Of Fish, Dreams and Blank Books

If you consult any number of books or websites in the hopes of learning about dreamwork, almost everyone last one of them will tell you there is one essential practice on which all dreamwork depends. If you want to engage in the art and science of dreamwork, you must keep a dream journal. If you don't keep the journal, you won't develop your dream memory. If you don't remember your dreams, there's no material to work with. Pretty obvious.

It can be a very difficult habit to cultivate. It has to be a daily thing. And you have to be consistent. Sitting down to write down your dreams (unless you actually have the time, leisure and privacy to write them down while you're still in bed in the morning) has to be one of the first things you do every morning. If you wake up to an alarm, hit the snooze button and then don't move. Stay lying exactly where you are and ask yourself what you were dreaming. Only if you are lucky do you recall an entire dream right then and there.

Dream recall is like fishing. It all starts with a nibble on the line. There's the lingering feeling of a mood from a dream. Or the faintest memory of just one image or object. Or you only remember that "I was with Stephanie", or that there was something having to do with Sacramento. Be gentle. Be skillful. If you pull too hard, the fish won't get hooked. Just stay with whatever little bit you have. Now let your attention wander from it for a second or two (kind of like letting out a little line) and then focus your mind on the object again. You might find that something else "breaks the surface" along with what you already had: the background to the vague image; what it was that Stephanie said to you; what specific part of Sacramento you saw. Let your concentration go for another second or two, and then "pull in some line", i.e. focus on the things you remember. You will likely find that something else comes along with them. If all goes well, you feel the fish bite! A whole dream sequence comes back to you in one piece. But be careful! You still haven't reeled that beauty in. Nothing worse than "the one that got away." When the next alarm goes off, don't hit snooze again. Turn the alarm off and get out of bed, whether you remember a dream or not.

There is a short window of opportunity after one wakes up -- I'd guess no more than fifteen or twenty minutes -- during which the portal to the sleeping consciousness hasn't quite shut tight, kind of like that little gap on a baby's skull that hasn't quite grown together (which is why, a friend tells me, babies can still talk with angels). One needs to cultivate the habit of not hurtling headlong into the day. Stay quiet, both physically and mentally, while making that first visit to the toilet for a pee. Don't turn on lots of bright lights. Don't turn on the radio or other loud electronic devices. Sit down in a quiet place with a notebook and pen and write down whatever it was you remembered. Don't be surprised if you now can't recall what you remembered while waiting for the second alarm. Close your eyes and ask yourself, "what did I dream last night?" Just relax and allow it to come to you. Most times something will. But there are those times that it won't. One of the emotionally challenging aspects of dreamwork is the moment when you realize that, despite all of your efforts, you are empty handed. You don't remember anything. Nada. Zero. Goose egg!

It can be discouraging. It can be very discouraging when you are just starting out in dreamwork, and only remembering one or two dreams a week, if you're lucky. But the truth is that the dreaded "dream drought" is something that even veterans have to endure. Even people who have been faithfully recording dreams for several decades, and who have stretches in which they remember several dreams a morning for three or more mornings in a row, still hit patches as dry as the Mohave desert; no dream recall for days, or even weeks.

What do you do then? Many writers on the subject suggest writing anything at all into the dream journal: what one was thinking after one woke up, or even making dreams up. The theory is that the subconscious mind responds to this signal from conscious behavior that says the conscious mind takes dreams seriously, and provides one with dreams on subsequent mornings. This has never worked for me. I've always felt too silly writing things that are not dreams into my dream journal.

Recently I've come up with a new tactic. I've designated a new little blank book to be for dreamwork exercises. Never mind that this means I am now carrying no less than four hard-back blank books in my briefcase everyday. My wife can tell you that I have a hard time passing a blank book display in a shop without buying one. I have a reserve that should last me for several years. But I digress.

I take both my journal and my new dreamwork book to the table where I write down my dreams. If, after all efforts and tricks, I can't recall any dreams, I open up my dream journal and read one of the dreams that's already in there. Then I open my dreamwork book, date it, indicate which dream I'm going to work with, and then do a little dreamwork. For an idea of what that work might entail, I recommend this very convenient collection of exercises generously published for free by Professor John Suler (warning: it's a PDF file, so the link will open Acrobat or whatever PDF reader you use).

This has a dual purpose. Firstly, I am using the first half-hour of the day to work with dreams (either recording them or doing exercises), and secondly, I'm actually designating a time in which to do dreamwork. I think one of the pitfalls of dreamwork is that we sometimes keep collecting more and more dreams, but we keep putting off working with them, because our lives are so busy. I'm guilty of this. This way, I don't get so frustrated if I don't remember any dreams on a given morning, and I automatically get a certain amount of dreamwork done every week, without having to set aside more time in my otherwise over scheduled day.

Dreams as Spiritual Practice

I Just wrote this essay as a contribution to a project being conducted by an on-line dream group I belong to. I thought it was worthy of space on this blog.

The majority of mankind's current problems can be attributed to a drastic restriction of the race's consciousness to a narrow band of phenomena that can be perceived by our physical receptor senses. This trend in human priorities is generally known as materialism. Various esoteric schools have differing explanations for how and why this veiling of the face of Isis came about (some saying that it was a necessary stage of development in order to make us more fully manifested on the physical plane), but they generally agree that cultural evidence shows there was a time mankind was, as a whole, more sensitive to vibrations from other planes of being, and communicated with these planes of being.

Materialism as a "philosophy" (if one may grace such a narrow-minded view with such a lofty designation) is completely bankrupt: it is impossible to find one's way through life with no guide other than one's perceptions of the material world, and the conclusions of the physical brain. Actually, going about life in this manner inevitably leads to error. There is vastly more to the Universe than the material, and there is vastly more to Mind than the brain.

For the purposes of this essay, a good definition of spirituality would be: the desire to escape the prison of materiality and to expand consciousness to an awareness of realities beyond the material.

In this day and age of unfettered eclecticism and prolific syncretism, people driven by their spirituality to search for means to transcend the material world have access to a bewildering volume of resources from myriad cultures and historical eras. There are countless trail heads for paths up the mountain to the one unifying peak: meditation (comprising a plethora meditation methods), ritual, herbs and potions (including outright drugs), alchemy, sex, dance... you name it! (And any eclectic/syncretic combination thereof!)

