dream

Picnic on the edge of a volcano – a dream

Eve Neuhaus 4 Comments


Un pique-nique au bord d’un volcan : un rêve



I’m walking up a high hill with a group of friends, all of us carrying baskets. When the path spirals round to the top, I can see that the hill is a volcano, but it’s an inactive one, its crater a gentle dip soft with grass. More people are coming up the path and joining those already spreading blankets and tablecloths on the ground along the rim of the crater.


Je gravis une haute colline avec un groupe d’amis, et nous portons tous des paniers. Lorsque le sentier serpente jusqu’au sommet, je constate que la colline est un volcan, mais inactif : son cratère forme un léger creux recouvert d’herbe. D’autres personnes remontent le sentier et rejoignent celles qui sont déjà en train d’étaler des couvertures et des nappes sur le sol, le long du bord du cratère.

It’s my job to feed them all. There is a huge cauldron filled with something warm. I supervise some women friends who are ladling the soup (or stew?) into smaller cauldrons, which we then take around the circle to fill each of the picnickers’ bowls.


C’est à moi de les nourrir tous. Il y a un immense chaudron rempli d’un plat chaud. Je supervise quelques amies qui servent la soupe (ou le ragoût ?) à la louche dans des chaudrons plus petits, que nous faisons ensuite circuler pour remplir les bols de chacun des pique-niqueurs.

The mood is benign, cheerful, almost ebullient, though we’re all aware that it’s a volcano we’re sitting around.

L’ambiance est sereine, joyeuse, presque exubérante, même si nous sommes tous conscients que nous sommes assis au pied d’un volcan.

When I wake up, the sky is yellow gray with smoke from the wildfires all over southern Europe, savage wildfires as close as an hour’s drive from our little haven on a hill, Cordes-sur-Ciel. Tom is coughing. We barely glance at the news—it’s too apocalyptic.

À mon réveil, le ciel est d’un gris jaunâtre, chargé de la fumée des incendies qui ravagent tout le sud de l’Europe, des incendies dévastateurs qui font rage à peine à une heure de route de notre petit havre de paix perché sur une colline, à Cordes-sur-Ciel. Tom tousse. Nous jetons à peine un coup d’œil aux informations : c’est trop apocalyptique.

The waking world is falling into chaos. It’s fortunate that the fire nearest our place is contained, but the sister of a friend’s family has been evacuated from a much worse fire a four hour drive from here. Climate change is everywhere, we are in our sixth week of relentless heat, the wars in the Middle East and in Ukraine continue, and there are more earthquakes and erupting volcanoes along the Ring of Fire every day. Not to mention the political situation.

Le monde réel sombre dans le chaos. Heureusement, l’incendie le plus proche de chez nous est maîtrisé, mais la sœur d’un ami a dû être évacuée en raison d’un incendie bien plus grave, à quatre heures de route d’ici. Le changement climatique est omniprésent : nous en sommes à notre sixième semaine de chaleur accablante, les guerres au Moyen-Orient et en Ukraine se poursuivent, et les tremblements de terre et les éruptions volcaniques se multiplient chaque jour le long de la Ceinture de feu. Sans parler de la situation politique.

Yet Tom and I just returned from a few idyllic days in Amsterdam with family. The skies were blue and temperatures were well below the searing ones we’re enduring here.

Pourtant, Tom et moi venons tout juste de rentrer d’un séjour idyllique de quelques jours à Amsterdam en famille. Le ciel était bleu et les températures bien inférieures à celles, caniculaires, que nous subissons ici.

We were indeed picnicking on the rim of the volcano.

Nous étions effectivement en train de pique-niquer au bord du cratère du volcan.

The geometry of the dream bears further examination. There is the hill, the same one I’ve been climbing in my dreams for as long as I can remember. (I write about the series in another blog Spiral dream: Redemption, written a few years ago). At the top of the hill, there is a round indentation, grassy, but similar in form to the spring at the center of the women in white I saw in the vision which I describe in the blog called A Drop of Love, and like the spring, it is surrounded by people. In the vision, the other women and I are meditating while a battle goes on around us. In this dream, both men and women are sitting on the volcano’s rim, and the battle going on around us isn’t evident, though it’s glaring in the waking world.

