12/212018 The Dream by John D. Grove: Mr. President Donald J. Trump lifted himself up and climbed through a hatch to get out of a submarine vessel. He opened the hatch and disappeared. Meanwhile I watched this but the hatch closed, sealed off and locked preventing me from following even if I wanted to do so.
Associations: This has current associations to events that have happened this week of 12/21/2018. As this above drawing shows, Mr. Trump the President abandoned the submarine. Likewise by unilaterally deciding to bring our troops home from Syria and Afghanistan; he did not involve his Secretary of Defense nor alliances of other parties including the Armed Forces, the Kurds, the Taliban and other governmental agencies. Water symbolizes the collective unconscious; the submarine is a vessel within the collective which we humans navigate. Mr. Trump, the President, is leaving the vessel and being absorbed by the collective unconscious with results- no one can predict. Sometimes dreams can show the dreamer another side of conscious life in an event that is current or in relation to a person that the conscious mind is not aware of.
“The shadow is an unconscious part of the psyche characterized by traits and attitudes whether negative or positive, which the conscious ego tends to reject or ignore. Persons of the same sex as the dreamer personify it in dreams. Consciously assimilating one’s shadow usually results in an increase in energy. (Hall, James A. Jungian Dream Interpretation, Inner City Books, Toronto Canada, 1983, p. 31).
Mr Trump represents my Shadow; the side of me that I reject, suppress and when I see it in other people- I become extremely prejudiced against them. I had been feeling distress lately at the way Mr. Trump is handling our national and international affairs. He is not in favor of traditional alliances like NATO and other relationships with foreign groups that support each other when facing a common threat. This dream is showing the side of me , my shadow, personified in the dream by Mr. Trump who represents a negative attitude that I have personally toward him. He is abandoning international tradition and global alliances which makes our country less safe in my opinion; he angers and disappoints me by his behavior. But I have to own the fact that maybe in my uncionscious, there is a part of me who would like to act with impunity and without caution, merely by instinct. If I don’t recognize a part of Trump in me, I will have hatred toward him and project all my negative attitudes on him every times he acts as President. I have had a lesson by this dream…don’t think your shadow projections are harmless. They are not and there are consequences for hating someone so much.
“Dreams come from psychological complexes in the personal unconscious of the person and from the collective unconscious. Dreams can act as compensation in content, balancing the conscious perspective so as to give the dreamer a new perspective on a person or event. They usually take the form of unpleasant images in the dream of the individual challenging him /her to face changes in an old, maladaptive attitude” (Grove, John D. Dreams and Astrological Psychology, Hopewell Publishing, Knutsford, England. 2014, p. 84. If I hate Mr. Trump, I miss the opportunity to gain a new perspective on him. For example, in the above dream, I am not to follow Mr. Trump into the field of the collective unconscious symbolized by the ocean that the submarine was submerged in. In stead, I stay within the vessel navigating through the maze of the collective unconscious while Mr. Trump “jumped ship’ and entered into the field of the unknown.
This dream , as a fact, is not looking at Mr. President critically but instead is contrasting his journey of being adrift into an impersonal unknown world in which he loses his individuality versus my journey which is navigating within the confines of a ship submerged so that I can control where I go, what I see and when to disembark. This is a new attitude that my unconscious is instructing my ego to be aware of. It is merely stating neutrally and objectively that we have differing paths and Mr. Trump may have to be swallowed by the psychic storms at sea, the waves and the uncertainty of nature in his leaving the ship.
Mr. Trump’s actions have created a departure from the norm of International and National political navigation. In the past two years of his presidency, he has chosen paths that reveal a scary possibility of an incompetent, yet instinctual individual adrift in the sea of the unconscious, unaware of where he is going. This scenario is common in elders in retirement who as they age, there is a loosening of complexes (Hillman, James Force of Character), a stubbornnesss, and if they can act out their impulses, there is usually no harm to anyone because they have little influence. And when one is an elder, one can have a second childhood, drift into the world of fantasy without any repercussions. But when one is a world leader, being a powerful President; then going on this path can scare a lot of his constituents. I believe we are in for a whirlpool of a ride. And where we will end up is anyone’s guess. I can say at this point that I have to navigate my own ship through murky waters and hope, and pray that we all make it to portside sometime.
