Alejandro Jodorowsky - Psychomagic - The Transformative Power of Shamanic Psychotherapy

A depressed child tells me, “I am insignificant. I have no value. God does not see me. He is occupied with more important things.” I respond, “You represent the surface of a sphere composed of infinite points. Imagine now the center of this sphere: it is a lone point, which is, at the same time, communicating with all the other points.”

I was expecting your dreams to be a bit more crazy, a proliferation of symbols of initiations, like in your films or comic strips. The dreams that you tell of here are a bit more sober, unusual for you.

Well, my comic books and my films correspond with the lucid dream.

As you have seen, these dreams are often very short. Their special character resides in their impact and in the sensation that I have of myself in them. In the dream, I am a sage, detached, happy, and this sensation persists for a time upon waking.

I would like for you to now give some examples of the “ humble” dreams.

Here is a typical dream in which I admire the value of others:

I find myself in the home of friends. I am in the company of an undistinguished woman who, however, has a very distinguished style. She can’t have been more than fifty-eight years old. I find her very perceptive, extremely kind, and understanding. After a moment, she asks me, “Do you know who I am?” I reply in the negative. “I am Christine,” she says. “It is I who cared for you when you were an infant.” I realize then that I’ve found myself in the presence of my first nanny. I then say to my friends, “Understand this! She is the first woman I ever loved!” Knowing that she is still living and has reached such a degree of evolution gives me great joy. Christine and I embrace, then she goes. My friends then say to me, in a very affirmative tone, “She is eighty years old and yet she seems so young!” I wake up with joy in my heart.

Another example:

I am surprised in the middle of the road by a student rebellion. The youths burn cars, and there are police officers everywhere. Someone shoots a machine gun, so I lie on the ground without feeling any fear. A policeman takes me in. I am interrogated: I remain calm. I have in my pockets heaps of antimilitary tracts as well as newspaper clippings of rather funny facts showing the police and military in their ridiculousness. I explain to them that I am a professor of the tarot, and they release me. I walk the streets. My suit is a wreck, and I have even lost my shoes. Instead of shoes, I slide the tips of my feet into an eyeglass case. I enter a café to ask directions. Among the clients, a plump-enough woman of the popular kind, who seems full of goodness, looks sadly at me as she takes me for a hobo. She murmurs, “Look what a state this poor man is in. Something must be done.” She takes me for a derelict. I find her to be so good, and I am so touched by her charity that I decide not to set her straight. I resolve to accept the role that she gives so as not to disappoint her, and I permit her to freely give course to these good feelings. I open my black leather suitcase and look for a little game of tarot that I can offer her. Among the tarots, there is a bottle of pills. They are vitamins, but the woman is persuaded that I transport drugs, and she experiences even greater pity. Without knowing anything about the tarot, she takes a card, that of the Magician. “Bad,” says she. “You should not carry this card. Look: the young man has a pill between his fingers.” She actually takes the yellow circle from between the Magician’s fingers. I tell her thank you for her good intentions, and I promise to no longer use drugs. I leave the café. At no point do I have the intention to make myself seem important; to the contrary: it is with joy that I am abased.

Do you make distinctions among other kinds of dreams?

Of course! There are “generous dreams” in which the dreamer shares with the rest of humanity what he has learned. For example:

I find myself in an immense space, flying over a peace march of millions of demonstrators. I suddenly realize that I am dreaming. I go around in the air in order to attract their attention. The public reacts in admiration upon seeing me levitated. I ask them all to join hands and form a huge chain so they can fly with me. Upon touching them, I make them rise and try to make them fly by force of my thoughts, but they do not move. I must touch them with tenderness, hang on to them. They then fly toward me, and we give ourselves up to the exercise of drawing figures in the sky, all together in a chain, until I wake up.

To know not only how to give but also how to receive, to accept the service that another can give, is equally part of the art of generosity. This I understood from the following dream:

I am in Paris. The newspapers have a problem with the government, as it did not provide the raw material for printing. France-Soir feels obligated to publish with a typewriter and print according to a primitive process using sugar. At the side of a newspaper stand, seated in front of a wooden table, is Bernadette, the deceased mother of my eldest son, Brontis. I sit facing her, and I find her beautiful, happy, as she rarely was in her life. Unlike before her death, she is totally positive toward me. Now, she inspires my self-confidence; I know I can count on her. Realizing that I am dreaming, I tell myself, “Bernadette is dead, but in the dream she lives. To speak with the dead does not scare me. I trust her. It is an archetype, which can be useful to me, since she knows politics (in which I am totally ignorant) and will always be available whenever I want to consult her on this subject.” Bernadette begins to explain why the situation is so tense, and why the president is wrong to trust the minister he has just named. Then she speaks to me of the future, “We live,” she tells me, “in the idea that the future does not belong to us, that it is not for us. . although we are totally tied together with the future. In the future, we will be very active.” I think she makes reference to the future in general, the millions of years remaining to know the universe.

After this dream, I very lucidly delighted in this reconciliation with the mother of my son, all the more so as we lived with so much conflict. Bernadette became an ally who proposed to collaborate on the perfecting of my spirit while adding the best of herself. I have thus accepted her new presence in my life, through the dream.

Lucid dream, therapeutic dream, sage dream, humble dream, generous dream. . What is for you the ultimate dream, the oneiric ne plus ultra?

The magical, creative dream. All these years of oneiric exploration, I have only known one. Here it is:

I am in my bedroom. Supporting myself in the air with my hands, I take off. I decide to feel all the power of my voice. Letting the song come to me, I emit, with an almost limitless force, sounds, which go well beyond those of the opera. The voice does not depend on me: I invoke it and it comes. I don’t have to do more than let it out through my mouth to discover it, living magic. . Very touched, I feel I have opened a dimension of myself unknown until now. In plain lucidity, I open my eyes, and I wake up. I note that my heart beats fast. Without moving, I recall all the details of the dream. Suddenly, a song not far and not close comes to my ears. It is not emitted from a human voice, but it cannot be less than human resonance — as if all the neighborhoods in the city were singing. This song seems to arise out of another dimension. I tell myself that I am still half asleep, and I must observe more lucidly what happens. The phenomenon repeats, and I abandon myself to listening, especially since this totally new and extraordinary experience alters the rhythm of my heart. On the one hand, I believe myself prey to hallucination; on the other hand, it appears to me that a little door opens that could be called the third ear, like one speaks of the third eye, a door of clear hearing. . I sleep deeply and, in another dream, I see myself on a street in Montmartre. I walk murmuring, “It was a divine voice, the voice of a goddess. She does not come from a throat but was exhaled by reality itself. She comes from the streets, from the homes and from the air. .”