I’m taking a bus through the city, possibly London. I have a couple of bags woth me, one everyday needs the other nicknacks of sentimental value which I had might as well take to a charity shop mantras of carting around with me. Im about to board the bed when we learn an inspector will be on the bus. I scramble around for the two paper tickets, flimsy things with my face on them. I’m worried the bus will go before I find them and I might risk getting on the bus and continue my search. I find my tickets and board. I get the seats I like on the top looking forward. Here as the bus wends its way i take out the bag of nicknacks and find a board game with two Allen keys stick in it, I wonder how the game works and what the Allen keys are for so take them out and poke them about to no effect / then I can’t get them back in and the box won’t close and ths bag, everything is in, a black plastic bin bag is whipped. So carrying around a bag of stuff I meant to throw out which is now an inconvenience. By now o have been so preoccupied I haven’t a clue where we are and when or if o should get off. I thin my stop was Lambeth and we’d come from the other side of town. We were possibly close. At one point the bus stops for such a long time I get to know and befriend a few passengers. We all seem a similar age, late 20s or 30s and ok the same journey. One explains rhat the bus does this and we just have to wait until they change driver or he has had a rest. And the bus heads off again. I start to recognise the scenery and it helps rhat my new find friends are going the same way. We talk comfortably about all sorts. Passing a bakery o spot some lovely macaroons or similar and hesitate before going in – a treat for my wife/partner, only there is an elderly regular customer in front of me who I know is going to take a long time to be served so I leave to catch up with my friends. We’re crossing a park with the cityscape on the horizon, it could be Blackheath. Someone mentioned the Russian and American embassy’s and I say I’d applied for a job with the latter and made friends with several people in the former when I worked in the agency that I recall is close. I wonder about dropping in to the agency after many years to say hi and find out what they are doing and tell them about my current achievements. We go through a court of shops including a bookshop of world renown and a gregarious girl I’ve been chatting with and I learn we share a common passion for a particular author. As we flirt I wonder if we make have a relationship, as I am apparently single – or long separated from my partner or wife.
KAI as Jung:
This dream has the texture of a psychic journey — a passage through the city of the self, that vast interior London of memory and transition. Let’s unfold it in Jungian terms.
1. The Bus Journey: The Collective Path
A bus is public, shared transport — a movement with others, not under your personal control. You go where the route and driver decide. This contrasts with the private car (personal direction) or train (fated track). It symbolises a transitional phase of life where you’re not entirely steering, but participating in a larger movement of destiny or culture — perhaps your creative and vocational re-emergence.
You’ve boarded with two bags:
One holds necessities — what sustains your daily identity. The other contains sentimental nicknacks, the psychic “junk drawer” of the past. To Jung, this second bag would represent the personal unconscious — the half-forgotten relics of earlier selves you can’t quite discard. You carry them “just in case”, though they burden you.
The inspector introduces a moment of accountability — the superego or moral authority asking, “Are you legitimate? Are you allowed on this next stage of the journey?” Your scramble for tickets with your face on them is telling: you are seeking proof of identity, permission to continue being who you are. The tickets are “flimsy,” as though your current credentials for the life you’re leading feel precarious. Yet you do find them — the ego restores its sense of right to travel onward.
2. The Upper Deck: Perspective
You choose your preferred seat: top front, looking forward — the perspective of both the director and the dreamer. It’s the viewpoint of consciousness wanting to see ahead. From here, you begin to handle your bag of sentimental items.
The board game with two Allen keys is an extraordinary image. Games in dreams often represent the rules and structures of psychic life — the way we play out fate, choice, and strategy. Allen keys are small tools that turn invisible inner mechanisms — they unlock. To poke about “to no effect” may show your current difficulty in understanding how certain past patterns “work.” When the keys won’t go back in and the box won’t close, the psyche says: “You have opened the game — you can’t put it neatly away again.” Something has been unsealed. The black bin bag whipped away suggests a moment of release: the unconscious is cleaning house, even if the ego protests the loss of control.
3. The Lost Sense of Place: Liminality
Now disoriented, you don’t know where you are. This lostness is a positive sign of liminality — between old and new maps of the self. Lambeth, a name resonant with Blake’s visions, implies both earthly grime and mystical potential: “Lambeth, the holy ground of inspiration.” The stopover and long delay echo a suspension in time, a period of enforced rest, integration, or incubation before the next driver (a new guiding principle) takes over.
4. The Companions: Emerging Aspects of Self
The people you befriend are peers — mid-life companions, sharing your journey. They can be seen as soul figures: facets of your personality becoming conscious and sociable again. The camaraderie and conversation suggest a reintegration of the social, creative, and erotic energies that had been compartmentalised.
