Carl Jung: The dream is a little hidden door in the innermost and most secret recesses of the soul...

With Faustian indignation my patient will cry out:

This witch's quackery disgusts my soul!
Is this your promise then, that I be healed
By crooked counsel in this crazy hole,
In truth by some decrepit dame revealed?
Cannot you brew an ichor of your own?

To which I shall reply:

"Haven't you tried one remedy after another? Haven't you seen for yourself that all your efforts have only led you round in a circle, back to the confusion of your present life? So where will you get that other point of view from, if it cannot be found anywhere in your world?"

Here Mephistopheles murmurs approvingly, "That's where the witch comes in," thus giving his own devilish twist to Nature's secret and perverting the truth that the dream is an inner vision, "mysterious still in open light of day."

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.

For all ego-consciousness is isolated; because it separates and discriminates, it knows only particulars, and it sees only those that can be related to the ego. Its essence is limitation, even though it reach to the farthest nebulae among the stars.

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.

There he is still the whole, and the whole is in him, indistinguishable from nature and bare of all ego-hood. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 304


The descent into the world, whether it is at the beginning of the existence of the human being, or whether it happens in the course of life after a phase of life in the unconscious, is always characterized by sacrifice.

Therefore people, when they are leaving analysis for a while often cling to certain things which they had better not cling to.

You know, one of the ordinary prejudices of people who have gone through a period of analysis is to think that the relation to the world and people consists in psychologizing things, they think that everything ought to be analyzed; whether they are going to a concert or taking a trip, they must have a dream about it.

But we analyze dreams not in order to learn about particular matters, but to learn about the relationship of the unconscious to these matters, namely, to learn whether certain conscious developments coincide with the collective unconscious, or what the reasons are for certain disturbances in the conscious.

It is not meant that you should live your whole life in a sort of superstitious dread of what the dream says about things, so that you cannot move unless the dream tells you to, that you must wait for a dream to tell you when to balance your household account, for instance.

I have seen the most amazing things in that line.

"But why the devil don't you do it?" "I have had no dream about it."

Such nonsense!

It is the same thing, you see, one clings to certain ideas and is completely lost without them.

That does not mean, however, that one should throw the whole thing out of the window, that would be quite wrong, for there are plenty of circumstances in life where one had better consider the dream, really problematical situations where the dream is needed.

But whether you should scrub your floor or buy a pair of new shoes when you need them are not problems.

People who upon leaving cling to the analytical style, insisting upon everything being discussed and analyzed, become exceedingly clumsy and boring.

This must be sacrificed, it is quite clear; this style is good for analysis but not for life.

And then it looks like a terrible sacrifice, inasmuch as people are inclined to think they have then entirely lost contact with the unconscious.

You must be able to lose contact, you can never gain anything new without losing something. So risk losing the unconscious.

You see it is quite ridiculous-to put it mildly-to be afraid that you could lose your unconscious; that clings to you so tightly that you may be just glad if you can sometimes cherish the illusion of having lost it.

The unconscious clings to you so tightly that you cannot get rid of it; no fear of losing contact with it, that is all illusion.

But it looks like that; the transition from a psychological atmosphere into the collective atmosphere of the world is a most painful procedure, no doubt, and a painful contrast, and therefore it is quite justified to symbolize it by a lot of sacrificial blood. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Pages 1356-1357