Inrterpretation of Jane's Dream

"I climb, ascend as in my imagination should be a building. Having climbed very high, I expect to find a storey, an apartment, at least doors leading to a big platform. Instead of that I find difficulty in getting on the tiny balcony, carrying my satchel on my back, which gets stuck in the strings attached to the sides of both corners, almost causing me to tumble and fall from enormous height.

Then I find instead of doors leading to halls or whatever, kind of a mirror (at first this seems barricaded, as if I've got to push some big black bear or other animal aside), but it's not a true mirror though. This tiny balcony, me having climbed all the way over here, apparently with full expectation, and now acrobatically having to climb all the way down. And... most astonishing: what first was supposed to be a high storey building, turned out to be a brownish closet with open shelves... So I go like an acrobat, one hand then the other, one shelf then the lower and lower... There's no end to it it seems.

When I arrive ground floor the dream proceeds with the topic it originally had, namely 'my piano recital'...

OK... For some reason I think I get the message, but it's awfully scary.

I want to get direction in my life, being completely devastatingly damaged, and all I get is dream symbols which only point to the fact that: NO YOU WON'T GET THERE WHERE YOU WANT."

Could someone shed a different light on this weird fragment?

I was just rereading an essay by Marie-Louise von Franz called The Discovery of the Self in Archetypal Dimensions of the Psyche. In it she says (p371):

Perhaps someone facing an imminent and problematic decision might come for a consultation. S/he wants to get a divorce, for example, but not give up hir children. And what do dreams do in such cases? They do not touch upon the burning issue at all, but they comment on the dreamer’s rationalism or obstinacy or other secret character defects. To begin with there is disappointment, even shock, that the unconscious took so little notice of the urgency of the current situation. Only later in retrospect does one discover that, in avoiding a confrontation with the rigid position of consciousness, by ingenious subtlety the unconscious was pointing towards dismantling some rigidity in the dreamer’s approach – that would result in the problem resolving in an entirely unforeseen way.

However, even after the study of 40,000 dreams, I would never predict what a person’s dream ‘should’ be like regarding a given situation. Each dream composition is always so creatively unique. The intelligence of the dream can only be compared to the other miracles of nature: the ingenious organisation of DNA, or the processes of molecular biology, or the development of higher organisms altogether. [I have adapted the writing to gender neutrality.]

I dont know if <the topic it originally had, namely 'my piano recital'> means that you are a pianist, or whether this is merely a performance anxiety dream which expresses itself this way? 

   Looking now at your Burglary Dream I see this is so. 

But speaking as a musician I know for myself the intimate relationship between psychological experiences and one's own craft or art. 

What I find your dream evokes in me is the sense which I sometimes have that 'if there were any justice in the world' something I have done should be recognised. I may have ascended to a great height within /as a result of my endeavours - yet am deeply disappointed to find this doesn't produce the response in others I had hoped for. And why? Look at the baggage I am carrying, which causes me to get hung up - and ultimately to stumble and fall. Fall from what? From my expectation of what should occur - as if I can control the outcome, the responses of others, as I seek to control my own performance. (Damn them!) 

So what do I have to do? I have to climb down, to re-ground myself. Is this humiliating? It shouldnt be, unless we have a puffed up ego, and the whole experience is like a pin to a balloon. Well, we had great hopes, but were they realistic &/or were they congruent with our soul/psyche? Did we want to make a great splash, and have a virtuoso career? All well and good if this is our path (often q a superficial and limiting one) or has our inner dynamic or daimon/genius some q other pathway for us to follow. 

We will always be at our most potent and strongest if we're standing on the ground to which our soul/psyche has led us, for there the complex resonances of our personality will acquire an amplitude and resonance they cannot have where we dont 'belong'. That place of belonging/home is the lifelong search of we born into the deracinated culture of the West, for only the lucky few are born with the network of meanings that come with membership of a peasant culture.

Look, in this dream instead of a high storey building (eminence/celebrity) we find <a brownish closet with open shelves> and guess what? In this secret recess of the soul 'the cupboard is bare'. And brownish? Well, you may not like this, but in the period of my life when I was creatively blocked I had a tremendous number of dreams about pooing accidents. For our lives to shine on the outside, they need first to shine on the inside, and that means cleansing ourselves of the stinky grievances /wounds /grudges that fester in our hearts. Once one engages with that process, miraculously, mysteriously, the cupboards are no longer bare.

Is there no end to it? Yes there is. And it can stop the moment we accept we're in the right situation for us right now. If we go on thinking we have to find out how to be someone in order to be acceptable, then yes, it's an endless climbdown. But once we say to The Powers That Be, yes, Im here, this is me. Im ready to work from my true centre - then we immediately discover 'the ground of our being' and are in a position to building something real and lasting where we can give of our truth to the world without pretence or the charades involved in trying to have a career simply by virtue of being identical with a class of person or performer.

I'll tell you just a little bit about my own journey. There were several points in my early life & career when I thought yesss! Im on the inside. Now I can do it my way. One was when I did my first studio recording for the BBC. I thought the gates of valhalla had opened for me. It all went well, everyone was pleased, but thereafter nothing got easier. Then about 12 years later one my first day as a BBC music producer with my own office and a secretary I thought: now I can make things happen. Only to discover that the nearer you get to the centre the more intense and cut-throat the competition is for artists /studios /slots etc, and the clearer your position in the pecking order is made.        