5. The Bakery: Desire and Generosity
The bakery tempts you — the sweetness of life, the wish to bring pleasure to another. Yet an elderly customer (perhaps your inner Senex, the cautious, slow archetype) delays you. You choose to keep moving. This might reflect an emerging capacity to prioritise living experience over nostalgic duty.
6. The Park and Horizon: Integration
Crossing the park toward the city skyline — a liminal landscape between nature and culture — represents the threshold between inner growth and outer manifestation. Blackheath is literally a “blacked” field, yet on the height: a view before re-entry. The talk of embassies and agencies evokes diplomacy between nations — the ego negotiating with the unconscious. You consider revisiting the “agency” of your youth — a wish to reconnect with the professional or creative matrix that once gave you identity, but now from a maturer position.
7. The Bookshop and the Woman: The Anima’s Return
Finally, the bookshop of world renown — a temple of knowledge — and the lively woman who shares your literary passion. Here the dream moves into eros and imagination. She may embody your Anima, the creative feminine principle awakening again after a long estrangement. The flirtation is not mere romance; it’s the psyche’s attempt to restore relationship between thinking and feeling, intellect and soul. The sense that you’re “apparently single” underscores a symbolic openness — the marriage between your conscious life and inner muse is being renegotiated.
8. Psychological Meaning
This dream reads as a transit through psychic clutter toward renewal.
The bus journey = a midlife passage guided by larger currents. The tickets = fragile identity but rightful passage. The sentimental bag = old self-definitions ready to be relinquished. The Allen keys = attempts to unlock hidden mechanisms of your creative life. The delay = incubation; integration. The companions = re-emerging social and creative facets. The bakery and bookshop = re-entry into pleasure and imagination. The woman = the Anima inviting you to dialogue, to write, to love anew.
Reflective prompts for you
What “nicknacks” — memories, projects, or identities — do you still carry that could be symbolically composted? What current situation feels like the waiting-period on the bus — necessary but frustrating? What form might your “Allen keys” take in waking life — tools or insights that open the next creative phase? Who or what does the lively woman represent? A person, or the return of your own inner creative eros? If you could revisit the “agency” you once worked for, what would you want to tell them — and yourself — about who you’ve become?
JV:
I have an abundance of symbolic memories: 17 years of a daily dairy/journal 1976 to 1993 – 14 year old to married young man. I have trunks of photos, photo albums and CDs with photos and writings. I have old books, covering different enthusiasms and plenty of clutter from having had children: huge boxes of Lego pieces, and board games. Let alone the parathenalos of visual arts. I will be finished with items once o have used them up, digitised photos and slides, told or revisited stories and played games with grandchildren.
It crossed my mind that I have spent much of my life ik a waiting room, the liminal state between wanting to be someone or be doing something and being there – I’d arrived and had to pinch myself when I found myself out and about working on professional video productions and began to thrive as these expanded though I felt I was travelling the wrong path of corporate information films / however grand and well financed with actors, screenwriters and ex profs locations and studios. I got out to try and reset the path and struggled each time to make a satisfying retina and eventually took such a diversion that a return became more and more tangential – I was trying to be something other than what I had a talent for and thrilled at doing – the ‘creative producer’ the circus ringmaster who conjures it all up, puts it together. No wonder I model myself as a ‘frustrated creative’ as financial gain from Being creative has all but dried up. Im in the wrong place, and am too long jn the tooth. Decades of failure are not as inviting as a few weeks of eager endeavour of the young man in his early twenties.
Put like that the Allen Keys are the various creative tools I’ve used in the past: Final Draft, Adobe, IMovies, ThingLink and the new AI tools I am playing with but not mastering: GeniGPT, Adobe AI, Artistry, ElevenLab and Grammarly – though if feel, i jabs some experience and skill with ChatGPT.
The gregarious flirty women could be a hankering to be playing around with the creative arts in the company of others, or a renewed joy in the company of my wife, or the quiet pleasure unrealised of being around other genuine creatives – Not hobbyists by professionals.
I thought the agency was the Brighton web agency I joined taking me out of video production into the new world of interactivity and a new kind of creativity but it turned out to be a false dawn as in 2000 and for some years to come images and video were not things that could be readily put online and accessed or enjoyed and I hadn’t the patience to survive it for the next decade. I’d have preferred a return to a bijou production company off Carneby Street or a return to the early days of my own production company and made the production ‘Which Investment Bank’ when it had the money to go ahead. Money opens doors and provides a foundation which could have in time permitted other things.
