Showing posts with label Dream. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Dream. Show all posts

Saturday, May 5, 2018

Carl Jung on “Dreams” – Anthology





He who sleeps in the grave of the millennia dreams a wonderful dream. He dreams a primordially ancient dream. He dreams of the rising sun. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 272

I must learn that the dregs of my thought, my dreams, are the speech of my soul. I must carry them in my heart, and go back and forth over them in my mind, like the words of the person dearest to me. Dreams are the guiding words of the soul. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 232.

When I comprehended my darkness, a truly magnificent night came over me and my dream plunged me into the depths of the millennia, and rom my phoenix ascended. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 274.

We also live in our dreams, we do not live only by day. Sometimes we accomplish our greatest deeds in dreams. ~Carl Jung; The Red Book. Page 242.

And you, my soul, I found again, first in images within men and then you yourself I found you where I least expected you. You climbed out of a dark shaft. You announced yourself to me in advance in dreams. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 233.

I am ignorant of your mystery. Forgive me if I speak as in a dream, like a drunkard—are you God?” ~Carl Jung to his Soul, The Red Book, Page 233.

You announced yourself to me in advance in dreams. They burned in my heart and drove me to all the boldest acts of daring, and forced me to rise above myself. You let me see truths of which I had no previous inkling. You let me undertake journeys, whose endless length would have scared me, if the knowledge of them had not been secure in you. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 233.

Who are you, child? My dreams have represented you as a child and as a maiden. I am ignorant of your mystery. Forgive me if I speak as in a dream, like a drunkard-are you God? Is God a child, a maiden? Forgive me if I babble. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 233.

Dreams are the guiding words of the soul. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 233.

The spirit of the depths even taught me to consider my action and my decision as dependent on dreams. Dreams pave the way for life, and they determine you without you understanding their language. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 233.

Scholarliness belongs to the spirit of this time, but this spirit in no way grasps the dream, since the soul is everywhere that scholarly knowledge is not. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 233.

The dream is not only the fulfillment of infantile desires, but also symbolizes the future ... The dream provides the answer through the symbol, which one must understand. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 233, Footnote 53.

The dream is never a mere repetition of previous experiences, with only one specific exception: shock or shell shock dreams, which sometimes are completely identical repetitions of reality. That, in fact, is a proof of the traumatic effect. ~Carl Jung, Children’s Dream Seminar, Page 21.

The dream represents that tendency of the unconscious that aims at a change of the conscious attitude. ~Carl Jung, Children’s Dreams Seminar, Page 5.

We are so captivated by and entangled in our subjective consciousness that we have forgotten the age-old fact that God speaks chiefly through dreams and visions. ~Carl Jung, The Symbolic Life, Page 262.

Dreams are very often anticipations of future alterations of consciousness… ~Carl Jung, Symbols of Transformation, Page 51.

All consciousness separates; but in dreams we put on the likeness of that more universal, truer, more eternal man dwelling in the darkness of primordial night. ~Carl Jung, Civilization in Transition, Page 304.

The conscious mind allows itself to be trained like a parrot, but the unconscious does not—which is why St. Augustine thanked God for not making him responsible for his dreams. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 46.

It should therefore be an absolute rule to assume that every dream, and every part of a dream, is unknown at the outset, and to attempt an interpretation only after carefully taking up the context. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 44.

…You can dream other people's dreams, can get them through the walls. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1259.

The self is a fact of nature and always appears as such in immediate experiences, in dreams and visions, and so on; it is the spirit in the stone, the great secret which has to be worked out, to be extracted from nature, because it is buried in nature herself. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 977.

The dream was of the general form of three elements being differentiated and a fourth less well developed; he elaborated at great length the problem of adding the fourth element to the existing trinity of faculties and the implications of this development. . ~Robert Johnson, C. G. Jung, Emma Jung and Toni Wolff - A Collection of Remembrances; Pages 36-39

He indicated that though it was true that I was a young man, my dream was of the second half of life and was to be lived no matter what age I was. ~Robert Johnson, C. G. Jung, Emma Jung and Toni Wolff - A Collection of Remembrances; Pages 36-39.

I realize that under the circumstances you have described you feel the need to see clearly. But your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Without, everything seems discordant; only within does it coalesce into unity. Who looks outside dreams; who looks inside awakes. ~Carl Jung, Letters Volume I, Page 33.

. . . I simply want to point out that the capacity of the human psyche to produce such new material is particularly significant when one is dealing with the dream symbolism . . . ~Carl Jung; Man and His symbols; Page 26.

. . . dreams are difficult to understand . . . a dream is quite unlike a story told by the conscious mind. ~Carl Jung; Man and His Symbols; Page 27.

Fortunately, we have not lost these basic instinctive strata; they remain part of the unconscious, even though they may express themselves only in the form of dream images. ~Carl Jung; Man and His symbols; Page 36.

The problem of my destiny goes back a hundred and fifty years. Indeed it appeared as early as the twelfth century, as I have now discovered. Formerly I believed it only went back to Goethe's Faust. (Jung now told the dream of his ancestors in which the last was only able to move his little finger.) The problem that appeared as a question in the twelfth century became my extremely personal destiny. Already Goethe had found an answer a hundred and fifty years ago. My father was so tormented by it that he died at the age of fifty-four. ~ Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 67.

The repressed libido for animal relationship is living in the unconscious. It appears in dreams either as animals; or we appear as having animal reactions, for example, the panic fear of animals; or we have inhibited movements due to being in water, a racial memory; also many flying dreams are really swimming. ~Carl Jung; Cornwall Seminar; Page 23.

There is no difference in intelligence level between those who tend to have dreams and those who have visions. ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Psychotherapy, Page 19.

I do not know for what reason the universe has come into being, and shall never know. Therefore I must drop this question as a scientific or intellectual problem. But if an idea about it is offered to me - in dreams or in mythic traditions - I ought to take note of it. I even ought to build up a conception on the basis of such hints, even though it will forever remain a hypothesis that I know cannot be proved. ~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections; Pages 301-302.

In the dream, … there are numberless inter-connections to which one can find parallels only in mythological associations of ideas (or perhaps in certain poetic creations which are often characterized by a borrowing, not always conscious, from myths. ~Carl Jung; CW 9I; para. 259.

First, fantasies (including dreams) of a personal character, which go back unquestionably to personal experiences, things forgotten or repressed, and can thus be completely explained by individual anamnesis. Second, fantasies (including dreams) of an impersonal character, which cannot be reduced to experiences in the individual’s past, and thus cannot be explained as something individually acquired. ~Carl Jung; CW 9i

[Visions] are like dreams, only they occur in the waking state." ~Carl Jung; “The Psychological Foundations of Belief in Sprits", 1920

he primitives I observed in East Africa took it for granted that "big" dreams are dreamed only by "big" men - medicine-men, magicians, chiefs, etc. This may be true on a primitive level. But with us these dreams are dreamed also by simple people, more particularly when they have got themselves, mentally or spiritually, in a fix. ~Carl Jung; "The Meaning of Psychology for Modern Man"; CW 10: Civilization in Transition. Page 324.

An exclusively sexual interpretation of dreams and fantasies is a shocking violation of the patient's psychological material: infantile-sexual fantasy is by no means the whole story, since the material also contains a creative element, the purpose of which is to shape a way out of the neurosis. ~Carl Jung; “The Therapeutic Value of Abreaction," CW 16, par. 277.

The dreams of redemption, whereby God descends into the human realm and man mounts up to the realm of divinity. ~Carl Jung; "A Psychological Approach to the Dogma of the Trinity", 1942.

Dreams are often anticipatory and would lose their specific meaning on a purely causalistic view. They afford unmistakable information about the analytical situation, the correct understanding of which is of the greatest therapeutic importance. ~Carl Jung; "The Practical Use of Dream Analysis" CW 16: The Practice of Psychotherapy; Page 312.

This process of becoming human is represented in dreams and inner images as the putting together of many scattered units, and sometimes as the gradual emergence and clarification of something that was always there. The speculations of alchemy, and also of some Gnostics, revolve around this process. It is likewise expressed in Christian Dogma, and more particularly in the transformation mystery of the Mass. ~Carl Jung; “Transformation Symbolism in the Mass"; CW 11, par. 399.

