Bob Part 2: What the F*ck Is Going On Here? Dreams, Letting Go, and Finding Peace

A father-daughter conversation about The Wizard of Oz, surrendering to the journey, and trusting what comes

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Sometimes the most profound teachers are the ones sitting across from us at breakfast. My father, Bob Gates, is a retired English professor who taught at Syracuse University for 40 years. He’s also a former photographer and someone who has spent decades doing the deep inner work that most people avoid their entire lives. 

He's 84 years old and still learning, still growing, still curious about what comes next. When people from season one of this podcast asked me to bring him back, I understood why. There's something hopeful about experiencing someone in their eighties as they continue to evolve, continue to question, continue to shed old identities and trust what emerges.

Our relationship isn't what people might imagine. We don't sit on the couch having philosophical conversations about spirituality every morning. We go to the Y three times a week. We go to the farmer's market together. We have occasional family dinners where we talk about health and finances and logistics. But every so often, we have conversations like this one - about The Wizard of Oz, about dreams, about letting go of what no longer serves us, about being on a journey that never really ends.

The Most Watched Film of All Time

I wanted to talk to Bob about The Wizard of Oz. It might sound like a strange topic for a podcast about surrendering to the signs, but my father taught the timeless story in one of his courses, and it seemed a perfect topic. From the minute I mentioned the idea for the pod, there were synchronicities everywhere. I was listening to a call with the former actor John Newton who does ancestral clearing work, and in it he mentioned the symbolism and archetypes of The Wizard of Oz. I was on another call about quantum physics - the person talked about Jung and archetypes and The Wizard of Oz. 

In preparation, my dad turned to Google, “I asked, what's the most watched film of all time?" The answer was Star Wars, because of tickets sold and box office gross. “And I said, no, no, no. I mean total viewership, including television.".

The Wizard of Oz was shown  every year on TV in the USA from 1959 to1991. That's not just a fun thing to do or watch, that’s a tradition. 

"So the question is, why is that the most watched film of all time?" my father asked. "Anything that grips an entire population such that it has to be repeated and viewed every year has to have a deeper, significant meaning to it."

The Development of Feminine Consciousness

Dorothy is the protagonist. The main character. To have the most watched film ever have a woman, a girl, a young woman at the center of it - that's significant.

"It's the development of the feminine consciousness," my father explained. "Dorothy doesn't seem to have parents. There's Auntie Em, her aunt and uncle. She has ‘biological parents’, but she needs a psychological parent. She needs archetypal parents."

She's threatened by the tornado, torn into another world. She wakes up in this other world. And the business about her individuation, her growth of consciousness, involves four companions.

Jung's typology says there are four functions we have: thinking, feeling, sensation and intuition. Part of the development of consciousness is we come to be able to embody and use all of these functions.

The thinking function is the scarecrow - I don't have a brain. The feeling function is the tin woodman who doesn't have a heart. The sensation part is the cowardly lion - sensation has to do with bodily function and animal instincts.

Then we're left with Toto.

"What does Toto do that really makes him special?" my father asked.

At the end, when they're in the presence of the Great Wizard of Oz with the huge screen and the voice saying "I am the great and terrible Oz," Toto goes over and smells a rat. He sniffs out the truth. He pulls aside the curtain, and there's this little old man with his device.

"So Toto is that which reveals something through an intuitive function," my father explained. "The film is the development of these four functions in the feminine consciousness. And the four functions are masculine - they're all male characters. So she's incorporating the typically masculine features that a woman needs to have as part of her consciousness."

Good Witches and Bad Witches

Then we have the shadow part - the good witch and the bad witch.

"Dorothy's a good girl," my father said. "She's cute, she's pretty, she's got her little basket. And somehow she ends up killing not one witch, but two witches. So she needs that aggression."

It doesn't seem conscious in her, especially in the beginning, because it's the house that does it. The house lands on the first of the evil witches. Then in the final moments of the film, Dorothy takes a bucket of water to douse the fire, and it goes onto the witch and the witch dissolves.

"The shadow part gets enacted in a violent act and then gets resolved by the unconscious, which is the water," my father explained.

And the wizard? "The wizard is the patriarchy. I am the great and powerful Oz, bow before me. She has to see through that using her intuition and realize the patriarchy is just this little old man."

The resolution is what Jung calls inflation - being blown up in your own sense of importance. The symbol of inflation is that the wizard gets in the balloon and it takes him away. She doesn't need him anymore. She's got her own grounding.

"She already has everything she needs," my father said. "Seeking it somewhere else and trying to find a wizard that's gonna solve all her problems is not the way. It's to realize who she is and who she always has been."

It Always Begins in Suffering

Dorothy wouldn't have come to that realization had she not gone on the journey. And the journey kind of happened to her - though she did run away from home, so there was dissatisfaction.

"It always begins in suffering," my father said. "Jung says, ‘there is no birth of consciousness without pain.’ So she's suffering and she runs away from home."

