About 5 years ago I had a dream. I’ve been thinking about it again recently as I consider the relationship of my spirituality and my activism to contemporary Paganism.
I was in a plane with my wife and some other people. We were under a spell which compelled us to jump out of the airplane without parachutes. As I fell, I intentionally fell backwards, fearing to look down. My wife, in contrast, chose to plummet head first, and so she passed me on her way down.
Somehow, I survived. At first I thought I was the sole survivor. I was so upset at the loss of my wife, I did not want to live any more.
I found my way to a shopping mall. A long-time friend of mine was there. My friend had no other friends and he was lonely. But his wife was with him. It turned out that he had made a wish and that wish had somehow compelled everyone to jump out of the plane. He was trying to start an organization, a Pagan organization. He was calling it the “Dragon Network”.
Then people from the plane started showing up and gathering with my friend. I left my friend quite abruptly to go find my wife. I looked and looked for my wife. I yelled her name, but I could not find her. Then suddenly she appeared, the last of all the people who had jumped out of the plane. I asked her where she had been, and she told me it didn’t matter so long as we were together now. I was so relieved, I woke up almost in tears.
From a Jungian perspective, in order to understand a dream, it’s important to remember that when other people appear in your dream, they are not other people, but parts of yourself. So my wife was not my wife, but a part of me. The same with the friend.
So, here’s my self-analysis:
The airplane was the transcendental/metaphysical approach to religion I had as young man. Falling from the airplane was a psychological descent to earth, to physicality and roundedness, which I experienced through my transition to Paganism. I was falling backwards, because my descent was involuntarily.
The shopping mall is a place I associate with desacralized, profane space. Curiously, it was there that I discovered the Pagan group. The name “Dragon Network” resembles the Dragon Environmental Network which I learned about through Adrian Harris, someone whose work on embodied spirituality I admire.
The friend in my dream was an aspect of myself which I associate with that friend, a kind of a sterile rationality. He had no other friends and was trying to create a community. The people who had fallen from the airplane and were gathering in the mall represented the Pagan community that I discovered. The friend was, of course, myself, or part of myself.
Interestingly I had to leave my friend (or that image of myself) and the emerging Pagan community to find my wife. My wife represented my soul/anima. Her more intentional descent from the plane suggests that she was a more intentionally embodied figure. My search for my wife was my search for my own soul. Our reunion represented the promise that I will find my soul.
But, and here’s the thing that bothered me when I had this dream: it seemed to suggest that I would have to leave behind the Pagan community that I had found in order to be reunited with my soul. This was my interpretation of the dream five years ago, and I even wrote about it on my blog. But I was uncomfortable with it, because I was really feeling settled with my Paganism at the time.
I don’t fully understand the dream yet, but it tugged at my mind at the time and I find myself thinking about it again now as I have become more and more disillusioned with the Pagan community.
The Allergic Pagan 
Maybe it’s time for a hiatus.
Take a break. A solution to your struggle will present itself if you give yourself time and space away for awhile.
You can’t make others the way you want them to be. Take care of yourself for a time.
Here’s a thought: why bother with the “Pagan” label if it no longer fits? The earth, the waters, the sky, they don’t care if you call yourself Pagan or not. They are, and will always be, sacred regardless of the language we use to describe them or ourselves. Some of the most connected-to-nature people I know would never call themselves Pagan; they just love nature and live their lives accordingly.
The word “Pagan” is just a word, and the “Pagan community” is just a bunch of people – some good, some bad, most just human. Find your own words, craft your own community. And, to echo the above comment from Doc Murphy, look after yourself.
It occurred to me that finding your wife was an indication of finding the feminine face of God, the Divine feminine which is in all of us (if we would recognize) and especially in all of the natural world.