The practice of devoting oneself to dreams, and especially what evolved in the late 20th century under the rubric of "dreamwork", is undoubtedly a means of expanding consciousness beyond the material. Although it would be disputed by the most intransigent of academic scientists, it does not take too many months of dreamwork -- especially if one's work involves other people -- before one has experiences that lead one to suspect dreams are not solely dependent on the physical brain. There are things that happen in dreams that strongly suggest (some would go so far as to say PROVE) they are transpersonal, transdimensional, and involve communication between the self and other beings or states of mind beyond the physical body. These experiences are characterized by an unexpected transgression of the assumed laws of nature one has absorbed from the society we live in. For instance, time is demonstrated not to be what we thought when we see an event in a dream before we experience it in physical reality. Or space gets bent when we see something happening in a dream that is taking place somewhere else in the world. Or the nature of personal reality and individuality is challenged by perceiving knowledge that someone else knows, but has not told you.

So it is not hard to argue that increasing one's awareness of dreams is a path to breaking out of the material fetters our milieu tends to bind us with. But the bigger question is: HOW does one pursue dreams as a spiritual practice?

One conclusion I've come to is that the discipline of keeping the dream journal is the single most important aspect of dreamwork. It is the sine qua non (Latin for: without which there is not) of dreamwork. If you don't keep the journal, dreamwork can't happen. It's what practicing katas is to karate; playing scales is to musicianship; drawing sketch studies is to painting. If you don't write them down, you don't remember them, and if you don't remember them, there's no material to work with. Keeping the journal is already an act of "spiritual anarchy" in and of itself. You are declaring that you are willing to put time and energy into something which has no physical reality, and is unrelated to the usual mania of acquiring possessions that dominates the motivations of most people in the materialist world.

But there's another aspect to this. The act of keeping the journal is what rebuilds the bridge. This loss of awareness of noumena outside the realm of the ordinary conscious mind (the aforementioned falling of the veil) is why we are such strangers to our unconscious minds. It takes practice to rebuild that bridge. As most people know now: we dream every night, most people just don't remember it. With practice, we learn how to coax those memories into the bright light of day. And along with that ability to remember dreams comes an ability to pay attention to the subtler things that are always going on at various levels of one's mind.

The subconscious mind is the gate to greater reality. The word dream is a very broad catch-all term that encompasses all the experiences we have from the time we put our head on the pillow and close our eyes until we get out of bed the next morning. Once we pay attention to these experiences we realize that they are not all of the same nature. Some can be accurately described as psychic experiences, visions, astral projections, readings of the akashic records, and other types of internal experiences that have been documented in esoteric teachings, religious texts, and other literature, as far back as our records reach.

But paying attention to and recording dreams does not yet constitute a spiritual practice. To be able to call it that, one has to make a commitment to act on the experiences one records. You cross a line from intellectualizer, dabbler and dilettante to spiritual practitioner once you act with will and courage, and actually base an action you take in the physical waking world on something you experienced in a dream. And it does take courage at first. After all: this is the kind of thing the materialists call insanity! "You did it because of WHAT? Something you dreamed? Are you nuts?" There is something downright magical in allowing this knowledge, this energy from another dimension to manifest in your physical world. It's like lightning striking. And sometimes the effects can be just that dramatic, or they can be simply deeply gratifying. And that’s everything one could expect from a spiritual discipline.

The Two Gates

Szilvi and I have recently gone through a life-changing experience. I wrote the following essay in order to explain it as clearly as I could to my family.

Your mind turns its attention, at some point in your life, away from the portal through which souls enter this world and becomes increasingly aware of that other portal through which souls depart again. I'm not talking about the moment you first truly realize your mortality sometime in your twenties, when you understand that this life won't last forever, and that you will have to make some choices that narrow your possibilities for the rest of this life. No, I'm talking about the point at which you cannot deny that your years in this body have reached well beyond half of the statistical average lifespan for your gender, social stratum, and geographical location. It's just a fact: you are closer to the exit, than you are to the entrance. It doesn't mean you need to fret or panic, but it does mean that if you are wise, you should slowly begin to prepare for it.

This has nothing to do with being morbid, or having a death obsession. As a matter of fact, due to my adherence to a Rosicrucian philosophy, I avoid using the words death, and dying, because they tie you to a limited, materialistic conception of human experience. The truth is, we never die, only these bodies we inhabit while in this world. I may have misgivings about the physical pain involved, and I may have some fears about what it's like to get old and weak and forgetful, but I don't really fear death itself. I know I existed before this life, and I'm certain I'll continue to exist after this particular incarnation. That's not really an issue.

But there is the matter of gracefully living out the rest of this life. I've always been what they call a "late bloomer"; slower to mature than my peers.

So I find it hard to understand why I, at this stage of my life, am still intimately involved with the gate that lets souls in. This was the question raised inside me when, not more than a few weeks ago, we determined that Szilvi was pregnant. As usual, it caught us by surprise. I'm not going to go into the gritty details, but it's not as if we don't use contraception. We always have. Nonetheless, none of our children were planned; none of the four of them, and soon to be five (six, counting my child from my first marriage). Their conceptions have always beat the odds, which if calculated, were always several thousand-to-one. These souls really wanted to be born into this family, into this time, into this milieu. If you accept the idea of reincarnation, it follows that souls choose the time, place and circumstances of their birth. These children chose us. The corollary is that we, unconsciously wanted all these children. I love every last one of them with all my heart. I can't imagine what my life would be like without any one of them.

But the news was overwhelming. When we discovered that we would be having a third child (Abigail) and a fourth (Timothy), I somehow managed to get over the shock rather quickly and adopt a positive, accepting attitude to the new situation. But this time I felt overwhelmed. No! It can't be! We can't have a fifth child! Out of the question! It didn't take much discussion after the line turned blue on the home pregnancy test. There's no place in our lives for a fifth child. We would just have to abort it.

A grey gloom subtly and immediately engulfed Szilvi's and my lives. We tried (or at least I tried) to be cheerful and matter-of-fact about the situation. Szilvi accepted the reasoning I had stated that first evening. It goes like this:

It's one thing to be an irresponsible young person who thinks abortion is just an unpleasant way to fix the consequences of your reckless behavior, but it is quite another for a responsible married couple who are already bearing more than their share of society's burden by conscientiously raising several young children as well as they can. We are nothing if not responsible parents. We should not feel we have to justify ourselves. That was the reasoning I was going by.

