The Bridge as Dream Symbol: The Rainbow Bridge

Considering the recent disaster of the bridge collapse at Minneapolis, no doubt many people are dreaming night dreams of bridges, not just those in proximity, but any who have heard of the event that took place there. ‘Like tends to stimulate like’ and the dream maker picks its symbols that consciously or unconsciously resonate for the dreamer and… they show up in night dreams sometimes, sometimes remembered, sometimes not.

In dreams of my patients I’ve listened to over the decades, bridges figure prominently in the night stories of those who are in a strong transition of some kind, or about to be. The condition of the bridge, the placement of it, the architecture of it, the events near or upon it, along with the dreamer’s associations, often have interesting, sometimes startling meanings and realizations for the dreamer.

Generically, the symbol of the Bridge is an archetypal representation. An archetype is thought to be a universal, primal idea, ‘a first model,’ a sub strata of the psyche that cannot be grasped in its entirety, so we perceive that phenomena through representations or symbols. Aristotle is one of the earliest to mention such as a phenom of the psyche’s way of grasping concepts and forces larger than itself. One archetype conjectured is that of The Great Mother, and there are literally millions of symbols, which in some way typify every aspect of the idea of “Her,” including those found in many religions and mythologies wherein some kind of morphic resonance perhaps, has created similar stories about the Great Woman, one being about Her giving birth to a son or daughter who is God and yet human.

19th and 20 century psychoanalysts, notably Freud and Jung, did riffs on archetypes, each writing about them in their own ways. Freud however, said that dreams were the Royal Road to the unconscious… something native and aboriginal people have put forward for centuries previous, and still yet, today.

Thereby, one of the oldest mythos containing the symbol of bridge, is that of the ‘Rainbow Bridge,’ a Native American religious symbol, that speaks of a way of life, a way of living wherein one stands between the destroyed world and the new world. The Rainbow Bridge is a metaphor, this word, metaphor, although seeming depleted in meaning to merely sign ‘transfer,‘ I believe more so derives from meta-phoros, meta: a super-sensible, and phoros, an element…thus a transfer, as in from one supersensible idea, to a language more earthy… Rainbow Bridge is a metaphor, that if shaken, other nurturant ideas might fall out from it, depending on each person’s sense perception…

…an idea, for instance, like being able ‘to bridge’ an event in one’s own life… such as able to withstand devastation on one side and yet being able to hope anew on the other… being able to walk in the ruins, and being able to build again, too… maybe drawing from the ruins, maybe not. But, build, none the less.

Bridging something that otherwise would be merely perilous. Being able to cross from one kind of consciousness to another. Being able to see in more than one way. Being able to think in multiple ways. Being sensate in more ways than one. Bridging.

The archetypal symbol of The Bridge is variously conceived as representing a fixed pathway between two stable ways of thinking, two ways of perceiving, two ways of living…yet with a watery, changeable element underneath it.

Some of the native groups say souls walk the Rainbow Bridge after they die. Some of my relatives say babies come to earth walking over The Rainbow Bridge. Some tribal storytellers I know say that the Rainbow Bridge saved humanity when the world flooded, and everyone managed to climb up the Rainbow Bridge into the new world we are in now… but that the time is nearly here that we will have to climb the Rainbow Bridge again, for this world is nearly used up now. The Rainbow Bridge is not a worldly way of thought, but a super-ordinary way of thought; refelctive, grounded at each end, radiant in the middle.

I once lived in Taos, which is a place on earth where God paints rocks with amazing colored light. There, all the old grizzled Latino farmers who only shaved once a week, kept their houses this way: One part of the house had fallen down, the rotted roof timbers gray from rain, collapsed, no more roof tiles, doors long gone, window frames with no glass, chamisa growing where once was a floor, studs leaning out like crooked teeth. That was one end of the house.

Then the middle of the house was often called the Puente, the Bridge, the exact just right place, as in el Puente, the exact point; the fulcrum, the middle of the stable middle; That’s where everyone lived, and the gas stove often had 6 burners and huge iron pots and iron hooks in the fireplace over the hearth where Los Todos would cook all day and all night…los todos, everything, anything there was to eat, last ten kernels of corn, bones with no meat, cebollas, onions found growing in the swamp iris, anything, Los Todos went into that pot and nourished the family.

The floor was dirt. As my grandmother said, if you don’t know the difference between a clean dirt floor and a dirty dirt floor, you don’t know anything about anything.

So, there the family lived on in el Puente, and ate and studied and counted out seed, and grew up and made love, slept and dreamed.

Then there was the other end of the house, the other end of the world, some said. There was the part being built, the new part, the part yet to come, the promise from the wedding night, I will build you a beautiful bedroom from which there will be a window to see the stars. That promise, perhaps, if things went right, 30 or 40 or 50 years after the first wedded night, maybe… maybe the addition would finally be completed.

But the intention was there all along, and the work progressed, little by little, maybe only one row of adobe mud bricks laid last month, with places above the sill plate left open for windows. But the tiny progresses would be made. They would accumulate.

And meanwhile, the farm woman would be weaving and sewing curtains for the new room that-was-not-yet, curtains that might be done years before the room has a roof and glass in the windows and shiny yellow straw imbedded in the interior adobe walls, and before the old women would hand pat mud on the outer walls… before all that was done, the beautiful, the decorative, the hand loomed rugs and valances would be completed. And the broom made. For the new dirt floor, for everyone knew what was a clean dirt floor from a dirty dirt floor.

If you asked old Trujillo or Martinez, which in the southwest are equivalent to the names Smith and Jones… if you asked them where is ‘the Bridge’ in your house, they would wave their arm to the left. Oh, the left falling-down part is the Bridge? They would wave their arm to the right. Oh, I see now, the right side, the new part of your house is the Bridge? They would laugh then showing missing teeth and gold teeth and dark teeth. They would sweep their blue jean jacketed arm across the entire roofline from falling down part to center part to new part… and say, Los Todos. All of it. All of it is The Bridge.

That’s the underlying genius of the symbol of The Bridge in dreams: the los todos stew into which everything is put and thereby nourishes, everything goes into the bridge…

…what has fallen down, what is being built up, where we stand at the moment… in the dream world too, these in some way, specific to each person and their associations, create intelligence about how to, when to, why to Bridge across and through and in and out of the river of our own lives.

What has fallen down is one end of the bridge. A bridge cannot stand without two ends. As absurd as it may sound, ‘what is no longer’ can have a kind of stability to it… a kind of ‘cant turn back, it is what it is’ iron anvil-like. When accepted, whether understood or not, this can act as an anchor for one end of the bridge… the bridge representing how we go forward in life, how to get from there to here, how to keep building the other end, the new part of life… where we can tell the difference between a dirty dirt floor and a clean dirt floor. And keep los todos cooking on the hearth for nourishment all the days of our lives.