La géométrie de ce rêve mérite d’être examinée de plus près. Il y a cette colline, celle-là même que je gravis dans mes rêves depuis aussi longtemps que je me souvienne. (J’ai évoqué cette série dans un autre blog intitulé « Spiral Dream: Redemption », rédigé il y a quelques années). Au sommet de la colline, il y a un creux arrondi, recouvert d’herbe, mais dont la forme rappelle celle de la source au centre des femmes en blanc que j’ai vues dans la vision que je décris dans le blog intitulé « Une goutte d’amour » ; et tout comme la source, ce creux est entouré de gens. Dans cette vision, les autres femmes et moi-même méditons tandis qu’une bataille fait rage autour de nous. Dans ce rêve, hommes et femmes sont assis sur le bord du volcan, et la bataille qui fait rage autour de nous n’est pas évidente, bien qu’elle soit flagrante dans le monde éveillé.

Symbols of the Feminine abound: the crater, the cauldrons, the bowls. We women are providing nourishment to the community.

Les symboles du féminin abondent : le cratère, les chaudrons, les bols. Nous, les femmes, nourrissons la communauté.

If the message of the vision, which I refer to fondly as “my dickhead vision,” is that women need to hold the center during period of chaos by remaining calm and focused on the deeper world, the message of this dream is that we also need to be of service by providing sustenance.

Si le message de cette vision, que j’appelle affectueusement « ma vision de con », est que les femmes doivent garder leur équilibre en période de chaos en restant calmes et concentrées sur le monde intérieur, le message de ce rêve est quant à lui que nous devons également nous mettre au service des autres en leur apportant le réconfort nécessaire.

That volcano doesn’t look like it’s about to erupt in my personal dream world, but I’d be a fool to think it’s just a hill.

Dans l’univers onirique qui m’est propre, ce volcan ne semble pas sur le point d’entrer en éruption, mais je serais bien bête de croire qu’il ne s’agit que d’une simple colline.

Get your cauldrons ready, my women friends. There will be work to do.

Préparez vos chaudrons, mes amies. Il y aura du travail à faire.

Living a symbolic life: where a Celtic cross took me (part 1)

Eve Neuhaus 6 Comments
A Celtic Cross

At just before six in the evening on February 20, 2026, I was immersed in a Japanese-style hot tub, perfectly round and not too hot, with three dear women friends. With our legs bobbing in the warm water in front of us, the four of us formed a Celtic cross.

It was a seminal moment. We all knew it.

At just that time, the conjunction of Neptune and Saturn was exact. Not only was it exact, which happens every 36 years, but it was exact at 0° Aries, which only happens every 6000 years.

And, not only was it exact, but it fell exactly on the north node of the moon in my birth chart. And we were at that spa at that moment to celebrate the birthday of one of the other women.

That’s a lot of astrology to unpack, and I’ll do it, but first, take a look the Sabian symbol for 0° Aries:

A Woman Just Risen From The Sea; A Seal Is Embracing Her

I hoped the four of us would take that moment to rise from the water and embrace, but, sadly, the water wasn’t welcoming enough for any of us to feel like submerging.

So we meditated and emerged from there to embrace.

What’s the significance of all this?

Last night I dreamed that I was deep in a forest with a group of people. We’d had to escape from somewhere and there was a question about whether we had brought the right stuff with us and whether there was enough food. It was a fairly large group of people, maybe twenty or thirty. I was at the back of the group, walking slowly with a companion. When we caught up with the others, they were cooking and eating. I was happy to see that they had roasted some chicken and that I had a choice of either a leg or a breast piece—I didn’t want them both because it seemed like too much.

Our whole civilization is entering the deep woods of uncertainty, and the question of whether we’re bringing the right things with us matters. The dream is reassuring—there’s enough chicken for us to have a choice, even if we’re the last to be served. Yet it would be a mistake to take it literally. Most of us won’t have to carry chickens along as we navigate the deep woods. We have to take some form of symbolic sustenance.

