Ark

ark An area of yourself that has been shaped by following your innermost urges and intuitions, as opposed to those arising from fear, passion, ambition. Or something can come out of the ark and thus be old fashioned. For some people the ark represents a survival aid in times of stress. So it might depict a means of escape from a difficult situation.

An ark is a safe refuge, therefore feelings or attitudes that have some strength and survival value.

Example: The ark is obviously connected  with religious beliefs, and I see Christ as an Ark. The only way I can explain this is to ask you to imagine a being that has been able to develop a symbiotic relationship with all life forms at the level of sentience or consciousness. In our own view of life, such a being is incredibly highly evolved. But also imagine that this being does not have a physical body, existing as it dies outside the limitations of time and space as we usually know it. The image I saw was of an immense being standing in space by earth, absorbing all human experience. This being was an Ark because, from what was being shown me, even if humanity destroyed itself, all its experience would be preserved and expressed again in another time and place. Nothing of importance would be lost. Even such an apparently small thing as a child’s love for its Grandma would be preserved and allowed to live again.

Carter uses the image of the ark in his poem So That We Build, and suggests a mistake or a transgression prior to deliverance. So it might be that in your dream is might say you have survived a transgression.

This suggests that the bonds we create and live by are a part of the system itself. What survives is to create a bonding system which actually survives and perpetuates itself. It cannot do this without utilising the hidden but powerful underlying systems in cosmic processes. There is another fundamental action – it is that when we move against an implicit social conditioning, we feel the pressure or pain of that – whether it is sexual, clothing, or whatever it is. When we actually face the discomfort of that we actually meet consciousness. We discover the underlying feelings and forces that have created the conditioning in the first place. So in facing out discomforts we may uncover a new person we can become.

The biblical account of Noah taking pairs of the animals aboard the Ark to preserve them suggests the preservation of our animal instincts not the repression or destruction. The meaning of taking pairs – one of each sex – is that we can uplift these animal tendencies we find within. This says that if we do this then we are the ark, and our body the structure of the ark.

Exampl: Hello Tony I am puzzled by this recent dream as it seems so at odds with my conscious understanding: I return to my home town, a small seaside place and find that where the Church I used to attend, which was close to my mother’s retirement home, stood, my Mother had had it demolished and built a small supposed to be luxury but, actually in places, a bit over the top modern hotel. I went into the new place looking for my room but it was a new hotel room full of sports – wear.. in the dream it had the name of my second son …Roddy’s room. Although the space the hotel took up was large the 3 bedrooms were close almost crammed together at the end of a long hallway.

As I explored I came upon people building a strange boat type ark. It was ready to go to sea and after some indecision involving a man who said I could not go, I leapt on but all the doors were shut so I sat right at the front on a sort of step. The boat was on the promenade and then turned sharply onto a slipway and began to move quickly down the slip-way. I looked at the sea hoping it would be calm as I was on this exposed bit and as I looked I saw that the sea was a massive wave, tall as a skyscraper very dark and huge and we were racing towards it. I realised there was a young woman beside me and as I frantically thought how to escape she said “What a sadist to send us this wave.” I woke myself up very frightened. S.

S. – I see that despite all the promised luxury your actual living space is diminished – the three rooms at the end of a long hallway. The ark suggests a way out of the mess, based on old ideas of religion. But in fact the door is closed to you and as the young woman remarks, “What a sadist to send us this wave.” Yet I feel that the wave is the way out, even though frightening. This may not seem a very good idea, but you have to remember that when we dream we are creating images that clothe feelings and emotions. If you can see that facing what is an uncomfortable feeling and going through it frees you from it. Either that or you could visualise other alternatives

Useful Questions and Hints:

Is there a difficult situation I am trying to escape from?

What am I trying to save or salvage from my present life?

What part in my dream is this ark playing?

Am I in some way the ark? Using Processing Dreams may help.