Budgie Dreams

On Mothering a Flock of Ideas

Jul 19, 2025

It has been said that the unconscious has a great sense of humor and given my latest dream, I must agree. In fact, I’m still chuckling more than a week later, not only because of the cute content, but also the catchy use of dream symbols to convey a short and sweet message from the depths. Here’s the dream:

After pushing back the bedcovers and getting out of bed, I decided to make the bed before heading to the kitchen for a cup of tea. While shaking out the bedding my eye caught some movement, and out ran a bunch of baby budgies, a scurrying flock of fluffy cuteness in a variety of pastel shades. I began tossing the covers a bit, looking for their mother who must be close by, but to no avail. Suddenly it dawned on me that there was no mama bird to be found, and that I was now their mother. Then I woke up.

So, that was the message. Mother of Budgies. Me, who has always been a dog, cat, and horse person, with zero experience in raising birds. Thankfully, it was just a dream. But what could it mean? Despite the brevity, it felt like what Jungians call “a big dream”—one that is more specific or directive than the day-to-day variety and carries important meaning for the dreamer.

The bird as a psychological symbol can represent a number of things, but in this case it didn’t take long to figure out the meaning behind the message. I had been struggling with bringing several ideas together in support of one rather extensive topic, and had reached the point where it was necessary to just start writing and sort things out in the process. These little birds were representative of the multiple ideas in an early stage of development. That they were tangled up in the bedsheets was a humorous twist, but the fact that they were colorful and running together as a flock was a good sign. My job was to raise the flock of ideas until they had matured and were ready to be released into the wild.

“PATIENCE, GRASSHOPPER”

Not long ago I rewatched Edgar Wright’s 2017 hit film, Baby Driver, and found myself even more engaged in this second viewing. The plot and characters remained fresh, the get-away scenes still breathtaking, and the music-to-action coordination top-notch, but there also was a compelling quality that I couldn’t quite put a finger on. An online search brought up the film’s background story, and I learned how it had evolved from Wright’s early imaginings of a chase scene based on the hard driving rhythm of the mid-90s song Bellbottoms by The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. That early idea became the seed of Wright’s “passion project” which, over the course of 22 years, initially took form as a music video for Mint Royale and eventually developed into the opening scene of a full-length film that many consider to be Wright’s best work. The compelling quality I sensed was the amount of creative attention Wright gave to this idea over its long course of development. Indeed, raising a core idea to fledging and mature flight takes both time and attention, and more than a little patience.

Turning now to my own writing, I too have a passion project that has been gradually taking form over many years. The initial seeds were sown in my early 20s when I was first introduced to a variety of Eastern contemplative and bodywork practices, as well as a smattering of concepts from Carl Jung’s analytical psychology. However, it was a transformative experience in my mid‑30s that began to turn the seeds into a larger reality and, much like Jung’s “confrontation with the unconscious,” this experience became the impetus for all that has come after. Although my creative process did not produce anything like Jung’s Red Book, I did conduct psychological research which was formally presented in a doctoral dissertation. The funny thing is this: whether Red Book, dissertation, or other, projects arising from mid-life metamorphosis are not the final product, but rather, the foundation for a life’s work. Once the floodgates open in the psyche, there’s no going back.

TENDING THE FLOCK

One of my challenges in writing is the tendency to ‘go wide’ when gathering information and ideas, then struggling with finding a place to drop into the work. Oftentimes its like a dog circling their bed before committing to the perfect spot, but of late my passion project had me somewhat immobilized with a bad case of early jitters (aka the ‘here comes a BIG PROJECT’ heebie-jeebies). Although much has been written about the three healing traditions that are the foundation of my personal and professional practice, they are not based on mainstream concepts, so there’s been some internal pressure to get it right. However, as the budgie dream implied, the ideas are young and healthy and all flocked together, they just need to be made explicit and raised to maturity. Since the dream message was so specific, I took it to heart and did a little more circling, a couple of small adjustments… et voila! The drop-in point revealed itself:

Craniosacral therapy, yoga tantra, and Jungian psychology have common archaic roots that extend across cultures, and together they offer a therapeutic counterbalance to the one-sided consciousness and ensuing breakdowns that are so characteristic of modern life. The common denominator uniting these practices is the subtle body and its myriad functions, which includes the unconscious and the innate evolutionary potential known as kundalini shakti.

