Jung: Catnip for English Majors

 

Studying English literature, it turns out, is super useful when diving into Jung and dreams. Take, for example, this dream I had when I was thinking about my relationship to control:

Dreamed J was a project manager and gave me a task to diagram or analyze the Longfellow poem:

There was a little girl,
            Who had a little curl,
Right in the middle of her forehead.
            When she was good,
            She was very good indeed,
But when she was bad she was horrid.

Then P popped into my office wearing a casual outfit with a rainbow belt. I pointed out he might want to wear the tie in front vs in back, and he was pleased for the tip and adjusted accordingly.

Suddenly my computer was remote managed, even though I hadn’t put in a ticket to IT. A guy I didn’t know from IT pulled up the chat window and typed something like, “WHOOPS, sorry, my mistake.” I typed back (or tried to—the delay was extreme, and my typos built up, words ran together, and for some reason, numerals kept auto-formatting at the beginning of my sentences) something like: “Hah hah! I wondered what was happening. No problem!”

He wrote back, with the same delay/formatting issues, acknowledging me, then he gave me back my computer.

Having hair that has "behavior" means that it drives the bus sometimes. So the easy button for cutting THAT off at the pass is to flat-iron your hair into submission, which I did for a long time. A side effect of these measures is that the task gets harder over time, because your hair acts out more.

At the time of this dream, I was in a high-pressure job working long hours correcting mistakes and providing regulatory guardrails to cross-functional teams. It is SUPER hard to back-end this kind of thing, especially when you have no power except reputation and goodwill. My tendency was to overcompensate for gaps or try to bulldoze people (especially at 10 o'clock at night). Everything is tight and controlled until it's not.

But this dream is a thematic lesson in good control. My friend J: in real life, chaotic and terrible with boundaries. I'm hyper-competent, so I help him! Working in a system with clear inputs and deliverables that we both agree to: good control. Do I PM Mr Rainbow-Belt's terrible taste by steering him to better accessories? No, I give him a tip about something that seems like an oversight and let him take it however. The remote computer requires consent, and without that, it is an encroachment. With malicious intent, it's a violation. But here, it's accidental. We both acknowledge. He apologizes and stops.

There are things in your sphere of control and things that aren't. And even overdirecting things within your sphere of control can have consequences. Sometimes it's better to let go, allow things to play out, and to learn to live with imperfection.