[One of my patients] dreamed that she was commanded to descend into "a pit filled with hot stuff." This she did, till only one shoulder was sticking out of the pit. Then Jung came along, pushed her right down into the hot stuff, exclaiming "Not out but through. ~Carl Jung; from "From the Life and Work of C. G. Jung" by Aniela Jaffe.

In sleep, fantasy takes the form of dreams. But in waking life, too, we continue to dream beneath the threshold of consciousness, especially when under the influence of repressed or other unconscious complexes. ~Carl Jung; "Problems of Modern Psychotherapy" (1929). In CW 16: The Practice of Psychotherapy; Page 125.

Nature is often obscure or impenetrable, but she is not, like man, deceitful. We must therefore take it that the dream is just what it pretends to be, neither more nor less. If it shows something in a negative light, there is no reason for assuming that it is meant positively. ~Carl Jung; "On the Psychology of the Unconscious" (1953). In CW 7: Two Essays on Analytical Psychology; Page 162.

The dream shows the inner truth and reality of the patient as it really is: not as I conjecture it to be, and not as he would like it to be, but as it is. ~Carl Jung; "The Practical Use of Dream Analysis" (1934). In CW 16: The Practice of Psychotherapy; Page 304.

The dream is specifically the utterance of the unconscious. Just as the psyche has a diurnal side which we call consciousness, so also it has a nocturnal side: the unconscious psychic activity which we apprehend as dreamlike fantasy. ~Carl Jung; "The Practical Use of Dream Analysis" (1934). In CW 16: The Practice of Psychotherapy; Page 317.

I call every interpretation which equates the dream images with real objects an interpretation on the objective level… Interpretation on the objective level is analytic, because it breaks down the dream content into memory-complexes that refer to external situations. ~Carl Jung; CW 7, para. 131.

In contrast to this is the interpretation which refers every part of the dream and all the actors in it back to the dreamer himself. This I call interpretation on the subjective level…. Interpretation on the subjective level is synthetic, because it detaches the underlying memory-complexes from their external causes, regards them as tendencies or components of the subject, and reunites them with that subject. ~Carl Jung; CW 7, para. 131.

Our dreams are continually saying things beyond our conscious comprehension. We have intimations and intuitions from unknown sources. Fears, moods, plans, and hopes come to us with no visible causation. These concrete experiences are at the bottom of our feeling that we know ourselves very little; at the bottom, too, of the painful conjecture that we might have surprises in store for ourselves. ~Carl Jung; Aion; CW 9i para. 299.

Everything living strives for wholeness. ~Carl Jung; "On the Nature of Dreams,"1945.

Within each one of us there is another whom we do not know. He speaks to us in dreams and tells us how differently he sees us from how we see ourselves. When, therefore, we find ourselves in a difficult situation, to which there is no solution, he can sometimes kindle a light that radically alters our attitude, the very attitude that led us into the difficult situation. ~Carl Jung; “Civilization in Transition", 1958.

The dream may either repudiate the dreamer in a most painful way, or bolster him up morally. The first is likely to happen to people who ... have too good an opinion of themselves; the second to those whose self-valuation is too low. ~Carl Jung; "On the Nature of Dreams,"1945.

We have, therefore, two kinds of thinking: directed thinking, and dreaming or fantasy-thinking. The former operates with speech elements for the purpose of communication, and is difficult and exhausting; the latter is effortless, working as it were spontaneously, with the contents ready to hand, and guided by unconscious motives. The one produces innovations and adaptation, copies reality, and tries to act upon it; the other turns away from reality, sets free subjective tendencies, and, as regards adaptation, is unproductive ~Carl Jung; Two Kinds of Thinking; para. 20.

[The dream voice] “utters an authoritative declaration or command, either of astonishing common sense or of profound philosophic import. It is nearly always a final statement, usually coming toward the end of a dream, and it is, as a rule, so clear and convincing that the dreamer finds no argument against it. It has, indeed, so much the character of indisputable truth that it can hardly be understood as anything except a final and trenchant summing up of a long process of unconscious deliberation and weighing of arguments.” ~Carl Jung; Psychology and Religion; Page 45.

The application of the comparative method shows without a doubt that the quaternity is a more or less direct representation of the God who is manifest in his creation. We might, therefore, conclude that the symbol spontaneously produced in the dreams of modern people means something similar-the God within. ~Carl Jung; CW 11; para. 101

As most people know, one of the basic principles of analytical psychology is that dream-images are to be understood symbolically; that is to say, one must not take them literally, but must surmise a hidden meaning in them. ~Carl Jung; Symbols of Transformation; para 4.

I have had occasion to observe, in the course of my daily professional work [that... ] a dream, often of visionary clarity, occurs about the time of the onset of the illness or shortly before, which imprints itself indelibly on the mind and, when analyzed, reveals to the patient a hidden meaning that anticipates the subsequent events of his life. ~Carl Jung; CW 5; para 78

I would not deny the possibility of parallel dreams, i.e., dreams whose meaning coincides with or supports the conscious attitude, but in my experience, at least, these are rather rare. ~Carl Jung; Psychology and Alchemy; CW 12; Page 48.

Anyone who wishes to interpret a dream must himself be on approximately the same level as the dream, for nowhere can he see anything more than what he is himself. ~"Marriage as a Psychological Relationship" (1925) In CW 17: The Development of the Personality. P. 324

Anyone sufficiently interested in the dream problem cannot have failed to observe that dreams also have a continuity forwards-if such an expression be permitted-since dreams occasionally exert a remarkable influence on the conscious mental life even of persons who cannot be considered superstitious or particularly abnormal. ~ Carl Jung; General Aspects of Dream Psychology; In CW 8: The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche. pg. 444

Lack of conscious understanding does not mean that the dream has no effect at all. Even civilized man can occasionally observe that a dream which he cannot remember can slightly alter his mood for better or worse. Dreams can be "understood" to a certain extent in a subliminal way, and that is mostly how they work. ~Carl Jung; "Approaching the Unconscious" In Man and His Symbols; Revised and included in CW 18 as "Symbols and the Interpretation of Dreams" Page 52.

The two fundamental points in dealing with dreams are these: First, the dream should be treated as a fact, about which one must make no previous assumption except that it somehow makes sense; and second, the dream is a specific expression of the unconscious. ~Carl Jung; Man and His Symbols

The dream is specifically the utterance of the unconscious. . . . It is imperative that we do not pare down the meaning of a dream to fit some narrow doctrine ~Carl Jung; Modern Man in Search of a Soul; Page 11.

It is the way of dreams to give us more than we ask ~Carl Jung; Modern Man in Search of a Soul; Page.

Dreams are the direct expression of unconscious psychic activity ~Carl Jung; Modern Man in Search of a Soul; Page 2.

The psychic fact “God” is a typical autonomism, a collective archetype…It is therefore characteristic not only of all higher forms of religion, but appears spontaneously in the dreams of individuals. ~Carl Jung; CW 8; fn 29.

. . . poets . . . create from the very depths of the collective unconscious, voicing aloud what others only dream. ~Carl Jung; CW 6: 323.

Dreams are impartial, spontaneous products of the unconscious psyche, outside the control of the will. They are pure nature; they show us the unvarnished, natural truth, and are therefore fitted, as nothing else is, to give us back an attitude that accords with our basic human nature when our consciousness has strayed too far from its foundations and run into an impasse. ~Carl Jung; The Meaning of Psychology for Modern Man; CW 10; Civilization in Transition; Page 317.

We can find clear proof of this fact in the history of science itself. The so-called "mystical" experience of the French philosopher Descartes involved a . . . sudden revelation in which he saw in a flash the "order of all sciences". The British author Robert Louis Stevenson had spent years looking for a story that would fit his "strong sense of man's double being," when the plot of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was suddenly revealed to him in a dream. ~Carl Jung; Man and His symbols; ~Carl Jung; Man and His symbols; P. 25.

A dream that is not understood remains a mere occurrence; understood it becomes a living experience. ~Carl Jung CW11; Page 497.

The dream is often occupied with apparently very silly details, thus producing an impression of absurdity, or else it is on the surface so unintelligible as to leave us thoroughly bewildered. Hence we always have to overcome a certain resistance before we can seriously set about disentangling the intricate web through patient work. But when at last we penetrate to its real meaning, we find ourselves deep in the dreamer's secrets and discover with astonishment that an apparently quite senseless dream is in the highest degree significant, and that in reality it speaks only of important and serious matters. This discovery compels rather more respect for the so-called superstition that dreams have a meaning, to which the rationalistic temper of our age has hitherto given short shrift. ~Carl Jung; On the Psychology of the Unconscious; In CW 7: Two Essays on Analytical Psychology; Page 24.