Despite the fact that my job provides my family with wonderful medical insurance, naturally such a procedure isn't covered, so Szilvi began the laborious process of dealing with the state health-care bureaucracy. First she had to go to a doctor to confirm she was pregnant, which had to be verified with an ultrasound. The radiologist, unaware of our intentions, cheerfully announced she saw a nice healthy baby. Great. With those papers in handSzilvi had to go a counselling agency, which -- once they heard we had four children -- didn't do the hard-sell to try to make her change her mind. There was a three-day waiting period, after which you can go back and get a "permit" to schedule the procedure at a hospital. WhenSzilvi got the papers, the soonest she could get an appointment at the hospital was eight days after that. It would be a Friday. It would be an ambulatory procedure: go in in the morning, come home in the evening.

All this time, it played on our minds. It was agony waiting.

And now we had a week and a half to wait. How do you just go on living your life with an event like that pending?

At one point, I took a day off from work to go with Szilvi and Abigail to the Obuda Waldorf Kindergarten for the annual Mardi Gras party. Szilvi was helping out with food and decorating, and she couldn't do that while she was taking care of Timothy. In Hungary, Waldorf families tend to be bigger than average. I'm not sure why that is, perhaps it has to do with the fact that they tend to be above the median income level. There are several families in our children's classes with four or more children. So as I made small talk and ate at the party, I kept watching the kids, and the parents, and I found myself entertaining the thought: what's the difference between four and five children? Can it be that much harder? They say the big jump is between two and three. We could do it, couldn't we? Of course, I didn't share any of these thoughts withSzilvi.

When we got home, Szilvi and I got into an argument. I accused her of making me feel guilty by making long faces and moping around the house. It came out in the conversation that she thought we'd made our decision too hastily. She thought we should at least talk about it and consider all the possibilities. I didn't want to consider! I'd decided. I was pissed off. We discussed the rightness/wrongness of abortion. I said I didn't have the same scruples that Christians do, since I was convinced of the truth of certain mystical doctrines that say the soul does not inhabit the body until the body takes its first breath. Until then, it's the power of the mother's soul that animates the body.Szilvi was not so convinced of that.

At some point in the conversation Szilvi mentioned a dream she'd had before she knew she was pregnant. In the dream Abigail had been saved from drowning, and when an ambulance arrived, they wanted to take her away for observation, butSzilvi vehemently resisted them taking Abigail away from her. Szilvi felt/suspected this dream had been a warning not to let "them" take away her daughter; her unborn daughter. After we'd both calmed down I proposed that we use our inner resources to help us get clarity. We would incubate dreams to address our problem, and see what they told us. We gave ourselves five days to make the "final" decision.

The dreams obviously addressed our question, but the answers were riddles. We did dreamwork together several times that week, and came to the conclusion (well, I guess I came to the conclusion) that there was nothing in the dreams screaming out not to go through with this. At this point we still had several days to go before the Friday morning appointment. The mood got darker, despite my efforts to take it matter-of-factly. I began spending lots of time during the day staring out my window at the office, and often closed my eyes in silent prayer, asking The Master Within to bring me peace and balance.Szilvi got more silent and brooding with each day. The fact that we weren't telling the children what was going on made things even worse. How do you explain something like this to a child? Especially your own children! You can just imagine them having nightmares about what would have happened had you decided to abort them. No. We weren't telling the children.

For the day of the procedure, I arranged to to take vacation time so I could take Abigail to and from kindergarten and spend the day with Timothy. I don't even recall what we were going to tell the children. Something vague about having to see the doctor. I took the Thursday off as well, to be emotionally supportive ofSzilvi.

I have to explain that in Hungary there is a particular means of paying money that goes into public funds. It's called a cheque, but it doesn't work like a check in Western countries. You pay it in the post office, and you get a stub that shows you've paid that amount to a certain beneficiary. With this, you can prove to an authority that you've paid. This was how the fee for the procedure had to be paid, which meant someone had to pay the fee at the post office at least the day before, which meant Thursday, soSzilvi could present the stub on Friday.

Thursday was a black day, no matter how cheerful I tried to be. Szilvi was listless. I told her she had to maintain her routines if she didn't want to go crazy. She did, reluctantly. Finally, it came time for me to take a walk to the post office. I was getting ready to leave whenSzilvi made the remark, "Could you arrange for a small tornado to rip that cheque out of your hands, and take it off to Utah." I was stunned. What did that remark mean? I thought we'd made up our minds. Well,Szilvi said, she still wasn't quite sure. She knew I was sure. I started getting really agitated. I guess I was even beginning to yell. What the hell kind of thing was that to say just as I'm going out the door! You don't decide one thing and feel inside you should do something else! Get it together! What are we doing here? I thought we had this decided days ago!

And then I yelled: Go get your dream journal! Let's get this matter clear! She looked at me incredulously. What good would that do, she asked. We've been over it all already, haven't we?

"Go get your dream journal! I'm not going to do something just because we're drifting into it. I want to be sure."

So we went over the dreams, hers and mine, one by one. I was pacing up and down the kitchen floor like a cat in a zoo cage, talking my thoughts out loud, going over every image, event and configuration in those dreams; drawing associations, speculating on the messages. Somehow, I saw those dreams differently in that moment than I'd seen them all along. I was becoming convinced the message was: we were capable of raising another child.

I confessed to Szilvi what had been going through my head all those days I'd stared out the window of my office. It had to do with faith. Faith in myself. Faith in providence. Faith in the powers I claim to know all human beings possess. When we found out thatSzilvi was pregnant with Timothy, it took a huge leap of faith to go through with it. But we did. We moved heaven and earth to find the resources and make the arrangements to get a bigger apartment suitable for our family. But we did it. It wasn't easy, but through the power of visualization, creative effort, and shear will power, we moved into a new apartment weeks before Timothy was born. BothSzilvi and I were somewhat amazed at what we were capable of doing when we had to do it.

And now we had learned there was another baby coming.

As we went over the dreams, there were a few that disturbed me. One in particular seemed to have a message for me. In this dream,Szilvi and I are visiting a museum that's been made out of the home of an Israeli man killed in a suicide bombing. The house has been preserved the way it was when he was alive. The upstairs of the house was reminiscent of the attic study I had during my last year as an undergraduate. There were all kinds of projects lying around, and things he collected: evidence of an intellectually active and curious human being. There was a low bed on the floor (as there had been in my study) consisting of a just a mattress or perhaps box springs as well, but certainly no frame. On the bed was a strange wooden tray, about the length of my torso, roughly carved by hand. It was like a giant trencher or meat serving dish. I knew this was there because the man had suffered from a bad back. There was a blanket on the bed, carelessly tossed aside, making it look like someone had just been taking a nap. I decided to try the tray out, and lay down on it. I could tell that it must have been comfortable for the man, but it was just too small and confining for me.

