In the Beginning was the Word ~ side two ~ The Dream The Illusion

- chapter 11 index -
pg. 1 - Moonchild | pg. 2 - The Dream The Illusion
pg. 3 - The Court of the Crimson King | pg. 4 - The Purple Piper
pg. 5 - Three Lullabies | pg. 6 - Orpheus
pg. 7 - The Keeper of the City Keys | pg. 8 - The Pilgrim's Door
pg. 9 - The Gardener | pg. 10 - The Yellow Jester
pg. 11 - The Dance of the Puppets | pg. 12 - Dionysus
pg. 13 - The Fool | pg. 14 - Logos
pg. 15 - The Magician | pg. 16 - Finis

site index

"As man now reasons in dreams, so humanity also reasoned for many thousands of years when awake."

- Friedrich Nietzsche

"The Apollonian tendency is closely related to dreaming. Dreaming, says Nietzsche, is a means of interpreting life through images. An essential part of the experience of dreams is an ever-present realization that the images are not real but illusory. He called this the "fair illusion of the dream sphere." Such images, however, must preserve the feeling of illusion, or they will fail in preserving artistic quality, preserving instead merely "crass reality."

- The Birth of Tragedy by Kelly Fagan

"Yesod is the culmination of the preceding influences of the system. The energies that have come before are finally converged in this location of the moon and prepared for final descent into the material world.
(and ascent to Tiphareth on the reverse path)
This sephira is also known as the home of illusion and reflection. Some know it as the astral plane and the dream world. As it represents a place of coming into reality without being concrete yet, it isn't always to be trusted.

The notion of illusion in this sephira stems from the symbolism of its rulership by the moon. The moon shines with the reflected light of the sun and is unable to produce its own brilliance. This reflective property of the moon was associated as a reflection of truth; reality was connected with the sun.

Neither darkness nor light rules in this sephira. Here we find the coagulation of ideas into reality. Many metaphysicians believe this to be the plane we wander while dreaming. In this land of half light we must be cautious of our experiences, never hesitating to question."

- Yesod

Occupying the point on side two of the album exactly opposite that of I Talk to the Wind on side one, The Dream and The Illusion , appropriately enough, also serves an opposite purpose. I Talk to the Wind portrays an inner dialogue between Thinking and Feeling but with the Thinking function denying the existence or importance of the other. In The Dream The Illusion Thinking is again confronted with Feeling but this time a meaningful dialogue ensues. The clock and other jarring/discordant sounds in The Dream and The Illusion represent, the waking, analytical, conscious masculine aspect of the psyche (the Thinking function) while gentle guitar and vibraphone passages represent the illogical, emotional, feminine, unconscious nature (the dream state and the Feeling function). Through this inner dialogue, the opposites are united. In Moonchild , it is the conscious state (the differentiated Thinking function) that produces "The Illusion" and thus "The Dream" (Thinking and Feeling working together in the dream state) is closer to reality (the truth of the Self).

"...in the story of the Sleeping Beauty the prince must win through a hedge of thorns. The princess slept because she had been pricked by a spindle, perhaps one of the three spindles of the Grail-tree on which the crystal was, so to speak, impaled, and this "tree" was, as we have seen, a hidden allusion to the "Bed of Solomon", in which she slept until the solar light should reawaken and bring her sparkling back to life."

- The Ancient Secret by Lady Flavia Anderson, p. 142

"In myths one finds that the magic or talisman that can cure the king or his country always proves to be something very special. In one tale 'a white blackbird' or ' a fish that carries a golden ring in its gills' is needed to restore the king's health. In another the king wants the 'water of life' or 'three golden hairs from the head of the devil'....Whatever it is, the thing that can drive away the evil is always unique and hard to find.
It is exactly the same in the initial crisis in the life of an individual. One is seeking something that is impossible to find or about which nothing is known. In such moments all well-meant, sensible advice is completely useless - advice that urges one to try to be responsible, to take a holiday, not to work so hard (or to work harder), to have more (or less) human contact, or to take up a hobby. None of that helps, or at best only rarely. There is only one thing that seems to work; and that is to turn directly toward the approaching darkness without prejudice and totally naively, and to try and find out what its secret aim is and what it wants from you.
The hidden purpose of the oncoming darkness is generally something so unusual, so unique and unexpected, that as a rule one can find out what it is only by means of dreams and fantasies welling up from the unconscious. If one focuses attention on the unconscious without rash assumptions or emotional rejection, it often breaks through in a flow of helpful symbolic images."

- C.G. Jung, Man and his Symbols