If we want to interpret a dream correctly, we need a thorough knowledge of the conscious situation at that moment, because the dream contains its unconscious complement, that is, the material which the conscious situation has constellated in the unconscious. Without this knowledge it is impossible to interpret a dream correctly, except by a lucky fluke. ~Carl Jung; CW 8; Page 477.

A persecutory dream always means: this wants to come to me. When you dream of a savage bull, or a lion, or a wolf pursuing you, this means: it wants to come to you. You would like to split it off, you experience it as something alien—but it just becomes all the more dangerous. The urge of what had been split off to unite with you becomes all the stronger. The best stance would be: “Please, come and devour me!” ~Carl Jung, Children's Dreams Seminar.

On paper the interpretation of a dream may look arbitrary, muddled, and spurious; but the same thing in reality can be a little drama of unsurpassed realism. To experience a dream and its interpretation is very different from having a tepid rehash set before you on paper. Everything about this psychology is, in the deepest sense, experience; the entire theory, even where it puts on the most abstract airs, is the direct outcome of something experienced. ~Carl Jung; On the Psychology of the Unconscious; CW 7: Two Essays on Analytical Psychology; Page 199.

Dreams are as simple or as complicated as the dreamer is himself, only they are always a little bit ahead of the dreamer's consciousness. I do not understand my own dreams any better than any of you, for they are always somewhat beyond my grasp and I have the same trouble with them as anyone who knows nothing about dream interpretation. Knowledge is no advantage when it is a matter of one's own dreams. ~Carl Jung; Analytical Psychology: Its Theory and Practice: The Tavistock Lectures. (1935). CW 18: (retitled) The Tavistock Lectures. P. 122

The art of interpreting dreams cannot be learnt from books. Methods and rules are good only when we can get along without them. Only the man who can do it anyway has real skill, only the man of understanding really understands. ~Carl Jung; The Meaning of Psychology for Modern Man; CW 10: Civilization in Transition. pg. 327

Dreams...are invariably seeking to express something that the ego does not know and does not understand. ~Carl Jung Quotation, CW 17, Paragraph 187

The sea is like music, it has all the dreams of the soul within itself and sounds them over. ~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections; Page 369.

The dream gives a true picture of the subjective state, while the conscious mind denies that this state exists, or recognizes it only grudgingly ~Carl Jung; Modern Man in Search of a Soul; Page 5.

The conscious mind allows itself to be trained like a parrot, but the unconscious does not — which is why St. Augustine thanked God for not making him responsible for his dreams. ~Carl Jung; Psychology and Alchemy; Page 51.

A story told by the conscious mind has a beginning, a development, and an end but the same is not true of the dream. ~Carl Jung; Man and His Symbols; Page 12.

The dream content is to be taken in all seriousness as something that has actually happened to us. . . . Every dream is a source of information and a means of self-regulation; . . . dreams are our most effective aids in building up the personality. ~Carl Jung; Modern Man in Search of a Soul; Page 18.

Dreams give information about the secrets of the inner life and reveal to the dreamer hidden factors of [the dreamer's] personality. . . . There must be a thorough-going, conscious assimilation of unconscious contents. By "assimilation" I mean a mutual interpenetration of conscious and unconscious contents. ~Carl Jung; Modern Man in Search of a Soul; Page 16.

Myths go back to the primitive storyteller and his dreams, to men moved by the stirring of their fantasies. These people were not very different from those whom later generations called poets or philosophers. ~Carl Jung; Man and His Symbols; Page 78

Just as the body bears the traces of its phylogenetic development, so also does the human mind. Hence there is nothing surprising about the possibility that the figurative language of dreams is a survival from an archaic mode of thought. ~Carl Jung; General Aspects of Dream Psychology; and CW 8: The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche; Page 475.

Yesterday I had a marvellous dream: One bluish diamond-like star high in heaven, reflected in a round, quiet pool—heaven above, heaven below—. The imago Dei in the darkness of the Earth, this is myself. . . . It seems to me as if I were ready to die, although—as it looks to me—some powerful thoughts are still flickering like lightnings in a summer night. Yet they are not mine, they belong to God, as everything else which bears mentioning. Carl Jung, The Jung–White Letters, Page 60.

…it is plain foolishness to believe in ready-made systematic guides to dream interpretation, as if one could simply buy a reference book and look up a particular symbol. ~Carl Jung, Man and his Symbols, Page 53.

Never apply any theory, but always ask the patient how he feels about his dream images. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Page 123.

And if we happen to have a precognitive dream, how can we possibly ascribe it to our own powers? ~Carl Jung, Memories Dreams and Reflections, Page 340.

Whenever we touch nature we get clean. People who have got dirty through too much civilization take a walk in the woods or a bath in the sea. They shake off the fetters and allow nature to touch them. It can be done within or without. Walking in the woods or laying on the grass, taking a bath in the sea are from the outside entering the unconscious, entering yourself through dreams is touching nature from the inside and this is the same thing, things are put right again. ~Carl Jung, Dream Analysis; Notes on a Lecture given 1928-1930.

Around the eighth year there is a transition to ego consciousness, as we have already seen in previous children’s dreams. The child breaks away from the extremely close relatedness with the familial milieu; he has already acquired a certain experience of the world, and the libido, which had up to then been tied to the parents, detaches itself from them and often is introverted. ~Carl Jung, Children’s Dreams Seminar, Page 323.

The number in a dream always has a meaning. If we cannot find this meaning, we are the idiots, not the dream. ~Carl Jung, Children’s Dream Seminar, Page 101.

Nature itself speaks in such dreams. The wisdom of the child is the wisdom of nature, and it needs the utmost cunning to follow nature. ~Carl Jung, Children’s Dream Seminar, Page 136.

This God is no longer miles of abstract space away from you in an extra-mundane sphere. This divinity is not a concept in a theological textbook, or in the Bible; it is an immediate thing, it happens in your dreams at night, it causes you to have pains in the stomach, diarrhea, constipation, a whole host of neuroses.

The meaning of the dream is only that when the churches keep silent the psyche gives you food and drink. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 153-154.

Dreams do not "jumble up the personalities." On the contrary, everything is in its proper place, only you don't understand it. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, 326-327.

The fact of having dreams is not nearly enough. You also have a digestive system but this is not nearly enough to make you a physiological chemist. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 328.

In the Old Testament it says: “Your old men shall dream dreams.” They had a wise anima who could open their inner ears. ~Carl Jung, Children’s Dreams Seminar, Page 319.

Moreover, the unconscious has a different relation to death than we ourselves have. For example, it is very surprising in which way dreams anticipate death. ~Carl Jung, Children’s Dreams Seminar, Page 343.

Moreover, the unconscious has a different relation to death than we ourselves have. For example, it is very surprising in which way dreams anticipate death. ~Carl Jung, Children’s Dreams Seminar, Page 343.

But there’s absolutely no way around it, because we can be sure: the simpler a dream is, the more we are confronted with general and fundamental problems. ~Carl Jung, Children’s Dreams Seminar, Page 368.

Precognitive dreams can be recognized and verified as such only when the precognized event has actually happened. Otherwise the greatest uncertainty prevails. Also, such dreams are relatively rare. It is therefore not worth looking at the dreams for their future significance. One usually gets it wrong. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 460-461.

Thus, as early as the dream-book of Artemidorus, we come across the case of a man dreaming that his father perished in a fire, and after a few days the dreamer himself died of a high fever. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 546-548.

I realize that under the circumstances you have described you feel the need to see clearly. But your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Without, everything seems discordant; only within does it coalesce into unity. Who looks outside dreams; who looks inside awakes. ~Carl Jung, Letters Volume I, Page 33.

Your dream is very remarkable in that it coincides almost literally with my first systematic fantasy which I had between the ages of 15 and 16. It engrossed me for weeks, always on the way to school, which took three-quarters of an hour. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 218.

The analysis of older people provides a wealth of dream symbols that psychically prepare the dreams for impending death. It is in fact true, as Jung has emphasized, that the unconscious psyche pays very little attention to the abrupt end of bodily life and behaves as if the psychic life of the individual, that is, the individuation process, will simply continue. … The unconscious “believes” quite obviously in a life after death. ~Marie-Louise von Franz (1987), ix.