It struck me that this man was my former self: a man with the time and leisure for numerous intellectual pursuits. And he had a bad back. He didn't have a strong enough spine! And now, the comfortable way he compensated for his weak spine was too small and confining for me!

This and other dreams convinced me that I'd been trying to dodge my responsibility. I had no excuse thinking I didn't have the power to handle the situation.

I got the cheque, and held it in my hand. I told Szilvi that I'd never accuse her of saddling me with too many children if she promised never to complain that they were too much of a burden. She readily agreed. I took a dinner plate off the shelf, and a box of matches.

"Are you certain this is what you want to do?"

Szilvi, looking at me in wide-eyed disbelief, nodded. I struck a match and touched the flame to the corner of the thick paper of the cheque, and the dry material caught quickly. Very soon, it was a tiny black object on the plate.

I knew we'd done the right thing, because for the first time in weeks, Szilvi and I were happy that afternoon. We smiled and laughed, and started talking about having a baby. God knows we'd been through this often enough already. We have lots of practice. I recall that when Timothy was born, the very next daySzilvi and I were in the familiar routine of feeding, changing, naps, and carrying him around. It becomes second nature. And as for the material and financial matters involved in having one more child; we just have to believe in our power to make our way in the world.

Indeed, I am closer to the door from which souls leave this world than to the one where they enter, but that's no reason for me not to look back and watch as the miracle of birth continues to happen, as it always has, and always will.

Developing a relationship to fairy tales - closing remarks (part 2)

(To interpret, or not to interpret?)

Why is it important that these stories are a mixed bag, and don't neatly fit the categories scholarship has created for them? Because seen in this way, one can appreciate that all of the approaches I've mentioned so far in this essay, as well as many others I haven't mentioned, are legitimate in their own rite.

But precisely because there are many different kinds of narratives lumped together under the rubric of "fairy tales," one has to be careful which methods one applies to which fairy tales.

Again, there's an apt comparison to dreams and dreamwork. When working with a dream, it is essential that the dreamer feels deeply within his intuition to determine what kind of dream is in question (I credit Robert Moss and his book Conscious Dreaming for making this clear to me).

Let's say that you dream your uncle Charlie comes to you and tells you that your boss has a sharp sword in his office and he plans to cut off your head the next time you go there. In order to begin working with this dream, the dreamer has to decide whether it is a) transpersonal, b) prescient, or c) psychological (or another type of dream, but this covers the big categories). The dreamer has to ask himself: do I really feel that uncle Charlie came to me? Or does the image of Charlie represent something? If he feels it really was Charlie (i.e. a transpersonal dream), then it would be foolish to try interpreting Charlie as a symbol. One would miss the entire point! If one feels Charlie is a symbol, or represents a principle or "archetype" (i.e. it's a psychological dream) then one would apply other tools. The dreamer would also have to ask himself "do I feel this dream is speaking of the future?" If yes (i.e. it's a prescient dream), then the manner of treating this dream would, again, be different.

Using the wrong tools on a given dream yields dubious results. The same applies to fairy tales, especially considering the types of fairy tales that Rudolf Steiner and Werner Zurfluh are talking about. If the narrative speaks of a hero who must cross a threshold into another world, and the terms of the story indicate that what follows is the hero's psychic experience, it does very little good to get out all the tools of literary analysis and try to interpret this passage or the subsequent passage (dealing with the hero's adventure beyond the threshold) with post-modern, post-colonial, feminist, queer, hermeneutic, Jungian, Freudian, structuralist or any other type of criticism. It just misses the point.

And another parallel between dreamwork and "fairy tale work": It's very important that you base your own understanding of a fairy tale on your own experience. There is great danger in abdicating to so-called experts one's own right to decide the significance and meaning of aesthetic artifacts. Just because someone has degrees from respected institutions doesn't automatically give them insight into matters as deep as the ancient stories told by our race, nor into the meaning of creative inspirations from sources deep within our beings. The modern world regards the word inspiration, which means "to breathe in the spirit", as a quaint, colorful, but ultimately antiquated metaphor. Creativity is believed to arise in the physical brain. The average educated person believes that all the meanings of artistic creations can be found by means of various intellectual, analytical processes. And this is patently untrue. There are some things the objective mind cannot penetrate. Let's look again at that remark Rudolf Steiner made about symbols:

"Explanation and interpretation of symbols is really nonsense; so too is all theorising about symbols. The true attitude to symbols is to make them and actually experience them. It is the same as with fables and legends and fairy tales. — These should never be received merely abstractly, one must identify oneself with them. There is always something in man whereby he can enter into all the figures of the fairy tale, whereby he can make himself one with the fairy tale. And so it is with these true symbols of olden times, which come originally from spiritual knowledge..."

Many people are confused when you tell them that you should not focus your efforts on interpreting fairy tales, just as they have troubles understanding how you deal with dreams without immediately jumping to the interpretation. That's what the intellectual culture we've been brought up in tells us to do. Everyone has seen films in which there is someone lying on a couch and telling their dream to a shrink, and the shrink tells that person what the dream means, right? Your English teacher in high school (or English professor in college) gives you a poem or a story, and you're supposed to analyse it and interpret it, right? So, naturally, when you get something as highly symbolic as a fairy tale, which anyone with a couple of live nerve endings and a remnant of the natural in-born sense of awe knows is just pregnant with significance and meaning, what do you think you're supposed to do with it? Interpret it, of course! Wrong.

What can you do instead of interpret? If you have graphic skills, you can take a page out of the Waldorf school book and draw or paint the motifs of a fairy tale. You can act them out with friends and family playing different roles (OK, I admit I've never tried this with fairy tales. But I have tried acting out dreams with friends. Powerful stuff!) You could simply review the dream in your mind and then journal about the episodes in your life it reminds you of. You can use a tale, a part of a tale, or even just an image in the tale as the subject of a meditation. The possibilities are up to your own creativity. But the most important thing is to read them repeatedly. If you have children the right age to tell fairy tales, you are blessed. You don't have to contrive a reason for reading them, nor to justify the time you spend reading them. And there is also something special about reading them out loud. You get to experience the tales as a fringe benefit of doing service for your children. And never doubt for a moment: reading fairy tales to your children is a great service.

