writing process snapshot

Woke around 5am this morning from a wretched grossmare that is too weird and foul to share in any detail. It started with me in my darkened bedroom making the conscious decision to write about people and specific experiences. The middle of the dream involved [bizarre sex stuff deleted] and it ended with a man poet, sort of in a daze, possibly unknowingly or drunkenly, peeing in my bed. Chris (my logical/methodical/go-to/caretaking animus figure) picked him up and carried him away while I stripped off the sheets and hoped it didn't get on the blankets. As I took care of the bed, two women stood nearby, laughing.

Urine belongs to the second chakra, the Svadishana, to the kidneys, or reins, to the bladder, the pressure of instinctual urges and our awareness of them (Jung, 1087). It denotes the urgency of emotional and creative self-expression, the feeling-toned "yielding to or allowing the flow of what needs to come through one" (Whitmont, Perera, 243). But embedded in our modern idiom, we find urine also representing affect that is hot, intense, personal and sometimes not ideally contained. We speak of a "pissing contest," a display of aggressive power; of being "pissed off," suggesting resent or fury; of "pissing and moaning" as angry complaint; and "pissing in the well," a spoiling of a creative source through envy or rage. Countless dreams document needs, inhibitions, complexities and frustrations around urination--and the significance (and relief) of letting go of one's golden stream.

. . .

Bedroom also evokes for some the experience of the feminine womb as both regression and revivification. In the rhythms of sleep and walking or in sexual surrender, there is a ritual continuity of symbolic death and rebirth. Healing or admonishing voices from the "spirit world" are activated in the lunar darkness. The bedroom can be said to be a liminal space where one's defenses and persona yield to the vulnerable humanity of the naked self. The nocturnal journey of consciousness into the "underworld" of psychic depths echoes the cyclical movement of the sun, its light extinguished in its setting, only to be renewed at dawn. Just so, in the morning one rises from the horizontal space of sleep and dream, dresses and makes the bed, closes up the night in the bedroom and enters the vertical world of day.

--The Book Of Symbols: Reflections On Archetypal Images by Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism (Taschen)