But the ground-plan of these images [Archetypal] is universal and must be assumed to be pre-existent, since it can be demonstrated in the dreams of small children or uneducated persons who could not possibly have been influenced by tradition. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 538-539.

I too am in a retrospective phase and am occupying myself, for the first time in 25 years, thoroughly with myself, collecting my old dreams and putting them together. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 515-516.

When I came to Zurich, the most materialistic city of Switzerland, there was nobody ready-made for my needs. I then shaped some for me. They were meant for this experience. One could see it from their dreams. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 516-517.

When you are in the darkness you take the next thing, and that is a dream. And you can be sure that the dream is your nearest friend; the dream is the friend of those who are not guided any more by the traditional truth and in consequence are isolated. ~Carl Jung, The Symbolic Life, Para 674.

Human beings do not stand in one world only but between two worlds and must distinguish themselves from their functions in both worlds. This is individuation. You are rejecting dreams and seeking action. Then the dreams come and thwart your actions. The dreams are a world, and the real is a world. You have to stand between the gods and men. ~Carl Jung to Sabina Spielrein January 21, 1918.

The feminine mind is the earth waiting for the seed. That is the meaning of the transference. Always the more unconscious person gets spiritually fecundated by the more conscious one. Hence the guru in India. This is an age old truth.
As soon as certain patients come to me for treatment, the type of dream changes. In the deepest sense we all dream not out of ourselves but out of what lies between us and the other. ~Carl Jung to James Kirsch, Letters Vol. 1, Page 170.

I have never lost touch with my initial experiences. All my works, all my creative activity, has come from those initial fantasies and dreams which began in 1912, almost fifty years ago. Everything that I accomplished in later life was already contained in them…~Carl Jung, Memories Dreams & Reflections, Page 191.

The dreams of early childhood contain mythological motifs which the children could not possibly know of. These archetypal images are the primeval knowledge of mankind; we are born with this inheritance, though this fact is not obvious and only becomes visible in indirect ways. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Lecture XIV, Page 119.

The animus lives in the daytime in the eyes; at night it houses in the liver. When living in the eyes, it sees; when housing itself in the liver, it dreams. Dreams are the wanderings of the spirit through all nine Heavens and all the nine Earths. ~Richard Wilhelm, Secret of the Golden Flower

A certain line of thought, for instance, is developed through a series of dreams; and I discover that I am the duplicate of my unconscious anticipation of myself; at the same moment I am filled with a sense of purpose as if a secret arrangement of my fate existed. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 214.

We do not suffer from the delusion that a cherry could not hang on its stalk without our help, yet it never occurs to us that we are just as powerless in our own dreams. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 27Jan1939, Pages 65.

We find all the ancient forms of the human psyche in dreams and in such texts as the Shri-Chakra-Sambhara Tantra. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 3Mar1939, Page 98.

It is as if the dream were quite uninterested in the fate of the ego, it is pure Nature, it expresses the given thing, it mirrors the state of our consciousness with complete detachment; it never says "to do it in such and such a way would be well”, but states that it is so. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 8March1935, Pages 198.

All dreams originate in the unconscious though occasionally a dream can be induced by suggestion or hypnosis. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 1May1935, Pages 202.

Dreams can spring from physical or psychic causes, a dream can be caused by hunger, fever, cold, et cetera, but even then the dreams themselves are made of psychic material. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 1May1935, Pages 202.

Dreams as a whole are without purpose, like nature herself, it is wiser to regard them as such. The third question asks if we can dream of experiences undergone by our ancestors. I cannot be sure of this. There are so many curious sources from which we dream, that we cannot say for certain where anything comes from. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 8March1935, Pages 198.

Phantasies and dreams do not of themselves enlarge consciousness, they have to be understood and here the great difficulty begins. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture III, 17May 1935, Pages 208.

A dream gives us unadorned information about the condition of a patient, it is as if a nature- being were stating his diagnosis or taking a child by the ear and telling him what he is doing. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 18Jan1935, Page 174.

A dream is a product of nature, the patient has not made it, it is like a letter dropped from Heaven, something which we know nothing of. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture V 23Nov1934 Page 156.

Dreams often seem nonsense to us, but they spring from nature and are related to our future life. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture V 23Nov1934 Page 156.
It was the anticipatory quality in dreams that was first valued by antiquity and they played an important role in the ritual of many religions. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture V 23Nov1934 Page 156.

So we cannot judge dreams from the conscious point of view, but can only think of them as complementary to consciousness. Dreams answer the questions of our conscious. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture V 23Nov1934 Page 157.

So we cannot judge dreams from the conscious point of view, but can only think of them as complementary to consciousness. Dreams answer the questions of our conscious. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture V 23Nov1934 Page 157.

We are not far from the truth, in fact we are very near to primeval truth, when we think of our dreams as answers to questions, which we have asked and which we have not asked. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture V 23Nov1934 Page 157.

Big dreams are impressive, they go with us through life, and sometimes change us through and through, but small dreams are fragmentary and just deal with the personal moment. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture XI 5July1934, Page 133.

Dreams never really repeat experience, they always have a meaning, they are like association experiments, only they themselves produce the test words, they are a whole system of test words. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture XI 5July1934, Page 134.

Then there are philosophical dreams which think for us and in which we get the thoughts that we should have had during the day. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture XI 5July1934, Page 135.

We can have prophetic dreams without possessing second sight, innumerable people have such anticipatory dreams. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture V, Page 26.

Amplification: A method of association based on the comparative study of mythology, religion and fairy tales, used in the interpretation of images in dreams and drawings. ~Daryl Sharp, Jung Lexicon.

He [Jung] indicated that though it was true that I was a young man, my dream was of the second half of life and was to be lived no matter what age I was. ~Robert A. Johnson, J.E.T., Pages 36-39.

As for instance the ordinary physician neither imagines nor hopes to make of his patient an ideal athlete, so the psychological doctor does not dream of being able to produce saints. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 474.

He [Jung] told Laurens van der Post that he worked through 67,000 dreams with patients and helpers before even attempting to theorize about them. ~Claire Dunne, Wounded Healer of the Soul, Page 85.

If the unconscious does not cooperate, if, that is, there are no dreams or fantasies, then it is very difficult to deal with a neurosis. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 15.

When geometric symbols appear in dreams or drawings they are the original images of the primeval condition. Geometric designs may also appear if a schizophrenic destruction is threatening. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 17.

The unconscious has its consciousness, it reveals it f. i. through dreams, for otherwise we could not know anything about it. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 41.

So you see, in a moment during a patient's treatment when there is a great disorder and chaos in a man's mind, the symbol can appear, as in the form of a mandala in a dream, or when he makes imaginary and fantastical drawings, or something of the sort. ~Carl Jung, Evans Conversations, Page 21.

In the last analysis, most of our difficulties come from losing contact with our instincts, with the age-old unforgotten wisdom stored up in us. And where do we make contact with this old man in us? In our dreams. ~Carl Jung, Psychological Reflections, 76.

They [Dreams] do not deceive, they do not lie, they do not distort or disguise… They are invariably seeking to express something that the ego does not know and does not understand. ~Carl Jung, CW 17, Para 189.

Personality need not imply consciousness. It can just as easily be dormant or dreaming. ~Carl Jung, CW 9, Para 508.

The dream is a series of images, which are apparently contradictory and nonsensical, but arise in reality from psychologic material which yields a clear meaning. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Page 7.

Between the dreams of night and day there is not so great a difference. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Pages 21-22.

The darkness which clings to every personality is the door into the unconscious and the gateway of dreams, from which those two twilight figures, the shadow and the anima, step into our nightly visions or, remaining invisible, take possession of our ego-consciousness. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 222.

What Freud calls 'the dream façade' is the dream's obscurity, and this is really only a projection of our own lack of understanding. We say that the dream has a false front only because we fail to see into it. ~Carl Jung, CW 16, Par. 319.

The question may be formulated simply as follows: ‘What is the purpose of this dream? What effect is it meant to have? These questions are not arbitrary inasmuch as they can be applied to every psychic activity. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, para. 462.

There is no difference in principle between organic and psychic growth. As a plant produces its flower, so the psyche creates its symbols. Every dream is evidence of this process. ~Carl Jung, Man and His Symbols, Page 64.

The interpretation of dreams enriches consciousness to such an extent that it relearns the forgotten language of the instincts. ~Carl Jung, Man and His Symbols, Page 52.

