He too felt that the therapy had nearly reached the end. At this point, we both felt
that it was quite interesting that, although both of us were completely indifferent to
Buddhism, the significant Buddhist image, the Buddha’s Pari Nirvana (final
Nirvana), appeared. At that time, I did not give any more thought to the dream. I
focused on the idea that the dream indicated a change in his image of the therapist.
But when I look back on it now, I believe that the dream was referring to my reality
as well. I feel that this dream was indicating how much weight Buddhism exerts on
the way I conduct psychotherapy even though at that time I was not ready consciously
to accept the fact. I saw the dream’s half-light and half-dark field of people
surrounding the central figure in terms of the client’s work on his ‘Shadow’ problem.
Now I see that it may have indicated my own half-conscious state of mind as regards
Buddhism. In my own dreams, my I does things that would be completely out of
character for the I in the awake state. In one’s dream, sometimes the I becomes not
oneself, but another or an animal, a plant, or even an inorganic being. Here is an old
story from a dream in which the I becomes an animal:
There was a man who hunted birds with falcons. He lived with his wife and
three children and kept many falcons and dogs for hunting. He was getting
quite old, and one night he was sick but not able to fall asleep. Finally, near
dawn, he fell asleep and had a dream. He and his family were pheasants living
happily in the meadow. Suddenly hunters, with falcons diving and dogs
charging, started after them. Right there in front of his eyes, his wife and three
children were murdered in cold blood by the falcons. When he saw he would
be next, he woke up.
He began to think about all the many pheasants he had killed. Those
pheasants must have felt as sad as he felt in the dream. So he let all of his falcons
and dogs loose. In tears, he told this dream to his wife and children.
Immediately he renounced the world and took the tonsure (ordination as a
monk).
(Yamada et al. 1951b:77–80)I have summarized the story for you, but the original contains a lively and detailed
description of how frightened the hunter/pheasant became, witnessing his wife and
children being murdered in front of him. This shows how well he had experienced
the sadness of pheasants in the dream.
The notable characteristic of this story is that, in the dream, the dreamer became
a being other than human and by that gained empathy toward pheasants. Then this
experience in the dream became the generator of his behavior in the waking state.
This type of thing happens in varying degrees in my practice of analysis at the present
time. The cases of becoming an animal in dreams are rare, but they do exist in Japan.
There may be fewer in Europe and America.
You sometimes see yourself doing something impossible in a dream—for example,
you see yourself falling from a high place. In a dream you might clearly experience
your ‘double.’ In a dream, you might see another you. The phenomenon of the
138 HAYAO KAWAI