The Doll in Our Pocket

The path is lit

Last year, I had a significant pathway open up, which led me to write about the film Eraserhead. I had a series of dreams that ultimately gave me the confidence I needed to set my sights on a creative path I hadn’t considered seriously for myself. Prior to this, a feeling to have an online presence for writing lingered; I just didn’t have any idea what I would even write about yet! The feeling persisted, and the avenue revealed itself some months later, through dreams and synchronicities. The journey of the process is discussed here in this podcast, as it is contextual to the film analysis.

However, this week, something else clicked for me that I thought would be interesting to share on top of what had already been talked about on the audio. I essentially stumbled upon an amplification of the dream that ignited it all. In Jungian terms, amplification is a method for dream interpretation that helps to zoom out on symbols within a dream to its potential wider context, especially useful if one is at a loss for the personal context. Just to reiterate, over months of synchronicities and symbols, I was stumped, then finally, something actionable landed for me. It surrounded itself via a central theme of birth, monsters or hybrid babies and culminated into the feeling like I had decoded what Lynch’s Eraserhead was about, where many before have looked past its possible deeper context.

The selection of dreams that sparked it all, as something serious to pay attention to in my life, I will roughly recap two:

Dream:
I was on a toddler bike atop a hill, but I was struck by indecision. The hills around me were ripe to ride down, allowing for speed and momentum, but I was overthinking it. People had gathered around to watch the descent.

Interpretation: Here, I needed to take action (ride down) and trust the process, even if it felt clumsy or child-like (toddler bike) to do so.

Then a week later…

Dream:
I had a small object in my hands, trying to fix it with batteries, I keep putting them in and out. An older woman was giving me advice, but I was making excuses. She said my house was just over there, and I said that it wasn’t, since the electricity did not work. Finally, the batteries click in, and the object is now a figurine, where what appears to be the head, a light turns on.
Later, we head down the path to the cottage. I can open the door and flick the lights on. I recognise the cottage now. The woman is outside wandering down a path. I bring a stick with me to offer it to her for defence, after seeing a slender brown dog, but she doesn’t need it. She stops near a bridge, beneath which is a clear stream under it with multiple paths. We cross over, and she points out, “Nice, Amanita muscaria!” I’m surprised and ask where. In the shallow stream below, along the wall, is the mushroom and blue butterfly. After noticing them, I started to see more and more pairs all around – an incredible and beautiful sight.
We head back to the house, and I get a montage of scenes related to advice, practical processes to do with art and design. How to store things away, how to care for materials. I wanted to see the project to fruition, but the dream ended.

Interpretation: In the first part of the dream - something within has been activated (figurine), since it has been paid attention to and given the source (batteries) it needs to awaken. The cottage now in action, is my psyche ready for creative work, revealing that it was dormant or inaccessible for a while. The instinctual nature represented by the dog does not need to be defended against. The stream nearby offers up what is available, a vision that is teeming with magical life, a surreal sight, which reflects the uniqueness of the viable life source.
The cottage and the women show me what tools I have at my disposal and offer their mentorship.

Vasalisa the Wise

Now recently, I came across the cross-cultural fairy-tale of “Vasalisa the Wise (or the Beautiful)”, in Clarissa Pinkola Estés book on the Wild Woman archetype.

In this tale, a girl is initiated into the mysteries through a doll handed down to her by her mother on her deathbed. When the father remarries, a cruel scheme by the stepfamily sends her into the darkness of the forest to seek the witch’s abode to ask for fire for their hearth. Since she is a naïve, helpful girl, she does as she’s told. Vasalisa makes it through the forest with the help of her doll, a stand-in for her intuition – the path is made by trusting its guidance. Sustained with little food, she can offer. She encounters horsemen with the colours of alchemical significance, loyal to the witch, and interestingly, the doll wears the same colours.

Finally, she makes it to the home of Baba Yaga, a fearsome crone and is enlisted by her through a series of intense, tedious and consuming trials, which the doll manages to complete for her when the trial exceeds Vasalisa’s own capacity. Baba Yaga, while not ecstatic at Vasalisa’s resilience, since she’s a rather vicious cannibal when it suits, allows her to ask anything she wishes. Tempered by the doll, Vasalisa hesitates to go further than enquiring about the horsemen, since the deeper knowledge of the three floating hands that appear to cook or resolve tasks for Baba Yaga herself would unknowingly fail her initiation.

Baba Yaga eventually rewards Vasalisa with what she came for, fire for the hearth, which translates to a fiery skull on a stick - she is instructed to take the fire back to the home of her origin and present it to the step-family. Vasalisa returns and contemplates discarding the skull in the garden; fortunately, she is convinced by it to stay strong. With her newfound power, she enters the home, where the skull’s fire burns through the step-mother and sisters, evidently casting its judgment upon them.