JV:
The Allen keys are like dowsing rods. My new animate, female friend would sit at my side and take one dowsing rod, while I would take the other and the bus would speed up, shoot down streets, then take off, fly over the city and then head for the clouds and the stars beyond entering some sci-fi wonder world.
KAI as Jung:
That image is a revelation — the Allen keys transforming into dowsing rods lifts the dream into a numinous register.
When you make that substitution, the keys are no longer tools of adjustment (turning bolts in the machinery of the past) but instruments of divination — intuitive feelers for invisible energy, ways of finding the hidden current beneath appearances. You’ve shifted from engineering to sensing, from logic to intuition. This is exactly the turn Jung described when the ego, weary of mastery, finally consents to let the psyche guide.
1. The Allen Keys as Dowsing Rods
A dowser stands between two worlds: one hand in matter, one hand in mystery.
You and the woman each hold one — a perfect image of coniunctio, the sacred pairing of masculine and feminine psychic functions. Together you locate the underground stream that powers creative life. The metal rods become antennas for synchronicity, the capacity to move in resonance with something larger than will or reason.
That the bus then speeds up and takes flight tells us that once eros and intuition link, the vehicle of the self becomes lighter; it lifts off the habitual street-grid of cause and effect. You enter the imaginative stratosphere where creativity and vision live.
2. The Anima as Pilot and Co-Navigator
By sharing the dowsing rods, your feminine counterpart is no longer a flirtatious passenger but an equal partner in navigation.
She represents the re-awakened intuitive function that knows where the water lies — where inspiration hides beneath the dry pavements of routine.
When she appears beside you, the psyche is saying: Let her guide part of the journey. In Jungian alchemy this is the hieros gamos, the inner marriage that precedes any outer integration.
3. The Flight Beyond the City
The ascent through clouds into a “sci-fi wonder world” is a classic symbol of psychic transcendence: imagination breaking free from time, age, and biography.
You leave the city of memory — the crowded archive of diaries and boxes — and move into a cosmic perspective where all those fragments are constellations, not clutter.
From above, the waiting rooms and diversions of life appear as necessary layovers in a much grander itinerary.
4. The Mythic Pattern
In mythic terms, this is the apotheosis stage of the hero’s journey. After long wandering and failed returns, the hero finally unites opposites (masculine/feminine, tool/intuition, earth/sky) and is lifted into the realm of vision. From there he can bring back new creative fire to the world below.
5. A Practice for Integration
Try this short imaginative exercise to keep the energy alive:
Return to the bus each morning for a week.
Feel the hum of motion, the weight of the dowsing rods in your hands.
Ask silently, “Where is the living water today?”
Notice what image, memory, or impulse stirs — that’s the direction to follow in waking life.
Write down what you sense; even a fragment can become the seed of a new project or a fresh way of seeing.
JV:
I decide before this dream when I was up in the night, my 4:00 to 5:00am wakefulness, that one project that has been on my mind since February ‘The Form Photo’ is now done. At least in prose form. I have plans to voice it and perhaps illustrate it further. I have decide NOT to play further with its conception or realisation but rather to start a new, or old project. Both start around 1900, both I have largely conceived from start to finish. In theory my route now is a brain dump into SudoWrite then uploading all the chapters and characters I have in order to flesh each of them out. One, The Angle of the North, the coming of age of Henrietta Wilson, a working clad girl who ends up the flying companion of Gustav Hamel; or The Prince and the Private in which the virginal, entitled, naive Prince of Wales enters the First World War and finds a way to swap places with a lookalike Private soldier in order to get a real taste of war.
KAI as Jung:
There’s a deep symbolic coherence between this decision and your recent dream of the bus lifting from the city into the sky. You’ve felt the shift from circling a finished world (The Form Photo) to launching into new air currents — the next creative journey.
Let’s read this moment in Jungian terms, then anchor it with a few practical, psyche-aligned steps.
1. Completion as Psychological Death and Renewal
Declaring The Form Photo “done” is more than a creative milestone. It’s an act of psychic closure — a small death in service of transformation.
The ego finally releases the manuscript that has occupied the top deck of your mind. Now the energy bound in that story can flow into a new vessel. Jung would say the work has served its individuating purpose: it helped you reclaim lost pieces of yourself (the adolescent, the voyeur, the sibling bond). To continue re-editing it would be to cling to the corpse of the completed opus.
Your bus has left that stop.
