Every night recently, they offer themselves to me – a beautiful woman arrives, baring her breasts. The women entice me, willingly surrendering a view of their bodies for my pleasure. What’s up with this already?

My personal trainer, Sal, with whom I work out twice a week early in the morning, is a sharp cookie. A side benefit of having someone who knows how to keep my body healthy is that we have a shared interest in psychology and dreams.

“So Sal, what do you think it means that I’ve had multiple dreams this week of women baring their breasts?
Erik doesn’t miss a beat as I apply a foam roller to my quads. “Something to do with your mother!”

What a comedian, I think, and we laugh. But he’s probably right.

“That’s what they say,” I reply. “If it’s not one thing, it’s your mother.”

My psyche of late seems to be indulging in these symbols of maternal care. When I take the time to meditate on these sensual images, they calm me more than they arouse me. I feel strangely nourished and satisfied.

I try to imagine it – mother and child at the breast. What a lovely experience it must be! The giving and receiving of warm milk, the infant’s face against the soft, smooth skin of the mother, the scent of maternal care. This primal sustenance must, for the child, feel like the taste of eternity. For whatever time it takes to fill the child’s tummy, the outcome is that there is no unmet want or need. There is only pure joy. The ultimate in transcendence, an oxytocin dream. Is this, I wonder, a child’s earliest experience of God? A thing larger than life, something felt, momentarily and with reliable regularity until the day the child grows out of it, or the mother grows weary? Whatever time it lasts, a child knows what it is like to be one with mother and one with God – mother as priestess. And when all goes well, the child learns to remain one with the Source even when she is gone – an internalized connection to her Presence even in her absence. Mother and child have become One.

I imagine that I felt that way before memory and before time and before loss. Before the arrival of words and understanding. Mother as substance and touch and smell and experience. Mother as the taste of transcendence and eternity. Mother as symbol. But because of the necessity of separating from mother, in order to grow and become an individual, those earliest desires and needs have to be relinquished and, to some great extent, grieved, never ever returned to. Never, ever again to be repeated.

And yet, we remember and we long to return, not to the past but forward to current-day sources and presences, replacing maternal nourishment and ease with suitable substitutes: relationships, religion, academics, and nature. Seeking that which satisfies ultimately and eternally. For men, certainly, women often carry the hope of transcendence through love and sexuality. A rescuing from the pain of loneliness and emptiness. The bare-breasted women in my dreams seem to be participants in healing those ancient wounds. And so, I welcome them as they welcome me.

But I welcome them not just as symbols of Mother, but also manifestations of Sophia, the feminine face of God. This was where Jung argued with Freud and his propensity for reducing all dreams to infantile sexual wish fulfillments. Jung said that our dreams are more than regressions. Dreams are also expressions of a soul’s urge to be fully alive. It is the nature of our souls to want to suck from life as much juice as it can. The unconscious doesn’t just lead us back to the past. We are also continually being drawn toward a future where life is lived with zeal, with meaning, and with purpose. When we can get out of our own way and stop making excuses for not living more fully, the psyche offers it’s reservoir of energy for our creative imaginations. A woman might help a man with this, but it is the divine Self from which he needs to drink. A woman can often point the way to the Self, the God within, but every man has to take up the challenge of living courageously and creatively. Otherwise the man simply projects on a woman a weight no woman can or should bear.

So I am happy with these dream-women who show up now and then: these angels of the night, guardians of eternity and divine love. It’s as if they are saying to me, “You’re on the right track. Keep going. Keep loving what you love and keep giving your love in whatever ways and to whomever you can.”