Jung saw dreams as objective statements by the psyche about itself. There’s no question they express a different reality than the waking mind sees. Despite claims by certain materialists that they’re residual neuronal activities of a re-charging brain, those who sense meaning in them know they contain information about life they couldn’t otherwise know.
Reflection on a dream unearths a complex web of associations, and moods can change perceptibly even with no understanding. Their compensating role was an early discovery of Jung’s and presupposes an unconscious balancing function aimed at unity or wholeness.
Their apparent personal level is a paradox: beneath it, instinctual patterns of behavior shape the most intimate private needs around the pre-existing forms required for the regulation of development. Who chooses his own growth?
Though Jung outlined the general process, how the personal grows out of the impersonal and the role dreams play in mediating it to consciousness is a deeply subjective mystery. From day-dreams and nightmares to gods and devils, what may appear as fantasy is a ceaseless stream of symbolic creative activity aimed at consolidating the personality for the fulfillment of its destiny.
“Archetypal” describes our functioning as a species. Historical associations give context to personal conflicts, and primitive images sometimes depict graphic violence and/or sexuality mixed with profound spiritual and philosophical ideas with little or no personal experience behind them: the reason Jung stressed the value of religious symbols — only history provides their reference points.
Since they come from the “old brain”, they often appear disgusting or repulsive. Their organic aspects are a reality modern life will avoid when possible. There are men who can’t bear to see their own children born. When I was a child, men weren’t even allowed in the delivery room. Nature appeases no whim of man in the creation and maintenance of life — including weakness, disease, and death.
Consistent with our earthly natures, biological urges reflect the dark regions of prehistoric religious functions. We worry little about such living paradoxes in the frenzied pace of life today, though unconscious diversions contribute to our anxieties. By the middle years, we may feel such dreams as frightening, hostile, even as an “alien will”.
They may appear startling and bizarre. As a teen, I dreamed of a naked woman, arms open, raised as if to a deity, an erect penis protruding between her breasts. I thought I was crazy. Only much later did I read Erich Neumann’s assessment: the developing masculine principle was emerging from the unconscious matrix of the creative feminine.
Their depth is as philosophically sophisticated as it is primitive. Contemplation leads far beyond the brute world they often portray: analogies which embrace the whole of man’s development, and they change shape as quickly as thought pursues them. There’s no doubt they’re inherited ways of perception for anyone willing to inspect them.
Jung and Neumann, along with many others, have documented them — much to the chagrin of modern science: tangible proof that we’re conditioned by factors extending back to the animal world, inconceivable without an orientation to history.
Jung established a comparative model to interpret this history. All of science depends on its symbols but lacks the knowledge to understand them. I read of a team of anthropologists studying cave paintings in France. They wasted untold resources searching out aboriginal peoples who would tell them what the symbols meant. This is backwards, for the knowledge was never conscious. As my last post implies: what do such assumptions say about the scientific intellect?
Who’s ever had an archetypal dream will sense its profundity — if he/she doesn’t dismiss it as too foreign and incomprehensible for reflection. Emotion dictates, however, that it can never be completely repressed. Of course, it is foreign; its perspective is far from the contemporary one. The more convinced one is of an artificial truth, the more frightening nature’s images appear. Archetypal dreams have very different notions of life than our conscious appraisals.
While going through the youthful process of separating from home, I had a dream in which a voice stated: “I am my father, my father is me.” I was having conflicts with my father, and it helped me to understand the projections we were trading — but I had no knowledge at the time that it echoed almost verbatim a religious idea straight out of Egyptian mythology.
Such dreams are of a still-living psychic history — regardless of what we think or believe. The emotions they evoke feel divine, leading some to believe that God speaks directly through them. They’re almost always misinterpreted by those anchored in certainty, ego-security, and fear of the unknown. They derive from an unconscious authority outside any culture or belief and tend to isolate and confuse those who experience them — however…
If you trust collective assumptions to make moral decisions for you; if you trust the direction culture is taking to forge a sane future for your children, then beware these unsettling voices in the stillness of your soul — they mean inner conflict. If exposed to enough of them that you question the culture you live in — you may be deranged.