"Then He will open the ears of men" James Kirsch, Tel Aviv, spring 1934

"Then He will open the ears of men" James Kirsch, Tel Aviv, spring 1934

It is widely understood in medicine at this time that neuroses are functional in nature, meaning that certain pathological symptoms cannot be traced back to anatomically identifiable organs or organ systems.

There are no localized seats of disease in neuroses; instead there is "a certain something" which is ill or suffering and cannot be readily named.

The first investigations by Charcot and Bernheim showed very clearly that it was possible to plant symptoms by means of hypnosis - i.e. through mental
influence - just as one could make them disappear again.

Thus the facts seemed to indicate that certain mental phenomena - thoughts, words, feelings, affects, or experiences - evoke neurotic symptoms, i.e. changes, which also have an impact on physical well-being.

As important as these discoveries undoubtedly were, therapeutically they were totally unsatisfactory. For it was soon recognized that the individual symptom did indeed disappear, but another took its place.

It is to Freud's indisputable credit that he found an alternative way.

With his wonderful intuition, as if by chance, he discovered that when one causes a patient to speak in detail about himself, the symptoms also disappear; especially if a patient relates pertinent experiences with appropriate affect, the experiences will be, as it is called in medical terms,
abreacted.

On such occasions, patients often also related dreams. Here again, the imp "Chance" led a highly gifted individual to a crucial discovery.

Freud soon recognized that dreams elicited vitally important material from the deeper layers of the psyche.

Long-forgotten experiences which may have adversely affected a person's health came up from the depth of the unconscious.

With the discovery of dreams, Freud found a new instrument for treatment which in contrast to the coarse and violent method of hypnosis -
originated in the patient's own psyche.

The first dream analyses deeply impressed Freud and moved him to call the dream the via regia to the unconscious.

On the basis of these surprising new impressions, Freud very quickly felt the need to establish a theory about dreams - the famous wish theory - and with it began Freud's unending tragedy.

Unexpectedly, by way of dreams, Freud had encountered the creative depth of the human psyche.

In the final analysis, every psychological theory originates out of the experience of whoever creates it.

It always depends on the subject and is capable, at best, of explaining the psychology of its creator or human beings similar to him.

It is either a fine- or a wide-meshed net, which indeed can pull much from the deep seas of the soul and bring it to light.

One cannot claim, however, that all organisms living in the seas of the soul have been caught with this net.

It is far more likely that huge numbers of living things of great diversity exist in regions where the net will never reach.

The distressing but inevitable fact is that the creator of a psychological theory catches himself in his own net and loses sight of the vastness of the soul.

An excellent example of the way Freud deals with the unconscious is his analysis of a dream which he published in his work Miirchenstoffe in Triiumen:
She [Freud's patient] is in an entirely brown room.

A small door opens to a steep staircase where a strange, little man ascends and enters the room. He is small, has white hair, a bald spot, and a red nose.

He dances in front of her around the room and acts comically.

Then he withdraws and descends the stairs.

He is dressed in a gray, tight-fitting garment. (Correction: He wears a long, black coat and gray pants.)

Here I cannot enter into all the details of Freud's proposed interpretation and his odd use of associations but would like to emphasize one point which has methodological importance.

He writes: "The personal description of the little man fits her father-in-law without alteration."

However, his annotation already indicates that the description of the person does not entirely fit the father-in-law.

Also, it is not clear why the dream did not mention the father-in-law if it referred to him.

The patient doubtless brings up the father-in-law as an idea that suddenly occurs to her.

The question is whether the little man explains the father-in-law or, conversely, the sudden idea of the "father-in-law" explains the little man.

What should be considered as real? To whom does the dream actually refer?

The simple question, how the associative material is to be used, shows clearly that the interpreter can bring his own attitude into a dream. In general, Freud tends to relate and reduce all dream figures to real persons.

Also, in this case, Freud says:

This is the father-in-law; then, without further justification, the father; finally also the penis.

The second association is to the German fairy tale "Rumpelstiltskin." Freud comments, "'Rumpelstiltskin' also facilitates the access to deeper, infantile layers of dream-thoughts.

The droll little fellow (Rumpelstiltskin, father-in-law, or penis?) whose name is unknown, whose secret one would like to discover, who performs such extraordinary feats (in the fairy tale he turns straw into gold) the rage one feels toward him, etc. - these are elements whose relationship to the
fundamentals of the neurosis can only be touched upon here."

