Carl Jung: Such a dream has always to be understood under two aspects.

To Jolande Jacobi

Dear Frau Jacobi, 27 October 1936

Best thanks for your kind letter.

I have just got back from America, where I had a pretty gruelling time.

I am thinking of severely restricting my work this winter because I am working on a book that has long been due.

I have also suspended most of my lectures and therefore cannot, unfortunately, accept your kind invitation to lecture in Vienna.

I regret very much that I cannot duplicate or triplicate myself, which would make things decidedly easier.

With regard to your dream, I entirely agree that it is a "big" one.

It is obviously dreamt in a state of introversion.

In such a state the deeper layers of the unconscious become activated, and since the collective unconscious does not keep strictly within the limits of time and space as we conceive them, shifts in time and space may easily occur.

If in a dream there is an intense regression in time, for instance back to earlier centuries, this also indicates a progression covering the
same span of time.

Such a dream has always to be understood under two aspects.

On the one hand the historical root, on the other the freshness of the tree.

The tree is what grows in time.

The youth always signifies enterprise, hastening ahead, anticipation.

The tree expresses spiritual growth in time.

The planting of the tree means the beginning of a development whose fruits will appear in the new Platonic month.

The two historical vagabonds are the opposite of the youth, namely the historical, primitive element, the deposit of the past in the body.

The blood potion seals the union of opposites, the coniunctio oppositorum from which new growth will come.

The dream is in my opinion a look behind the scenes into the age-old processes of the human mind, which might explain your
special feeling of happiness.

With best regards,

Yours sincerely,

C.G. Jung ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol I, Pages 221-222