Session Five – Wednesday, November 11, 2009, 9:00 p.m. Eastern Time
Gold in the Darkest Dark: Understanding Repetitive Dreams, Nightmares, and Disembodied Voices

Mother Night presents a new series of teachings from Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés, the esteemed senior Jungian psychoanalyst and bestselling author of Women Who Run With the Wolves. This six-session online learning event invites us to tap the generative power of all goodness of the core self, all creativity and understanding that lies out of sight, in darkness called the unconscious.

In the fifth session of the series, Gold in the Darkest Dark: Understanding Repetitive Dreams, Nightmares, and Disembodied Voices, Dr. Estés explores the question, “How do we make sense of the sometimes subtle, sometimes harsh, distressing, sometimes extraordinarily loving, sometimes profoundly informative ideas, insights, and data—even summonses and commands given to us by the unconscious?”

Through her family stories of “The Fool and His Feather” and “The Four Rabbinum,” Dr. Estés illuminates four ways of understanding uncanny insights that often arise from the dark, that is, from the unknown side of the unconscious. “The hero and heroine’s darkest challenges are to ever pull away from scorn and under-valuation of one’s own—and others—psychic contents, as well as to not fall into the tar pit of over-valuation of same. But rather, be able to bear, to be able to unlock the mystery that gives the transformative instructions from soul to psyche. The messages of meaning for the dreamer are to be held with inquiry and respect, no matter how odd, misshapen, lumpy, bumpy, distasteful, beautifully fantasy-like they may be. Nightmares, sudden voice-only dreams, and the entire fantasia of dreams are like the map home to center, written in invisible ink until held over the fire built by the soul.”

A Q & A session with the audience concludes with a story regarding Our Lady who repulses and leaches away weakening influences, and then the blessing prayer “We Are the Atomic Children, and We Are Still Dancing.”

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS
All users: high-speed internet connection; working speakers or headset.
PC: Windows 2000, XP, or Vista; Internet Explorer 6.0 or Firefox 2.0 or newer. 1GHz CPU with 512MB RAM (2GB for Vista).
Mac: OS 10.4 or newer, G4 or Intel processor, 512 MB RAM; Safari 3.0 or Firefox 2.0 or newer.