Notes On Alchemical Psychology is a series of texts dedicated to personal creative therapeutic work, merging the old ways & the new. This one’s about solving riddles in our sleep with music.
Maybe once in a blue moon, I wake up with a tune, a fragment of a lyric, a footnote straight from an end of a dream, carrying within it a message about an essence of a situation – an insight that travelled through multiple microcosms just to reach my mundane mind. Especially in times of turbulence, moments of emotional potency, these headlights illuminating the dark road ahead seem to switch on remotely – processed by the wheels of inner desire and the sensible life of the senses – the one that listens to the radio.
It’s always a cause of incredible wonder for me the way the unconscious world, when honoured by the conscious self, gives directions that are unmatched by any we encounter in our left brain lives, no matter the setting and circumstance.
These melodies and words, however precise and often literal they are, also contain multitudes, reflections of meanings, they are crystal spheres refracting light, inhabiting, as we do, many points in time and space, at once. The amount of wisdom you can get off a fragment of a tune is a divine thing.
It’s never a good idea to switch off our inner guides, and this is what we do, when we start believing that our mechanical self has all the answers to the riddles of existence, as if our lives are not essentially half spent in a dream.
Maybe that’s why we get earworms, random music on repetition – a condition, rather than these hermetic messages that last for a spin or two, until they disappear in the ether like a sage’s advice to the novice, told only once.
Our soul speaks to us in a poetic way, but we first have to acknowledge that we have a soul, that it has journeyed, perhaps through eons, dark tunnels, and stardust, to reach our bodies, and animate our presence in this one world we know.
That jukebox in our mind is available at a coin toss, it costs a dime of our time. But it helps in skipping through the insomniac agony of analysis, and barren nightly forebodings – when you’re firmly secure in your mind’s musical knowledge and your psyche’s innermost best intentions.
In your dreamscape, you might get a rhyme, a verse, or a tune – jot it down, examine its origins, timeline, its surfaces, it might just be the message in a bottle you’ve been waiting for.
EPILOGUE: The other morning I woke up to the melody of the Windmills Of Your Mind (1969), as sung by Dusty Spingfield, but I only managed to fish out one verse from my dream. After some humming and a google search of the lyrics, I intuited my advice to myself, and that inspired this first of the notes, and a lot else, besides.
AUTHOR: ©Milana Vujkov
Disclaimer – These notes follow a personal journey, and are offered as philosophical & creative inspiration. Although I am a psychologist by education, the material within them is not therapy or substitute for therapy. However, they are dedicated as temenos for accessing the therapeutic numinous, in hope of being of good service to your soul in exploring the potentials of each moment in time.
Poets, Mavericks & Prophets 