Crying

The dream dictionaries reach for the obvious: you are sad, you are releasing emotion, something in you needs to grieve. The reading is not wrong so much as it is finished too quickly. It treats the tears as a symptom to be cleared rather than an event to be read. But crying in a dream is never one thing. There is the cry that shakes you awake and the tears you find already on your face; the weeping you cannot stop and the single tear that surprises you; the grief that has an object and the sorrow that arrives without one. The tradition does not gloss tears as “feeling.” It treats them as a substance with a direction — something leaving the body, something dissolving, something being washed — and the only useful questions are what kind of weeping this is, and what it is carrying out of you.

The oldest layer is startling in its literalness. R. B. Onians, tracing the Greek vocabulary of the soul, finds that for Homer tears were not a sign of life draining away but the very stuff of it. The husband who weeps for his lost return does so until “there flowed down the sweet aiōn as he lamented” — and aiōn, Onians argues, is no abstraction but “life itself or a vital substance,” the same liquid that is “wasted” when one weeps for a missing mate (Onians, The Origins of European Thought, 1988). To cry, in this archaic understanding, is to pour out a measure of your own life. The dream that floods you may be doing exactly that.

The Greeks built whole forms around this pouring-out. Margaret Alexiou distinguishes the ordered thrênos, the set dirge of professional mourners, from the góos, “the spontaneous weeping of the kinswomen” — the cry that is “spoken rather than sung” and that “tended to develop a narrative” out of grief (Alexiou, The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition, 1974). Weeping, in other words, was the beginning of speech, not its collapse. Gregory Nagy shows how deep this runs: the word for grief, penthos, names a hero’s very being. Meleager’s beloved Kleopatre is twinned with a “bird of much penthos” who “wept” for what was snatched from her, and it is precisely this grief, conjured into voice, that “impelled Meleager to enter the war” and so earned the kleos, the undying fame, of men who came before (Nagy, The Best of the Achaeans, 1979). The tears are not the end of the story. They are what sets it moving.

Depth psychology reads the same chemistry of sorrow. For James Hillman, tears belong to salt, the alchemical principle of felt, personal experience: “salt makes events sensed and felt, giving us each a sense of the personal — my tears, my sweat and blood, my taste and value.” Without it there is only “a running on and running through of events without psychic body.” So the deep hurts we return to are not merely wounds; they are “salt mines from which we gain a precious essence and without which the soul cannot live” (Hillman, A Blue Fire, 1989). The crying dream may be the soul, in his image, licking at its own wound “to derive sustenance therefrom.”

And salt has its alchemy of consequence. Edward Edinger places tears in the solutio, the dissolving water that both annihilates and renews; he records Jung’s reading of salt as the carrier of a “fateful alternative” — “Tears, sorrow, and disappointment are bitter, but wisdom is the comforter in all psychic suffering” — where the bitter and the wise are two states of one substance (Edinger, Anatomy of the Psyche, 1985). Jung himself, in the alchemical sea-water, sets weeping inside the aqua permanens, the water that “kills and vivifies,” whose office is “ablution, the cleansing of the sinner” before the new form can rise (Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis, 1955). Tears in this register are not collapse but a baptism the psyche performs on itself — dissolution that is also a washing.

The Christian East made of this a discipline. Irénée Hausherr’s study of penthos recovers a whole “doctrine of compunction,” the deliberate grief that does not erase the wound but leaves a scar that itself becomes knowledge: “He who repents ceases to sin, but he keeps the scars from his wounds” (Hausherr, Penthos, 1944). And the Philokalic fathers go further still, naming weeping a sacrament: John Climacus called tears “joy-creating sorrow” and dared to write that “the flood of tears which we shed after our Baptism… is yet more powerful than Baptism itself” — a second baptism, “the gift of tears,” without which “few indeed would be saved” (Coniaris, Philokalia, 1998). To weep, here, is not to fall apart. It is to be cleansed a second time, more deeply than water alone could manage.

Even the body keeps this counsel. Alan Fogel describes the physiology of “a good cry,” in which an initial spike of sympathetic arousal — the effort of holding back — gives way, as the cry unfolds, to the parasympathetic system that slows the breath and the heart. Emotionally induced tears, he notes, are chemically unlike the tears that merely wash the eye: they carry stress hormones out of the body and the natural opiate that soothes pain, so that good crying “releases and flushes toxic stress hormones from the body, calms and soothes, and creates fellow feelings” (Fogel, Body Sense, 2009). The flood is not a breakdown of regulation. It is regulation, arriving.

So the dream that has you weeping is not telling you, redundantly, that you are sad. It is asking what is dissolving, and whether you will let the water do its work. The image holds tears between two readings it refuses to separate — bitterness and wisdom, the wound and the scar, the life poured out and the life restored. Onians’s flowing aiōn, Hillman’s salt, the góos that becomes a story, Climacus’s second baptism: each says, in its own idiom, that the crying is not the wound but the cure beginning to move through it. The dream is not asking you to stop. It is asking whether you are finally willing to weep the thing all the way out.