Wild Man and the Lion Cub

                                                                            by Scott Fortney
 
This drawing was the splice of the following two dreams:

Dream:

I am in our bed next to a large she-lioness. She has bobbed hair like my wife and I am told it is for her to hide her cubs in. I am wondering if we are going to have sex, how it would work. I feel my body is a bit different too. My wife gets up to go about her day and it is just me and lioness.

Dream:

I am sitting at a picnic table with some guys from work and see a Wildman on a hill side through a telescope. I am afraid of him, wondering if I could protect myself against him with a 2x4 if he attacked. I know he speaks no languages.

My homework - be with the lioness. In the beginning, I felt like I was myself, except I knew I had the loins of a lion and growing lion anatomy. As I did this homework it became apparent that the lioness was my Anima mother and that I was just a cub. The feeling of smallness, of being loved was wonderful.

It was also frightening because a couple of times it triggered an incest trauma that I had to do something for the lioness, like in the dream where I think I have to have sex with her, but this passed and then I dropped into receiving her love.

The following week I came to Marc with the Wildman dream and my new homework was to be now be the cub, but with the Wildman, the Animus, and working the edge of staying in relationship with Animus in social situations. When I decided to draw this I started with the Wildman high on the mountain and it occurred to me to have him holding me, the cub, by the nape of the neck the way female mammals move their young. It was very clear that I need do nothing, not even hold on.

Doing this homework I could feel the movement through the air, a real letting go. Just as important was the fact that the Wildman doesn’t speak, so there was no talking, asking what is happening, where are we going—all the ways I want to control.

I drew a nebula for the background sky because I look at an Astronomy Photo of the Day daily, most of which come from the repaired Hubble Telescope and I enjoy them. A nebula is the raw material from which new galaxies and stars are made — it is all about becoming.