I ask for the reader's indulgence for my dwelling on these details.

However, it is really necessary to ascertain, for once, on precisely what facts Freud bases his theories and to what extent he does violence to the dream with his "interpretation."

Actually, he does not interpret the dream but only provides a number of "symbol" translations, so that nobody has truly understood the dream, but only receives, at best, some references to Freud's well-known theories about infantile sexuality, the castration-complex, etc.

Rumpelstiltskin also does not merit further consideration after being recognized
as the "penis."

Is that what he really is?

Or is there again a confusion between the Phallus and the penis, the creative principle and the visible expression on the human body? Inasmuch as this physical part is also comprised in the Phallus, Freud's theories may be accurate.

However, they cover only one aspect, and Freud does not recognize the larger and more essential one, which- with his oft-repeated phrase, "this is nothing but" is at first unconsciously and later, in Future of an Illusion, fiercely rejected.

Anyone who appreciates the fairy tale atmosphere of "Rumpelstiltskin" may prefer to perceive the little fellow who lives in the woods and spins gold from straw at night as the soul, or perhaps the nightly creative activity of the soul, manifested in dreams.

Is it not the soul which confers value on everything we are, think, feel, and believe, and which transforms an event into an experience, turning straw into gold?

Since I do not know the lady who had the dream and have no additional associations from her, I can only presume this interpretation, basing it on my knowledge of the fairy tale.

But isn't it at least just as possible as Freud's view, based on the associations he mentions, as his conception of the little man as father-in-law, father, penis?

Would my conception provide a new understanding of the dream?

For example, the soul as the creative principle comes to her (by means of analysis) at night, in a dream, dressed in gray theory, and leaves her again when it is not understood.

As I said before, I cannot give an exact proof of this interpretation, but the allusion to Rumpelstiltskin, who after all is able to tum straw into gold, is certainly more than the male sexual organ.

Thus the tragedy of the Galut Jew has been realized once again in Freud's psyche.

Fate led him into the creative depth of life, but at that moment he closed it off with a theory conditioned by his uprooting and his childhood experiences of the Galut.

"He roused the unconscious so that it gushed forth powerfully, but not in order to honor it as his superhuman, eternal part, but instead to obtain information and to give his children contemptuous names."

Therefore, it is no surprise that strong oppositions arose against Freud and his theory.

Freud overlooked the fact that this resistance emanated not only from individuals who did not want to become conscious of their infantile shadow side, and so, for instance, did not wish to admit their perverse sexual fantasies.

There were also people who espoused an entirely different psychology and who lived, as it were, on a different island in the ocean of the soul.

The great Zurich psychologist C. G. Jung- upon whom, in his personal relations, Freud had made a great impression - grasped this great aspect of the unconscious and with it the huge importance that exploration of the unconscious could have for human intellectual development

On the basis of his experiences he could not concede that the psychology of all people could be explained with a view from only one comer.

He therefore avoided establishing one theory that should be viewed as the one and only solution.

When he casts his net into the sea of the soul, he remains cognizant of the fact that there is an infinite diversity of additional life in that ocean.

Consequently he avoids theories as such, preferring to leave the images of the unconscious in their natural state, pregnant with possibility.

For this reason, he has to live with reproaches of being "mystical," unclear, and difficult to understand, which really bears witness to the fact that he recognizes the difficulty, complexity, and liveliness of psychic material.

These things can easily be destroyed with words, concepts, and intellectual haste.

With this attitude, Jung left behind the atmosphere of the sick-room.

He is no longer treating the neurosis but instead the suffering human being.

A neurosis is not a localized illness but rather a sickness affecting the whole human being - often without symptoms.

The person, the entire person, is suffering, perhaps because he has not found meaning in life, or the meaning of his life.

Everyone has dreams, and the unconscious has much to say to everyone.

The dream itself is never a neurotic symptom, but it has something to add to the consciousness of the patient, something he does not know, or something he is not sufficiently aware of.

Thus, Jung perceives the unconscious not only as the center of repressions, a rubbish heap of perverse fantasies, but instead as the creative life within us.

The unconscious is not neurotic. Our attitude to the unconscious determines whether we are neurotic or not.

Therefore, Jung strives to lead human beings to the experience of the unconscious; whether or not they succeed is a question of fate.

Jung often experienced that a patient's contact with the unconscious affected the individual in a way which can only be characterized as "transformation."

