Up: [[Collage]] Related: [[Dreams]], [[Death]] Created: 2018-02-04 Updated: 2026-06-24 Note: I have used [[Collage]] to amplify some dreams since early 2018, half a year before starting to work with a Jungian analyst. This is one of my early examples. ____ ### Dream I dreamt of death twice last night. One time it was the death of one of our rabbits in the jaws of a fox. The other was a more involved dream where we were traveling as a family to Scotland. It felt like our old family trip in some respects but my sister and brother were shadow figures, Dad had dementia, and my favourite teacher, Jim Auld, was there too in handcuffs. A young girl, maybe four years old (who?) broke away from us and walked into the curve of the street in front of us. It was like the curve at Yorkdale Mall but it was near an airport in Scotland. We'd arrived and were meeting our relatives at the curb. A car came around the curve and hit the child. There was nothing the car could do. We were all distraught, but Jim was destroyed. The police came and released the handcuffs that were at his back so that he could cradle and sob over the child. Another police officer said the cuffs shouldn't be taken off, but he was given an incredulous and withering stare from the first, so he shut up. ### First Thoughts I just assumed that these two dreams of death were similar in message to the [[13 - Death]] tarot card —Something ending so that something new can be born. But as I write out the more elaborate second dream, I can see it so clearly in my head even hours after having had it. That makes it important, so I am going to take the time and use Robert Johnson's four steps to interpret it, to work with it. The first thing to do, according to Jungian Jill Mellick is to title my dreams fast without a lot of thought. ‘She's Gone’ is the title of this one. I just went into the house, got tea and dark chocolate for sustenance, and Robert Johnson's book *Inner Work* and Jill Mellick's book *The Art of Dreaming* I'm not sure now if I want to do a written interpretation or an artistic one. I think I will make a collage. I've just made a collage. It came together very quickly. I worked super fast and tried to select images by gut, not thought. I'm really happy with it. ![[Dream - She's Gone 2018-02-04.webp|500]] The outlining of the guy — Jim — is inspired. It's an image that came through from the back side of the page, a man looking down at a child in a stroller. I held it up to the light and traced it in bold black pen then went over my trace again to get some of the angles sharper. The page from a book is one I opened to earlier this morning. It took only a couple of tries before I opened to it again. Now I'll try dialoguing about my collage using the modified Johnson techniques talked about in my book *Living into Art: Journeys through Collage*. Name each image, why I selected it, or what it means to me. The Amish girl is young, innocent but incredibly wise, as you can see in her eyes. Her gaze is steady. In my dream she died and in this image, in her facial expression, I read an acceptance, surrender to the reality. The outline of the man is Jim Auld from my dreams. He is bent double, bowed by grief. The sharp angle of his feet, which I emphasized, pushes away the reality of her death. The policeman looks on, a witness to the sadness, torn between being human and imposing the law. The text is the sounds accompanying the scene. The air is rent by keening and wailing, this very real nightmare. The fog is our feeling, our sadness and despair. It's also an in-between world where the girl is right after death. The line full of clothes and the trees are echoes of the poignancy of this moment, of all of the things, the real and mundane and beautiful things the girl won't ever get to do. The clothes on the line are also a story of what will be for all of us in the future after this experience: going through the motions; doing what we need to do but always in a fog, not really seeing beauty, just duty. It is an unutterably sad collage to me. #### Note This isn’t an analyzed dream. For that, I would have needed context notes of what was happening in the day or two prior to the dream.