PrimaMateria – Anima is a fancy word for the woman in your life – in you. She is all the women you have experienced from the beginning – from your mother and the midwife who may have helped you into birth; all the girls you have met and been involved with, all the women you longed for, held or avoided. In fact, the women you dream of are the summary of all of them.
But in our dreams we can play wonderful games with yourself – because all the women in your dreams are you playing at all the games and feelings we can have about women, from worshipping them, to longing to holding them sexually, to avoiding any contact, or peeping into their/your intimate moments.
Try holding each one close to you and watch what you feel.
You obviously have opened the door to your inner dream world because you were able to see the kneeling figure. That is nothing to be afraid of. Please see
http://dreamhawk.com/dream-encyclopedia/hallucinations/ and the following:
Example: While we sleep our conscious self is largely or totally unconscious, and while we sleep our voluntary muscles are paralysed – therefore another will or motivating force moves our body. So we have a Conscious Will, and what I will call a Life Will. The first one we have experience of as we can move our arm or speak in everyday activities; but the second will takes over when we sleep. See Sleep Paralysis
This Life will can move us to speak, to move our body, and in fact do things that we cannot do with our Conscious Will. As Freud pointed out this inner will has full access to our memories. It can do so many other things that are described elsewhere – See Edgar Cayce and the Cosmic Mind; ESP in Dreams.
For simplicity I have called this experience, of what is actually waking lucid dreaming, ‘LifeStream’. It would take us too far out of looking at dreams to explore it, but it can be studied within these features: LifeStream-People’s Experience of LifeStream- Life’s Little Secrets - Arm Circling Meditation
This Life Will or motivator has been active for millions of years and we see it working all the time in animals. We experience it as spontaneous movement - as we do when breathing and our heart beating. It is what keeps us alive - and when we relax our hold as you do when allowing spontaneous movement, it is simply your life will acting upon you. It is like dreaming while awake, and like any dream your identity is taken over by the Life Will. But because of the belief system of people who believe in spirits or ghosts, which is exactly like spiritualism, they use different symbols - the spirits and different characters, exactly as we do in our dreams. See
http://dreamhawk.com/inner-life/water-wonderland/Also I have the feeling that you are reaching too hard to touch the mystery that you are - R. D. Laing, the psychiatrist, in describing the search for one’s fundamental self said, 'The Life I am trying to grasp is the me that is trying to grasp it.' A website about enlightenment has a heading, 'What you are looking for is what is looking.'
I know it goes against all that we are taught about succeeding, but here is a useful quote:
One of the things we need is to have an open and allowing state of mind and body. Writing about this in relationship to problem solving in his commentary to the book SECRET OF THE GOLDEN FLOWER, Carl Jung says: -
“…the essential urge to find a new way lay in the fact that the fundamental problem of the patient seemed insoluble to me unless violence was done to the one or the other side of his nature. I always worked with the temperamental conviction that in the last analysis there are no insoluble problems, and experience has so far justified me in that I have often seen individuals who simply outgrew a problem which had destroyed others. This ‘outgrowing’, as I called it previously, revealed itself on further experience to be the raising of the level of consciousness…..
“Here and there it happened in my practice that a patient grew beyond the dark possibilities within himself, and the observation of the fact was an experience of the foremost importance to me. In the meantime, I had learned to see that the greatest and most important problems of life are all fundamentally insoluble. They must be so, because they express the necessary polarity inherent in every self-regulating system. They cannot be solved, but only outgrown. I therefore asked myself whether this possibility of outgrowing, or further psychic development, was normal, while to remain caught in a conflict was something pathological. Everyone must possess that higher level [of possible growth], at least in embryonic form, and in favourable circumstances, must be able to develop the possibility. When I examined the way of development of those persons who, quietly, and as if unconsciously, grew beyond themselves, I saw that their fates had something in common. Whether arising from without or within, the new thing came to all those people from a dark field of possibilities; they accepted it and developed further by means of it….
“What then did these people do in order to achieve the progress which freed them? As far as I could see they did nothing but let things happen… The art of letting things happen, action in non-action, letting go of oneself, as taught by Master Eckhart, became a key for me… The key is this: we must be able to let things happen in the psyche. For us, this becomes a real art of which few people know anything. Consciousness is forever interfering, helping, correcting, and negating, and never leaving the simple growth of the psychic processes in peace. It would be a simple enough thing to do if only simplicity were not the most difficult of all things. It consists solely in watching objectively the development of any fragment of fantasy. Nothing could be simpler than this, and yet right here the difficulties begin. Apparently no fantasy fragment is at hand – yes there is one, but it is too stupid! Thousands of good excuses are brought against it: one cannot concentrate on it; it is too boring; what could come of it? It is ‘nothing but’, etc. The conscious raises prolific objections. In fact, it often seems bent on blotting out the spontaneous fantasy activity despite the intention, nay, the firm determination of the individual, to allow the psychic processes to go forward without intervention. In many cases there exists a veritable spasm of the conscious."
Tony