The unconscious is a part of nature, and like all of nature it is true; it is not hypocritical, it does not lie. Consequently, the dream does not have a facade.

It represents the text of the unconscious, and it is a text which wants to be read, and read according to what the writer wished to convey.

It can be compared to a letter somebody writes to us, which we should understand as much as possible as the writer intended it.

Perhaps the most distinctive characteristic of the dream and of all messages from the unconscious is its strangeness from the point of view of
consciousness.

It is as if we had nothing to do with the creation of the dream, but it was sent to us. So in German we often say, "Es traumte mir. "

In ancient times, the dream's strangeness in relation to consciousness was clearly perceived, and so it was said that a god or goddess had sent the dream.

This coincides with one of Jung's fundamental conceptions.

He recognizes a higher force, greatly surpassing the human ego, an all-knowing force beyond time and space.

Within the unconscious he distinguishes two layers:

(1) a personal layer containing memories, experiences, feelings, affects, etc. which originate in the personal life of the individual; and

(2) the layer of the collective unconscious storing all experiences, images, possibilities, instincts, etc. acquired and developed by human beings in the course of millions of years.

They are embedded in a layer of guessed-at possibilities in the depths, ready to well up in an individual whenever his life encounters a dead end, or when his suffering cannot be alleviated by the limited means and experiences of the human mind.

For that reason, primitive people made a clear distinction between "small" and "big" dreams.

The small dream is of importance only to an individual, while the big dream is significant for the tribe or the general public.

On the basis of such big dreams, the fate of entire peoples has been decided.

For Europeans who are reasonably well informed about the life of primitive peoples, it is astonishingly impressive to experience how far-reaching the influence of a dream, a vision, an inner voice, and all manifestations of the unconscious can be on the lives of primitives.

However, we do not even have to go that far.

We merely have to tum our attention to our own early history, as it is recorded in the Bible, in order to be aware of the decisive importance of the dream, and the unconscious in general, for the life of our people.

For instance, I would like to cite a passage in The First Book ofMoses9 20:3-6:

"At night, God appeared in a dream to Abimelech and said to him ... " It is self-evident that God comes to human beings in their dreams.

The voice which speaks in a dream is not the voice of the ego.

It has information to convey which is not known to the ego and which the ego cannot know on its own.

Naively, and without the slightest doubt, Abimelech is guided exactly by what the dream proclaims.

This brief example shows that the ancient people, unlike us moderns - "Triiume sind Schi:iume " is the ridiculous opinion of enlightened people - attributed great significance to their dreams and regarded them as the source of God's revelations. (Similarly in The First Book of Moses 31 :24.)

The same is true in Jacob's dream in The First Book of Moses 28: 10-22.

A big dream, without doubt! It shows in a splendid way how Jacob's soul initiates a relationship to the Highest and how an intimate exchange with the Eternal takes place. "God's messengers ascend and descend."

The experience touches Jacob in the depth of his soul.

He experiences the sublimity of the place and is deeply frightened:

"He was afraid and said: how awesome is this place! It is none other than the house of God and the gate of heaven."

In this dream, we find three characteristic elements: (1) the imagery of the dream; (2) the direct language; and (3) the emotional affect of the dream
experience.

It is generally known that dreams occur in images.

How these images are to be interpreted, however, is a problem that has been on people's minds since prehistoric times.

Freud was not the first who thought these images speak a language.

The question is, of course, what language they speak.

Such a classic dream shows clearly the absurdity of a merely sexual interpretation.

In Jacob's dream, an interpretation is initiated within the dream itself, through the prophecy of a blessing.

As a consequence, Jacob is quite certain that he did not invent the dream but that it originated in exalted spheres, where one also has to search
for its meaning.

As he awakes, he is overcome by an overwhelming emotional impression that the Absolute, the Irrational, has spoken to him.

He knows that he has had a big dream, and he vows that the place where he had the dream is a holy place.

We sense the effect of the dream on Jacob and how he has been transformed by it.

For the future, this dream will have the greatest significance for the entire people of Israel and its history.

Joseph's dreams have a different character.

Of course, they are also immediately recognized for their importance, and it is interesting to note that they were understood the same way by his brothers (The First Book of Moses 31 :5-8).

Here again, God's messenger is speaking, and so the dreams confer importance and distinction to Joseph.

He feels like a special person, and his legitimacy is confirmed by these dreams.

The voice of the unconscious was not always heard.