I was particularly interested in the dream which, in mid-August 1955, anticipated the death of my wife. It probably expresses the idea of life's perfection: the epitome of all fruits, rounded into a bullet, struck her like karma. C.G. Jung ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 310.

Before we strive after perfection, we ought to be able to live the ordinary man without self-mutilation. As for instance the ordinary physician neither imagines nor hopes to make of his patient an ideal athlete, so the psychological doctor does not dream of being able to produce saints. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 474.

But, since I appear in your dream, I cannot refrain from making the remark that I like thick walls and I like trees and green things, and I like many books. Perhaps you are in need of these three good things. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 26-27.

Your view is rather confirmed, as it seems to me, by the peculiar fact that on the one hand consciousness has so exceedingly little direct information of the body from within, and that on the other hand the unconscious ( i.e., dreams and other products of the "unconscious") refers very rarely to the body and, if it does, it is always in the most roundabout way, i.e., through highly "symbolized" images. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 43-47.

I have observed the case of a man who had no dreams, but his nine-year-old son had all his father's dreams which I could analyse for the benefit of the father. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 62-64.

When you dream of a savage bull, or a lion, or a wolf pursuing you, this means: it wants to come to you. You would like to split it off, you experience it as something alien, but it just becomes all the more dangerous. . .The best stance would be: ‘Please, come and devour me.” ~Carl Jung, Children’s Dreams, Page 19.

As the result of a dream I completely laid off smoking five days ago. …At present I'm still in a foul mood. What would the gods do without smoke offerings? ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 109-110

Dreams may contain ineluctable truths, philosophical pronouncements, illusions, wild fantasies, memories, plans, anticipations, irrational experiences, even telepathic visions, and heaven knows what besides. ~Carl Jung, CW 16, Page 317

As I once dreamt, my will to live is a glowing daimon, who makes the consciousness of my mortality hellish difficult for me at times. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 119.

A lexicon of dream symbols is a nightmare to me, as I see this task from the standpoint of responsible science and I know its enormous difficulties. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 123.

As for your colleague's dream, I have since discovered that in the Midrashim the symbol of the eagle is ascribed to the prophet Elijah, who soars like an eagle over the earth and spies out the secrets of the human heart. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 131-132.

The dream of the horse represents the union with the animal soul, which you have missed for a long time. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 145-146

There is no loneliness, but all-ness or infinitely increasing completeness. Such dreams occur at the gateway of death. They interpret the mystery of death. They don't predict it but they show you the right way to approach the end. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 145-146

I don't use free association at all since it is in any case an unreliable method of getting at the real dream material. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 292-294.
That is to say, by means of "free" association you will always get at your complexes, but this does not mean at all that they are the material dreamt about. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 292-294.

The question of colours or rather absence of colours in dreams, depends on the relations between consciousness and the unconscious. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 299-300.

In a situation where an approximation of the unconscious to consciousness is desirable, or vice versa, the unconscious acquires a special tone, which can express itself in the colourfulness of its images (dreams, visions, etc.) or in other impressive qualities (beauty, depth, intensity). ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 299-300.

Your dream seems to me a genuine revelation: God and Number as the principle of order belong together. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 301-302

The essential dream-image: the Man, the Tree, the Stone, looks quite inaccessible, but only to our modern consciousness which is, as a rule, unconscious of its historical roots. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 325-327.

As far as my knowledge goes we are aware in dreams of our other life that consists in the first place of all the things we have not yet lived or experienced in the flesh. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 341

Noise protects us from painful reflection, it scatters our anxious dreams, it assures us that we are all in the same boat and creating such a racket that nobody will dare to attack us. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 387-392.

The younger an individual is, the nearer he is to the primordial unconscious with its collective contents. This becomes particularly impressive when one studies those dreams of earliest childhood that are still remembered in adult age. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 392-396

This, too,[UFO’s] is an expression of something that has always claimed my deepest interest and my greatest attention: the manifestation of archetypes, or archetypal forms, in all the phenomena of life: in biology, physics, history, folklore, and art, in theology and mythology, in parapsychology, as well as in the symptoms of insane patients and neurotics, and finally in the dreams and life of every individual man and woman. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 397-398.

Thus on New Year's Eve I had a great dream about my wife, which I will tell you sometime. It seems that individuation is a ruthlessly important task to which everything else should take second place. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 408.

Your patient is obviously someone who would need either to pay his tribute to Nature or to make some correspondingly meaningful sacrifice. What this might be is provisionally indicated by the dreams. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 409-410.

But in reality we seem rather to be the dream of somebody or something independent of our conscious ego, at least in all fateful moments. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 426-427

I therefore stop speculating when I have no more possibilities of ideas and wait on events, no matter of what kind, for instance dreams in which possibilities of ideas are presented to me but do not come this time from my biased peculation but rather from the unfathomable law of nature herself. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 445-449

Concerning archetypes, migration and verbal transmission are self-evident, except in those cases where individuals reproduce archetypal forms outside of all possible external influences (good examples in childhood dreams!). ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 450-451

How do you explain f.i. the fact of a little child dreaming that God is partitioned into four? ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 450-451

I myself recently dreamed that a UFO came speeding towards me which turned out to be the lens of a magic lantern whose projected image was myself; this suggested to me that I was the figure, himself deep in meditation, who is produced by a meditating yogi. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 476-477

The other dream points to the coming shock, a complete shattering of your view of the world, as a result of which you and your anima fall into the depths-the catacombs. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 507-508

I think it is even better to make ready for the great catastrophe than to hope that it will not take place and that we are allowed to continue the dream-state of our immaturity. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 512-513

The lack of dreams has different reasons: the ordinary reason is that one is not interested in the mental life within and one does not pay attention to anything of this kind. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 514

Another reason [for lack of dreams] is that one has not dealt enough with one's conscious problem and waits for dreams so that the unconscious would do something about it; and the third reason is that the dreams have-as it were-emigrated into a person in our surroundings, who then is dreaming in an inordinate way. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 514

A light sleep is certainly a favourable condition for the remembrance of dreams. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 514

The dream of X. means chiefly that it would be advisable to you to give yourself that kind of loving attention as well as whatever X. means for you in yourself. In other words: worry about yourself more than about others; see and understand what you do more than what you assume other people do. Otherwise you will be accused of a meddling power drive. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 515-516

As to what absolute consciousness might be, this is something we cannot imagine even in our wildest dreams. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 504-506

Just as the dream seeks to maintain a psychological balance by filling out the daytime conscious attitude by the unconscious elements, so art balances the general public tendency of a given time. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 57

As another example, one is always hearing persons who have had some experience of analysis saying, “I won’t make up my mind about that, I’ll see what my dreams say.” But there are hosts of things which call for decisions from the conscious, and about which it is idiotic to “put it up” to the unconscious for a decision. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 114

That is to say, I turned all my libido within in order to observe the dreams that were going on. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 35

By assuming a passive attitude at night, while at the same time pouring the same stream of libido into the unconscious that one has put into work in the day, the dreams can be caught and the performances of the unconscious observed. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 35

In the late 1950s, when Aniela Jaffé was engaged in her biographical project that resulted in Memories, Dreams, Reflections, she raided sections of this seminar to supplement the material from her interviews with Jung. ~Sonu Shamdasani, Introduction 1925 Seminar, Page xxii

I have not been there [Oxford] again although I always dreamt and hoped to delve more deeply into the treasures of alchemistic manuscripts at the Bodleian. Fate has decreed otherwise. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 579-580

As you have found out for yourself, the I Ching consists of readable archetypes, and it very often presents not only a picture of the actual situation but also of the future, exactly like dreams. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 584-585

One could even define the I Ching oracle as an experimental dream, just as one can define a dream as an experiment of a four-dimensional nature. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 584-585

In explaining dreams from a causal point of view, Freud got to their primary causes. But what interests me is why a person dreams of one thing rather than another. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 141-145

When a man is in the wilderness, it is the darkness that brings the dreams ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 674

And you can be sure that the dream is your nearest friend; the dream is the friend of those who are not guided any more by the traditional truth and in consequence are isolated. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 674

The dream is a little hidden door in the innermost and most secret recesses of the soul, opening into that cosmic night which was psyche long before there was any ego consciousness, and which will remain psyche no matter how far our ego-consciousness extends. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Pages 144-145

Go to bed. Think of your problem. See what you dream. Perhaps the Great Man, the 2,000,000-year-old man, will speak. In a cul-de-sac, then only do you hear his voice. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 359-364

When I dream of a patient, it is usually a sign that one of my complexes has been touched. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 359-364

The self is a fact of nature and always appears as such in immediate experiences, in dreams and visions, and so on; it is the spirit in the stone, the great secret which has to be worked out, to be extracted from nature, because it is buried in nature herself. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 977.

