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Step 1 – Write the dream down as it comes

I am inside the movie The Passion of the Christ. I am watching a scene where a bloodied Christ is pulling his cross from the right to the left. The cross is attached on him with strings that latches on his skin. ​

The scene is so full of blood that it is hard for me to watch. But Jonathan Pageau, present next to me, says that he is not afraid of blood and strong symbolism from the unconscious. That’s how it should be otherwise it would be unnatural.​

At some point, Christ is propelled backwards, as if the cross and its latches were a slingshot. Despite this, he walks back to the place he was ejected from. When he arrives, his composure changes. He is looking at something but it’s off-screen, to my left. I can’t tell what it is. As he keeps looking at this glowing unknown, his many wounds are spontaneously healing.​

While this is happening, Pageau makes a speech about the fact that the blood marks of Christ are similar to the mother giving birth.​

Step 2 – Identify the key symbols and provide spontaneous associations

The Passion of the Christ ~ the bloodiest depiction of the Passion, movie by Mel Gibson that I have not watched.​

cross ~ “He must celebrate a Last Supper with himself, and eat his own flesh and drink his own blood […] Is this perhaps the meaning of Christ’s teaching, that each must bear his own cross?” (CW 14, par 512)​

Jonathan Pageau ~ authority on symbolism.​

Step 3 – Describe the personal context

November was by far the busiest month of the year. I was overwhelmed.

Step 4 – Feel into the inner dynamics of a dream

Moment 1 – setting: Christ’s Passion, blood​.​ Feeling: between discomfort and horror, too graphic/intense​

Moment 2 – Pageau’s explanation​​.​ Feeling: uneasy acceptance, more focused​​​

Moment 3 – slingshot and healing mystery​.​ Feeling: awe/wonder, confused or puzzled​

Moment 4 – conclusion: blood marks = birth​​. Feeling: receptive to new information​

Step 5 – Aim for an interpretation that promotes self-knowledge

To carry one’s task is to bear one’s cross, which also means to undergo a series of “red” transformations.​ This is equivalent to the mystery of the mother giving birth, of a new attitude coming out from the unconscious.

Step 6 – Make the dream concrete with a symbolic act

​I decided to honor the dream, but not to act on it.

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Books quoted

Carl G. Jung. Mysterium Coniunctionis. Collected Works 14

Carl G. Jung. C.G. Jung Speaking

Carl G. Jung. Psychology and Alchemy. Collected Works 12

Edward F. Edinger. The Mysterium Lectures

Richard Noll. The Jung Cult​

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