On Unconscious Fear and The Hanged Man

I begin this post with a dream.

I walk down a dark alley or street at night and approach a brick warehouse style building with a door, pasted over with unreadable fliers and posters, reminding me of a speakeasy. I knock. The door is opened, but only partly.

"Who are you and what is your business?" I am asked.

"I have an appointment with [unknown name] Therapist" I reply. I am looked over and begrudgingly admitted. It seems like I am not normally allowed into this place, but for this special occasion and circumstance it is permitted.

As I walk into the foyer I see many staircases leading off in different directions and a large lobby entrance in an art-deco style, softly lit, with gilded decorative accoutrements and flowing but blocky masonry and tile-work. I walk into the lobby and at either far side are brass door elevators.

I find my memory is spotty, but have distinct memories of walking through various hallways (very much like acrylic tubes at times) and seeing out and through the buildings exterior and noticing that it is actually underwater. The entire building is underwater, or at least this part is. I find my way down and through a stairwell back into the main lobby with the elevators. I call an elevator with a button and step in. After ariving at my floor I am greeted with a reception desk where I inquire about my appointment. It will be soon, and She will be ready for me, but I cannot take my son into the appointment.

I look down at my son and let him know that he is to go and play, but not to wander too far. At this point he wanders off and I do not see him for the remainder of the dream.

As my appointment time comes due I go into a dark recess of the building and through and into an industrial warehouse, with metal catwalks and booming electronic music. Scantily clad dancers gyrate and thrust seductively above me, including the woman I recognize to be my therapist. All other men and women are obviously congregated around her, and she leads them. She is tall, black, female, and topless, with a short-cropped hairstyle. She reminds me of a BDSM themed Grace Jones.

I do not remember what I ask her, specifically, but I remember her response.

"You need to face your fear.". Great, what fear?

Some time passes, but the party "ends" and She and Her entourage walk me into another room that is much quieter and off to the side. This room has a sub-mariner nautical feel to it—acrylic windows into the oceans depths and steel-rivoted accents, painted yellow. There is an open tube on the floor with water in it that obviously leads into the open ocean, and next to it is a steel gurney with straps that can tilt. I am instructed to climb on.

I follow Her instructions onto the gurney where I am secured, tilted upside down, and lowered into the tube head first. I know this is where my fear is supposed to be. I do not remember whether I feel it viscerally, but I know that I should. Beneath the surface I see machines, submarines, and the sandy ocean floor, along with many other buildings and acrylic tubes connecting them. I breathe, but do not choke. I am still alive, and deep under the surface of the water there is life.

Okay, what the hell does this mean? Let me try to break down some of the symbols that are obvious and then some that are obfuscated from you, the reader.

The building itself with it's larger than life interior (bigger on the inside) with multiple levels, checkpoints, guards, and strange sadomasochistic psychosexual atmosphere is the halls of my unconscious. There are hallways leading all over the place, lots of rooms with strange activities (mail sorting etc.) where the sub-surface mechanisms and operations that keep "me" running go on.

The dark street and clandestine "speakeasy" door is the guarded nature of my unconscious, normally not admitting any conscious contact. My dreams typically are not participatory (and neither is this one). I have only had a single "lucid" dream that I can remember in my entire life, and that was rather boring and sterile.

The figure of my oldest son in the dream feels to me like it firstly represents me and my childhood self. I see so much of myself in my son and often forget that he isn't me—I take him along on my personal journeys into the spiritual and esoteric, and in this case into the domain of my unconscious discovery. I am still not sure about this, but this is my initial gut reaction. I also feel that the unconscious fear of underwater machinery from my childhood and his inclusion as a childhood me tie this together, but not completely—so I am open to new revelations and insights on this.

The Therapist. Her. She is the "Queen" of this place, and obviously runs it. Her word is Law, and at her command anything can happen, but instead of ruling from an austere throne she is bathed in sweat, thrusting and gyrating in an overwhelming deviant sexual sensory cacophony of harsh music and cold industrial themes. However, she is not cold. Her demeanor is not cold. She breaks off from her revelry immediately to introduce me to my treatment—facing my fear directly. She is only outwardly intimidating, cold, and sadistic—inwardly she is warm, caring, but maybe not loving like I think of a doting grandmother. I think the kind of caring she displays is perfectly manifest in the "job" she is performing in the dream—the Therapist. Professionally detached, but professionally caring. She is giving me exactly what I need because of course she would. That's her job.

The fear, and the process surrounding it. This is the most apparent esoteric and occult portion of this encounter—I am sure there is more that I am missing, but this slaps me right across the face. The symbolism of water is everywhere. I am underwater—beneath the surface, but not yet in it. And beneath the surface there are things that I am scared of. Since I was a small child I have had a recurring dream (though not for a long time) of being caught underwater in a mechanical wave machine or pump. Submechanophobia was never a fear in my waking life to any major extent, but I do have memories of not liking being in the pool at a family friends house when their pool vacuum was going. I don't think this is a direct causation, but it's a strong enough signal to at least mention it here.

The other obvious occult component is the action of the metal gurney that swivels to allow for upside-down dunking. This jumped out at me as an obvious allegory for The Hanged Man. This is where we go a bit into occult symbolism and Quabbala.

The card of The Hanged Man in Crowley's Thoth Tarot is associated with the Hebrew letter מ‎ (mem), originating from the Phonecian𐤌 letter of similar pronunciation, and spawning the Greek letter μ (Mee)‎, and originally from the Egyptian hyroglyph 𓈖. All of these letters have direct meanings of water. In Crowley's Thoth tarot the Hanged man is suspended over the deep of the watery depths (position 23) between Geburah and Hod, which is Water.

I quote Crowley here...

This card is beautiful in a strange, immemorial, moribund manner. It is the card of the Dying God; its importance in the present pack is merely that of the Cenotaph.

According to the timeless and wonderful narrative ability of "Baba" Lon DuQuette explaining Crowley in "Understanding Aleister Crowley's Thoth Tarot",

A cenotaph is a tomb or a monument erected to honor a person whose actual body is buried somewhere else. Be that as it may, he goes on to give us a very good Aeon-of-Horus interpretation of the Hanged Man, the highlights of which...I will try to summarize.
...
First, observe that the arms and legs of our crucified hero make the figure of a cross surmounting a triangle. Crowley tells us that this symbolizes “the descent of the light into the darkness in order to redeem it.”111 It is nothing less than the cosmic sacrifice that creates, sustains, and destroys the universe. Our perception of how we are part of this grand sacrifice has evolved over the aeons. The sacrifice meant one thing to our ancestors in the Aeon of Isis, another thing in the Aeon of Osiris, and now, as we shall see, means something altogether different in the present Aeon of Horus.

...he is talking about is the “annihilation of the self in the Beloved." This is symbolized in the card by the ankh (the union of the Rose and Cross, of male and female.) It is the devotional ecstasy that dissolves al sense of separateness that I wrote about in chapter 11. This “marriage,” as mystics and saints of every age and culture have tried to tell us, is the supreme sacrifice.

The Hanged Man of the Thoth Tarot still symbolizes the descent of the light into the darkness in order to redeem it, but the word “redeem” no longer implies an existing debt that needs to be paid. Instead, redemption in the Aeon of Horus is the noble duty of the enlightened to bring enlightenment to the unenlightened.

There is an immense fear of awakening, of what it means, of the death of self and what that means. This is ever evolving and the fear is a shadow of what lies on the other side of the "water". There is still life down there, including mine. It never stopped.