They [Children’s Dreams] must come from the psychology of the collective unconscious; one could say they were remnants of things they had seen before they were born, and that is really vision. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 424.

One often has dreams which seem destructive and evil, the thing one cannot accept, but it is merely due to the fact that one’s conscious attitude is wrong. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Pages 405-406.

For it is really true that if one creates a better relation to the unconscious, it proves to be a helpful power, it then has an activity of its own, it
produces helpful dreams, and at times it really produces little miracles. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 604

Whatever you experience outside of the body, in a dream for instance, is not experienced unless you take it into the body, because the body means the here and now. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 1316

If you just have a dream and let it pass by you, nothing has happened at all, even if it is the most amazing dream; but if you look at it with the purpose of trying to understand it, and succeed in understanding it, then you have taken it into the here and now, the body being a visible expression of the here and now. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 1316

If a fatal destiny is awaiting us, we are already seized by what will lead us to this destiny in the dream, in the same way it will overcome us in reality. ~Carl Jung, Children’s Dreams, Page 159.

If he is intent only on the outer reality, he must live his myth; if he is turned only towards the inner reality, he must dream his outer, so-called real life. ~Carl Jung, CW 6, Para 280

The dream, we would say, originates in an unknown part of the psyche and prepares the dreamer for the events of the following day. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 5

It is only in modern times that the dream, this fleeting and insignificant-looking product of the psyche, has met with such profound contempt. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 21

It [Dreams] leads straight to the deepest personal secrets, and is, therefore, an invaluable instrument in the hand of the physician and educator of the soul. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 25

Apart from the efforts that have been made for centuries to extract a prophetic meaning from dreams, Freud’s discoveries are the first successful attempt in practice to find their real significance. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 447.

Experience has shown, however, that even professional analysts, who might be expected to have mastered the art of dream interpretation, often capitulate before their own dreams and have to call in the help of a colleague. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 141

Childhood is important not only because various warpings of instinct have their origin there, but because this is the time when, terrifying or encouraging, those far-seeing dreams and images appear before the soul of the child, shaping his whole destiny, as well as those retrospective intuitions which reach back far beyond the range of childhood experience into the life of our ancestors. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 98

Not infrequently the dreams show that there is a remarkable inner symbolical connection between an undoubted physical illness and a definite psychic problem, so that the physical disorder appears as a direct mimetic expression of the psychic situation. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 502

Dreams throw very interesting sidelights on the inter-functioning of body and psyche. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 502

My method, like Freud’s, is built up on the practice of confession. Like him, I pay close attention to dreams, but when it comes to the unconscious our views part company. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 875

I leave theory aside as much as possible when analysing dreams —not entirely, of course, for we always need some theory to make things intelligible. ~Carl Jung, CW 16, Para 318.

For the collective unconscious which sends you these dreams already possesses the solution: nothing has been lost from the whole immemorial experience of humanity, every imaginable situation and every solution seem to have been foreseen by the collective unconscious. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking, Page 231.

Dreams have influenced all the important changes in my life and theories. ~Carl Jung, Man and His Symbols, Page 85.

Dreams may sometimes announce certain situations long before they actually happen. This is not necessarily a miracle or a form of precognition. Many crises in our lives have a long unconscious history. ~Carl Jung, Man and His Symbols, Page 29

Later we talked again, and C.G. said how interesting it would be if someone were to study the dreams people had under anaesthetics; he mentioned one or two examples. ~E.A. Bennet, Meetings with Jung, Page 157

Speaking of dreams he said we must always ask ‘Whose dream?’ ~E.A. Bennet, Meetings with Jung, Page 289

I dislike as a rule interpreting dreams of people whom I don't know personally; one can easily be led astray. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 187-188.

I would be very chary of the assumption of "make-believe." I have good reasons for doubting whether there is such a thing in dreams at all. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Pages 185-186

The Self is the center of the totality of the psyche in as far as we can measure it or have an intuition about it, or in as far as we have dreams about it, and surely beyond, for we cannot assume that we are informed through our dreams of everything that is happening in our psyche. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Pages 1158-1159

Wednesday, August 2, 2017

Carl Jung Dream Analysis Seminar Lecture IV 13 February 1929




LECTURE IV 13 February 1929

We have quite a number of questions to deal with, most of them about the I Ching.

This seems to have aroused general interest. Mr. Gibb's question goes to the root of the whole thing: "This question refers to the design in the previous dream and to the subject of such designs and patterns in general.

Are we justified in assuming that such dreams and fantasies support the truth of a particular form of philosophy, for example one based on the idea of four functions? Or should we just take them as an expression of an unconscious desire or need for a philosophy of some kind; that is, for some way of making a complete integration or synthesis of experience?

I feel that at most they indicate that there is a need for a philosophy based on psychic experience instead of on the collected abstractions of physical science.

But are we justified in saying any more than that?

An -example of what I mean is the Mogul emperor Akbar's Divan-i-Khas (hall of private audience) at Fatehpur Sikri.

This building is constructed so as to form just such a design as we are discussing, and Akbar used to sit in a sort of saucer in the middle of it, while learned men from all parts of the world told him about all sorts of religions and philosophies and discussed them with him.

There he tried to make an integration for himself.

"The red sandstone saucer is supported on a pillar with a jet black stem, in the middle of the square hall.

Four gangways lead to the saucer from the four corners where they meet a gallery that goes round all four sides of the hall.

When one looks up at the saucer the black stem of the pillar is practically invisible so that the whole thing seems to be suspended in mid-air."

Dr. Jung: I admit that what we said about the mandala and its possible meaning sounds like philosophy, but it is not philosophy.

It is akin to Pythagoras and his four.

It has to do with principles, yet in itself it is not philosophy.

It is merely an expression of unconscious facts.

I would not even say that it expresses an unconscious need for a philosophy, as many people would prefer a religion to a philosophy.

These figures are naively produced by the unconscious and therefore you can find them all over the world.

The earliest one I know has just been found at Chichen Itza, in the Mayan Temple of the Warrior.

An American explorer has broken through the outer wall of the pyramid and discovered it was not the original temple; a much older, smaller one was inside it.

The space between the two was filled with rubbish, and when he cleared this out he came to the walls of the older temple.

Because he knew that it had been the custom to bury ritual treasure under the floor as a sort of a charm, he dug up the floor of the terrace and found a cylindrical limestone jar about a foot high.

When he lifted the lid he found inside a wooden plate on which was fixed a mosaic design.

lt was a mandala based on the principle of eight, a circle inside of green and turquoise-blue fields.

These fields were filled with reptile heads, lizard claws, etc., One of my patients has made a similar mandala with the same sort of divisions but filled in with plant designs, not animals.

These are expressions apparently so natural that they are to be found all over the world.

Mr. Gibb gives us a beautiful example.

It is a naive expression of the same idea: the Mogul Emperor, Akbar the Great, in his hall of private audience.

The pattern of the building quite clearly forms a mandala, the Mogul sits in a sort of saucer of red sandstone supported by a slender pillar, so that the saucer appears almost to be suspended from heaven.

It is a fine idea for the old man to sit in that manner in the middle of his mandala, so that wisdom should come to him from all four corners of the world.

In Chinese philosophy the mandala is the "Square Inch Field of the Square Foot House."

It is said that the house means the Imperishable Body and the building up of that mandala means the building up of the Imperishable Body.

Mead wrote a very interesting study on the theory that man possesses a subtle body besides his physical material body.

Geley has a complete theory of it, a new physiology called "systeme psychodynamique," a new word for an old thing-as are most of our scientific terms.

The subtle body is the definite abode for what old philosophy would have called entelechia, the thing which tries to realize itself in existence.

Now, the Chinese idea is that the mandala is the symbol of the subtle body.

According to the Eastern theory, by meditation on the mandala all the constituents of the subtle body are withdrawn from the outside and are concentrated in the innermost man, where they build up the imperishable body.

The new man of St. Paul's early Christian teaching is exactly the same thing as the subtle body.