In the fall, while preparing a presentation for the Seeker’s Compass (watch it here: https://youtu.be/iQIEb5dbF9w), I remembered the profound importance of living symbolically. I’ve appreciated the idea since I was fourteen or so, when the marvelous creative writing teacher at my summer camp introduced us to the power of myth through the work of CG Jung and Joseph Campbell. (My eternal thanks go to Joe Beatty at Lighthouse Art and Music Camp). Ever since, I’ve attended to the metaphors behind details of daily life. I even studied myth at Pacifica and, in my work with Alice O. Howell, focused on seeing the sacred on the commonplace as well as on astrology—but when I used those words “living a symbolic life” in that talk, something powerful reawakened in me.

In the talk I said something like, “In these liminal times, living a symbolic life is surely one of the ways through to the next world.” It wasn’t a phrase I intended to put into that talk, which I gave several times, live and on camera, with and without notes. It wasn’t in my notes.

After the talk, I thought, huh, good thing nobody asked me a question about that—I wouldn’t have known what to say, or who to attribute it to for certain. I thought I remembered hearing it first in a talk by James Hillman at Pacifica, and had assumed it was his. It actually comes from Jung himself. In The Symbolic Life: a collection of miscellaneous writings, he says,

You see, man is in need of a symbolic life – badly in need. We only live banal, ordinary, rational, or irrational things . . . but we have no symbolic life. Where do we live symbolically? Nowhere except where we participate in the ritual of life. . . .

Have you got a corner somewhere in your house where you perform the rites, as you can see in India? Even the very simple houses there have at least a curtained corner where the members of the household can perform the symbolic life, where they can make their new vows or their meditation. We don’t have it; we have no such corner. We have our own room, of course, – but there is a telephone that can ring us up at any time, and we always must be ready. We have no time, no place.

We have no symbolic life, and we are all badly in need of the symbolic life. Only the symbolic life can express the need of the soul – the daily need of the soul, mind you! And because people have no such thing, they can never step out of this mill – this awful, banal, grinding life in which they are “nothing but.” . . .

Everything is banal; everything is “nothing but,” and that is the reason why people are neurotic. They are simply sick of the whole thing, sick of that banal life, and therefore they want sensation. They even want a war; they all want a war; they are all glad when there is a war; they say, “Thank heaven, now something is going to happen – something bigger than ourselves!”

These things go pretty deep, and no wonder people get neurotic. Life is too rational; there is no symbolic existence in which I am something else, in which I am fulfilling my role, my role as one of the actors in the divine drama of life.

After I copied and pasted the above text into this essay, I thought I’d look for an image to illustrate the concept, maybe something from Jung’s The Red Book. The very first image that came up in my search was this one:

Over the top synchronicity.

But to return to the astrology that marked the moment: when the woods get deep and all the trees look alike, I often look up at the stars. Astrology provides a symbolic map for understanding changes in our personal and civilizational lives.

Astrology divides the celestial sphere into 12 sections or signs of 30 degrees each, for a total of 360 degrees. 0° Aries is considered the first degree of the zodiac, the threshold of a new level in the upward spiral of change. The exact passage, or conjunction, of two planets that appear to be moving slowly through the heavens, occurring at 0° Aries begs exploration.

Saturn is the furthest away of the seven “planets,” which in astrology include the sun and the moon, which are visible to the naked eye. Thus, it’s what holds the “world” together, the outer boundary, the structure.

Neptune, discovered using a telescope in 1846, was assigned the farthest out concepts of the time: imagination, illusions, dreams, the abstract, the mysterious.

The conjunction of Saturn and Neptune indicates a merger of structure with dreams.

In a birth chart, the planets are laid out on the zodiac in the position they were in at a person’s birth, each planet at a certain degree in one of the twelve segments, or signs.

