Another bear dream
I had another dream about black bear cubs last night. This is the second bear dream in about two weeks.In last night's dream, bear cubs were in my grandmother's house. I was trying to sort them out from the cats. In the other dream, bears stood on my grandmother's porch, rubbing their backs against a piano (?).
Hmm. Why am I dreaming so much about bears right now? And what do they have to do with my grandmother?
In J.C. Cirlot's Dictionary of Symbols, the entry for bear says that bears are related to the concept of blackness (nigredo) or prime matter in alchemy. It's the first step in all transformations, so bears correspond to "all initial stages and the instincts." And it seems Jung believed this stage of blackness was related to despair, which he saw as a necessary beginning step to change.
I don't know about the desapir part. The bears in my dreams are unruly, but they're bears. They're supposed to be unruly. I don't have any sense of fear in the dreams, though I do feel a kind of urgency.
Maybe I'm just getting tuned into the time of year. Black bears have given birth in their dens by now, and the cubs are awake, tumbling over their mothers and nursing. And starting in spring, bears regularly show up at the meadow house — sometimes right next to the window.
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