Editor’s Note: Sarah Taylor is attending an intensive training workshop this weekend, but suggested this particular archive selection for this weekend’s tarot column. She also says that Monday’s Tarot Reading is still active, and worth revisiting in light of this weekend’s astrology. — Amanda
By Sarah Taylor
You’re a gorgeous mystery with a wild heart and a lofty purpose. But like all of us, you also have a dark side — a part of your psyche that snarls and bites, that’s unconscious and irrational, that is motivated by ill will or twisted passions or instinctual fears.
It’s your own personal portion of the world’s sickness: a mess of repressed longings, enervating wounds, ignorant delusions, and unripe powers. You’d prefer to ignore it because it’s unflattering or uncomfortable or very different from what you imagine yourself to be.
— Rob Brezsny
When I was younger, I used to dream about monsters — usually horned beasts that roamed corridors, or little bright lights that fuzzed along the floor towards me and tickled my childish self, jarred and unsettled, back into waking life.
There are two things that I have subsequently learned from these dreams.
The first was that my monsters may have been outwardly terrifying — and they were — but what they masked was something that I deemed ‘monstrous’ in the corridors of my own psyche. They symbolised what was outcast and downright alien to my waking self, calling to me in the way they knew how. I wasn’t attuned to their language, though. All I could hear was the sound of fear pulsating in my ears, driving me away from them. And I kept running in my dreams for a long, long time.
The second thing I learned came much later: that I had it in my power to approach them differently. Some years ago, I had started seeing a Jungian analyst who worked with my dreams in ways that previous therapists had not. I had recounted to her the recurring dream with the little bright lights — lights that waited for me, and which drew me in like awful gravity — and looked at her, exasperated: “Why would they keep doing that to me?”
“Maybe they wanted to wake you up.”
Her response hit me like a lightning bolt. A moment of illumination. What it illuminated was that it was my waking life that had been the nightmare. So it was that the unacceptable circumstances in which I found myself as a child — and all that I consequently believed was unacceptable about me — were consigned to the shadows, playing peekaboo in my dreams.