An excellent example is the passage in Samuel:

"And God's word was precious in those days" (I Samuel 3:1). It is wonderful to note the reverential attitude with which Eli and Samuel accept this voice.

More often than dreams, we find "visions" in the Bible, a vision in connection with a voice, and also apparitions where it is not at all clear whether
they originated in a dream or a vision.

As varied as their content is, it is all the more essential to be clear about their structure and psychological construction.

In the vast majority of cases, not only the vision is communicated, but also the
individual's reaction to it.

A human being responds to the inner apparition, and often there is a continuing conversation between the ego and the absolute "Other," e.g. The First Book of Moses 15:1 and Isaiah 6.

The vision oflsaiah's call contains the primal experience.

It is recounted with
the lively power of the great visionary.

It begins with a simple description of
the magnificent experience (Isaiah 6:1-2):

"I saw God sitting on a huge, raised
throne, and his robes filled the temple. Seraphim stood above him, and each had six wings. With two wings the Seraphim covered his face, with two wings they covered his feet, and with two they flew."

In the third verse, a voice is heard:

"Holy, holy, holy," and with that the interpretation and comprehension of the marvelous happening has begun.

The enormous psychic upheaval of seeing God himself, even veiled by the wings of the Seraphim, is indicated by the shaking of the foundations of the threshold.

But he remains differentiated from what is happening within him. He says, "Woe is me, I am undone! I am a man of unclean lips" (Isaiah 6:5a).

The fact that he is not devoured by this vision shows the strength of his conscious personality.

In the subsequent verses the contact with the vision is fully resumed. The Seraph touches him with the burning coal.

He is cleansed. With this he is called, but also transformed.

When we submit such dreams and visions to a psychological analysis, there is no mention of the divine content itself.

Such an approach to things we are familiar with does not offend religious feelings.

On the contrary, it gives us as human beings a new understanding of the Immensity and its effects on the soul.

Certainly, Freud saw in the "unconscious" only repression and rejected contents of all sorts; but the consensus omnium, and also that of our Bible, knows it as the Highest speaking to human beings through the soul.

The Bible has various views of the expressions of the unconscious.

Originally dreams were considered to have originated self-evidently from God; this is especially clear in The Fourth Book of Moses17 12:6:

"And he said, Hear my words, when a prophet of God appears to you, I will make myself known by visions, I will speak to him through dreams."

In contrast to this, Moses was deemed worthy of direct and sustained revelation:

"I speak to him from mouth to mouth and show my face, and he will not see the image of God through riddles."

He appears to other prophets mostly in dreams.

And as we know, dreams speak a language which is difficult to understand; they pose riddles.

How to understand these riddles, and who is a ''poter, "have been questions throughout time. How could a prophet prove his identity?

Certainly, not every dream was sent by God.

Two personal prerequisites were necessary: spiritual purity and the absence of self-interest.

"Otherwise you will have night without vision, darkness without prophecy" (Micah 3:6-8): "Indeed, it will be night for you; you will no longer have visions. It will be dark, and you will be unable to do divination. The sun sets for the prophets, the day is dark for them. "

The third prerequisite consists of an entirely irrational moment, a choice which occurred before the human being comes into existence. Jeremiah 1:5:

"Before I formed you in the body, I chose you, and before you emerged from your mother's womb, I ordained you and appointed you as the prophet for all peoples."

But also, the content of the prophecy is the Shibboleth, to show whether they were sent by God, whether they are authentic or not.

This is the sign, whether or not what they prophesy is a vision of their hearts.

Inauthentic prophecies have an entirely personal character and reflect the human ego with its desires and impulses.

The experience is missing that something objective, something other than "I," has spoken.

This experience of the non-ego, the certainty that "It" is happening within me, and that the ego assumes a relationship with "It," this is the
characteristic of a true prophet.

If anyone has an authentic primal experience, like Jeremiah, that individual has a :fine power of discernment between the genuine and the false.
Referring to the fact that a dream has spoken is not sufficient.

There is something special about genuine inspiration, unlike the claims of other prophets.

Jeremiah 23:25: "I hear the words of the prophets who prophesy lies in my name. I have dreamed, I have dreamed!"

Only images can convey this unspeakable truth. Jeremiah 23:29: "My word is fire, says the Lord, a hammer which blasts boulders."

This power of discernment for true dreams, in comparison to lying dreams (chalomot sheker) was lost soon after the appearance of the great prophets.

Since it was no longer possible to tell who had the real inspiration, dreams and prophets were rejected.