In 1925, an astrologer, Marc Edmund Jones, and a clairvoyant, Elsie Wheeler, created a series of 360 images, one for each of the degrees of the zodiac. They called them the Sabian symbols. Each one is completely unique. For example, the woman rising from the sea embraced by the seal is followed by a man entertaining a group of people, and a few degrees later, by a triangle with wings.

In addition to the planets, there are other markers that are assigned meaning, among them the lunar nodes, which mark the moon’s orbit as it intersects the apparent path of the sun. The south node is said to show what a person comes into life with, and the north node what their purpose is.

One of the basic things astrologers do is to compare the position of the planets in the sky at present, or at any given time, to their positions at the time of one’s birth. Thus, I knew that the rare conjunction of Saturn and Neptune at 0° Aries coincided with the position of the north node in my birth chart at 0° Aries. When I looked up the significance of that, Astrology.com said, “When planetary transits touch your north node directly, you’ll find significant, destined events and meetings take place. The north node is uncharted terrain and unlocks the key to your life’s purpose.”

So, there I was, creating one of the four limbs of that cross in a circle at the exact moment of the structure/dream collaboration, at the exact point in time when I am supposed to come into whatever I came into this life to do. And with three dear friends, one of whose birthday was at the same time.

It’s taken too many words and too much time to get to this point in the story, so I’ll explore where the experience took me in my next post.

A drop of love

Eve Neuhaus 4 Comments

Une goutte d’amour

This is a vision that came to me not long ago when I was doing longer than usual meditations in the morning. I’d been sitting for maybe 45 minutes when it floated into my head.

C’est une vision qui m’est venue il n’y a pas longtemps, alors que je faisais une méditation plus longue que d’habitude le matin. J’étais assise depuis environ 45 minutes quand elle m’est venue à l’esprit.

In the vision, I am sitting in front of a spring with low circular wall around it. 

Dans cette vision, je suis assise devant une source entourée d’un muret circulaire. 

From my left comes a figure in a white cape and hood. Without saying anything, she seats herself on the opposite side of the spring. I see that she is a very, very old woman. 

De ma gauche arrive une silhouette vêtue d’une cape blanche à capuche. Sans dire un mot, elle s’assoit à l’autre côté de la source. Je vois qu’il s’agit d’une femme très, très âgée.

 We sit together quietly for a while. I close my eyes.

Nous restons assises ensemble en silence pendant un moment. Je ferme les yeux.

When I open them, I see that many women in white have come.

Quand je les rouvre, je vois que de nombreuses femmes vêtues de blanc sont arrivées.

I’m so pleased to be there,  I feel full of joy. I love these women. I love being part of a circle of women sitting around a spring. I feel so blessed.

Je suis tellement heureuse d’être là,  je me sens remplie de joie. J’aime ces femmes. J’aime faire partie d’un cercle de femmes assises autour d’une source. Je me sens tellement bénie.

Then I remember something I had read the night before.

Puis je me souviens de quelque chose que j’avais lu la veille au soir.

It’s something a friend, Robert Sachs, said in a response on Facebook. His exact words don’t come to me, but what I remember is “One drop of love can overcome all the difficulties going on around you.”

C’était quelque chose qu’un ami, Robert Sachs, avait dit en réponse sur Facebook. Je ne me souvenais pas exactement de ses mots, mais ce dont je me souvenais, c’était : « Une goutte d’amour peut surmonter toutes les difficultés qui vous entourent. »

“One drop of love can overcome all the difficulties going on around you.”

« Une goutte d’amour peut surmonter toutes les difficultés qui vous entourent. »

The idea pleases me. It makes me even happier to have remembered it.

Cette idée me plaît. Je suis encore plus heureux de m’en être souvenu.

.While I’m feeling that ebullient love bubbling up inside me, and that deep, deep comfort that being loved brings, I notice a disturbance off to the right.

Alors que je sentais cet amour bouillonnant monter en moi, et ce profond réconfort que procure le fait d’être aimée, j’ai remarqué une agitation sur ma droite.

A man is coming, a man who, for his head, has the tip of a penis.