When she meets the fortune teller who looks into the crystal ball, she realizes her aunt is missing her and she heads back. Then we have the tornado.

"Women are often taxed with being hysterical, out of control, losing it, enraged," my father explained. "So the tornado represents the emotion, out of control and powerful. And that's also the portal. It's dangerous, it's powerful. If it takes you over and you act it out, it can be destructive to other people. If you follow it, if you allow it to take you somewhere else into yourself, into the inner world of your spirit, your character, your archetypes, your images, then it can be transformative."

Surrendering vs Overcoming

I brought up Joseph Campbell and the hero's journey - heading out on a path, encountering obstacles, and those obstacles becoming opportunities for learning and growth and greater consciousness.

My father paused. "I'm a little uncomfortable with the word overcome. We assimilate. We see in those obstacles something we've been missing. We have to find it in ourselves. The whole idea of overcoming and fighting - there's a place for that, no question. But finally, it's a surrendering to those things and accepting of those things. Taking them with us."

That's what Dorothy does with the characters. She takes them under her wing because she recognizes unconsciously that they are a part of her. She has to find them within, bring them within.

"That's what these journeys are finally about," my father said.

What Surrender Really Means

The word "surrender" can be triggering for people. For me, it's not about giving up or letting go or acquiescing. It's really about allowing.

"You surrender to something within yourself that you didn't yet realize was true," my father said. "You don't surrender to the outer world. In fact, many times you have to fight the outer world. You do have to resist, you have to fight back. But when what is bothering you, attacking you, preventing you from going forward, causing you difficulty - in Buddhist terms, causing you suffering - that's when you have to find what it is you need to surrender to."

And what is it that you need to surrender to? "Always something you haven't yet recognized as part of yourself that needs to be assimilated, accepted, understood, and brought home with you."

The signs are pointing. "With all due respect, you don't surrender to the signs," my father said. "You surrender to what the signs are pointing you toward."

Dreams Are Always Giving Us Something We're Missing

My father has been documenting his dreams for 45 years.

"Deborah (his wife) used to make fun of me because when we first knew each other, she would talk about dreams and I'd say I never remember my dreams," he told me. "And then through a period of suffering and opening up to the unconscious, the dreams began being very, very powerful and very productive."

For at least the past five or six years, there have been maybe a few times - once a month, maybe once every two months - when he doesn't have a dream. Most nights he has between two and three, sometimes more dreams.

"I don't write them down, I dictate them," he explained. "I get up in the night, I pull up my phone, I dictate them and it ends up being a text. And then in the morning I bring the text and clean it up a little bit."

For the past year, he's been sharing his dreams with ChatGPT. "You can upload a hundred dreams and say, you know, ChatGPT, you're really good at organizing things and classifying things and finding similarities and patterns. How about you help me with my dreams? And it's really cool. Very helpful."

But my father doesn't interpret his dreams. "People often talk about interpreting dreams. I've never interpreted a dream. Jung's idea is to find an association. An association is always something you don't know."

Dreams are compensatory, challenging. "The dream ego represents your consciousness. If you think you want something in the dream, it's the same as what you want in real life. If you're afraid of something in the dream, it's the same as what you're afraid of in real life. The dream is challenging that. The dream is bringing the unconscious side closer to consciousness."

Dreams are rarely very informative individually, but if you pay attention to them over a period of time, the symbols evolve, change, shift, and cluster.

Propping Up the Corpse

My father was a professional photographer for many years. He gained a lot of satisfaction both in doing the photography and in having his photographs published and shown in galleries.

"The idea of being a photographer became a really important part of my personality," he said. "Jung would call this one of our personas."

But at a certain point, he started having dreams in which there was something wrong with his camera or he couldn't find his camera or there was dirt on the lens or he couldn't get the exposure right.

"This was over a period of months, maybe a year," he explained. "And what the unconscious was telling me is, sorry, that's over. That's done. You can't, you know. Sorry. I know that was fun being a great photographer, getting all this acclaim and success, but time to put it down. Time to let that camera be broken. Time to let that camera be lost."

Why would something he loved doing go away or be less of a priority?

"Everything that has been productive and satisfying and enlightening and healthy in my life didn't come to me as a willed decision to do something, but as an impulse or an inspiration or a creative idea," my father said.

He talked about the drawings that appeared, the poetry, the photography. "But what happened with each of these things is that they initially had a powerful creative purpose. Then I attached my self-worth and my identity to the reception of these activities, and then the impulse dried up. The creative urge to actually do these things started to go away."

He couldn't draw anymore. He couldn't write a poem anymore. He lost interest in photography.

"All of those things were taken away from me for my own benefit," he said. "I was using them for something other than what they were intended to be. They were intended to feed my soul, to teach me something, to develop some ability or skill. And when I used them for pride and applause and people thinking I was a great photographer, then they were not being used very skillfully or effectively, and they had to be torn away from me."

