On Wings of Dreams, a Life Completed

By Barbara Bronson

On Wings of Dreams, while simultaneously a deeply personal memoir/biography of the writer and her husband, is also a sharing of the universal experience of loss and transformation. The narrative is woven seamlessly into the psychological framework of Carl Jungs writings.
Jung wrote of another kind of time, not horizontal time - the time of clocks and calendars that rule our lives. This vertical time is experienced through those shared motifs found in our collective human memory. Carl Jung describes this as the collective unconscious, the intersection where we experience horizontal time and are connected to the Divine in vertical time. Through the un-folding of our dreams we are touched and transformed by this connection. On Wings of Dreams takes the reader through this transformational journey, lighting the way we must all eventually follow.
Mrs. Mary Jane Leone, a first reader/editor wrote: I have never experienced dream journals so completely shared and explained by a loving couple with 40 years of marriage. Life and death journeys melded into one! Combining Carl Jungs teachings, with your world wide experience through reading and living, plus your deeply shared religious beliefs is a book completed and ready to be published. It is a treasure not to be lost.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jul 23, 2016
• ISBN: 9781524527204

Barbara Bronson

Barbara Bronson was born in 1933, and raised in a rural community in Connecticut. The summer before she left to study piano at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York she met John Bronson. A year later he was drafted into the army, she returned home, and they were married in 1952 when she was nineteen and he was twenty one. Shortly after they were married, he was stationed in Germany where she joined him after finishing her sophomore year. After they returned home, they both continued their studies at the University of Connecticut while starting a family, their daughter Dru and son David. They both worked in education and later psychology. She earned a Master of Science in Speech Pathology while teaching and childrearing, working in this field for twenty years before entering the Jung Institute in Zurich Switzerland at the age of fifty. She earned her diploma in Analytical Psychology after seven years postgraduate study and returned to Massachusetts as a Jungian Psychoanalyst. She and her husband John continued to live and work in the field of psychology until his death in 1993. After his death she moved to the Northampton area where she co-founded the Western Massachusetts Jung Group in Northampton while building a practice in the area. She continued her private practice until 2014, when she began devoting her time to completing on “Wings of Dreams.”

Book preview

Copyright © 2016 by Barbara Bronson.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016911880

ISBN:   Hardcover              978-1-5245-2722-8

              Softcover                978-1-5245-2721-1

              eBook                      978-1-5245-2720-4

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Author photo by Stanislaus Skarzynski Jr.

Used with permission

Rev. date: 07/23/2016

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CONTENTS

Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Prologue

Introduction

PART ONE

Chapter 1: Biographical Frame

Chapter 2: Memories: Snapshots of a Childhood

Chapter 3: Thoughts from His Own Pen: Journal Entries

Chapter 4: Anchor

PART TWO: DREAM GIFTS

Chapter 5: Preparatory Dreams before Diagnosis

Chapter 6: Coming to Terms with Death: Diagnosis

Chapter 7: The Promise

Chapter 8: Preparing to Say Good-bye

Eulogy by Thomas Peterson

Chapter 9: Leave-Taking

Epilogue

Notes

Glossary

Bibliography

ILLUSTRATIONS

Cover Art

Over the Water toward the Setting Sun

By Richard John Bronson

Together at Cape Cod, Massachusetts

Figure I: Celebrations

Figure II: Winchester Center of Events

Figure III: Portrait by Harris, 1937

Figure IV: Heaven’s Northern Light

Figure V: Red -winged Blackbird

Figure VI: Psalm 46

Figure VII: Eagle’s Golden Wings

Figure VIII: Scrimshaw

Figure IX: Morning Fog Rising from a Pickerel Pond

Figure X: Wise Old Man

Figure XI: Christ and the Lily

Figure XII: Loomis’s Barn

Figure XIII: Kali

Figure XIV: Entrance to the Tiger Cave

Figure XV: Kneeling Blond Woman

Figure XVI: Obelisk

Figure XVII: Fiery Dragon

Figure XVIII: Beast

Figure XIX: Flying Over the Water toward the Setting Sun

Figure XX: October at Tuckerman’s Ravine

Figure XXI: Hymns from His Greenwood Earth

Figure XXII: John and I Together at Cape Cod

Note on Carl Jung (wise old man dreaming and drawing): Carl Gustav Jung was born in Kesswil, Switzerland, in 1875 and died in Küsnact, Switzerland, in 1961 at age 83. Jung was a student and colleague of Freud until their methods diverged. Jung named his new method of depth psychology, analytical psychology.

Jung’s work in the depths of the psyche and his appreciation of the reality of the psyche opens the individual to healing potential and discovery of undiscovered possibilities. Dreams, active imagination, biography, and outer events are communication lines to our center, or essence. From here, we can know there is divinity—something beyond us yet enfolding us.

To our children, Dru Adele Bronson-Geoffroy and David John Bronson

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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It is impossible to acknowledge all those who were involved in bringing this book to fruition. The love and support of family and friends wrapped us in a cocoon of caring during John’s illness. After his death, they were there for me.

As part of my grief process, I started gathering John’s material and began writing. I first introduced some of his dreams to the people of the Jung Society of Western Australia. I want to thank them for their comments and encouragement. My special thanks to Olive and Archie Mason, who were my hosts and who added so many wonderful memories to my time down under.

Our longtime friends Jack and Jean Riddle were first to read my very rough draft. I could see tears in their eyes as we talked about it. I have given them many hugs.

John and Julie Gittins gave me valuable suggestions and encouragement. Their backgrounds in psychology and art, as well as their lengthy friendship with John and me, often gave me fresh eyes to see my work.

