Pearls from Mary Watkins' Waking Dreams

From Waking Dreams (1984)

by Mary Watkins


We have skillfully tried to strain the mythical from the scientific, the imaginary from the real, metaphor from matter. We have used science to tell us just what “reality” really is and we have taken our scissors of reason and accordingly trimmed into the waste basket the apparently superfluous and contradictory. We have chased the gods from the stones, the animals, and the heavens in the hope that we will be left with a clear and modern idea of matter and life. Knowledge has brandished the censors of “ridiculous,” “superstitious,” “unscientific,” “imaginary” and “unreal” at Myth as he has disrobed her and believed himself superior. Myth leaves him standing there, coat in hand, as she hastily ducks within his closet of wraps. She has heard his sensors before, at times of transition between one dominant mythic mode and a newly arising way of understanding.

       Metaphor is denied its province in the material world. The experience to which it refers has filled one shape, one particular group of metaphors, retreats before the threatening force of the prevailing doubt, fathered by Knowledge, and lies so seemingly barren. In time, however, it begins to arise to consciousness and animate a new form which does not conflict with what is known. Myth reappears, often unrecognized as such, in the dress of the day. More often than not she even ducks beneath the coat-tails of Knowledge (where he scarcely ever looks). To see her peeking out, while he smirks with the success of a victor, betrays the fact that a fundamental misunderstanding and confusion is prevalent, to which Knowledge (as well as his students, we ourselves) is usually so blind.

       Our reasonable friend has confused the world of Myth, of the imaginal, with that of his own. When she has spoken he has laughed and snickered, if he has not more vehemently shut her up. He knows that there are not spirits in rocks and dragons in caves. She tries to explain herself, as well as the intimate connection, and paradoxical autonomy her world has to his. He wants nothing to do with her. Although he can make her appear foolish his actions of scandalizing and ignoring her do not make her disappear. He forgets her and proceeds in ignorance of her reality. He thinks that Myth is merely incorrectly describing the material world. When he studies aspects of phenomena in his world and draws his conclusions about them, he discards all that Myth has surrounded these same aspects with and which do not concur with his views. 

     He picks an argument where there is no need. Myth speaks about an imaginal reality using aspects of his material reality. Her statements are not meant to be mere literal, concrete descriptions and opinions about this world. She wants to convey her reality. When he takes some aspect away from her, she must choose others. The more he denies her expressions the more she must use his own words. Though he can discredit her means of expression and make her look foolish to his friends he cannot destroy that which she seeks to express. His inability to distinguish between the concrete level of the symbol and what the symbol refers to leaves him open to her use. It leaves her totally misunderstood. She hides in what and how he studies and her reality begins to come from his own mouth, although he does not hear her inclination. 

     In our confusion we, as students of Knowledge, have tried to separate the scientific from the metaphorical, matter from spirit, behavior from psyche, the real from the imaginal. They pretend to yield, and in so doing trick us. They have not separated at all, these lovers. What we find flowing down our sinks is our awareness of our participation in myth at every moment of our being in reality, of psyche in our every action. We mistake our confusion for straightforwardness and clarity. What we have packed away in those boxes is not the imagination and the mythical but our recognition, acceptance and conscious valuing of it. 

       We live out the imagination in everything and yet we are against the very notion of it. In our confusion we lose something. Our actions are “nothing but.” Life can be found boring, interminable and most unkind in all the harshness of its “reality.” And yet it is the crushing of a dream that makes us cry; the refusing of a wish that makes us feel hopeless. (4-5)

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The psyche reveals herself in the form of images, for that is her experience. If we wish to befriend her, to love her, we must take great care in how we react to her, as her life speaks of itself to us. Our relation to the image, therefore, becomes all important. 

       When a friend tells us of an experience, how do we move in relation to it? How do we hope others will respond to our revealing of experiences? We do not want to be interrupted in our story; nor do we wish to be rushed. When our experience has moved us we are connected to it through the telling. It lives as we tell it, especially if the other person is receptive. If the other is not, we begin to say words but are no longer connected to them. The telling has become dead. We wish we had not begun. 

