Stampede of Sweetness
I write a blog called Ask the Dream Queen for which I interpret reader-submitted dreams. I receive a dream featuring an elephant every two months on average. Elephants are notable as symbols of memory, especially collective memory, which is to say, history. About half the dream-elephants are baby elephants. The characteristics of the baby elephants are the same from dream to dream, as are dreamers' responses to them:
1. I had a wonderful dream about a playful baby elephant that had so much character. We had to go to the jungle in between these bars to find him everyday and he would be at the same place waiting laughing. It felt great. I'm a musician and am on tour and I cant help but feel like this dream is a blessing of some sort since things are starting to pick up for me.
2. I dreamt that I got a little baby elephant as a present. He was having only one tooth, so he was not complete. But I loved it so warm and tender. He was so nice and brought so much joy in my life. I can still feel it. I am a woman of 53 years old, I live in Belgium.
3. About a week ago I had a dream about a pretty, blue-eyed, grey baby elephant. I was at my grandmother's house swimming in her pool, and all of a sudden this elephant was there with me swimming and splashing water with its trunk. We had so much fun! We got out of the pool and as I dried off she wanted to play. She started running and slightly jumping around me. After playing we took a nap and I can remember petting her and feeling her tough skin. When I woke up from my nap in the dream, my baby elephant wasn't there and I began frantically looking for her. When I actually woke up from the dream I was so dazed and felt like I should've been doing something but couldn't remember what. Since that night I've missed this baby elephant and think about her everyday, as if I've lost a dear friend or family member.
4. I dream of a baby elephant - so cute and affectionate - with our chocolate lab whose name is Beauty. They are friends and play in our backyard. We have hay in our garage and they sleep together there. But, winter is coming and I start worrying that I need to find a place for the baby elephant to live other than our garage. I write many letters to zoos, etc. asking them to make a home for the baby elephant. While writing the letters, I worry that Beauty will miss the baby elephant. I am frantic to find a home for the baby elephant. I remember thinking in my dream how sweet the elephant is and how much Beauty loves it and protects it.
5. I dreamed last night that a bad person pushed a baby elephant down some stairs. When I went down the stairs the baby elephant was crying and calling out for his "mama." I felt horrible and while I was carrying the baby elephant up the stairs, it died in my arms. Upstairs I put the baby elephant down and wept bitterly as if it were my own child. I woke up from this dream actually sobbing and could not get back to sleep. This dream was obviously very disturbing to me.
The baby elephant is the archetypal child; what Jung calls "the Divine Child;" the Child in all people that Christ speaks of in Matthew 18:3, "I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the Kingdom of Heaven." In dreams the Child can be symbolized by a human child or a baby version of another species.
The emergence of the Child as dreams' baby elephant marks an awareness of the Child that is newly arrived to adult consciousness, enabled by millennia of collective memory, by how much history has accumulated. The extent that birth has been given to this new awareness parallels the extent to which that historical consciousness has died and is moribund.
By historical consciousness, I mean traditional orientations that subverts the Child through rites of passage and socialization. By socialization, I do not mean learning proper behavior. I mean, killing the Child with hatred, fear, and abuse - as is dramatized in Dream 5, above. I am speaking of the mortification of the Child that jerks so many tears in the Disney classic "Dumbo."
Anyone whose inner-child is adequately damaged finds it difficult if not impossible to accept that the Child is going to outlast the archetypally fallen adult. In response to adult cynicism, here is a perspective on how the Child will proliferate:
Each person is a mirror. Everything that happens in the world is projected from the individual mirrors of all participants. The goodness and Truth people may wish to project into the world is severely compromised because of the images of evil and falseness their mirrors receive.
By definition, when a person invests themselves into inner-work in their inner-world - to which the Child is central and intrinsic - they choose to stop mirroring the evil and falseness of the external world. They become more aware of the images their mirror is receiving and projecting. This allows them to receive less evil and falseness and project greater goodness and Truth. This is how spiritual evolution works in a "grass roots" level. Bit by bit, as individuals master their mirrors, more goodness and Truth is projected into the world.
