Similarities and Differences Between the Vision and the Dream

Similarities

Similarities between the described vision and the described dream are the threefold structure and themes of the ‘female' and ‘earthy’. These three may refer to what the current dominant patriarchal culture seems to underestimate or even to suppress:

• the female rhythmic :
  • the virginal pure, untouched;
  • the maternal receiving, carrying, nurturing, releasing into autonomy;
  • the old and wise;
• The feminine earthly
  • the autonomous indomitable power from the depths of earth and time;
  • the life-supporting and centring;
  • that which is taking back and is simultaneously a source of spirit and light.

What is common to the threefold structure of vision and dream is that they start with a virgin image, continue with a motherly image and conclude with an image of old age, death and rebirth. The images point far back into the past, into ´ prehistory ´. In terms of analytical Psychology the vision and the dream showed ancient archetypes, which work autonomously from the unconscious in individual and collective.

differences

One difference between the vision and the dream is, that the vision depicted the feminine as women, as individuals, or characters, and that the dream depicted the female as element earth. The vision showed a virgin, a nursing mother and an old sage. The dream showed a virgin rock formation, a maternal navel in the grass at my feet, and a burial chamber full of light. The vision showed human figures and seemed more personal, individual human. The dream on the other hand shows aspects of the earth and seems more impersonal, collective unconscious.

I read what I could get hold of scientific literature on these pictures and visited when possible prehistoric graves throughout Europe. Doing so, I found that femininity and human prehistory are by far more linked to each other than I ever could even only have assumed. Besides, I painted megaliths in various countries in Europe, but in Amsterdam I took drawing and painting lessons again in Nude, at the artist Paula Vermeulen. Studies and art practice changed my view of myself, my self-image, and of man and the world.

So I concerned myself firstly with the meaning of gender, the femininity, which again changed my understanding of the masculinity and of my manhood. Secondly, I began to immerse myself in the human and the pre-human prehistory. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe once said that man cannot understand himself, unless he understands his past. In his time one thought yet of a few thousand years. Today However we speak of an almost unimaginably long time, of millions and billions of years. The collective human past we imagine as materially stored in our genetics and immaterial in our collective unconscious.