One-sided consciousness is what happens when the natural integrity of the synergetic relationship between opposites in the individual or collective psyche has been negatively impacted in some way. In his commentary on The Secret of the Golden Flower (Collected Works 13) Jung described how one-sided consciousness results in a breakdown of the underlying primordial images or archetypes that give form to mental and emotional impressions, leading to internal conflict and the suffering of various neuroses. Although internal conflict begins in the individual unconscious, it can spread like wildfire throughout the collective by way of psychological projection between individuals, between groups, and between countries. The extreme polarization and unrest, power struggles, secular outlook, lack of beauty, and poor mental and physical health happening in society today—specifically Western society—are all symptoms that point to long-term psychological one-sidedness.

Philosopher and psychiatrist, Iain McGilchrist, discusses the phenomenon of one-sided consciousness through his theory of the brain hemispheres, which he developed over 30+ years of research and working with neurologically challenged patients. In his book, The Master and His Emissary, McGilchrist supports this theory with medical examples of hemispheric deficiency or injury, and discusses how the changes in art, science, and culture that define different historical periods also illustrate fluctuations in hemispheric dominance over time. He emphasizes that although the relationship between the hemispheres is meant to be cooperative, there is an asymmetry in structure and function that favors the right hemisphere as Master and the left hemisphere as its Emissary. Essentially, all new experience is first taken up by the right hemisphere, then analyzed and sorted by the left and, if all goes well, the analyzed parts are returned to the right for integration into a greater gestalt. The problem is, sometimes the left hemisphere becomes hubristic and determined to be Master, so that the analyzed parts are seen as the end-all and are prevented from circling back to the right hemisphere for integration into the whole. This is the breakdown of primordial images spoken about by Jung.

So, at this point the question that arises is: what can be done to support the integrity of the psyche? Jung believed that “the approach to the numinous is the real therapy” and similarly, McGilchrist stresses the importance of a return to the sacred for healing the ills of modern society. Notably, both Jung and McGilchrist developed a deeper understanding of the need for the sacred through their experiences with Eastern religions and spiritual practices, especially Daoism. Jung also became deeply interested in kundalini yoga as a comparative model to his ideas on European alchemy, and this is where my personal experience converges with the Jungian sphere of influence.

In the introduction to Jung’s 1932 lectures, The Psychology of Kundalini Yoga, Sonu Shamdasani refers to the book Kundalini Tantra by Swami Satyananda Saraswati as a “comprehensive guide to kundalini yoga.” I lived for a brief but deeply formative time about a mile and a half from Satyananda’s main ashram, Ganga Darshan, located in the Fort area of Munger, and would occasionally visit when they had public events. I didn’t know it then, but Satyananda’s teachings would be key to my understanding of the embodied sacred, specifically the rise of kundalini shakti and subsequent transformation of the psyche that happened in my mid-30s.

Now, when I bring together the work of Jung, McGilchrist, and Satyananda along with a retrospective view of my transformative experience, I’m fairly certain that kundalini awakening and the phenomenology of its unfoldment is a mid-life developmental process (average age 36). Not always, but mostly. Just as puberty transforms the child and ushers in the years of adolescence and its associated cortical development, kundalini transforms the early adult and ushers in the mid-life passage by activating the innate potential for greater hemisphere connectivity and integration. In other words, the neurological changes that happen over the three to five years of kundalini metamorphosis serve to stabilize and deepen the relationship between hemispheres. This not only prevents one-sided consciousness, it also creates an unshakable connection to the sacred spark within.

To be continued!

Body - Breath - Imagination

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