“I am on trial. The courtroom is my church. My father is the judge in the pulpit. I am resigned. The verdict is inevitable. I know I will be found guilty for being who I am. I stand dignified before my father-judge, but I am terrified because I can hear the barking of starving dogs in the graveyard and I know the punishment for my crime is to be thrown to the dogs.
We can see in the dream how the father, albeit quite unconsciously, betrayed his child’s essence. Trusting him to understand her empathy with the abandoned child in the story, she was totally cut off when he laughed at her tears. Her feelings were repressed in her body, which became the tyrant dogs that threatened to eat her as ravenously as she ate food to try to avoid their rage.
Significantly, the father appears in the dream as a patriarchal principle — judge, bishop, father-god — without personal love for Julia. The outer man has become the inner magician. In reality, the power she once projected onto her father she now projects onto her lover; the lack of grounding in life (abandoned by the mother) now makes her cling to her lover as mother; her terror of loss activates her eating compulsion (sweetness, nourishment from mother). The dogs in the graveyard were hungry for all she had denied herself…”
— Marion Woodman, The Ravaged Bridegroom – Masculinity in Women