What I am calling "mastering one's mirror" is equivalent to finding the "Kingdom of Heaven within." (Luke 17:21). By turns, when the individual does inner-work, the Kingdom of Heaven becomes manifest in the external world, bit by bit, day by day.
I cannot illustrate the link between elephants, mirrors, the Child, and the Kingdom of Heaven any better than this recent TV commercial that may be familiar to Americans. (The Child in the commercial has a Victorian cousin named "Alice" whose mirror was called a "looking-glass.")
***
Ganesha the elephant god, one of Hinduism's most exalted deities, appeared in two of the elephant dreams I have received for interpretation. Ganesha creates obstacles and removes them, which is also what accumulated history helps to do. A new world will indeed flourish when collective memory becomes so vast that it can overcome obstacles that were insurmountable to the old world.
History is the story of one level of consciousness succeeding the previous as humanity adapts to its potential to be spiritual. History is also the story of the death and rebirth of man by way of his adaptation to inner, global and cosmic realities he has no control over. The need to answer to these broader realities is the cause of all his tribulations. The new world is in infancy, and cannot express itself that much. This is why the baby elephant in Dream 2 has a single tooth. In dreams, teeth are linked to expression.
For a new world to begin, the old one has to end. People misunderstand the end of the world as the extinction of man. Instead, it is the extinction of history's man, of the beast in man. The apocalypse is, at once, the end of the old world and the beginning of a new one. The transition will be made possible by technology, education, the evolution of ethics, the Internet, the arts, self-awareness, compassion, and the Child to name a few.
At this time of monumental change, it is easy to get distracted by collapse and conspiracy. The archetype of the fallen adult is in free fall, but to focus on it exclusively is to lose sight of what is being born.
Edited by Kelleil Riebel
Image by Sowri, courtesy of Creative commons license.
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- 1-6-09
- Amy George's blog
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Comments
so sweet indeed
wonderful piece, Amy,
very inspired and uplifting - thanks for sharing!
sprout
a teaching
In the sense that life is a waking-dream, falling asleep in Geography is falling asleep on the world - which is what people do when they transition from childhood to adulthood. In lieu of your teacher rousing you, the baby elephant did. She is a teacher. The Koran tells us: SLEEPERS AWAKE!
Lovely.
I especially like this part: " but to focus on it exclusively is to lose sight of what is being born."
Very nice. I think of it in much the same terms. If you were to walk in to a room where a woman was giving birth -- and you didn't know what was going on -- you would think the poor creature was dying, such is the pain of birthing.
In fact, however, something beautiful is occuring: the bringing forth of a new life. Another sacred mote set to explore the world, live its life...and add its experiences, knowledge, and actions to our shared history; and collective consciousness.
But mothers can die giving birth; and some children are still-born. It is a dangerous, unsure thing, birthing. The pressures involved are tremendous.
We must listen to the cries of pain; and offer comfort and aid in any way we can...that we do not lose our own Mother -- and/or our collective selves -- in the process.
"You must *be* the change you wish to see in the world." Mahatma Gandhi
beautiful analogy for our times ChibiOne
A mother giving birth to a new life - something utterly normal, miraculous, & perilous all at once.
I guess that means that the job of a conscious being is to serve as midwife or doula... Thanks for sharing! :)
I, Vyassa, knew Ganesh before he was an elephant
Hi Amy,
—A few thoughts on Ganesh:
“Ganesha” is a Sanskrit compound, made from the words “gana”, meaning group, multitude, or categorical system, and “isa”, meaning “lord” or “master.” “Ganas” are also a group of semi-divine beings that form part of the retinue of Shiva. In an echo of Biblical terminology, the name could be translated as “Lord of Hosts.” Due to his vast bulk, Genesh could perhaps be seen as the “Rock of Ages.” Ganesh is an example of a “coincidence of opposites”: his immovable bulk contains a multitude, as the apparent solidity of matter contains the emptiness of space.