One last remark. I apologize to anyone who takes umbrage at my sometime somewhat dismissive attitude to the discipline of psychology. As the old joke goes: some of my best friends as psycholgists (I just wouldn't want my daughter to marry one!). The reason for this is that, despite an increasing number of enlightened individuals among their ranks, there is still a frightening number of them who fail to be human when examining the human mind, and who feel it is their duty to destroy and discredit anything that supports a viewpoint based on the divine nature of man's essence (the soul), mistakenly believing they are fighting superstition and ignorance, when indeed they are only showing their intolerance and ignorance of things beyond the ken of their particular sub specialty.

The blinders that give many psychologists tunnel vision is a combination of materialism and the limits imposed on them by the scientific method. Materialism is a state of mind that refuses to acknowledge anything beyond the physical senses (or the measurement instruments that represent an extension of our senses). Unfortunately, dealing with the products of the subconscious and the imagination does not always yield easily repeatable results. Instinct, emotion and intuition are equally as important as reason and logic. And although many psychologists would like to stake out the territory of fairy tales and dreams as their own, in which non-shrink dilettantes dabble at their peril, they forget that dealing with these worlds is much more an art than a science. And these realms are everyone's birhtright.

Developing a relationship to fairy tales - closing remarks

(Some observations about the arbitrariness of genre)

Although it's obvious that I think certain modes of dealing with fairy tales completely miss the boat at times, upon reflection, I can't truly assert that those approaches are either without value, or that they have not contributed something important to my understanding of fairy tales or to the understanding of fairy tales in general.To begin with, let's posit that there's something akin to dreamwork that applies to fairy tales; let's call it "fairy tale work." One of the central tenets of dreamwork is that one shouldn't rush jump straight to interpretation. One needs to absorb the tale, play with the tale, live the tale. Only when one has finally experienced the tale on several different levels should one venture to say what it "means." One thing that has to be kept in mind when talking about fairy tales (and when talking about all literature for that matter) is that all categorization of literature into genre and sub genres is arbitrary. To get a sense of just how arbitrary, indulge me in considering the following potted history of literature.

Story telling began around the campfire 150,000 years ago. After the tribe had sated itself on whatever beast they had roasted that night, Ogg, Igg and Oog would perform a dramatic re-enactment of catching a particularly worthy antelope: the world's first narrative. The story would have everything. There would be the foreshadowing of the place and time they found the magical creature through omens along the trail. There would be the enchanted moment when they beheld the beautiful animal, and it looked back at them, and consciousness beheld consciousness. There would be the tests of strength, endurance and courage the hunters underwent, as they chased the wounded prey across the landscape and almost got hopelessly lost (or they actually did get lost but magical beings and powers aided them in returning to the tribe).But was that the only kind of tale told around the fire? Well, no.

In succeeding generations Org, appointed by the elders to remember everything that happens to the tribe, as well as all the stories he was told by elders before they croak of, would give recitals of certain stories of particular importance to the tribe, including Ogg's famous story of stalking the enchanted antelope. Org's stories tended to be what we would call history, or legend nowadays.

Big Mama, Ogg's main woman (monogamy hadn't quite caught on just yet), would sometimes be called on to tell about the visits she got during the night from the Sky Mother, whose tits are the stars and whose womb is the waxing and waning moon. Sky mother would tell her which plants to use to cure various illnesses tribe members suffered from. Sky mother tended to talk in riddles, so the tribe would have to play around with Big Mama's dreams to figure out which plant Sky Mother meant and how they were supposed to prepare it. Very often the solution was a horrible pun that made the whole tribe groan and then giggle. Sky Mother has a strange sense of humor.

Then again, there were the tales told by Jackal, the tribe's shaman. These tales were always fantastic, and involve travelling to other worlds; some of them are like the world the tribe knew, and some were very different than their world, inhabited by gods, people and beings unlike anything they knew.In his tales there were heroes who leave their tribes to find women and treasures they have seen in their dreams. To triumph in his quest, the hero (or heroine) must bravely fight battles with creatures unlike any beasts the tribe knew from it's world, and the hero must perform tasks requiring great skill and cunning.Once Jackal told about visiting a world of people with white skin who live in square boxes and travel inside things that look like shiny turtles with clear ice on the sides they can see through. There were so many things in this story that no one could understand, like the giant seed pods these people hold to their ears to talk to other people who are far away. Jackal said he didn't understand this world either, but he went there and watched how people do things if he needed ideas for how to make better tools. He said he couldn't go there very often because it drained his spirit; although the people in this world are god-like, it was clear to him that most of them are lonely, and afraid of each other.

Oops. Got carried away there. But my point is this: although it's the shaman's tales that would most easily be classified as fairy tales, the historian's tales as "legend", Big Mama's tales as some sort of "religious" text, and the hunter's tales as something else, all of them would cross lines into one another. The hunter's tales have elements of the religious tales, the historian might relate an important ancestor's encounter with with a supernatural being, or his voyage to another world, which are more fairy tale-like.

The same goes for the collections of folk tales created in the 19th century. When some philologist doing field work found a peasant who was willing to offer up some of the yarns common people told each other around the hearth (a modernized form of the campfire, mind you!), there was no telling what she/he might tell the scholar. It might be a ghost story. It might be a local myth. It might be a legend connected to a local landmark. It might be a fable. And many times it was some mixture of these "genres." Many times it's not exactly clear what category a narrative fits into, but it has to be put into some pigeonhole or other.

And the picture is further muddled by the fact that various collectors attempted to edit and rewrite some tales. It is evident when reading some collections that editors made attempts to "prettify" some tales, and to make the language, plotting and other elements more consistent with the standards of the current literary (read: high culture) texts of the time.

(Next: to interpret or not to interpret)

Evolving a Relationship to Fairy Tales (Part VI)

(Werner Zurfluh, Part II)

There are two ways in which Zurfluh's work relates to fairy tales.


Zurfluh claims that collections of traditional fairy tales contain numerous examples of slightly coded instructions regarding the virtues of maintaining awareness in the "realms of the night". And, indeed, if you examine the vast treasure of recorded fairy tales, you'll find that a great many of them hinge on things which occur around the time a character in the tale falls asleep. An inordinate amount – one might even say a suspicious amount – of sleeping goes on in fairy tales. But you never notice until your attention is drawn to this fact.