Amos, the most powerful of the early prophets, had said (Amos 3 :8): "The lion has roared; who should not be afraid?

God has spoken; who should not prophesy?"

But Zechariah judges the prophets with contempt, resulting in a tremendous social decline, from adviser to the king and leader of the people ( even
if not always welcome as such), down to the lowest level of society.

Prophets and a spirit of uncleanness were now viewed as one and the same. Zechariah 13:2-6:

"I will also remove the prophets and the unclean spirits from the land. If anyone should still make prophecies, his father and his mother, his own parents will tell him: You shall not live, because you have told falsehoods in the name of God. And his own parents, his father and his mother, shall pierce him through as soon as he prophesies. On that day, the prophets will be ashamed of their prophetic vision whenever they prophesy. They will no longer put on a hairy mantle to tell lies. Each one will say: I am not a prophet, I am a farmer; or, from childhood I was raised to be a cattle-breeder."

The same as 2,000 years ago, we again stand at an important turning-point in our history.

The entire world finds itself in an era of enormous upheaval.

The old values and forms of religious and social ideology have little meaning for the psyche.

At best, religion is a "private matter."

It is stored in a more or less hidden corner of our life.

In any case, religion is not the whole of life.

Life yearns for a new experience, for an attitude which embraces the entire life.

At this critical stage, many sufferers turn to physicians who are supposed to heal such conditions. Were the physicians equal to that task?

Did the physicians understand the suffering of the soul, which was manifested in the strangest forms of neurosis?

Did they know that the problems of the time and the eternal human question expressed themselves in the individual as depression?

Our hygienic era could not have responded in any other way than to label these phenomena medically as neurosis, illness.

And yet, fundamentally, these are very old experiences and have eternal answers.

The writer of Job, for instance, knew very well that the human soul is the place where supernatural powers, God and Satan, do battle.

He was also aware of their effect on human beings.

Job 3: 11-13: "Why did I not die at birth? When I came out of my mother's womb, I should have died at once.

Why did the lap receive me, why did I suck from the breasts? Then I could lie still and rest, I would sleep and be at peace." Job 33:20-21: "All food disgusts him, even the most desirable delicacy." Is this not neurosis and depression?

How does Job find a way out of this depression?

"In a dream, in a vision of the night, when deep sleep falls on people, in a light slumber on their bed, at that time he (God) opens the ear of the people and seals it with their teachings."

Also for us, who experience people's suffering and see how individuals express the radically shifting times as neurosis, the dream and all manifestations of the unconscious have proven - not by chance to be a fruitful path toward the patient's healing.

With this we also have rediscovered an old path that leads the individual to the
experience of the ancient fire, the "esh kedoshah. "

And thus we have come to what we know, glancing at the Tanakh, as the essential, to that which made Jacob into Israel, to the primal experience of religion.

For us, of course, in contrast to him, these experiences take entirely different forms and produce different effects; but what we experience is always the One, the Unchangeable, at all times and in all places.

With the return to our own land it is necessary to remember our own essence, the special character of our existence.

Everything will depend on whether our heart will harden, our ears go deaf and our eyes blind, or whether this time our eyes will see, our ears will hear, and our heart will understand (Isaiah 6: 10).

Whether we can give the true name to that which speaks to us through dreams and visions:

"This is a holy place." "Then he will heal us."

The way such things are happening to us now as Jewish people, and what response the unconscious is giving to the Jews' state of distress, may be illustrated by the following dream of a woman who heretofore was totally estranged from anything Jewish until awakened by events of the Hitler era:

Now I was crossing K. Street with Dr. S. and entered a store. There was a large exhibit of books and pictures. I descended further down a flight of stairs to the basement where especially rare and valuable books were stored. It was very dark there, and each book had additional lighting which was only visible as one stood directly in front of it. In the basement there was another room from which I heard voices, and I asked what was going on there. A small, bent-over man appeared, wearing a cap on his head and a heavy coat, with a large bunch of keys. He opened the door and pointed to a table, a large, round table, where ten men with long beards and caps were seated, holding prayer books. In the middle of the table was a silver box, lined with velvet, in which lay a diamond that sparkled so brightly, the table was lighted by it.

To comprehend the essential components of this dream, one only needs to extract what it contains.

The dream tells us that the lady goes into a store where all kinds of spiritual and artistic works are exhibited.

On the floor below especially rare and valuable things are stored, which require special illumination which is only visible when standing directly in front of them.