Fascinatingly, his “vehicle” is the rat, an embodiment of the blind instinct of survival, which ties in with the association of Ganesh with the “Muladhara”, or base, chakra. It is here that the power of Kundalini is coiled, like an atom bomb, at the bottom and the center of the material world. The rat, his vehicle, is very small, mobile, and adaptable; he is a metaphysical vagrant, able to range far and wide, and carries off the scraps of many an exploded civilization, scavenging and consuming many bits of knowledge too unworthy for the educated mind to notice. The rat gladly violates the most secret places.
It is thus Ganesh, in the form of the poet Vyassa, who is the author of the Mahabharata, the great epic of the world before our own. Some of the earliest images of Ganesh depict him with a single tusk, the other having been broken off; it is this tusk that penetrates through the center of the spine, opening the chakras, and creating a channel from the “lowest” to the “highest” realms of energy. Preoccupied with the sweets that he is eating, to which he is addicted, Ganesh may or may not pause to notice the illumination that accumulates around him.
the womb of history is a cage
Vignesvara
Between 2 armies, on the field of Kurukshetra, I will raise my rat banner high!
Hi Amy,
—A few more thoughts on Ganesh and his vehicle, the rat:
The rat, if viewed as a manifestation of desire, both creates and gnaws away at obstacles. As “Vignesvara”, the “Lord of Obstacles”, supervision of this process of obstruction and liberation was one of the primary functions of Ganesh. It is significant, however, that Ganesh “rides” upon the rat, and makes no attempt to kill it or remove it.
One of 16 hands is turned toward the viewer in the “abhaya”, or “fear not”, mudra. All things will be well.
According to Dhavalikar, Ganesh’s rise in the Hindu pantheon may be due to a shift in emphasis, from the role of “vighnakartā”, or obstacle-creator, to that of “vighnahartā”, or “obstacle-averter”—a role perhaps more appropriate to our position in the time-cycle. But the one role can’t be understood in isolation from the other, anymore than one can exhale without having first inhaled.
Here is an excerpt from my essay, “The Gods Behind the Calendar”, which also deals with this process of “obstruction”; in which knowledge, still living, is encoded at the depth of materialization. The passage reads:
“A group disappears. With the passage of three centuries another group appears, almost but not quite connected to the first.
Carving glyphs in stone in no way guaranteed that the story, as told and understood by its creators, could be read. The audience for whom the story was intended might not exist for many years, at a more opaque point in the time- cycle, when the language had been almost, but not yet entirely, lost.
A monument was at best a memory cue, a challenge thrown at one’s more ignorant descendants that they should reinvent the story. Simultaneously, an immovable object had been left to stand guard against the living, to prevent full access to the knowledge that existed after death. Creative violence was the necessary means for overcoming the anxiety of influence.
Of course, it is my contention that no language can be lost, and that each glyph points to an audience that is not in our dimension.”
Elf Ant
Hi Brian,
RE “gana”, meaning group, multitude, or categorical system, and “isa”, meaning “lord” or “master.” “
I recall mentioning to you seeing that TV show tracing the life of Jesus from age 14 – 30, which said that he traveled to India where he was known as “Isa.”
Due to his vast bulk, Genesh could perhaps be seen as the “Rock of Ages.”
This is reminiscent of one my dreams:
There is a fearsome elephant as big as a mountain. His power cannot be denied. I am scared of him.
That is fascinating about the rat (and elephants really do get freaked out around tiny rodents). “Bohemians” are history’s rats.
In the 90s, when I was male, a recurrent thought that came into my head was of me “chasing a rat into the dark.” Read: chasing Ganesha’s vehicle into the unconscious. I was a "glad violator of secret places" – not esoteric places necessarily, but taboo places.
After the peak of my initiating mystical experience in 1998, while my blood still coursed with alchemy I dreamed:
A black rat is running in the dazzling August sunshine.
It is significant, however, that Ganesh “rides” upon the rat, and makes no attempt to kill it or remove it.
The biggest and the smallest are perfect partners.
Here is another of my elephant dreams, in which the elephant may be the grown-up version of our sweet baby one:
It is the distant future. People are applauding joyously for an elephant with twinkling eyes. He laughs like a man and walks off.
Thank you everyone for your comments! AG
RE
A sweet small pink