A case in point: last night I read my children "Habetrot and Scantlie Mab" (from More English Fairy Tales, ed. Joseph Jacobs, 1894). Wouldn't you know that the main character "falls asleep" by a knoll while despairing over how to perform a task her mother has set her? She "wakes up" to the voices of some people in a cave she can see through a hole in a rock. These people are performing the task for her. This motif -- a task being performed for someone while they sleep -- occurs again and again in traditional fairy tales.


Zurfluh argues that the tales teach the technique of maintaining awareness, and not going "unconscious," as one slips into "the realms of the night". He draws attention to the Grimm’s tale "The Worn-Out Dancing Shoes", in which a soldier takes on the challenge of finding out where seven princesses are slipping away to at night, despite being under lock and key. The princesses have foiled previous attempts by giving their chaperon a glass of drugged wine before bed. By means of a trick (a sponge tied under his chin) he only pretends to drink the wine and fall asleep, but stays awake, and fakes snoring. In this way he is able to follow the princesses into the fantastic world reached by a ladder under one of their beds. Zufluh says this is an admonishment to maintain continuity of ego while falling asleep. There are many more tales in which the characters achieve amazing feats when they fall asleep, or deliberately don't fall asleep.


Another thing he tells us to pay attention to is passages in tales in which the hero arrives at a gate, a wall, a border or any other symbolic threshold. This, he says, is the transition into the other world, at which one must maintain awareness, or risk falling into an ordinary, non-lucid dream state. The hero is usually armed with a magic word, a power object or some other means of passing through the barrier. On the day I read those remarks in Zurfluh, that evening I read my children "The Three Heads of the Well” (English Fairy Tales, Ed. Joseph Jacobs, 1890). In this story, after the heroine proves that she has a good heart by sharing her meager travel provisions with a hungry old man, the man tells her, "There is a thick thorny hedge before you, which you cannot get through, but take this wand in your hand, strike it three times, and say, 'Pray, hedge, let me come through,' and it will open immediately." (I suspect this could be adapted as a visualization for breaking through into the other world with awareness intact. I'll let you know if it works!)


These practices were known in ancient times because, he says, ancient societies always had a certain class of people, mostly known as shamans and priests, who were privy to this knowledge. It later became necessary to code this information because of the persecution of the church, which regarded such practices as witchcraft and sorcery. But once one knows what one is looking for, he says, the message in fairy tales about lucid dreaming is fairly obvious. And I agree.

The other connection between Zurfluh and fairy tales is his perspective on the source of fairy tale content. He is very much in agreement with Steiner that they are retellings of psychic experiences. In his essay "Über den Ursprung der Märchen" ("On the Origins of Fairy Tales"), Zurfluh says that it’s a mistake to look for the origins of fairy tales in historical or folkloristic terms. He regards all arguments over the comparisons of various versions of tales, most of which have only been committed to writing during the last few centuries, to be very academic. He asserts that fairy tales originate in the experiences of those individuals who manage, through hard effort and training (meditation, dream recording, cultivating proper sleep conditions) to penetrate into the realms of the night with their awareness intact, which consequently means they return from such experiences with memory of them intact.

In this essay, he presents a passage from his journal which records his experience of visiting the "Land of the Fauns." He is of the view that the beings he encountered were the actual fauns of classical myth, and that this land (this "plane") exists apart from the material plane. Anyone who develops the proper skills and discipline can visit this world, or any of the other worlds depicted in myths and tales, because they really exist.


And so I've brought you to the point I've reached at this point in my relationship with fairy tales. I'm very pleased that my youthful suspicions concerning their importance to spiritual growth have panned out. Since, besides the other three children who still live under my roof, I still have a 1 1/2-year-old boy, I look forward to reading fairy tales nightly for many years to come. And now that I have been given so many keys from the researches of others, I fully expect that relationship to continue growing and changing.

(Next: conclusions and finals words)

Evolving a Relationship to Fairy Tales (Part V)

(Werner Zurfluh, Part I)

My research into the more mystical aspects of fairy tales led me to the work of Werner Zurfluh, an intriguing explorer of consciousness. The majority of his previously-published German-language works are available on the internet in html format (unfortunately little of it translated into English, and the translations are of substandard quality). Though he is very well-versed in the literature of mysticism, meditation and eastern philosophy, and despite the fact that his works are heavily annotated, the power of what he says in his writings comes from the fact that it is based on his own inner experiences, and does not rely on anyone else’s authority. A large portion of the text consists of extracts from his journals.


Zurfluh, as a child, was prone to Out of Body Experiences (OBEs), or what is also called astral projections, and he had many of them until he was a young adult. During his student years, he noted that due to the stress of intellectual work these experiences stopped and his internal experience became confined to "conventional" dreams. He resigned himself to the situation and later began occupying himself with Jungian interpretation of his dreams. With time, however, he came to the conclusion that this was the wrong way to go about things.


Zurfluh's main theme, in almost all of his published writing, emphasizes the importance of striving for personal experience of those states of mind called dreams (especially lucid dreams), astral projection, and OBEs. Because of his own background as a biology teacher and due to several years of study at the Carl Jung Institut in Switzerland, he spends a lot of his time arguing against the tenets of mainstream materialistic science and psychology, including depth psychology. He is critical of today's science because of its inability to work with, acknowledge, or even entertain the possibility of anything that cannot be measured with state-of-the-art instruments (in spite of the fact that "science" acknowledges all sorts of things now that could not be measured as recently as a decade ago), and he faults depth psychology for still falling into the Aristotelian trap of analysing and categorizing internal experiences in ways that kills them and makes them empty shells like so many mounted butterflies.


In his works he sites hundreds of pages of dream-, lucid dream- and OBE experiences that show a progression over time (many years, in fact). At first he utilized the standard sort of Jungian analysis on his dreams, and the symbols and sequences yielded exactly the type of results a Jungian analyst would expect. But with time, and by applying the lessons these experiences were teaching him, he began to understand that these "internal" experiences are, to a surprising extent, subject to the "observer effect". When he was expecting content that lent itself to Jungian analysis, that is exactly what he got.

But once he had spent more time simply observing, and putting his efforts into being as aware as possible in whatever state of consciousness he happened to be, the nature of his experiences changed dramatically, and he began to understand that these states are not just subjective (i.e. just going on in your head), nor purely objective (i.e. something you are perceiving which exists outside of you), but a subtle interaction of the two. Fact is, he says, sometimes the things one encounters in these experiences are astral beings. They might be other people journeying in those worlds, or other kinds of beings which have been called spirits, elementals, genies, djinn, demons, angels, fairies and many other things throughout the ages. It's not appropriate to treat these like some aspect of yourself, as many depth psychologists might advise, because then you will not really find out what they wish to communicate to you.

