My recurring dream began in 1999. I know this because it started only after my family moved out of my childhood home and into what would become my parents' forever home.
The new home felt massive. I'll never forget the first time I walked in - the vaulted ceilings, the lofted balcony over the great room, the huge windows - I couldn't believe the space was ours, and there was so much of it.
Which is why the subject of my recurring dream is so confounding.
In my recurring dream, I stumble into a hidden corridor, which leads to a secret room. The room is always a secret hideaway, filled with endless possibilities. Sometimes, it’s a cozy library, other times it’s a sprawling art studio. The details change, but the feeling of discovery remains the same.
The elation at finding that such a hidden place exists is equaled only by the letdown of waking to realize it was all a dream.
If you google "recurring dream, hidden space found in house", you'll find countless instances of people sharing a similar dream. Most commentators think the dream has to do with unrealized goals or potential. This Freudian explanation seems fair (and might be mostly correct), but a Freudian analysis doesn't scratch the itch like a Jungian one.
Rather than analyzing one's traumas, dominant experiences, or experiential voids (in the Freudian sense), a Jungian analyst might focus instead on the totality or plenum of one's own experiences, but also within the larger context of the collective's proclivity to generate mythopoetic experience. Also, crucially, in Jungian analysis, there is room for god, and we are it.
A Jungian dream analyst might say:
The dream is a manifestation of the innate curiosity of god, expressed from the godhead to the dreamer, using language and imagery familiar to the dreamer, for the purpose of igniting a sense of wonder and curiosity within the dreamer.
There is, in this Jungian explanation, the idea that god is not an all-knowing being, but that god is, like us, created with an imperfect knowledge and understanding of the nature of its own reality and existence, and that we are all created by god as tools to scratch an itch which it cannot scratch by itself. That we are all manifestations and expressions of this godhead, created as an outgrowth of its own wonder and curiosity, and that we are most-aligned with the will of the godhead when we tap into the same engine of wonder that perpetuates the unfoldment of the godhead into countless and endless meandering iterations of experience.
In other words, the recurring dream is god saying:
“Hey you, this world is not what it seems. There's more to it than what your senses suggest. But, I don't have the answers. I don't even know what questions to ask, but I made all of this (including you) in order to find out. So, a little help please?"
This is my interpretation of the recurring (extra room) dream.
So how does a person become a tool of god, to help god scratch the itch of all the questions and the unknown that come along with existence?
I think the answer is simple - novelty.
Novelty of experience generates situations, experiences, and conditions which have never existed. New experiences generate new outcomes. New outcomes generate ever-more novelty, and it is only through this process of creation that anything can be known at all. It is only through this process of creation that language and ideas are formed.
Jung embodied this idea of novelty in his life, work, and by the evolution of his understanding of psychology. Having arrived at the edge of the frontier of the practice of psychology, he met internal resistance in turning away from Freud, and inward toward his unconscious self, and ultimately, toward deeper meaning.
Jung spent decades engaging with his thoughts and dreams. He called them active imaginations. He emphasized the importance of these present-sense projections of the mind, especially when they occurred in a meditative state, because he felt they were communications from what he called the Pleroma (the godhead) and manifestations of what he termed the collective unconscious. Basically, he felt these visions emanated from the godhead, and that, a careful observer of his own thoughts could glean insights into the mind of god via the practice of meditation.
To be clear, I don’t have this dream anymore, so I think whatever insights I was meant to learn from it have been accomplished. For added context though, the plenum of my experiences at the time of this recurring dream are best characterized as shallow, unquestioning, and materialist in nature. I was a kid who enjoyed sports, being a good student, and playing with friends and cousins - that was my world. I wasn't encouraged to read or explore new ideas - I was truly a master of being engaged with the physical world before me. So much so, that I developed a mastery of the use of my body through sport in a way that few kids did.
Very good athletes usually make terrible coaches, because they have not learned the lessons and nuances that less-physically-gifted players are forced to learn in order to compete. In the same way, my mastery and focus on the physical world slowed the development of my thinking mind, such that I seldom considered the nature of reality or questioned conventions.
At the same time, I was steeped in Greek/American culture. So much so, that even my religious experience was filtered through the lens of this culture. For Greek/Americans, church is less about God and more about appearances and community. Sunday church gatherings are a social event, not a spiritual event. Church was a pageant show - a display of mom's ability to present respectable children.
For kids, Orthodox religious ceremonies are bad at evoking a sense of wonder. They are excellent at evoking boredom and making one question why anyone would subject themselves to such boredom. Other church services were quicker, more fun, less restrictive, and less weird.
In response to my displeasure with the church, I ran toward science and logic. I became a militant atheist and became fascinated with all of the ways religion failed, instead of viewing it as an interesting emergent phenomenon within the larger context of civilization. I thought religions were antiquated relics of the past, with nothing to teach. Whereas, now, I view religions as fascinating vessels for the carrying of wisdom across time.
I was so caught in my war against religion that I wrote my college and law school thesis' on the negative effects of religion on culture. My quest for meaning and purpose had begun, and the thing that ignited it was my realization that my faith in god (or rather, my indoctrination) was not only absurd, but logically flawed. How could an ancient religion, which refused to reform its practices and teachings (and which refused to address the elephant in the room) compete with modern-day common sense?
Here I was, this cognitively under-developed child, feeling invincible in my beliefs for the first time. I KNEW I was right about the nature of reality. I KNEW science and materialism contained the answers. But actually, I knew very little, and trusted a great deal.
Then I ran into Alan Watts, which led me to Terence McKenna, which led to Ram Dass, and finally to Carl Jung. It was the work of Carl Jung, which emboldened me to explore the nature of reality, through other various thinkers, in a way that has been less limiting and more fulfilling.
Watts, marshalling the most beautiful prose, only ever manages to dance around the idea of god. Using his mastery of language, he points to god in a way few others can.
McKenna dives deeper into the nature of language itself, forcing you to consider the role of language as nothing less than foundation and structure of reality itself. From McKenna I also learned the primacy of direct experience, which emboldened me to dabble in psychedelics, trust my own experiences, and helped me to observe and deconstruct my own ego.
Dass cemented for me the contrast between the Eastern and Western world views. His experience as an ex-Harvard professor, turned mystic, and his direct experiences with the occult allowed me (a staunch materialist) the freedom to experiment in good-faith with the esoteric subject matter of the occult.
Eventually, all occult rabbit-holes meander through the garden of Jung. Jung's ideas were like an ether which bonded everything together for me. There are two phases in every seeker's journey - before Jung and after Jung.
Grokking Jung is lIke understanding a new language or unlocking a new way of understanding, through which all experiences begin to take on new meaning. In alchemical terms, it is the “reddening” of your mind, signaling the completion of a journey toward understanding the mind of god and the nature of reality (which explains why the name of what many consider Jung’s magnum opus is so fittingly called "The Red Book").
And now, perhaps owing to the persistence of that recurring dream, which ignited in me the wonder which helped me achieve an escape velocity (away from materialism) toward the mind of god, I now describe my relationship with god the same way Jung did when asked whether he believes in god: