought (remember, it was in the early hours of the morning, and my mind was associating in a way only partly rational - probably a good thing when probing the depths of the unconscious) that I am always very aware of my own dignity, especially around women.

Given these three insights, I can now draw up an additional table:

*Modesty used in a different sense from the first column of the other table, as should be clear from context.

Naturally, just because I have filled the total of seven for the seven rings of my original dream does not mean that I have exhausted my Shadow and brought it all out into the light. I look forward, with some trepidation, to further discoveries. But I must also work out what to do with the ones I have already - how to open myself up to change and develop in these areas, and let the grace and light of God shine into them.

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This material is copyright 1998 to Mike McMillan. Use for profit is reserved to the author unless otherwise arranged.