Taming the Inner Dragon
I once had a vivid dream in which I faced Smaug, the dragon from The Hobbit. I do not claim it was more than a dream. But it stayed with me, and parts of it were clear enough that I wrote them down.
What happened
I was walking down a dark corridor, then winding stairs, then into a huge cavern. Smaug lay asleep on his hoard. A figure warned me that if I felt fear, the dragon would wake and become destructive. A voice said: “You don’t kill the dragon. You tame it.”
One way to read it
In Jungian psychology the shadow is whatever we avoid, deny or fear in ourselves, and dragons are a common image for it. Read that way, the dream says the aim is not to destroy these parts of yourself. It is to approach them calmly enough that they stay asleep, and to see what they guard. In the dream, Smaug sat on a treasure. A familiar idea in this tradition is that what we fear in ourselves often sits next to what is most valuable in us.
What I take from it
The fear was the trigger, not the dragon. That is a useful idea whether or not you care about dreams. The things we are afraid of in ourselves tend to wake up when we panic, and tend to stay manageable when we meet them with a steady mind. I see the same thing on the mat: the round goes wrong when I get afraid, not when I am put in a bad position.
It is one reading of one dream, and I hold it loosely. If you keep a dream journal, try noting what you feel in the dream rather than only what happens in it.
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