So, rather than torture the symbols of dreams for hidden meanings -- using the logic of the material world to analyze and interpret otherworldly experience -- he determined that it was more important to make every effort possible to maintain the continuity of ego (Kontinuierlichkeit des Ichs) while entering the "realms of the night," as he calls them. One must, as much as possible, maintain an awareness of one's own identity, as well as an awareness of the otherworldly nature of one's state of consciousness when one leaves the ordinary waking state. This seems paradoxical to those who have not had this experience: being "awake" while one is asleep. His techniques encompass both what is known as astral projection, and what dreamworkers refer to as working with hypnagogic imagery.

(Next: Werner Zurfluh on fairy tales)

Evolving a Relationship to Fairy Tales (Part IV)

It wasn't only Bettelheim who influenced me to read traditional fairy tales to my children. Once my children started going to Waldorf kindergarten and Waldorf school, I was made even more aware of the importance of fairy tale narratives in children's lives. Fairy tales are actually a major element of the Waldorf curriculum for the first several years. The teachers tell the children fairy tales -- by heart, so as to make it an oral/aural experience again. The children make drawings of scenes and characters from the tales. Sometimes they act the tales out in class. I knew that, being a "Waldorf parent", I was in contact with a state of mind much closer to what I'd longed for since my youth: a mystical and spiritual mode of relating to the tales. Waldorf pedagogy is based on a spiritual concept of the human race (in German: das Menschenbild). This conception involves not only who we are now, in this physical body, in the early 21st century, but also who we are in other dimensions of being (with our various other energy bodies), where we came from, what we are evolving into, and our relationship to other visible and invisible beings. What is taught in Waldorf schools never loses sight of this big picture, and it endeavours to nurture the entire human being, not just the rational intellect.


References to the nature of fairy tales and myths, and how to put them to use, are scattered throughout the voluminous works of Rudolf Steiner. You will notice that the ways the Waldorf schools use them in their curriculum avoid outright interpretation of meaning, or moralizing. The emphasis on using them instead of interpreting them is the same attitude advocates of dreamwork take toward dreams. The efficacy of the tales (as in Bettelheim's practice) is in experiencing them as deeply as possible.



In an essay on the methods of Rosicrucian initiation, Steiner speaks of the need to experience the symbols of esoteric teachings rather than intellectualize about them. He says:


"But now the pupils of this Master went further still; they learned to feel the inside, the inner nature, of the bones. Therewith they were able to experience a last example of what was practised in manifold ways in the ancient Mystery Schools, they learned to experience symbols by making their own organism into these symbols; for only so can symbols be really and truly experienced. Explanation and interpretation of symbols is really nonsense; so too is all theorising about symbols. The true attitude to symbols is to make them and actually experience them. It is the same as with fables and legends and fairy tales. — These should never be received merely abstractly, one must identify oneself with them. There is always something in man whereby he can enter into all the figures of the fairy tale, whereby he can make himself one with the fairy tale. And so it is with these true symbols of olden times, which come originally from spiritual knowledge..."


Steiner dismisses the notion that fairy tales are merely products of the imagination or the "folk fantasy" as the folklorists would call it. Like Jung, Steiner relates fairy tales to dreams, or more specifically to that more refined variety of "dream" called the psychic experience. According to Steiner, before the human race became what we are today -- that is, oriented toward a brain-centered awareness that focuses on a logical conception of the objective world through the five physical senses -- people experienced life with a natural clairvoyance that left them open to impressions coming from their other senses.* They experienced things that Jung would have called "archetypal." These experiences involved matters and themes that are more universal than the particular and specific experiences of the material world, which are tied to the conditions of time and space.


Steiner compares the conscious experience of hearing and experiencing a fairy tale (as opposed to the long-term process it effects on our deeper, subconscious level) to the pleasant tastes and sensations of eating nutritious food. Although they are a very important part of the process of properly feeding our bodies, they are only the obvious and superficial characteristics of food. It is only once the food is broken down, transformed and assimilated that we enjoy the full value of it. And all these things happen without our conscious awareness. Likewise, he says, it is only as we live with the tales and assimilate them into our beings on subconscious levels that we enjoy their full value.


Steiner points out a motif that can be found, in one form or another, in many, if not in the majority of fairy tales: the bewitched realm, person or object. The world is turned upside down. The prince appears to be a beast. The palace appears to be a humble cottage. This he says, reflects the illusory appearance of things in our waking state, where we are dominated by the veils of the material world. If we can view the same beings, objects and phenomena from another level of consciousness (i.e. while dreaming, or in a state of "astral" projection), then we will see that what we observe with our physical senses is not a clear or true perception. Bewitchment, then, is confinement to, or entrapment in, the material world. If the protagonist persists in doing what is right, which is achieved through following the dictates of the heart, then the spell is broken, and he/she gains the ability to see things as they really are, that is: to pierce the veil.


Another motif he points out is the "soul shepherd"; the old man, old woman, or other conspicuous stranger the protagonist meets who sends him/her on the quest. This contact, he says, awakens the deeper forces within the protagonist and makes the world take on its strange appearance.


Steiner's assertions present further arguments for why fairy tales can't be replaced by either fluffy-light children's literature or by the conspicuously and often ham-handedly didactic materials parents, schools and popular media present to children (often with the best of intentions, I acknowledge). Fairy tales embody truth. Truth, in this case, means an accurate reflection of the nature of being on the visible and invisible planes. They are appropriate for children, and for people of all ages, he says, because "they are able to combine the richest spiritual wisdom with the simplest manner of expression." This simple expression, clothed in the images of a simpler, pre-industrial life, interacting with our sublime inner realities, "brings the roots of human life together with those of cosmic life."


(*I am aware that some readers might find Steiner's claim that the human race once had clairvoyant abilities which have been lost to be an example of what Ken Wilber calls the "pre/trans fallacy." But I don't really think this applies here. He is not idealizing a previous state of the race, but acknowledging that certain developments in human consciousness came at the expense of other aspects of our beings. These abilities are merely suppressed and latent in the average person at this stage of our development, but will have to be recovered and integrated with our newly-won rational abilities before the race can advance to its next stage.)

