“Well, as he is an animal, I suppose he is some baser aspect of me. But as he is a lion, he can’t be wholly base. And he has a human face, my face, so he can’t be wholly animal. Though I must say the expression on the face was fierce and untrustworthy. And there I run out of ideas.”

“What side of your nature have we considered as not being so fully developed as it could be?”

“Oh, my feeling. Though I must say once more that I have plenty of feeling, even if I don’t understand and use it well.”

“So might not your undeveloped feeling turn up in a dream as a noble creature, but possibly dangerous and only human in part?”

“This is the fanciful side of this work that always rouses my resistance.”

“We have agreed, have we not, that everything that makes man a great, as opposed to a merely sentient creature, is fanciful when tested by what people call common sense? That common sense often means no more than yesterday’s opinions? That every great advance began in the realm of the fanciful? That fantasy is the mother not merely of art, but of science as well? I am sure that when the very first primitives began to think that they were individuals and not creatures of a herd and wholly bound by the ways of the herd, they seemed fanciful to their hairy, low-browed brothers—even though those hairy lowbrows had no concept of fantasy.”

“I know. You think the law has eaten me up. But I have lived by reason, and this is unreason.”

“I think nothing of the kind. I think you do not understand the law. So far as we can discover, anything like a man that has inhabited this earth lived by some kind of law, however crude. Primitives have law of extraordinary complexity. How did they get it? If they worked it out as a way of living tribally, it must once have been fantasy. If they simply knew what to do from the beginning, it must have been instinct, like the nest-building instinct of birds.”

“Very well; if I accept that the lion represents my somewhat undeveloped feeling, what about it?”

“Not a lion; a manticore. Do not forget that stinging tail. The undeveloped feelings are touchy—very defensive. The manticore can be extremely dangerous. Sometimes he is even described as hurling darts from his tail, as people once thought the porcupine did. Not a bad picture of you in court, would you say? Head of a man, brave and dangerous as a lion, capable of wounding with barbs? But not a whole man, or a whole lion, or a merely barbed opponent. A manticore. The Unconscious chooses its symbolism with breath-taking artistic virtuosity.”

“All right. Suppose I am the manticore. Why shouldn’t you be the sibyl?”

“Because we have come to a part of our work together where a woman, or a variety of women, are very likely to appear in your dreams in just some such special relationship to you as this. Did you notice the chain?”