Copyright © 2026 by Lois E. Wilkins, PhD, APRN
All rights reserved.
There are dreams that seem to belong to a particular night, arriving with enough intensity that we remember them for a few days or perhaps a few years before they gradually take their place among the thousands of images that have passed through a lifetime. There are other dreams that do not seem to end when we awaken because they continue living beside us, changing as we change and revealing something different each time life brings us back to them. I have carried such a dream for many years, although only now, in elderhood, am I beginning to recognize that perhaps I have not been carrying the dream at all. Perhaps the dream has been carrying me.
I find myself deep within a faceted sapphire crystal, not nearby looking toward it, but actually within the crystal itself, surrounded by its extraordinary blue light. Before me rises a spiraling staircase that seems to ascend toward infinity, and I begin climbing without knowing where the staircase begins or where it might end. As I ascend, questions arise within me, although I do not remember them as questions requiring answers so much as questions belonging to the movement itself, as though each turning of the staircase offers another elevation from which something might be seen differently. The staircase never asks me to hurry or invites me toward any particular destination, and I simply continue climbing until I arrive at a library.
Books fill the room, while carved jade figures rest among the shelves and seem almost to be engaged in conversations of their own. Beyond leaded-glass windows lies a garden, and within this luminous interior an elder sits quietly at a desk, neither instructing nor questioning me, but simply remaining there among the books, the figures, the light, and the garden. For many years I understood this dream primarily as an image of the inner life, a place within psyche where knowledge, image, memory, and mystery might coexist without requiring immediate explanation, although the longer I have lived with the dream, the less satisfied I have become with any understanding that attempts to hold it still.
I am no longer the woman who first dreamed it. I have continued climbing the staircase through years of clinical work and teaching, through books written and books read, through dreams and fairy tales, poems and patients, presentations and conversations, losses and beginnings, while the dream has quietly remained available for another encounter. Only now, from the elevation of elderhood, am I beginning to see that experiences I once regarded as separate may have been finding their way toward one another all along.
A lifetime of drinking deeply from the well produces in elderhood not simply knowledge, but a different relationship to what has been gathered, because experiences that once appeared separate begin revealing themselves as parts of a larger pattern. I recognize something of this in the later work of Jungian analyst and author Anne Baring, whose long engagement with psychology, myth, the feminine, the sacred, and consciousness gradually widened into a concern for the soul of the world. What interests me is not simply the breadth of what Baring has studied, but what becomes visible when a woman has remained in relationship with certain questions for a lifetime and discovers, from another elevation, that they were never as separate as they once appeared.
This is where Baring’s work touches my own experience of elderhood without explaining it for me, because I am becoming increasingly interested in what happens when accumulation begins becoming synthesis. What has been studied meets what has been dreamed, what has been taught meets what has been lived, and an image carried for decades suddenly finds itself beside a thought encountered only yesterday. The jade figures in the library may have been showing me this long before I possessed language for it, not knowledge arranged neatly upon shelves, but a conversation among things that I once believed belonged to different parts of my life.
I am beginning to recognize my webpage as part of this same movement. What I once understood primarily as a place where essays, poems, books, dreams, and reflections could be placed is becoming, in my imagination, a library in which the writings themselves are beginning to speak across the shelves. Sleeping Beauty’s sleeping kingdom converses with the loss and return of voice, while the Golden Bird enters the very contemporary problem of thinking instead of doing. Kevin the mouse carries old stories across thresholds, the barn remembers what human consciousness might otherwise leave behind, and Chiron’s wound appears again in another form, while somewhere behind all of them the sapphire staircase continues its quiet ascent.
I do not think this means that everything gathered during a lifetime eventually resolves itself into a single explanation, because the library in my dream offered nothing resembling that kind of certainty. The jade figures continued their conversations, the books remained upon their shelves, the garden existed beyond the glass, and the elder at the desk never rose to tell me what any of it meant. Increasingly, I find this absence of explanation important because elderhood may ask for something other than mastery, inviting instead a capacity to remain among the accumulated images of a life long enough to recognize relationships that were previously invisible.
There may also come a time when gathering is no longer enough and what has accumulated through decades of reading and writing, clinical work and teaching, dreaming and imagining, loving and losing begins asking to be given away. I find myself wondering whether this is one of the deeper purposes of the library now taking shape on my webpage, not as an archive intended to demonstrate what I have accomplished, but as a place where what has been gathered can remain alive by entering another person’s imagination.
The scholars who have accompanied me belong within that library as well, not simply as authorities whose ideas support my own, but as companions whose work sometimes gives language to something I have already begun sensing and at other times opens a door into a room I might not otherwise have entered. Baring is becoming one such companion in my thinking about elderhood, and I suspect other contemporary Jungian voices will find their way into these pages as the library continues revealing what belongs upon its shelves.
The image of the elder at the desk has also become more compelling to me with age. I once might have imagined that reaching the elder meant eventually knowing what I did not yet know, but the elder offered no final interpretation and seemed to possess no need to demonstrate wisdom. The elder simply remained within the library, surrounded by its books and conversations, and I am beginning to wonder whether elderhood may have less to do with possessing answers than with having remained with life long enough to recognize the conversation taking place among its many parts.
From where I stand now, the spiral staircase also looks different because each turning has offered another elevation from which to see what came before, while the library has quietly received whatever each passage of my life brought into it. The staircase may ascend toward infinity not because there is some final destination waiting at its summit, but because there will always be another turning from which an old image can be seen differently, another story that awakens something thought forgotten, and another conversation beginning among the books already resting upon the shelves.
When I return now to the sapphire crystal, the staircase is still there and the library remains filled with light, while the jade figures continue their patient conversations and the garden rests beyond the leaded-glass windows. The elder remains seated at the desk just as I remember, and nothing within the dream needs to have changed for me to recognize how profoundly my relationship to it has changed. I once thought I had carried this dream through much of my life, but in elderhood I am beginning to consider another possibility, that the dream has been carrying me toward the place from which I could finally recognize the library.
The library remains open, and I am finally beginning to understand why the elder has been waiting there all along.
Bibliography
Baring, A. (2013). The dream of the cosmos: A quest for the soul. Archive Publishing.
Baring, A. (2025). Divine wisdom and the Holy Spirit: The forgotten feminine face of God. Archive Publishing.