Un homme s’approchait, un homme dont la tête était remplacée par le bout d’un pénis.

So I look at him, and while I’m looking at him, lots of other guys join him from all directions. As I watch, all of their penis-heads start growing and getting bigger and bigger, and their necks are stretching longer and longer, until one of them hits another one and then suddenly they’re all bashing each other with their penises, with their long penises.

Je le regarde, et pendant que je le regarde, beaucoup d’autres hommes le rejoignent de tous parts. Alors que je les observe, leurs têtes de pénis commencent à grossir et à devenir de plus en plus grosses, et leurs cous s’allongent de plus en plus, jusqu’à ce que l’un d’eux en frappe un autre et qu’ils se mettent soudainement à se frapper les uns les autres avec leurs pénis, leurs longs pénis.

And we women, we‘re just sitting there, around the source, in meditation, in silence, holding that space.

Et nous, les femmes, nous sommes simplement assises là, autour de la source, en méditation, en silence, gardant cet espace.

And that’s the vision.

Et voilà la vision.

Everyday Magic: the culmination of 45 years of reflection on the nature of reality

Eve Neuhaus Leave a comment

It really is. I know not a lot of people think about stuff like this, but I do.

Today I put up a video of the presentation I gave to a couple of audiences on the subject over the past couple weeks. The video isn’t perfect even though I recorded it quite a few times. I wanted to do it one more time but Tom convinced me that it’s better with all the mistakes. “It’s more human,” he said. Good point. It’s not AI.

So, the presenatation is an exploration of the metaphor of the caterpillar dissolving into soup in order to become a butterfly, offering tools and understandings for navigating the liminal realms into which humanity seems to be dissolving.

It runs about 45 minutes. Take a look and tell me what you think.

Dreams and Everyday Magic: the Fairy Godmother costume

Eve Neuhaus 3 Comments

Early this morning, at about 4:30, I was woken by a dream.

Someone is knocking at the door. I know it’s still night and at first I resist answering. The knocking persists, so at last I get up and go downstairs. At the door is the UPS man who shows up periodically in my dreams. He’s in this one, for example: https://eveneuhaus.com/2017/04/22/the-changing-room/) In the new dream, he hands me a soft package wrapped in white paper.

When I unwrap it, I see that it’s a fairy godmother dress, complete with folding wings. I am delighted.

As I wake up, my inner eyes still on the sparkling costume, I realize that I’d been blessed with another gift from Alice O. Howell, the third powerful vision she’s blessed me with.

The first came in a dream too, the night before I had my first of our long interchange of e-mails, talks on Skype, and occasional visits. In that dream, the central image was a telescope or kaleidoscope that I found in my pocket unexpectedly. When I looked into it, my own eye looked back.

The second was a vision in a meditation a couple days after she passed. In it, she was flying back and forth past me merrily, calling out “Look! I’ve left that troublesome body!”

And now she sends me a fairy godmother costume right when I need one. Oh my goodness, I am grateful beyond words.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been busy preparing my talk for the Seekers Compass on November 16. Deadlines suit me. I like to work intensively on a project, and I have been working very intensively on this one. Day and night.

The talk is titled “Everyday Magic- synchronicity, symbols, and in-sight.” I gave it the name before I had any real idea about what I’d be saying, but I trust my intuition in matters like this. I planned to began the research by looking up the word “synchronicity.” I wanted to now what people are saying about it now.

Imagine my pleasure when the first thing that came up, before I even opened the search, was an announcement of a podcast, just released, in which someone I knew briefly about ten years ago is interviewed on the very subject. It was Laura London with Christophe LeMouël on “Speaking of Jung” speaking of his recently released book, Conversations with Marie-Louise von Franz on Synchronicity and Numbers: Insights and Amplifications.

I was off. I spent at least a couple of weeks down that rabbit hole.

Somewhere along the way, an app for recording and analyzing dreams, Temenos, was recommended. I downloaded it and immediately began having a series of dreams related, not surprisingly, to my upcoming talk. Using the voice recorder is much easier than writing down dreams. And, as these things go, the more you pay attention to your dreams, the more you remember them.