This is what he calls "propping up the corpse" - an old folk tale where the king dies and the attendants keep the corpse in the chair so they can keep the kingdom going.

"In each of these cases, I had to go through a period of suffering, of loss. Oh my God, I'm not that anymore. I'm nothing. I've lost my purpose in life. Until the suffering is enough that another impulse, another dream, another activity comes up and provides the next step in that journey."

What the F*ck Is Going On Here?

At 84, my father doesn't do what people would traditionally call meditation practice anymore.

"I wrote this funny little piece about a brief message from the Buddha," he told me. "I wrote from his point of view, “All I did was, I was suffering. I was really unhappy and I didn't know what to do about it. And I thought, what the heck, I'm just gonna sit under this tree until something happens. Like a stubborn kid. And I just sat under this tree and I sat there and sat there and things got worse and worse, and then suddenly I was okay."

My father realized that the particular practice of meditation he had done for many years - staying with your breath, and if ideas come up, shaking them off and coming back to the breath - didn't make sense anymore.

"It's called Insight Meditation. Why am I supposed to ignore the insights?" he said. "So I started writing those down and those became the sayings of Trebor Setag."

Now he trusts that if there are enough moments of peace, of tranquility, of just letting his mind wander and be open to what comes, things will happen.

"It happens very nicely in the morning," he said. "I'll wake up and I'll just say, okay, let's just lie here for a while. Let's just allow whatever will come to come. Usually there's a kind of gentle melting feeling in my body. A kind of releasing, more peaceful, often accompanied by a thought or an idea, but not always."

And his question for self-inquiry? "What the f*ck is going on here? That's all you need to ever do. Each person has their own question, but I finally found mine. It's more a kind of open-ended self-inquiry than a particular form of meditation."

You'll Never Live Up to My Expectations

My father told me once years ago when he was in therapy, something that stuck with me: "Laura, you'll never live up to the expectations I had of you as a 5-year-old."

Listening to him talk about meditation, I laughed about this. I kept thinking my dad is such a great meditator, he's so devoted, he sits on that cushion, he's so committed. And now he's like, I just kind of lay there and relax and see what comes.

"That's what I do every morning," I told him. "I just lay there and see what comes, and I think I should go sit on a cushion. I made this really cool meditation closet, but I never go sit in my little meditation closet."

Listening to my father, I realized this guy who I grew up with who had all these expectations of me - that now I have all these expectations of myself - is now this new man where everything's less suffering and less stressful.

My father stopped me. "I will remind you that after I said you'll never live up to the expectations that the person I was had of you, you have much more than lived up to the expectations that the person I am now has of you. So let that part sink in a little."

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My Thoughts

My father is teaching me that the journey never ends. At 84, he's still shedding identities, still curious about what comes next, still lying in bed in the morning asking "what the f*ck is going on here?" with genuine openness to whatever answers.

There's something about watching my father let go of being a photographer, a professor, a meditator in the traditional sense, and become more essentially himself that gives me permission to do the same. I don't have to prop up the corpse. I don't have to keep being the thing I was when it served a purpose.

The Wizard of Oz teaches us that we already have everything we need - the brain, the heart, the courage, the intuition to see through false power. But Dorothy had to go on the journey to realize it. She had to walk the yellow brick road, face the wicked witch, to see through the wizard.

My father is reminding me that we don't overcome these obstacles, we surrender to them. 

We assimilate them. We bring them home with us. And the signs aren't the destination - they're pointing us toward something we haven't yet recognized as part of ourselves that needs to be brought into the light.

At the Y this week, I pulled into the parking lot and Steve Winwood's "Higher Love" was playing - the song my sister Janice and I heard at one of the only concerts we ever went to together. I sat and listened. Then I went inside and my phone showed me a song called "Sister." Then "Miss You." What is going on here? I don't need my rational brain to make sense of it. I just need my heart to take it in. To feel loved. To know that loss is not truly loss. That there's a veil between here and there, and sometimes love pierces through.

My father is 84 and he's teaching me that there's always something interesting, always something intriguing, always another rope to grab hold of if we're willing to let go of the last one and trust the gap.

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Listen to the full episode on Surrendering to the Signs to hear more about collective consciousness, recurring dream symbols, and the Buddhist monks walking for peace from Texas to Washington DC.

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Bob grew up in New Jersey and attended graduate school in Iowa, where he obtained a PhD in English and studied photography at the University of Iowa School of Art. He taught English at Syracuse University for forty-two years and had a second career as a Fine Arts and drone photographer.

Bob is a student of various psychological and spiritual traditions, including Jungian and Lacanian Psychology and the Buddhist and Advaita Vedanta spiritual traditions. He has published fiction, poetry, and a collection of “sayings,” and his photographs have been exhibited and published widely.

You can connect with Bob on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BobGatesPhoto

Buy his books on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Bob-Gates/author/B07R28YH5F

And find out more about Bob on his website: https://www.bobgatesphoto.com/