Evolving a Relationship to Fairy Tales (Part II)

My leanings in academic pursuits, and my interest in mysticism inevitably led me to become acquainted with the ideas of Carl Jung. In the early 20th century, the world of psychoanalysis brought new dimensions to the understanding of fairy tales for the mainstream educated reading public. Freud and Jung -- especially Jung -- declared them to be phenomena arising from that "new" part of the mind they were telling the world about: the subconscious. (As an aside: the subconscious had been known and used as a tool for centuries by the esoteric schools. Buddhism understood it perfectly. Freud just gave it an acceptable "scientific" framework for working it into the Western paradigm.) This put fairy tales in close association with that other expression of the subconscious: dreams. As a matter of fact, Jung said that fairy tales were a product of the collective unconscious, which made them, more or less, the collective dreams of entire cultures, but in fairy tales the archetypes retain clearer, purer expression without the idiosyncratic complexes of individuals' dreams.

On the one hand, it is quite liberating to look at fairy tales as the workings of the human race's collective mind, since it moves beyond a materialist, empirical preoccupation with ethnic, geographical and linguistic origins (i.e. Someone, somewhere thought this story up, and it's been passed on across time and space ever since.) Jung says that fairy tales come from within us: they are an expression of a very deep part of our being.

But on the other hand, as interesting an exercise as Jungian analysis of fairy tales can be (identifying the roles played in them by such archetypes as "The Old Man" who always appears at difficult junctures in the hero's quest, or the talking animals who advise the hero), for an esoteric student, there is something dissatisfying about the fact that it remains psychology. What's this supposed to do for non-psychologists? True, one can use the Jungian system as a framework for aesthetic criticism (of literature, visual art, cinema, etc.), but the question still remains: what does this mean to my quest? It's fine to know what these stories "mean" in some abstract sense, but what are we supposed to do with that knowledge?

Evolving a Relationship to Fairy Tales (Part I)

(This is the first in a series of postings on various ways of looking at, and working with, fairy tales. Instalments will be published every two to three days.)

The material that makes up the following series of postings was originally written without any references to myself or to my own experiences, but after getting about half way through the project, it became apparent that the essay wasn't really jelling properly. I began to suspect that it needed the context of how my perspective has shifted over time in order to give it focus and direction. So, I went back through and inserted the personal aspect as delicately as possible, and only as much as needed. It's not that my perspective is so important, or any more important than anyone else's. It was just necessary to give the reader a pair of eyeballs to see this subject through. It was Hellibrarian's comment on my last posting about a fairy tale gave me the angle I was after by mentioning "the field of fairy tales as literature."

This story begins when, at the age of eighteen, I rediscovered a lovely cloth-covered hardback German-language edition of Grimm's Fairy Tales on a shelf in my parents' house. The beautiful beige volume with watercolor illustrations stirred memories of childhood, at which time I couldn't read German yet, but often leafed through it looking at the paintings. I began to read the rediscovered treasure, and noticed that there was a different pleasure in reading the tales as an adult than as a child. Part of my new perspective came from being a student of mysticism and the occult. There was a man twelve years my senior who played the role of spiritual mentor in my youth. He owned a vast library including " many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore", to which I had full access. From this perspective I saw the fairy tales as magic universes full of secret coded messages that could only be unlocked with the proper key. I analyzed the stories (as well as I could) pseudo-kabbalistically, and semi-Freudianly (We all know a little Freud, after all. It's in the food we eat.) But as charming as that all was, I knew there had to be more. There must be more one can get out of them.

A few years later I was studying German as an undergraduate. That's where I got exposed to fairy-tales-as-literature. To many people's minds, the phrase fairy-tales-as-literature seems to ennoble what are commonly thought of as "merely" children's' stories. After all, literature is part of what we regard as "high culture." The Grimm’s tales are associated with those towering figures of philological scholarship, the Brothers Grimm, who dedicated their lives to the documentation of the German language in the Deutsches Woerterbuch (The German Dictionary). The dictionary was a nationalistic project, meant to support the various efforts being made at that time to somehow weave the dozens of principalities from the defunct Holy Roman Empire back into some semblance of unity. The Grimms thought that could be achieved through cultivation of the common language.

Because the prime motivation for collecting these "German" fairy tales was actually a political/linguistic project, this left its stamp on how they were regarded in the 19th century. Indeed, the Grimms were not the only scholars collecting fairy tales and myths (i.e. folklore) in the German-speaking realm during that period. Dozens of collections were published by as many collectors. Much of the early scholarship and commentary on fairy tales retained this focus on fairy-tales-as-folklore. The commentaries dealt with geographical origins, and ethnic heritages. If there were similarities between tales collected in disparate locations, the question was how the oral tradition had travelled, and which cultures communicated with which others. Regarded as folklore, fairy tales were seen as “memes” passed from one generation to the next, like the best way to skin a deer, or the most efficient way to build a house.

Let me tell you an anecdote that sheds a little light on the limitations of fairy-tales-as-literature or folklore, that is, the academic approach. While a graduate student at UC Davis, I attended a seminar in German Romantic literature. Four of us met weekly in the professor's office. As we discussed fictional works of such writers as E.T.A. Hoffmann, Clemens Brentanno and Novalis, it became obvious to me that I saw things in some of these stories that the other students (or the professor, for that matter) didn't see, due to my background in esoteric literature. Most of the time I would keep this to myself, but at other times, when they were getting all wrapped up in (i.e. sidetracked by) some theoretical approach, I would reveal to them which legend or mystical doctrine was being referred to in a story that shed light on the author's intentions. On one occasion the conversation had taken some pretty absurd turns before I decided to inform them that the reference to mandrake root in one story had to do with the fact that European lore says the mandrake root has magical powers due to its being shaped like the human body. I further told them it was believed the root screams when it is pulled out of the ground, and it is fatal to hear this scream. For this reason they harvested it by tying a rope to it and getting some beast of burden to pull it out while the humans jammed their ears shut. After relating this information, there was a short silence. Then Brigitte, one of my fellow students squinted at me and asked, "Where the hell do you know these things from?"

My point is that scholars of Romantic literature often fail to understand that there's a dimension of that literature you can't understand unless you take the authors' obsessions with certain metaphysical ideas seriously, and not smile indulgently at their quaint superstitions. Novalis, for instance, made an intensive study of the works of Jakob Boehme. How can you grasp what's going on in Novalis's works without understanding his mystical view of the world? The same goes for fairy tales. The academic approach often leaves something to be desired. The mystical side of me was left dissatisfied.

The discipline of folklore studies has its uses, but fairy tales are much more than folklore. And as flattering a designation as "literature" is, fairy tales are also much more than that.