time and place

“Oh dear. I tried to keep a dream journal once, but soon realized that I was a woman of small dreams. I found that I could only keep it up for a week, filling page after page with inane details. Here’s a sample. ‘…spent what seemed like hours outside a door waiting for someone to come out and ask me in. Luckily there was a chair. Also there was a cat nearby sitting on an enormous Persian rug. He knew me but was not feeling friendly.’

“Night after night of circuitous errands and vague misunderstandings with men I’ve never met before. It became too much. Oh of course every once in a while I would have a fascinating dream where I was an assassin or was eaten by a huge animal, but those were few and far in between.

“Most awful.”

April 20, 1929

A few years ago I had a series of very powerful and symbolic dreams which I discussed with someone who was familiar with the works of Jung. When I mentioned that the star of these dreams was a dream person who has been in dreams I’ve had over the course of my life, the person suggested that this was probably my anima (click the link for a Wikipedia page on the subject.)

Both of these drawings are very dream-like to me, and there’s something about the woman in them that reminds me of my anima.

Besides the fact that they are from a serialized western story which appeared in a 1929 newspaper, I don’t know much about these pictures, although I asked the original scanner if he could find any more info (such as the artist) on them.