11/11/19
Before I forget this one... I feel I sort of remember a little over half of it
I am compelled to take an advanced math course in perhaps linear algebra, or logarithms or something. I travel down to take it in the middle of the night, in a suburban house. I travel to it from a muddy road next to a thick corn field.
It seems that your dream is analogyzing itself, that is, the process of dreaming or whatsoever takes place in one's psyche at night that is akin to "learning", to an advanced math course. What are your feelings about what it would be like to actually have to take such a course?
It is a common motif to also analogyze a downward journey to the process of losing one's waking world consciousness as one falls asleep. The house may be a straight-forward reference to the personality or the area of the brain that is where the learning will happen with learning being, perhaps, a reconfiguration of said brain/personality.
Muddy road and thick corn field...this dream also seems to feature a departure from a road. This road is muddy whereas the previous dream's road was rugged. In either case travel along the road seems to be more difficult than going off road.
We have to take a very difficult math test in a pitch black room.
I would say that the dream is double-downing on the difficulty with the math test given the pitch black room. It is hard to imagine any test that would not be difficult under those circumstances. However, it seems that you as the dreamer and the other "test takers" are prevailing nonetheless in spite of the darkness. A paradox. I sense humor in all this actually.
There are some story problems on it, you almost would not know they were math questions unless you really read deep into the center of them.
I find this to be an intriguingly semi-poetic way of describing doing a story problem. Buried in the story problem's story is a math problem. This could be a metaphor showing that the learning as represented by the math is something to be found contained within one's story. The story can be, on one level, for entertainment purposes, but usually whether we attend to it intentionally or consciously or not, our stories are also problems to solve in terms of determining who we are and what meaningful relationship we have with the reality we find ourselves in. This sort of work Jung described as individuation and it involves getting at the heart of who we are through the jungle of our habits, wounds and excessive behaviors. It is a most difficult task that may often feel like taking a test/being examined.
I think one of them got morbid or weird, something to do with dead feet.
Perhaps the greatest of human fears is death. Death is the end of our existence to all practical determinations, faith beliefs notwithstanding. I now read "dead feet" as potentially associated with the muddy road. I can imagine dead feet as relating to one's feet stuck in the mud or one becoming dead tired for having to slog through the mud. Given your other dream about leaping...those feet were quite amazing!
There might also be a reference here, given your association to the road as muddy or rough, that you are following a different path than the one already laid out for you. That premade path is un-preferred to the one you are choosing although the one you are choosing has its own difficulties it seems. It may be that that pre-made path is also "morbid or weird" and that taking this test, after all, is really just another way of walking that road.
The person in the desk next to mine breezes through it, and I am only half done when most are finishing.
Being the not best in class dream figure for me indicates that you are playing in another inner psychic role than that which you might identify with while awake. The waking ego has all the energy to direct to its own ends...that is why it is the ego. But in the nighttime classroom of dreams you may experience life in your psyche as the shadow. The shadow is typically a same age, same sex dream character who has less energy than the ego and who is often at cross-purposes or has a different experience than the ego. The competent ego breezes through while the shadow makes do. Also the shadow often represents making choices differently than your ego has made them.
This seems to fit in with the not following the main path. Let's say the path that has been laid out for you is the path of your waking ego consciousness, but you sense that there is another path, another voice, that should also be considered. Maybe your ego journey has become difficult and you suspect that this is because of an inner thing, something you need to discover about yourself that might make things better. It is a divergence to pursue such things and one may expect trials like tests, fears like death and failures as well.
I fail presumably, and arrive outside in the pitch black darkness. There are no clouds, there is no moon. I walk up a hill in the middle of a corn field, and enter the lighthouse, though there is no corn in this section and there is no sea.
The shadow knows all about failure, the shadow usually fails when it compares itself to the ego. The ego is the author of the official history of the psyche and the shadow always, eventually gets the short end of the stick. But as any Jungian will tell you, this is critical and essential work.
From darkness inside to darkness outside. Not even the reflected light of the sun/consciousness. You have, perhaps, reached a deep well of no psychic energy. The shadow stands in the shadow.