Ultimately, the fairy tale is similar to a hero’s journey, or specifically, the descent into the underworld, since it has been likened to the myth of Hades and Persephone following her subsequent transformation. Vasalisa, at the end of the tale, has been initiated into the wisdom and intuition of Life-Death and Rebirth, first with her mother’s blessing through the doll, a matrilineal intuitive wisdom, and through the trials of Baba Yaga, culminating in the gifts of instinctual awareness, perception, discernment and life cycles or the alchemical stages.

"As women we call upon our intuition and instincts in order to sniff things out. We use all our senses to wring the truth from things, to extract nourishment from our own ideas, to see what there is to see, to know what there is to know, to be the keepers of our own creative fires, and to have intimate knowing about the Life/Death/Life cycles of all nature—this is an initiated woman." ¹

What’s in a doll?

"The doll is the symbolic homunculi, little life. It is the symbol of what lies buried in humans that is numinous. It is a small and glowing facsimile of the original Self. Superficially, it is just a doll. But inversely, it represents a little piece of soul that carries all the knowledge of the larger soul-Self. In the doll is the voice, in diminutive, of old La Que Sabe, The One Who Knows." ²

This cottage dream not only revealed that I had a figurine or doll, but that it was something that needed batteries (or food, energy) to be activated, like the crumbs for Vasalisa’s doll. If I just needed to listen to the voices of the women advising me, instead of making excuses to the contrary.

The excuses I had in waking life were many, which I had to slowly shed. I didn’t believe I had the capacity to create or analyse from the depth psychology lens, since I had not gone deep into the works of Jung or other analysts to qualify for such a standing. There’s always a level of something akin to imposter syndrome or the idea of feeling little next to giants. I had to learn to let go of the indecision, the feeling of inadequacy or incompetence, even the idea that it was even worth pursuing at all. Since surely someone had these insights already on the analysis at hand, the research around the film helped to ease those self-doubts.

Returning to the dream, the support I was shown came in the shape of spiritual mothers or mentors, all reminding me I have the gifts and ability to work on the real-life task ahead, and that it was important to do so. This realisation was, and still is, immensely reassuring and heart-warming to have received this knowledge, knowing that the psyche has my back if I keep an ear to the ground and listen to it, and to also learn to trust the process of unfoldment. I knew that dream was pivotal in that moment of my life and a pertinent message from the self to keep going!

As I continue to write and explore these themes for myself and the collective at large. I feel that women especially need to trust in that personalised guidance that comes straight from within. I feel we can get too carried away with gurus and teachers when we have a greater personality within us, not that mentorship should be avoided, rather that we have to understand ourselves from a deeper level, not just on the surface, lest we project our gifts onto others. I am learning to trust that voice within, and trust what comes next as all part of my remembering and learning process, as long as I have ears to hear and eyes to see.

"We feed the deep intuitive self by listening to it and acting upon its advice. It is a personage in its own right, a magical dollish-sized being which inhabits the psychic land of the interior woman. In this way it is like the muscles in the body. If a muscle is not used, eventually it withers. Intuition is exactly like that: without food, without employment, it atrophies. The feeding of the doll is an essential cycle of the Wild Woman archetype — she who is the keeper of hidden treasures." ³

In our strange and uncertain times, and just like some mysteries that should not be delved into, like the three hands that help Baba Yaga to complete tasks or what Estés describes as ‘the core of the numinosum’, it is a bit like wanting to understand the minutiae of a calendar’s design, instead of preparing to bear down the season ahead. Returning to this inner knowingness is an imperative for us all, and yet it is a rhythm within cycles and has its own opportune timing or kairos.

"As a woman lives them, she will understand more and more of these interior feminine rhythms, among them the rhythms of creativity, of birthing psychic babies and perhaps also human ones, the rhythms of solitude, of play, of rest, of sexuality, and of the hunt. One need not push it, the understanding will come. Some things must be accepted as being out of our reach, even though they act upon us, and we are enriched by them." ⁴

It is endlessly incredible to me how the unconscious maps so consistently to these ancient stories, figures and symbols, even without one’s own conscious concept of certain archetypes or even the foreign culture it stems from. Jung’s mapping of the unconscious gives us a framework; however, each one of us has a responsibility to discover what unique aspect of that framework is within us. Suffice it to say, the unconscious is mysterious, timeless, anticipatory and quite amorphous in nature.

Guide for life

I simply wanted to share a personal anecdote, but I hope I have somewhat inspired you to look more closely at your own dreams and how they may fit into your life context. Since within us lies a bountiful source of wisdom, guidance, self-knowledge and creativity. So write them down, sit with them, and mark down how they feel. If you need some structure, this guide is useful to get started.

Dreams have their own language, and one must try to adapt to it in order to grasp the glimpses of symbolic insight and develop a relationship with the unconscious. There is a difficulty in interpretation for even the well-seasoned, but every now and then, a precise message can be felt and understood, directly from your soul, waiting to be heard and acknowledged, with an orienting wisdom and timelessness far deeper than we can perceive.

Till next time,
Bek

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