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Capfico | Writing from the Belly of the Whale | by Mala Kline |  Dec 2023

Capfico is a powerful word and image in Catalan:  it describes the action of plunging, diving, or ducking into the water.  But it can mean so much more – to enter anything headfirst; to bury a branch in the earth for it to take root; to think seriously about something.  It contains almost every aspect of the experience of imagery and dreamwork, calling us to take the plunge, descend, explore a new world, fresh every time we plunge.

Capfico is also the name of a series of books where I opened the first book as a dream – to open the dream literally in front of the reader’s eyes, to create the path for dream opening.  In this way, I explore a dream – my dream, then theirs – to show that DreamOpening can be used to open anything:  a name, a situation, an artwork, a symptom… anything can be read as a dream.

In the beginning is a word, capfico, a name and an image of the diving child. I do not know capfico, and neither does it know itself. Not yet. I let it rest in its foreignness, veiled in its potential. “Opening” is a way of holding the space for that which already is, but is not (yet) manifest for us until imagined.

“Opening” is a gentle act. Unlike dream analysis, it does not call the images symbols, and does not fix their meaning. It accepts the images of the dream and moves with them. It allows itself to be touched. “Opening” is all about looking at the words and images of a dream, but not with the eyes, at least not only. Here, looking is a form of touching, touching the images from inside, knowing them through feeling. I am not talking about physical touch. Here, imagination is touching through its capacity to feel forms. Dreaming is touching the image, the word, in-formed by its intention. Intention is in-formation. It gives the form the direction of its movement.

In the Kabbalist tradition it is said that all truth is contained in the first image one sees. Every dream, every fragment of a dream, every image received upon gazing within, has an intention, something like a force with a direction inherent to it. The inner focus of the dream is known as “the question,” or sometimes, “the one-pointed question.” It “announces” what is to come, what is to become manifest potentially. But the dream also shows if we have “gone astray” and what needs to be corrected so that what is not yet manifest can unfold fully. The task then is to open, to see and know the “truth” of the first image. [1]

Capfico, a first image: A girl child, a female in white covered with flowers of innocence, standing alone at the edge of the world, on a large rock, ready to plunge. Her hands clasped together in front of her head bowed down between her arms, her body stretched forward to pierce the surface, to make a hole in the glittering skin of the unknown so that the head enters and then the whole body follows, suddenly plunging into the deep. But here, it is still the “not yet.” Her posture precise in its readiness to jump, to take off, to let go, to plunge into another world, on the other side of the mirror, inside the belly of the whale, measuring the distance of less than a second it takes for the plunge to happen, for her to find herself in that other world of worlds lying below the glittering surface of her own reflections.

She is standing on a rock. Beneath her feet is a small, flat, white stone, holding her, supporting her, balancing her readiness for a take-off. She is not yet there. She is just before, standing on the edge of language, on a small rock, glorious body of imagination spreading beneath her feet. Just before, a thought passes through her trembling: how will the sea contain me, fear of the bottom, is there more to see than I see, and what about the monsters below? Wavering, she takes in the breath to take off. Everything is bathed in the warm light of an illuminated memory. I have been here before; I too have jumped. Many times.

Every time I enter the ocean. Every time I close my eyes. Every time I fall asleep. To see what is rising, what is coming to me from the other side, to be reflected in the mirror of dreaming. The word capfico and the image of a girl, standing at the edge of the world, ready to plunge into the ocean of the unknown: this both is a dream and opens a dream.

Dreaming is a way of descent. It is a plunge. You plunge into the vast ocean of dreaming without edges, without end. The moment you look within, the images surface. The images you see are the language of your body. It is your body talking to itself. The more you look into the mirror of your body mirroring the reverse side of who you think you are, what you think your body is, the further down you go.

Capfico. The word and the image are a fragment of a longer dream, the kind of dream, which upon waking, slips into forgetting and yet leaves us marked by its residue, asking us to look at it, asking us to know it – a dream “not yet remembered” carrying the blueprint of what is “still to come.”

Mala Kline | from Capfico | Writing from the belly of the whale

If you are interested in further exploring the art of DreamOpening, Mala will teach an Introductory to DreamOpening class on 7 January 2024. It will help lay the foundations for deeper study of this powerful practice.

Learn more here.

[1] DreamOpening® is a simple four-level way of reading a dream. Through the four levels – the story, the pattern, the question, and the secret (“the treasure”) – it unravels the meaning of a dream and its imagery. It shows the dreamer their true concern and opportunity and informs the dreamer on how to respond to the necessity the dream is showing (the secret or the treasure), to reveal to the dreamer how to return to re-alignment. In my writings I use DreamOpening® procedure to open a specific artwork, art practice, event, action, or object as a dream. DreamOpening® is one of the Saphire® Imagery techniques of with its origin in the ancient lineage of the Sephardic Kabbalah of Light, brought to our time through the profound work of Dr. Catherine Shainberg and her School of Images.