Walking up the hill represents a raising of energy as you are beginning to wake up, perhaps. You presumably pass through that corn field and now you find a lighthouse. No corn, no ocean. A lighthouse without an ocean is a paradox but one that I might be able to offer an explanation for. One of my super-epic dreams involved starting off on the shore of the ocean but the waters had all receded! The whole rest of the dream involved a series of scenes that took place on the floor of the ocean as if it were dry land. Toward the end the waves were returning...to escape them I moved upwards...
So I suspect that your dream has a similar metaphor in mind...while the dream state lowered your psychic energy to as low as it could go, moving out of the dream meant a return of that energy. Waiting in a building which is a lighthouse is an indication that there is, in fact, an ocean nearby, maybe even all around, but that in the process of waking the waters may return. In so many ways dreams indicate that consciousness is up and often up a tall building, while losing consciousness involves descending. I have since come to believe that the ocean in dreams is the flood of sensory neural inputs into the brain/psyche and that dreaming often self-describes this "land beneath the waves". In this dream land our unified sense of conscious personality gives way to a fractured collection of voices who are more or less integrated or cooperative. Sometimes they are experienced as combative.
The one major motif left to consider is the corn field. I am going to say something that might seem reductionistic or simplistic or even surreal, but I will expand on it enough that it might be more appreciable...I believe that the corn field, like the forest in your other dream, is metaphoric of the structure of the cerebral cortex. The cerebral cortex is that part of the brain that is associated with our ability to have language and to think beyond the capability of other species. Structurally it is a very thin "layer cake" of neurons with massive connectivity down into the mid-brain and sensory nervous system as well as massive connectivity between cortical regions. This layer cake has a "columnar" organization on a few levels. There are tiny "mini-columns" all the way up to those cortical regions which often contain a map of the body or world implicit in their connectivity and behavior.
If you look at a neuron it will often look like a tree. It has a horizontal long structure with branch-like dendrites on one end and root-like axon extension on the other. Now the trick to this interpretation is that this is not something that dreamers typically know. Maybe somewhere once they learned about it but why would that be an applicable metaphor to think that a dreamer's dream is referring to that? It may be simply a coincidence of poetic proportions.
But let's look at another way to look at the forest/corn crop metaphorically. In our waking experience we know that such things involve, for the most part, the natural growth of a natural organism. These examples of the plant kingdom root themselves in the dark earth for stability and reach up to the sunlight for energy. This is largely analogous to our own bodily experience of the sun as heavenly energy provider and the earth as dark ground of stability. The metaphorical possibilities here are endless. Consciousness itself is also seen as up while unconsciousness is seen as down. The sun is the light of waking consciousness and the moon is the pale reflection of that waking light in terms of the mostly unconscious experience of dreams or even of our inner thoughts and experiences.
These plant growths are also susceptible to another process whereby the natural resource of the tree or the corn is converted into another form via energy and intent by the conscious will of conscious beings. Corn with its golden "fruit" at about head height seem to reflect this sense that the yellow sun is captured in the head as the gold of knowledge and illumination. Trees can be harvested for wood or burnt for heat and light. All these things are metaphoric of the experience of a conscious being harvesting the resources of nature and converting them into the conscious uses of humanity...and so to is the process of the development of consciousness itself.
Over the course of our life we take in energy into our crop of neurons, they grow fruit in the form of the mind, its learnings and ideas. We take these perceptions and concepts and construct languages, cultures, technologies, art, etc. Amidst all of this we grow ourselves, our personality, our identity. And all of this is by virtue of some difference, presumably in our cerebral cortex or our ability to form un-noisy syllabic sounds...and out of this fertile grove of columnar neurons has come the the whole of what Teihard de Chardin has called the noosphere out of the biosphere, the realm of consciousness in physical operation over and above that of the relatively unconscious biological realm.
So perhaps we might see the lighthouse as having been constructed out of the corn in the field; built, perhaps, on a small rise just high enough to remain un-submerged when the darkness falls and the light of consciousness returns and innundates the dark land with the oceanic flood of the external world into the neural sea.