At the same time, we are standing in the shadow cast by a future of which we still know nothing, but which is already somehow anticipated by the unconscious.
-Carl Gustav Jung
A number of years ago, I attended a retreat exploring the phenomenon of intuition with about 50 others. One of the events began by standing before the entire group and stating my full name, James Denny Townsend. Then attendees were asked to simply say aloud the first descriptive word that came to their mind. As you might imagine, there were far more words spoken that day than I possibly could remember.
But afterward, several people approached me and said, “Wow, your name seemed much more powerful when you included ‘James’ in it.”
It really struck me. For the first two-thirds of my life I had gone by my middle name, Denny. When I looked up the name “Denny” and discovered it is derived from the Dionysius, the Greek god of wine, fertility, revelry, festivity, religious ecstasy and theater. Well, that pretty much fit who I had been until then. I thought of it as my Peter Pan name, the guy who never really grows up.
Something within knew it was time to take on ‘James’ at this stage in my life. So, I did. It took a while to become comfortable with the change, and most all of my friends and family were kind enough to accept my “new” appellation.
Now let me blow your mind a little and take you back a few years before I decided to own “James” as my preferred name.
One day I was sitting at my desk thinking about different writing genres in which I might be able to write a good story. I settled on “romance novel,” and began writing about a woman named “Marcy,” a pudgy, lonely, red head who was being tormented by a recurring dream. Marcy never liked her name, so she began referring to herself as “Marcela,” a name she felt was more elegant and beautiful, something to which she would aspire. Night after night she would have a sort of nightmare that she was in a room surrounded by lilies and their cloying scent. The room had a fireplace, heavy curtains, an antique bed, and a deeply uneasy feeling about the room.
One morning Marcela picked up the newspaper from her porch and, over her morning cup of tea, turned to the personals columns (this was set years before internet dating sites became ubiquitous) and found an ad someone had posted describing several of the items she was seeing in her nightly dream. It was signed, “James, the dream weaver.” Intrigued, she responded and … well, I’m not going to tell you the whole plot here, but my fledgling attempt at writing a romance story turned dark abruptly. James was eventually revealed to be using dark magic—dream weaving—to lure women to his home and kill them.
I tucked the story away in a file and forgot about it. About three years later, I met a lovely Argentinian woman at a writers workshop whose name was … you guessed it … Marcela. By then, I was mostly known as James. We shared some of our respective stories and, having forgotten the names of my two leading characters, I gave her Dreamweaver to read.
Marcela practically turned pale when she read it, and I realized that it might have been a big mistake to show her that story. But she survived and we soon became lovers.
This really happened. It’s not fiction.
And so, I challenge you, dear reader, to consider the possibility of Jung’s quote at the beginning of this little piece “… that we are standing in the shadow cast by a future of which we still know nothing, but which is already somehow anticipated by the unconscious.
Ever had such an experience?