       Every detail has a place. We seldom find someone who allows us to tell it all out. The other feels a need to break in – to label, to judge, to advise. They wish to be helpful. But we want them to help us spin it all out. We desire them to question every point – not to bring it into question, but to make us elaborate on each element. [...] 

      There is a tendency for people to think they understand what the other is talking about. They easily simplify it and can thereby equate it with their own or with concepts they have acquired. Comparisons fly. The subtle differences are lost. One loses the chance to see the other’s experience more in terms of itself than in terms of oneself. This makes us keep seeing whatever it is we are already seeing, over and over. We hear something unknown in terms of something known and, in doing so, we learn nothing. Now, you may argue, we can only know in terms of the known. That is not as true as it sounds. An experience provides its own terms for its understanding. The more our friend elaborates on his or her story the more a structure becomes evident. If we have refrained from being absorbed in our means of structuring and interpreting, his or her structure strikes us. It has itself a context, a frame. It lends its own hints as to weight and significance. 

       If it is a difficult experience they are trying to tell us, we are often driven by our own anxieties to do something about it: to relieve them (i.e. to sever their connection with it and thereby ours) or to draw from the complexity a moral or conclusion, to become pragmatic – even if those were not the terms in which the other is speaking. We may take their experience from their hands, and put it to the light of day to examine just how it can be changed for the better. Where would they have to go? What could we do? We try to see how such a thing developed historically (even if it was not their concern) in order, perhaps, to see how it can be avoided in the future, and where the blame lies in the past. Perhaps we are the essence of friendliness and kindly deeds. But though the treatment is outlined, the progress assessed, the history completed and the goals insighted, that possibility (always lingering, always fragile) between two people is mercilessly killed, unknowingly, quietly. 

       What is it that our story wants? It keeps coming to the tip of our tongue. It rushes into empty spaces and flees from unhearing ears. […] When the other ceases to offer hope or advice, when they listen to our tale for no ulterior motive of their own, when they are still and can yet be moved... then something happens. The experience we are recounting connects us. It lives with us. It is what at that one moment makes us live. It thereby becomes real in a new sense. 

       So it is between the image and myself. I can do a thousand things wrong in trying to listen to it. I run off into interpretations, amplifications, ramifications, ways to change, to compare, to cure, to care. And with each of these I risk losing the possibility between us. The imaginal’s experience itself is lost to me. I cannot sit still with it: refraining from gaining control over the situation, ceasing to impress it with my understanding and knowledge, becoming willing to stay with it even when it may begin to stink to my civilized nose. 

       The longer one sits with the other and lets him or her spin their experience, the deeper it becomes – the more profound. The more we hinder the other’s connection to their story, the shallower it all becomes. Our feet finally touch bottom, as they did in the beginning. We scoop only a cup or two of water from their story and although we may come to know that, that was not the experience. Its dimensionality of depth, and its qualities of body are lost. We keep ourselves out of it. We take spoonfuls and carefully subject them to our own tests, supposing all the time that a relationship is developing. 

       With the image we create currents that keep drawing us back to shore, to what we already know. We think the image leads us there and thereby confirms our world. But this is not so. The currents that return us to the shallows of our familiar experience are of our own making. Keeping us from the depths, they kill the possibility of our relationship to the imaginal’s experience – images. 

       The image dwells in depth, in depths created by shadows and reflections, depths that can be dived into and treaded amongst. Depths cannot be made shallow without losing themselves. The ocean is poured into the pool. It is safer that way. One can stand up into it. One can see bottom all the time. Everything that moves here is within our control, within our view. Here the image, like a fish, can always be caught. One can use it as food for the continuation of the usual life. But if one wanted to know the natural life of the fish, one has lost all by just such a move. The shallow destroys the usual life of the fish in the ocean. Is the fish really even “fish” anymore? (126-128)