I want to thank Michel Barker, a friend and a writer, who took time from her busy schedule to read and critique my manuscript. I am grateful for her many notes on both the content and writing. I considered them all and incorporated many.

I presented parts of this book in many lectures and seminars. I am indebted to the participants for their questions and comments.

I also want to thank Eric Bascom and the other members of our writing group for listening and providing suggestions and encouragement.

Many thanks to my daughter Dru Bronson-Geoffroy, a former editorial associate at Merriam-Webster Inc. Without her editorial help, this book might never have been completed.

I could not have written this book without my own personal journey. My work in analysis was with Thomas Peterson, an analyst in the Baltimore area, and Kathrin Asper and Mary Brinner, both in Switzerland. I thank them all for being with me in my struggles and celebrations.

When struggling with the decision about continuing in the training program, I had two important dreams. The first was that I came to a highway under construction. Although I didn’t see any destination signs and had no idea about the condition of the road, I knew I couldn’t back up. So I had to go on. The second dream was that I was giving birth to twins in the Institute library. Shortly after those dreams, I returned to Switzerland to continue to work with my own psyche and the psyches of my analysands. I continued to grow in the experience of the reality of the psyche. Working with John’s dreams reinforced that knowledge. Over the years, there have been many people who touched the writing of this book in some way or another. My thanks to all those people unnamed.

I want to express my sincere thanks to Mary Jane Leone for her help in editing and for her encouragement. She taught in every level from early education through college and also served as a school administrator. She received many awards and honors during those years. Her background in teaching, writing, and her training in psychology helped us connect, as can be seen in her summary of my book. Thank you, Jane.

Stanislaus Skarzynski Jr. (our friend Stan) worked many hours on the photos and helped us with the technology needed to send them. Thank you, Stan.

PROLOGUE

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To my readers, this book had a gestation period of more than twenty years. Its development started as a grief process before my husband John’s death, when we grieved the coming separation together and separately. After his death, it continued with my process aided by John’s dreams, writing, and art.

As variations on archetypal themes, the dream motifs are embellished by the life of a particular person; therefore, I have included John’s history. As we accompanied John through his life and its completion, we were given a window into what it was like growing up in a small rural New England town in the first half of the twentieth century. A tapestry weaves throughout this book of what Jung calls the individuation process—becoming what one is meant to be. Inner and outer threads are combined from his childhood to his death.

Dreams often have a compensatory function, and this aspect can be seen in the series of John’s dreams. When he was in a period of denial, he would often have a dream that dwelt on the stark realities of his situation. When at his low points, a hopeful dream would often arrive. We can see this relationship between the conscious and unconscious psyche weaving through this book.

I do not claim that On Wings of Dreams: A Life Completed is a scholarly work, although it is supported by the literature. It is experiential. Through the unfolding of dreams and their connection to life, I hope to communicate the reality of the psyche and how it requires our respect and attention. Everyone—from primitive man to the people of today—has variations on the motifs found in the deep unconscious, or collective unconscious mind, which contains the reservoir of past universal experiences and the seeds of future development. Therefore, I hope you find value for your own lives in this work. I try to avoid technical terms as much as possible and offer this book to both the general public and professional health providers.

INTRODUCTION

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Each person must meet death in his or her own way, influenced by inner and outer circumstances. This book shows how the psyche can offer us guidance in our struggles and our acceptance of death with its painful separations and its mysterious possibilities. This is the story of one man: my husband, John Bronson. However, in his journey, we can glimpse the underlying structure we all share in the depths of our psyches. We all share a human skeleton, and we all share a psychic structure that the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung called the collective or objective psyche. Here, we find the area of potential ideas and responses called the archetypes. Archetypes are mysteries known only through their appearances as images or actions in our life and are clothed in the culture where they appear. We see the archetypes mirrored in world religions, literature, art, and the everyday life of individuals and groups.

Our death is part of our lives and can be met with a sense of adventure. True adventure contains risk and possible hardships. It is a time when ultimate courage is needed.

In his book The Courage to Be, Paul Tillich wrote, Courage is the affirmation of one’s essential nature, one’s inner aim… but it is an affirmation which has in itself the character of ‘in spite of’. It includes the possible and, in some cases, the unavoidable sacrifice of elements which also belong to one’s being but which, if not sacrificed, would prevent us from reaching our actual fulfillment.¹

John was able to accept his adventure as seen in his last dreams and in the drawing he made about two weeks before he died. He was on the back of a friendly beast, flying across the water toward the setting or maybe a rising sun.²

The psyche, a totality comprising both the conscious and the unconscious, has developed certain predictable or archetypal reactions to death. The objective evidence that help is available through a connection to the richness of our unconscious can be seen in the dreams and struggles of John’s last months. The collective unconscious is the groundwater containing the inborn potentials for certain reactions and images in the psyche. From this groundwater, springs may erupt when triggered by inner or outer situations. In connecting with this depth, we open ourselves to the influence of the divine. We can call the divine, God. Other societies and religions may have other names for the divine. These images and actions appear in our dreams or in outer events and relationships. The collective unconscious operates independently of the ego because of its origin in the inherited ongoing mystery of creation. Therefore, we need to have a strong enough ego to develop a relationship to the unconscious without being flooded by it.

Jung had a dream as a young adult. It was night in some unknown place, and I was making slow and painful headway against a mighty wind. Dense fog was flying along everywhere. I had my hands cupped around a tiny light, which threatened to go out at any moment. Everything depended on my keeping this little light alive. This little light was my consciousness, the only light I have. My own understanding is the sole treasure I possess and the greatest…³

I first presented this