What Images Live in You?
The Photograph
I came across this extraordinary photograph recently. It is an image that has stayed with me. Since seeing it, the woman in the photograph has even visited my dreams.
The photograph is remarkable in itself, but for me it became all the more so, because of one detail in particular - the mountain. I knew it immediately. Mordáin (pronounced MORE-dawn). This is the village I grew up in in Connemara a village that sits at the foot of that mountain. According to local lore, Mordáin was one of the Tuatha Dé Danann and was known as “the king of all the ghosts.” It is quite something to live with a mountain at your back. It enters you somehow. I know its outline without looking. I know it in different weather, in different light, in different seasons. It has its own moods.
I grew up with Mordáin there. Always there. When I went out to the turf shed at night, Mordáin was there - my witness, my company. A looming presence that filled me, strangely, with awe, fear and comfort, all at once. And somewhere along the way, the outer mountain became an inner one. Mordáin entered my dreams. I have written about it so often. It lives in me.
Their Names Have Disappeared From Living Memory
I don’t know who took the photograph. No one in my village now seems to know who these people were. Their names have disappeared from living memory. One of my older neighbours recounts remembering the old ruin of this house as a ‘shed’ in the 1960s, when he was young.
I look at the woman in the doorway and the man standing outside and wonder who they were, what occupied their days, what they feared, what they loved, what stories they carried. Were they related to me? They certainly knew my ancestors. But there is one thing I do know. They had the same mountain at their back.
There are no windows on their dwelling, which was common enough at the time, as windows meant extra rent for the landlord, a cost they could not afford. I see the stones they put in place to build their home. I see the smoke rising out of the thatch. They knew Mordáin in rain and darkness. Like me, they watched weather move across its face. They woke beneath it and went to sleep beneath it. At night they dreamed there.
I wonder what the name Mordáin meant to them? What stories did they hear about the mountain? What images lived in them?
The Inner Images
From a depth psychological perspective, Jung understood that the psyche speaks to us primarily in images - in dreams, fantasies, symbols and figures that often arrive before we can explain what they mean. He proposed that beneath the personal unconscious lies a collective unconscious: not a storehouse of inherited memories in any simple sense, but a deeper layer of psyche that gives rise to recurring archetypal patterns and images across generations and cultures.
What happens when these deeper patterns of psyche meet a particular landscape and an ancestral story? The mountain has been a central image in my own inner life. It has followed me from childhood into memory, writing and dreams.
In my Deepening the Senses work, we become curious about this inner landscape and the images that arise within us. We are so accustomed to attending to the world outside - to what we can see, name and explain - that we can easily overlook what is unfolding within.
The unconscious rarely arrives as an explanation. More often, it comes through an image: a dream, a memory, a recurring figure, a place we cannot forget. Sometimes an image carries a feeling or intensity we understand only much later. It is symbolic.
Depth psychology invites us not to rush to interpret these images, but to stay with them. To become curious.
We might ask:
Why this image? Why now?
What does it stir in me?
What gathers around it when I give it my attention?
What might this image be asking of me?
When we pay attention to our dreams and inner images, we begin to piece together a fuller story of who we are. If we follow these images with curiosity, they can become something like a rudder, quietly helping us navigate towards what feels most true. As I become more conscious of my inner life, I begin to see beyond some of the stories and beliefs that once shaped my understanding of myself, and I find myself returning to a deeper question: What does my inner self genuinely desire? What feels most true to me? Sometimes I wake from a dream carrying only a fragment from that dream- a feeling, an image, a few words - but over time these fragments begin to connect, revealing parts of myself that may have been forgotten or pushed aside.
Gradually, they help me move towards a life that feels more aligned with who I am becoming. And yet these images do not always feel entirely personal. At times, I sense something older moving through them: echoes of family, place and the generations who came before me. Their struggles, stories and loves are part of the ground from which my own life has grown.
And so I return to the photograph.
I look again at the woman. I see her emerge from her house, standing in the doorway, Mordáin rising behind her. I cannot know what lived in her imagination, or what the mountain meant to her. But I find myself wondering. Did she know stories of the Cailleach? Did she listen for the cry of the Bean Sídhe? Had she heard tales of the shapeshifting Púca on the hillside, or of the Aos Sí, the fairies, who inhabited the land alongside the human world? What was her own relationship with the unseen world? What images lived in her?
And what interests me now is that, in looking at her, I am also encountering the images that live in me. Long before I found this photograph, I had written about that mountain in a poem. Reading it again now, I recognise many of the images that have gathered around Mordáin in my own psyche: ghosts and ruins, family faces, fire, loneliness, women, the dead, the ancestors and the eternal - and beneath them all, the mountain itself. Here is the poem.
The Mountain
In my dreams
I still hear the wind
scorch the mountain side
peeling granite ridges bare.
Night soothes the bruises
seeps black-slickened oil
into crevices
distilling into air.
I listen to an ancient breathing
buried here beneath this creaking world.
I light a bonfire on the hill
kindling made from ragged scars.
Flames fever at first than burst
fall to embers.
Heather and thistle.
Loneliness like a death
bristles underfoot.
Ghost children
play among ruins.
Family faces familiar, yet strange.
Women barefoot
wash clothes in streams.
In my dreams
I still see the mountain.
Published in the Burning Bush Literary Journal 2016
me, with Mordáin behind me.
My Invitation
Deepening the Senses is a mythopoetic, immersive space for personal development rooted in Jungian psychology, Irish folklore and mythology, language, and the imaginal landscapes of the Gaelic Otherworld. Through ritual, story, image, and embodied practice, participants are invited into a deeper relationship with the inner world where the soul speaks through symbol and sensation. Nourished by Ireland’s living heritage of myth, folklore, music, language, and landscape, the work explores our connection to ancestors and the echoes of intergenerational trauma, opening pathways for healing, renewal, and transformation.
Featured Course - Meeting the Gaelic Otherworld
LIVE! 4 hour Online Workshop - October 25th 2026 to celebrate Samhain.
A Door into the Dark
Bean Sidhe, ‘Woman of the fairy mounds’
The Cailleach, Samhain and the Supernatural.
Photography by Ken Williams
We journey into Samhain and the dark half of the year, encountering the Bean Sídhe of the Gaelic Otherworld and the ancient Crone of winter, the Cailleach. Drawing upon Irish folklore, ancestral tradition, and Jungian depth psychology, we explore a time when the boundaries between worlds grew uncertain and the unseen drew near—entering the wintering dark and its mysteries of chaos, uncertainty, and transformation.