It is an archetypal idea, exceedingly profound, which belongs to the sphere of the immortal archetypes.

There may be something in it, it may be true, I do not know; I am not God himself who knows everything; I must keep to my psychological world.

At all events, the Eastern theory and its symbols agree, in the most astonishing way, with our work.

A Chinese text explains the art of prolonging life by building up the subtle body.

It-eentains a lot of symbolism which I have seen with my patients, and while all this symbolism is well-known to me

I do not dare to make bold interpretations such as the East is making.

The East dares to use such terms as the "transmigration of souls."

To the early Christians it was nothing to call a man a "Son of God," it was a commonplace, it was their daily bread.

For thousands of years the King of Egypt was the Son of Ra, so that when Christ was called the Son of God there was no difficulty in believing.

But to us it sounds rather incredible because our belief in God is an abstraction, we have become philosophical.

So with our archetypes of immortality, the more we come to talk of immortality the more impossible it seems, even to hard-boiled spiritualists.

What about the teeming population of all the ages, what about the animals and insects, the dogs and fleas, etc.?

It soon becomes absurd, and we could hardly imagine heavens and hells enough for all.

In metaphysical matters you can never decide the truth, the only criterion is if it "clicks."

If it does, then I can feel that I think properly, and thinking like that I function properly.

We have no other proof.

All so-called spiritualistic experiences can easily be criticized.

You never can prove a ghost. There are a thousand loopholes for self-deception.

Dr. Shaw's question: "How do you account for such things as are found in Chinese philosophy being so applicable to our psychology today? I conclude you draw our attention especially to the 50th hexagram of the I Ching because it symbolizes the way of analysis as well as of Yoga."

Dr. Jung: Dr. Shaw points out the analogy between analysis and Yoga.

The chapter of the I Ching dealing with pot is one of those chapters which contain Yoga procedure, and our analytical procedure produces Western forms of what in the East is Yoga.

The terminology is different, but the symbolism is the same, the purpose the same.

The Chinese form of Yoga is quite like the symbolism we get in dreams and from the unconscious in general.

To speak of Yoga is to speak of a certain form of analytical method. These things are little known and arouse resistances.

Resistances are usually founded on ignorance.

Very few people in Europe know anything about Yoga.

We are filled with the most amazing megalomania, we assume that people in the East are ignorant and that we in the West have discovered a great truth.

Many people assume, for instance, that astrology is all nonsense.

It is true that astrology has nothing to do with the stars.

The horoscope may say that you were born in Taurus, but the constellations today have moved and horoscopes no longer correspond to the actual position of the stars.

Since 100 B.C. our time-measuring system has been kept at a standstill quite arbitrarily.

Our spring point is now at about 29° of Pisces and is no longer in Aries, although horoscopes are made on that basis.

The spring point is about to enter Aquarius.

But people criticize astrology as though it had something to do with the stars.

If one mentions Yoga, people at once think of fakirs, people standing on their heads for seven years, and all that nonsense.

A real knowledge of Yoga practices is very rare in the West. I felt quite small when I became acquainted with these things.

Here is a reproduction of a picture in the temple of the "White Clouds" in Peking.7 It belongs to the Chinese Tao system.

It is just as though I should write a treatise on how to proceed along the road of analytical psychology.

This picture has not been published, but if it were no one would know what it meant.

The mandala and the idea of the cooking-pot are in it.

A tremendous experience of unconscious symbolism would be necessary to understand all these details.

The form of this picture shows the human spine-head, eyes, the region of the heart, and below there are other centres or zones.

Instead of the vertebral column there are rocks standing on the bank of a river which flows up hill from the water-zone.

The Taoist Yoga has many parallels with analysis.

Just recently a text one thousand years old has been found by a Chinese and deciphered by the Chinese Institute at Frankfurt.

Wilhelm tells me it contains material similar to our results here.

It is a sort of psychological bridge between the East and the West.

There is no reason why we should have any sort of megalomania in connection with Eastern things.

We cannot assume that the Chinese is an idiot, and that we are terribly intelligent.

It is always a mistake to underrate an opponent.

Dr. Binger: Will you give us the derivation of the word mandala?

Dr. Jung: Mandala means orb or circle with a connotation of magic.

You can draw a mandala, you can build a mandala, or you can dance a mandala.

The "Mandala Nritya" is a dance in which the figures describe a mandala.

Here is another question that has to do with the famous chicken which runs away and gets squeezed and was found in the pot in a more or less eatable condition.

Mrs. Sigg thinks that the chicken which ran away was intuition.

But I see no possibility of interpreting that chicken as intuition.

I cannot see that we can assume that the patient has developed any particular function.

Mrs. Sigg: The first dream was naturalistic, then comes the mandala which expresses the whole situation, and now we see the whole process by intuition; it is synthetic.

Dr. Jung: The man was confused and bewildered, so something had to happen to give him clarity about the whole situation.

The mandala was a sort of letter from the μnconscious meant to clarify his mind. In this case its function is to bring order out of a state of confusion, and this order seems to be established in this particular mandala pattern. It is like an amulet.

Amulets often have a mandala form.

Quite a number of prehistoric mandalas from the Bronze Agive have recently been excavated and are in the Swiss National Museum.

They are called sun-wheels and have four spokes like old Christian crosses.

This is also the design on the Host in the Catholic Church and on the bread used in the Mithraic cult, a sort of "mandala bread" as shown on a monument.

Eating the bread is eating the god, eating the saviour.

This is the reconciling symbol.

Eating the totem animal symbolizes the strengthening of the social unity of the whole clan.

This is the original idea repeated eternally through the ages.

Mrs. Sigg: I don't see the difference between an inner vision and intuition.

Dr. Jung: When you dream, you can't say that you use this or that function, yet something can get into your head.

You do not need your eyes to get it. Intuition can mean a conscious effort.

If I need it in a situation I must look for it in order to get it.

It is quite possible that this man has made the effort before, but the thing in the dream is just a vision of a fact.

It is no function of the mind.

Mrs. Sigg: It is difficult in a dream to exclude the effort which he has made consciously.

Dr. Jung: We do not need to comfort ourselves and the patient by saying that he has made an effort and now as a reward there is the good dream.

Sure enough, this thing is the result of his thinking, but it is not intuition.

We have said so much about this dream already that we might assume it has been sufficiently dealt with.

Are there any points not clear to you?

Do you see the whole meaning of the dream in connection?


Mr. Rogers: How do you know when to include consciousness and when to leave it out? In some explanations where there were three figures, as in Macbeth and in Faust, you added consciousness to make four. But if you added it in others there would be five. In Macbeth the three human beings with consciousness would be four; here with the four chickens it is not. How do you know when to exclude?

Dr. Jung: The difference is that in our dream there are four animals, four chickens.

That points to the fact that the self, as represented by the mandala, is unconscious (animal!). There is no consciousness to add.

Mr. Rogers: How about the four sons of Horus, how would that work out?

Dr. Jung: Horus is in the centre and his sons are his four attributes.

With Horus as with the four Evangelists, the central figure is human and the four are merely attributes.

The Horus as well as the Christ (Rex gloriae) group symbolizes the self with three unconscious functions and one that has reached consciousness.

Thus the sons of Horus are often depicted as three with animal heads and one with a human head.

The same is true of the Christian mandala.

It would be difficult if we encountered a group of four such things alone, but we never find them without Horus.

So with the Evangelists, you never see them alone but always grouped around the Saviour.

You have to be careful in speculating about numbers and geometrical designs.

I am giving you mere conjectures in explaining our mandala motif by mythological parallels and in interpreting the mythological figures by our psychological observations.

It looks as if four animals without a centre would represent the unconsciousness of all four functions, whereas three animals and one human-headed figure would represent the fact that three functions are unconscious and one only is conscious.

A fifth figure in the centre would represent the sum total of man: his four functions [conscious and unconscious] under the control of a God or "nonego
centre."

Is there anything else about our dream to be considered?

Miss Hannah: What about the hind wheel? You have not told us about it yet.

Dr. Jung: What does the hind wheel represent?

Dr. Binger: The dreamer himself interpreted it as the driving force.

Dr. Jung: What is that psychologically?

Dr. Binger: It means libido, the chicken is escaping with the man's libido.

Dr. Jung: One of those functions is escaping where the motivating libido is. Why?

Mr. Roper: Is it going with that woman?

Dr. Jung: That woman was fantasy.

