What the Dragon Knows

Plucking the Pearl of Great Value

Kinuko Y. Craft’s depiction of entering our own dreaming pearl.

Through the darkened landscape, wander.

Lost within the coal-dark Earth.

Obsidian lake stretches, beckoning.

And dragons all around.

An unearthing.

A decision.

A reckoning.

When something lost is almost found.

What is the treasure buried here?

A dream unsought, unknown, untold.

Dare you pluck it from its setting?

Dare you wake from your forgetting?

Pearl within the dragon’s mouth

Begetting unexpected fear.

For as you take it in your hands

You cannot help but wonder.

Shall it be tended to,

Or squandered?

Perhaps I am odd, but so often when I meet people, I want to see beneath their surface. I wonder, what are the half-acknowledged dreams that lay buried beneath the predictable movements of their daily lives? What is that deep well of longing that lays like a pearl at the heart of them? And why are so many of us reluctant to lift that pearl from its setting?

Honestly, though, I get it. When I throw open the box of my inner, unspoken dreams, it can feel like unearthing a writhing nest of snakes. I find that my deep, heartfelt dreams sit just alongside my most intractable fears. I can’t access one without stirring up the other. What surprises me, though, is the form my fears take when I begin to catch the scent, the form, the feeling of a long-unacknowledged desire. I approach, and then, I hesitate.

What if I’m not strong enough, good enough, brave enough, to protect the beauty and purity of this realized dream? What if, when I bring it to the surface, I lose it, or it’s taken from me? Then, what would I have left? The formless promise of this longing has been my most cherished treasure. If it is no longer something I seek, but have, what then will drive me?

As Yeats so maddeningly asked in “The Tower,”

“Does the imagination dwell the most

Upon a woman won or woman lost?”

In this case, I ask rhetorically whether the imagination dwells the most on a dream won, or a dream that remains formless, never articulated.

An image of Pandora comes to mind when I think about the writhing snakes of fear that guard the pearl of my dreams. That brave and curious woman is often maligned, but when we dig deeper, I think she has more to teach us than a cursory glance at the story will yield. As I consider Pandora’s arc from curious innocent to the sole cause of human suffering, I believe we can find much, much more meaning here than a trite, cautionary trope. A precursor to Eve, we have to wonder why this curiosity to poke and prod into forbidden places is so deeply embedded and so hard to resist.

Maybe, in listening to the story, we forget to ask: what could be the pearl within the box of disaster that made it all worthwhile?

The Dragon and the Pearl, Pandora, Eve- these are all figures imbued with specific arhetypal frequencies that, when worked with, have the power draw forward new, revelatory truths into the conscious mind. These revelations are ultimately what we’re getting at here, with the dragon, the pearl, and Pandora’s box all acting as examples of potent vehicles.

I have mentioned that, years ago, I experienced a moment of profound and unexpected awakening. At that time, a dam burst in my mind and stored archetypal visions from the collective human experience was unleashed into my conscious awareness. One way to describe it is that a barrier broke between my thinking mind and my knowing mind- a distinction I had theretofore been unaware of. You could compare it to opening a locked gate and suddenly having a stampede of wild animals trample into your previously meticulously-ordered space. The animals, I understood, would not go back into the locked realms where they had been hidden for so long. I needed to somehow learn to work with them.

Needless to say, the space and landscape of my mind was irrevocably changed. It was suddenly populated by voices, images, and strange visitations I could not make sense of. As I tried to return to my previous state of rigid control over my reality, I came to understand that these visions were impossible to tame. I quickly gave that up. Instead, and through the guidance of teachers much wiser than myself, I began to listen to the visions, work with them, and submit more than once to being mauled by them.

I had to understand that my visions were entirely real, but never literal. This has been (and continues to be) an ongoing lesson in discovery. Each image, body-feeling, or message I receive is powerful, comprised of layers and layers of truth, but the messages are rarely direct. They are often transmissions of a multi-dimensional awareness that can take me weeks, months, years (lifetimes?) to integrate. Each message I receive gets filtered through the mesh screen of my own rigorous questioning. I am learning the art of questioning, probing, and deep listening in a way that offers illumination as opposed to reduction or dismissal. If every vision is a treasure offered from my subconscious, how do I receive it, tend to it and learn from it, instead of demanding it reveal itself according to my pre-conceived needs and desires?

Dr. Catherine Shainberg, founder of the School of Imagery, calls this “opening” a dream. In her book Kabbalah of Light, she advises us to “stay with the dream as it is, and live it. Then, when you speak about it, stay close to what you see and sense. Describe. Don’t interpret.” Later she advises, “Do not close up your dream. Do not reduce it. Instead, open it up to its living potential.”

This guidance has been instrumental for me learning to listen to the archetypes that visit me. They are breathtaking and wild. They arise from my longing and my fears. They reflect back to me the landscape of my own hidden subconscious.

I sit with it and, over time, it reveals itself to me. A single image can offer untold breathtaking, unfolding revelations. It is a rich box of treasure that I can return to again and again.

This brings me back to the opening of today’s image: The Dragon and the Pearl.

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