Wild Spirit of the Now
Decades ago, a middle-aged man in depth psychotherapy with me brought a dream pulsing with spiritual tension. In it, he was walking down the busy streets of a large city with his wife, enjoying the freedom and anonymity of vacation.
Suddenly, he was "caught" by members of the fundamentalist religious group he had once belonged to. They recognized him immediately—this former, once-famous preacher—and pressed him into service. There was a large conference just down the block, and they wanted him to preach.
In the dream, he felt a strange exhilaration rise in his chest. He had no Bible in hand, no text of authority, yet he felt a welling of inspiration "rise from deep in my chest." What he would proclaim was not the old gospel of fear and obedience, but a gospel of the Wild Spirit of Now—a wave of pagan, natural energy coursing through him.
In this inspired flow, he felt close to the wild, unmediated Spirit of life itself, "the living Jesus, and all mystics, seers, sages, and seers through the ages" who in unison said, "Follow me." The utterance was not a dogmatic command, but an invitation into daily, authentic being. This dream image dripped with Dionysian freedom, the sacred pulse that shatters rigidity and invites one into the aliveness of the soul.
The religious group, eager to claim him, showed him the house where he and his wife could stay. Inside, it was swarming with bugs—creeping, crawling, an unspoken horror. The church folk were blind to the behind-the-scenes infestation.
He and I both felt the power of the symbolism rise in the session. The infested house stood as the psyche under authoritarian control, the inner life made unclean by repressive dogma, the soul swarming with the restless vermin of suppressed vitality. It was a place of psychic death, a hall of contamination masquerading as holy. To lay his head down there, to enter this kind of sleep, would be to re-enter a state of unconsciousness, enslavement to old patterns.
At the last moment, he turned away. He did not enter the hall of preaching. He did not regress, step into the house of infestation. Instead, he vacated the realm of the dead. He turned and walked away with his wife. They chose the beat and pulse of the living city. The atmosphere in the dream, he reported, glistened. They entered an unbounded vacation of the soul.
This movement felt like a baptism not in water, but in the free-flowing current of the Self. It asserted itself as a choice for life over lifeless forms, for the soul's alchemy over the stale repetition of inherited patterns.
In our therapeutic reflection, he sensed he was stepping across a threshold in his own psychic journey. The dream was a summons from the deep Self, the archetypal source of his freedom and vitality, urging him to renounce the infested psychic houses of the past and to live in the luminous immediacy of his own unfolding path.
Yet, just as the session glowed with this sense of breakthrough, a shadow fell. His eyes drifted downward, and a subtle heaviness entered the room, as though the air itself thickened. He confided that a sudden wave of doubt had seized him—an almost physical sensation of contraction in his chest. A voice coming from inside him, that of a deceased clergyman he had once admired and who had mentored him, insisted that his freedom was an illusion, that the old religious dogma could not be outpaced.
It was as if a cold wind had blown through some invisible doorway. I felt it too, a shift in the field between us. A summoning of dark spirits, or old psychic complexes, crept in unannounced, seeking to reclaim the ground the soul has just won.
He sat in that stunned quiet for a few moments, staring into a space only he could see. I remained quiet, allowing his psyche to do its own sorting through. His hands trembled slightly, as if the numbing current of the old spell was trying to reclaim him.
We were at a point of relapse—the chronic pattern of self-doubt, a spectral chorus of inner accusers demanding he return to the bug-ridden house of his past.
Yet in our shared awareness, something deeper held. He slowly named what was happening, reclaiming his voice: "It's like something doesn't want me free… it wants to pull me back." By witnessing and naming the visitation, the energy began to shift again, the numbing spell receding like mist under sunlight.
The session ended with the felt truth that the battle was real, the forces tangible, and that remaining awake to the Wild Spirit of the Now was at once his challenge and his liberation. Together, we learned to navigate these thresholds. Freedom would surge like a river in spring, only to be shadowed by the sudden return of darkness. Over the years, the light grew steadier. The old complexes weakened, and the call to live in fidelity to his wild, free Self became the guiding thread of his life.
He carried this truth for decades, its fire enduring until his passing at the age of ninety-three. In the end, our work had been a living enactment of the gospel of all seers, sages, and mystics—a gospel that proclaims not dogma, but the soul's liberation. It was a life lived in rhythm with the Wild Spirit of the Now, a path that led him through the doorways of this life and, at last, into the luminous threshold of the next.
And I reflect now on this dear patient. To have refused the bug-ridden room, to have declined regression into the old gospel of fear and guilt, to walk on, was to honor the sacred fire of his own nature.
He left the dream, as he left the session, as he left this realm and entered the next, with a smile—lightened, liberated, and attuned to the Wild Spirit of the Now.