There is no indication in the dream that it goes to a woman.

The dream says one function escapes where the motivating or creative libido is.

If you assume that he is motivated by the fantasy of a woman, then this may be where the chicken escapes.

Mr. Roper: Could it be the occult studies?

Dr. Jung: How are these connected with the libido?

Mr. Roper: They are one of his two strong lines.

Dr. Jung: Yes, one doesn't know with this man whether the stronger motivation is his fantasy about women or his occult studies.

If he has devoted more time to his occult studies than to his experiences with women then you can be sure he is more interested in them.

I always try to get at the exact amounts of time and money one has expended on a thing, then I know how important it has been for the patient.

A woman counts not by the intensity off peeling but by the time you spend with her.

Better four hours with less insistence on beauty of feeling than fifteen minutes with only marvelous words.

Women are merciless, but this is a very efficient means. I learned it from women.

Three-fourths of analyses are made by women, and I learn from them.

In this case we have no way of knowing whether or not the motivating libido, "the hind wheel," is more concerned with the occult studies than with sex fantasy, but we at least may assume that it is concerned with the leaking-out by the hind wheel.

The leakage in analysis is very important.

There are many people who when they are being analysed try to establish a sort of stronghold, an island, a place where nothing moves, where nothing happens, where nothing is displaced.

It is the construction of a counterpole which I would not destroy, and the idea of such an island is a happy and important symbol, but many people make a wrong use of it by reserving their judgments, or witholding something.

Out of politeness, these reservations are always rationalized or pretexts are made.

By such subterfuges they create a safe place where they can sneak out.

A certain lady comes to me for analysis and falls in love with another man at once. One wonders why.

He is not particularly the sort one would expect to attract her. It is simply a safety valve for her, she is protecting herself against the transference.

The other man becomes the place of leakage.

The patient will not quite admit her falling in love, she says, "Oh just a little fantasy"; but there her libido is leaking away.

Nothing happens at all in analysis because it is all leaking out.

Then the analyst has to work on a sort of background of wet cloth.

You get no reaction, everything is postponed by leakage into this safe place.

When you have to deal with such people you can do just nothing.

Whenever you try to catch something it recedes.

You do a sort of provisional analysis.

It may be the same in life where the son remains in the father as a safe deposit.

You may discover that these people have a counterpole or safe deposit where the leakage is.

The influence of the analyst is counteracted by a steadfast autonomous something until he discovers the counterpole.

So this man at that stage of analysis was inclined to make a restriction mentale, a curious kind of trick.

For example, there is a story about a monastery of the eighteenth century, which wanted to get the estate of a peasant.

They had no right to it but they did everything they could to get it.

Then the abbot learned from a wise man that he could apply restriction mentale for certain things that would be decided by oath.

So the abbot got some earth from his own garden and put it in his shoes, then he stood on the peasant's land and swore "I am standing on my own earth."

Passe-partout par l'Eglise Romaine is a book on such restrictions.

They are terrible things, but they do happen.

The restriction mentale in this case would be that the patient might say, "Yes, I am doing analysis.

Oh yes, it is very interesting but it can be explained in a different way, as for instance, that Dr. Jung is a sort of medium.

The things he says which are good are inspired by Mahatmas in a monastery in Tibet, and the other things that he says are nothing."

With such an assumption, I could do nothing.

He had no such reservations really, but some tendency to it.

This is happening in analysis all the time, the animus and anima are busy at such things.

Once I had a case which really made me mad.

I was trying to explain something to a woman patient and I used a good deal of vitality to make it emphatic, but she got more and more dull and soon I
saw that she was not listening.

I found that she thought I was in love with her and was sexually excited, because I was so interested and lively and she saw no importance in what I was saying.

That was a restriction mentale where something was leaking, and I could do nothing.

So with this man, my idea is that the occult studies are the leak in the motivating libido. ~Carl Jung, Dream Analysis Seminar, Pages 114

Monday, May 29, 2017

Carl Jung and a "Big Fish" Dream



In conclusion, I would like to give a concrete example of the way the symbol of the fish springs out of the unconscious autochthonously.

The case in question is that of a young woman who had uncommonly lively and plastic dreams. She was very much under the influence of her father, who had a materialistic outlook and was not happily married.

She shut herself off from these unfavourable surroundings by developing, at a very early age, an intense inner life of her own. As a small child, she replaced her parents by two trees in the garden. In her sixth or seventh year, she dreamt that God had promised her a golden fish. From this time forth she frequently dreamt of fishes.

Later, a little while before starting psychological treatment on account of her manifold problems, she dreamt that she was "standing on the bank of the Limmat and looking down into the water. A man threw a gold coin into the river, the water became transparent and I could see the bottom. There was a coral reef and a lot of fishes. One of them had a shining silver belly and a golden back.

During treatment she had the following dream: "/ came to the bank of a broad, flowing river. I couldn't see much at first, only water, earth, and rock. I threw the pages with my notes on them into the water, with the feeling that I was giving something back to the river. Immediately afterwards I had a fishing-rod in my hand.

I sat down on a rock and started fishing. Still I saw nothing but water, earth, and rock. Suddenly a big fish bit. He had a silver belly and a golden back. As I drew him to land, the whole landscape became alive: the rock emerged like the primeval foundation of the earth, grass and flowers sprang up, and the bushes expanded into a great forest. A gust of wind blew and set everything in motion.

Then, suddenly, I heard behind me the voice of Mr. X [an older man whom she knew only from photographs and from hearsay, but who seems to have been some kind of authority for her]. He said, quietly but distinctly: 'The patient ones in the innermost realm are given the fish, the food of the deep.' At this moment a circle ran round me, part of it touching the water. Then I heard the voice again: 'The brave ones in the second realm may be given victory, for there the battle is fought.

Immediately The transparency of the water means that attention (value, gold) is given to the unconscious. It is an offering to the genius of the fountain. Cf. the vision of the Amitabha Land in my "Psychology of Eastern Meditation."

another circle ran round me, this time touching the other bank. At the same time I saw into the distance and a colourful landscape was revealed. The sun rose over the horizon. I heard the voice, speaking as if out of the distance: 'The third and the fourth realms come, similarly enlarged, out of the other two. But the fourth realm'—and here the voice paused for a moment, as if deliberating—'the fourth realm joins on to the first. 10* It is the highest and the lowest at once, for the highest and the lowest come together. They are at bottom one.' " Here the dreamer awoke with a roaring in her ears. ~Carl Jung, Aion, Pages 151-152



Wednesday, May 3, 2017

The Dream of Gilgamesh: The First Recorded Dream




Gilgamesh got up and revealed the dream, saying to his mother:

Mother, I had a dream last night.

Stars of the sky appeared, and some kind of meteorite of Anu fell next to me.

I tried to lift it but it was too mighty for me, I tried to turn it over but I could not budge it.

The Land of Uruk was standing around it, the whole land had assembled about it, the populace was thronging around it, the Men clustered about it, and kissed its feet as if it were a little baby.

I loved it and embraced it as a wife.

I laid it down at your feet, and you made it compete with me.

Commentary: Marie Louise Von Franz

This dream is about forty-six hundred years old. Still today we can find modern parallels for the language of the unconscious has changed much less than the language of human consciousness.

So if we interpret this dream from a modern stand-point we could say that up to the moment before the star fell upon Gilgamesh, he fulfilled the collective role of a king. He was the hero-king. He is typical of a man who ambitiously follows a collective pattern.

Nowadays, he might be a great politician or a movie star — a man who has followed up certain collective alleys and reached a goal.
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Looked at from within, such a person reacts in a very collective way fulfilling a collective role of power. They are generally not very individual.

The star, on the contrary, represents his uniqueness — every soul has one star in the heaven.

We can say that up to the appearance of the star Gilgamesh, with all his collective power and achievement, had not done anything unique.

On the contrary, he had only fulfilled the typical pattern of the hero-king. The, probably, about the middle of life (because that is where it most frequently occurs), something changes.
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While he is walking around among his subjects, proud of his own power position, a star falls from the sky onto his back. It turns out to be a very heavy load.

That is the moment when his unique destiny befalls him, literally falls on his back.

That means that just as Christ had to carry his cross, Gilgamesh now has to carry the burden of having to become the unique, chosen individual, a task which he has avoided by being an ambitious, collective man.
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Marie Von Franz, The Way of the Dream, pages 69- 70.