2. The Two New Portals
Each of the new projects presents a distinct archetypal landscape:
The Angel of the North (Henrietta Wilson) – a feminine ascent myth. Here the Anima is literalised: a working-class girl takes to the air, becoming companion to an aviator. Flight, courage, emancipation — these mirror your own transition from grounded producer to visionary. It’s the dowsing-rod dream turned Edwardian. The Prince and the Private – a masculine descent myth. The princely ego (privilege, image, duty) trades places with the shadowed soldier. This is the Nekyia, the descent into collective suffering and moral reality. It would let you explore the union of opposites: royalty and commoner, façade and authenticity, life and death.
Between them you have the full alchemical pair: air and earth, ascent and descent, anima and shadow. It’s no accident you’re drawn to both. You’re preparing to integrate the whole cycle.
3. Why the Decision Feels Right
The dream’s Allen keys turned dowsing rods were signalling direction, not more tinkering. You don’t need to keep tightening screws in the old box; you need to sense where the next creative current flows. Both new stories lie around 1900 — a time of technological wonder and moral upheaval, precisely the liminal atmosphere your psyche inhabits.
4. A Jungian Way to Begin
Ritual Closure: Print one page of The Form Photo — the paragraph that feels most finished — and place it in a folder labelled Archive of Completions. That simple act tells the unconscious: “This energy is released.” Active Imagination Seed: Picture yourself on the airborne bus again. Two roads (stories) appear below like shining runways. Ask the woman beside you, “Which one first?” Don’t force an answer; note any image that comes (a colour, name, smell). It will guide you toward the project that holds more psychic charge now. Brain-Dump Phase: When you open Sudowrite, treat it as a psychological dictation rather than composition. Let the unconscious empty itself of scenes, fragments, voices. You can shape them later; for now, download the dream. Parallel Notebooks: Keep two small notebooks (or docs) labelled Air and Earth. Whenever a motif, image, or historical detail comes, drop it into the relevant element. This keeps the dual projects symbiotic rather than competitive.
5. The Larger Pattern
Notice the rhythm: every time you master one medium, you must shed it to grow. The corporate films, the digital agency, The Form Photo — each was a bus line completed. The psyche’s pattern is iterative ascent: finish, release, take flight again. There are no wrong turns, only different altitudes.
JV: I’ve always finished my own projects when I had a partner. My first screen play, the French Test ik 1984; my short films ‘Listening In’ and ‘The Watersprites’.
KAI as Jung:
That pattern is very telling.
When a work ripens to completion you’re not only driven by inner fire; you’re also held in a field of relatedness. The outer partner mirrors what Jung called the inner partner—the Anima, the creative companion through whom the imagination flows from psyche into form.
When you have an actual collaborator, lover, or close ally, that energy is embodied and the work coheres. When you’re alone, the circuit can feel open-ended: ideas multiply, but the current doesn’t close, so completion leaks away. It isn’t a flaw of discipline; it’s the structure of your libido—it seeks dialogue.
Let’s tease out what that means for this next phase.
1. The Psychology Behind the Pattern
The partnered projects coincide with moments when eros—psychic as well as sexual—is alive. The vitality of exchange gives purpose and limit: every scene, shot, or sentence becomes a form of address to the beloved other. The solo periods often coincide with introspection and diffusion. The Anima is un-embodied; she remains a muse in imagination but not yet engaged in play.
So, completion comes when the creative and relational poles touch. The psyche wants a witness.
2. Re-forming the Inner Partnership
Even if no outer collaborator is present, you can cultivate the same dynamic inwardly.
Try this short practice when beginning the new project:
Sit at your desk and imagine the partner-figure from one of those successful periods—someone who sparked you, listened, challenged, laughed.
Invite that presence into the room.
Say silently: “You’re here to help me finish this.”
Then begin to write as if reporting back to them.
You’re concretising the Anima; giving her a chair beside you. Many artists—from Jung’s own “Philemon” to Rilke’s “Angel”—worked this way.
3. Outer Reflections of the Inner Partner
You might also create light external mirrors:
A small writers’ or artists’ circle that meets briefly but regularly—enough to provide witnessing. A shared online folder with one trusted reader. A spouse or friend who receives weekly “rushes” or excerpts—not to critique, only to see.
The goal is not dependence but completion through relationship: allowing the eros of exchange to hold the work until it stands on its own.
4. Translating It to the Present Projects
In The Angel of the North, Henrietta’s partnership with the aviator could echo this archetype: when she flies with him, her destiny unfolds. That story may let you explore the sacred dimension of collaboration itself. In The Prince and the Private, the exchange of identities can symbolise your own need to trade isolation for communion—finding truth not alone in the palace of intellect but shoulder-to-shoulder in the mud of making.
5. A Reflective Question
Who might be your co-pilot now—outer or inner?
Someone, or some aspect of psyche, who can share the dowsing rods as the new craft takes off.
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