Weeks pass. I begin an outline of my talk but it’s uninspired. I start over, this time using images. Since it’s an online presentation, I pull up Keynote, which I haven’t used for many years, and start to play with it. As those of you close to me know, I’ve always been drawn to computer technology. It runs in my family. Alice gave me permission to love it when she explained that the waves of the symbol of Aquarius are energy waves, not water waves. Aquarius is an air sign. She eagerly embraced electronic communication.

The images I came up with soon coalesced into a detailed breakdown of the diagram Ganesh Baba drew for me on a paper napkin in a diner in Watkins Glen, New York, in 1979, the first full day I spent with him. It’s a diagram of the cosmos. At the time that he drew it for me and pounded the numerology associated with it into my head, we thought we only had that time together, so there was a strong sense of urgency. “This is your work,” he told me. Study it, remember it, and pass it on.

Ganesh Baba the day we went to Watkins Glen

It took me about two weeks to get an explanation of his diagram into images and language that I hope will be intelligible. Yesterday afternoon I decided that part of my presentation was finished.

When I went to bed I asked for a dream to guide the rest of my presentation, which is, after all, about Everyday Magic: Synchronicity, Symbols, and In-Sight.

I got a Fairy Godmother costume from Alice.

To top it off, I had a related vision about it in my meditation this morning, but I think I’ll save that for the talk itself.

Now I’m off to work on that presentation again, feeling very grateful indeed.

An elephant in the room: a dream

Eve Neuhaus 6 Comments

November 2, 2024

A yogi lives on a corner near my home. I’ve known he lives there for a long time. You have to cross the baseball diamond to get to his place. The neighborhood is all white bungalows and the streets are dusty. The yogi is an old hippie, an American with long dark hair and a long dark beard. I’ve never been to his place before, but now there’s something I want to share with him.

It’s written on a small piece of very old paper, the kind made of fabric. The paper is soft and folds around my fingers.

The guy—his name is something short—John? Russ?—lives simply. He doesn’t even label the jars he keeps his food and herbs in, he tells me, laughing.

He’s old, but not much older than me, and he is wearing a lungi.

We sit on low round stools, 4 or 6 inches off the dusty floor. At first he doesn’t give me a chance to ask my question. Instead, he talks about the wonders of living there. An elephant lives in the baseball diamond. I know that. Sometimes it comes to him. Then the elephant comes. He had called it.

The elephant walks into the hut, which is now large enough to accommodate it easily. It lies down on a dusty carpet and looks at us. After a time it gets up and leaves.

I give the yogi the paper, which has a verse on it. We talk about what it says.

A white horse runs by on the street, kicking up a cloud of dust. The yogi and I laugh. “I didn’t think it was real when I first saw it around here,” I say. “But now I’ve seen it many times.”

“Yes,” he says. “It’s real.”

More people are in the room so I decide to go to the baseball diamond to use the toilet. There’s a game going on. I don’t want anyone to see me using the toilet, so I return to the yogi’s place.

I sit before him. He puts his hands on my shoulders and back and pulls me up to stand facing him. He tells me to inhale and exhale as slowly and deeply as I can. We breathe together for a while.

More people are coming, including Tom. When the yogi notices how many there are, he looks at me deeply and says, “That’s enough for now.”

I wake up.

(I remember so many details about this dream but not the message, the most important part!)

November 6, 2024, noon

Upon reflection, I think this is a dream about the American election, that archetypal battle that was just won by the elephant. The elephant stays in the baseball diamond. A vision of progress, the donkey, transformed into a white horse, rushes off into the future.

Values are changing. The words written on ancient paper, though they used to be very important, are forgotten by the dreamer, and replaced with the suggestion to focus on the wonders of the world around us. The white horse is real.

All the same, as my friend Robert Sachs said about the dream, “This is no time to piss around.”

Instead, return to the wise ones. Sit at their feet and they will lift you up.

And remember to BREATHE.