In addition, something extraordinary is happening, and a peculiar man is leading her to it.

This man we can consider to be the guardian of the threshold, the keeper of the keys, and in keeping with the entire atmosphere of the dream - a meliz, a religious figure who opens a spiritual room which is different from everything purely intellectual and artistic, as valuable as these may be. It is the religious community of Jews, and it is united and illuminated by the rays of a great gem.

So this dreamer, to whom until now Palestine and Judaism had consciously meant very little, found a very old truth.

She did not read or learn about it, but by experiencing the unconscious, she discovered the old Jewish idea that community can only be established with the help of the radiant force of a great symbol; the idea that the meaning and value of being a Jew and a human being are bestowed by this diamond, which is separate from all and yet unites all.

For this woman, and for psychotherapy, the same thing has happened through dreams as happened for Saul. He went out to search for female donkeys and instead found a kingdom.

She was looking for medication to treat a neurosis and instead found the royal diamond which heals the soul.

So I believe that dreams, visions, and other emanations of the unconscious can lead us Jews back to creativity, to humanness, and thus to Judaism and its lively further development.

We only have to learn, with the help of modem and exact science, to let the unconscious speak to us in its own language and to understand it. Intellect, art, and technology cannot save us, only the path that can revive the primal experience.

Then Israel - God's warrior - could once again raise its full voice in the chorus of the great religions of the East. ~James Kirsch, Jung-Kirsch Letters, Pages 279-289

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

Carl Jung: In itself the fact of having frequent dreams is not abnormal.

To P. Schmid

Dear Herr Schmid, 21 December 1934

In itself the fact of having frequent dreams is not abnormal.

There are very many people who have a very active dream life, but this could not be said to be in any way extraordinary or pathological.

If, on the other hand, people who ordinarily dream very little suddenly get into a phase of dreaming very much, this is a sure sign that an overloading
of the unconscious has set in, usually because there is a problematical situation which the dreamer has tended to overlook or has not mastered.

In such cases one can say that the unconscious would have all sorts of things to contribute to his conscious life provided he understood what the unconscious meant.

But even such an activation of the unconscious is not in itself a pathological phenomenon.

Only when the dreamer is basically disturbed by the dreams, for instance in sleeping, or feels nervous the next day, can one speak of a real disturbance of the psychic equilibrium.

But that is not in itself a disquieting fact either, for the equilibrium can often be temporarily upset without there being any fear of a more deep-seated injury.

Yours truly,

C.G. Jung ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Page 182

Carl Jung on the Dreams and Death of a 62 Year Old Woman.

In my rather long psychological experience I have observed a great many people whose unconscious psychic activity I was able to follow into the immediate presence of death.

As a rule the approaching end was indicated by those symbols which, in normal life also, proclaim changes of psychological condition—rebirth symbols such as changes of locality, journeys, and the like.

I have frequently been able to trace back for over a year, in a dream-series, the indications of approaching death, even in cases where such thoughts were not prompted by the outward
situation.

Dying, therefore, has its onset long before actual death.

Moreover, this often shows itself in peculiar changes of personality which may precede death by quite a long time.

On the whole, I was astonished to see how little ado the unconscious psyche makes of death.

It would seem as though death were something relatively unimportant, or perhaps our psyche does not bother about what happens to the individual.

But it seems that the unconscious is all the more interested in how one dies; that is, whether the attitude of consciousness is adjusted to dying or not.

For example, I once had to treat a woman of sixty-two.

She was still hearty, and moderately intelligent.

It was not for want of brains that she was unable to understand her dreams.

It was unfortunately only too clear that she did not want to understand them.

Her dreams were very plain, but also very disagreeable.

She had got it fixed in her head that she was a faultless mother to her children, but the children did not share this view at all, and the dreams too displayed a conviction very much to the contrary.

I was obliged to break off the treatment after some weeks of fruitless effort because I had to leave for military service (it was during the war).

In the meantime the patient was smitten with an incurable disease, leading after a few months to a moribund condition which might bring about the end at any moment.

Most of the time she was in a sort of delirious or somnambulistic state, and in this curious mental condition she spontaneously resumed the analytical work.

She spoke of her dreams again and acknowledged to herself everything that she had previously denied to me with the greatest vehemence, and a lot more besides.

This self-analytic work continued daily for several hours, for about six weeks.

At the end of this period she had calmed herself, just like a patient during normal treatment, and then she died. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 809