I did good work that Im proud of today, but all the experiences of my career made me realise that for me to sing my heart song I must stand alone and decode my own inner mental patchwork, independent of anyonelse. This led me into a dark 20 year wilderness, where in the silence I did truly encounter my authentic Voice (for there was noonelse's there) and learn how to use it, and bring much of my own inner darkness into the light by marrying up some of contradictions – a never ending task.

And then when Id done all that, and thought I was composing stuff that had integrity (so, to a degree, I thought I was inboard once a again) I had to face the disappointment that the new language Id evolved meant nothing to anyonelse. And that has been the hardest part - but you know? that just brings me back to the crucial thing about authenticity: it doesnt matter what it means to others (the small business of earning a living aside) it's what it means to yourself that counts. If you know youve nailed it, that is its own reward; and that certainty is what connects you seamlessly to Bach—did any of his contemporaries ever see why his eternal masterpieces were different from from everyonelse's?—or whoever your gods are. 'Justice' in artistic or legal terms is rarely quick: but if you know youve put the work in then simply trust in your inner connexion that transcends time. When ultimately the quality of everyone's workmanship is revealed, at 'the latter day' if not before, yours will stand the test of time: because it's time itself that winnows away the chaff. 

Once you're truly on your own ground, you cannot be shifted by man or earthquake - until then breathe the words accept and allow. I went throu 5 years of my life in mortal dread, and as each new blow struck I would simply say 'they will be done.' And my reward? I found myself weightless in eternity, no longer falling, no longer rising, with the exhilaration of having come throu a hailstorm of epic proportions, and realising that not only was I still alive but nothing other people did to me could hurt me. And there is no greater reward than that.  

A technological reminiscence

Today it took only about 20 minutes to upload footage of my pupils performances from the camera cards to my computer.
When I started recording my pupils’ concerts 20 years ago it was on a borrowed Hi8 analog tape camera. Editing was impossible, but I got quite an ace at dubbing off pupils’ performances onto each family's own dedicated piano VHS tape. At this time we used to have our concerts in the drawing room at Pyt House, when it was a retirement home.
The next stage was when Pyt House closed and the concerts moved to Port Regis. Initially they were recorded by a  film-maker mum on an expensive early Sony MiniDVtape camera, which involved realtime camera playouts to upload. I edited on iMovie 6, before moving to FinalCut. Around that time DVD emerged as a consumer format and, ever the early adopter, I wrestled with producing each concert onto DVD. Nowadays DVD production is a piece of cake, but then I called it DVooDoo, because in the early days there were so many user-programmable settings and, being before rise of Google, NO way to find out what they all did except by sucking & seeing; and hoping that you remembered what setting you'd chosen if it came out OK.
Then in 2006 two things came along to make everything easier. One was that I began uploading the videos to uTube; and the second was that Simon Davison and the Nadder Film Club got 2 sassy Sony MiniDVtape cameras.
Over the last few years I've invested in new cameras and portable digital recorders myself, including the handsome prosumer Canon used on this occasion.

I was always fascinated by the relationship between reality of performance and the process of capturing it. What is the most marvellous thing is that in my lifetime everything I wanted to do when I was 17—but couldn’t because it was far far too expensive and required technicians and none of the technologies linked with each other—I now can do pretty much single-handedly in my studio, thanks to digital.
My techno-memories go back to the very first Ampex multitracks. The first time I saw a 12” spool of ¼” tape, called a NAB hub, in a professional studio I just thought it was the most exotic and beautiful thing Id ever seen. I think they cost £4,* which was a lot of money in 1971. And the 12” spools of 2” tape used for multitrack recording were about £36* - and to me were more wonderful and alluring than anything else in the world. (*around £55 & £500 in today’s money).
Once Id seen the inside of a recording studio I knew I never wanted to do anything else with my life. I was totally in love with all forms of recording technology. I still think the smell of opening a can of film when rushes are delivered straight from the lab is about the most intoxicating perfume I know - the simultaneous hope & fear of being about to see what you did the day before makes the headiest cocktail.

Why then did I leave that world? And the answer is the filters which increasingly came to restrict the kind of programming you could make. Academics talk about the ‘discourse of broadcasting’ - by which they mean the consensus perspective that expresses mainstream political/cultural/moral perceptions while simultaneously marginalising alternative ones.
As my life and career progressed I became increasingly aware of the savage contrast between the potency of the technology to achieve positive effects on society and the lazy cowardice of those who were only in it for the money/fame/status. Despite some successes, I realised that I too was as trapt as anyonelse by the very luxury of the technology itself, and eventually I came to feel that if I wanted to reach my own creative potential I needed to reenter the roughness and imperfection of the analog world.
And that is how I come to be teaching the piano in Tisbury, where nowadays I feel I can do much more lasting good in a small area of the world than I could within the adverse currents of the big wide one. But what I learnt still comes in handy; and my hope is that in the long run fellow educators may look at the body of work I've created in these videos and ask themselves if there is something about motivation in the approach they could learn from?