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A very important case came to me from a man who was himself a psychiatrist. One day he brought me a handwritten booklet he had received as a Christmas present from his 10-year old daughter. It contained a whole series of dreams she had when she was eight. They made up the weirdest series of dreams that I had ever seen, and I could well understand why her father was more than just puzzled by them. Though childlike, they were uncanny, and they contained images whose origin was wholly incomprehensible to the father. Here are the relevant motifs from the dreams:

1. "The evil animal," a snakelike monster with many horns, kills and devours all other animals. But God comes from the four corners, being in fact four seperate gods, and gives rebirth to all the dead animals.

2. An ascent into heaven, where pagan dances are being celebrated; and a descent into hell, where angels are doing good deeds.

3. A horde of small animals frightens the dreamer. The animals increase to a tremendous size, and one of them devours the little girl.

4. A small mouse is penetrated by worms, snakes, fishes and human beings. Thus the mouse becomes a human. This portrays the four stages of the evolution of mankind.

5. A drop of water is seen, as it appears when looked at through a microscope. The girl sees that the drop is full of tree branches. This portrays the origin of the world.

6. A bad boy has a clod of earth and throws bits of it at everyone who passes. In this way all the passer-by become bad.

7. A drunken woman falls into the water and comes out renewed and sober.

8. The scene is America, where many people are rolling on an ant heap, attacked by the ants. The dreamer, in a panic, falls into a river.

9. There is a desert on the moon where the dreamer sinks so deeply into the ground that she reaches hell.

10. In this dream the girl has a vision of a luminous ball. She touches it. Vapours emanate from it. A man comes out and kills her.

11. The girl dreams she is dangerously ill. Suddenly birds come out of her skin and cover her completely.

12. Swarms of gnats obscure the sun, the moon and all the stars except one. That star falls upon the dreamer.

In the unabridged German original, each dream begins with the words of the old fairy tale: "Once upon a time...." By these words the little dreamer suggests that she feels as if each dream were a sort of fairy tale, which she wants to tell her father as a Christmas present. The father tried to explain the dreams in terms of their context. But he could not do so, for there seemed to be no personal associations to them.

The possibility that these dreams were conscious elaborations can of course be ruled out only by someone who knows the child well enough to be absolutely sure of her truthfulness. (They would, however, remain a challenge to our understanding even if they were fantasies.) In this case, the father was convinced that the dreams were authentic, and I have no reason to doubt it. I knew the little girl myself, but this was before she gave her dreams to her father, so that I had no chance to ask her about them. She lived abroad and died of an infectious disease about a year after that Christmas.

Her dreams have a decidedly peculiar character. Their leading thoughts are markedly philosophic in concept. The first one, for instance, speaks of an evil monster killing other animals, but God gives rebirth to them all through divine Apokatastasis, or restitution. In the Western world this idea is known through the Christian tradition. It can be found in Acts of the Apostles III:21: "[Christ] whom the heaven must receive until the time of restitution of all things...." The early Greek Fathers of the Church (for instance, Origen) particularly insisted upon the idea that, at the end of time, everything will be restored by the Redeemer to its original and perfect state.

But, according to Matthew XVII:11, there was already an old Jewish tradition that Elias "truly shall first come, and restore all things." I Corinthians XV:22 refers to the same idea in the following words: "For as in Adam, all things die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive."

One might guess that the child had encountered this thought in her religious education. But she had very little religious background. Her parents were Protestant in name; but in fact they knew the bible only in hearsay. It is particularly unlikely that the recondite image of Apokatastasis had been explained to the little girl. Certainy her father had never heard of this mythical idea.

Nine of the 12 dreams are influenced by the theme of destruction and restoration. And none of these dreams shows traces of specific Christian education or influence. On the contrary, they are more closely related to primitive myths. This relation is corroborated by the other motif- the "cosmogonic myth" (the creation of the world and of man) that appears in the fourth and fifth dreams. The same connection is found in I Corinthians XV :22, which I have just quoted. In this passage too, Adam and christ (death and resurrection) are linked together.

The general idea of Christ the Redeemer belongs to the world-wide and pre-Christ theme of the hero and rescuer who, although he has been devoured by a monster, appears again in a miraculous way, having overcome whatever monster it was that swallowed him. When and where such a motif originated, nobody knows. We do not even know how to go about investigating the problem. The one apparent certainty is that every generation seems to have known it as a tradition handed down from some preceding time. Thus we can safely assume that it "originated" at a period when man did not yet know that he possesed a hero myth; in an age, that is to say, when he did not yet consciously reflect on what he was saying. The hero figure is an archetype, which has existed since time immemorial.

The production of archetypes by children is especially significant, because one can sometimes be quite certain that a child has had no direct access to the tradition concerned. In this case, the girl's family had no more than a superficial acquaintance with the christian tradition. Christian themes may, of course, be represented by such ideas as God, angels, heaven, hell, and evil. But the way in which they are treated by this child points to a totally non-Christian origin.

Let us take the first dream of the God who really consists of the four gods coming from the "four corners." The corners of what? There is no room mentioned in the dream. A room would not even fit with the picture of what is obviously a cosmic event, in which the Universal Being himself intervenes. The quarternary ( or element of "fourness") itself is a strange idea, but one that plays a great role in many religions and philosophies. In the christian religion, it has been superceded by the Trinity, a notion that we must assume was known to the child. But who in an ordinairy middle-class family of today would be likely to know of a divine quaternary? It is an idea that was once fairly familiar among students of the Hermetic philosophy in the Middle Ages, but it petered with the beginning of the 18th century, and has been entirely obsolete for at least 200 years. Where, then, did the little girl pick it up? From Ezekiels vision? But there is no Christian teachin teaching that identifies the seraphim with God.

The same question may be asked about the horned serpent. In the Bible, it is true, there are many horned animals- in the Book of Revelation, for instance. But all these seem to be quadruped, although their overlord is the dragon, the Greek word for which (drakon) also means serpent. The horned serpent appears in 16th century Latin alchemy as the quadricornutus serpens (four horned serpent), a symbol of Mercury and an antagonist of the Christian Trinity. But this is an obscure reference. So far as I can discover, it is made by only one author and this child had no way of knowing it.

In the second dream, a motif appears that is definitely non-Christian and that contains a reversal of accepted values- for instance, pagan dances by men in heaven and good deeds by angels in hell. This symbol suggests a relativity of moral values. where did the child find such a revolutionary notion, worthy of Nietzsche's genius?

these questions lead us to another: What is the compensatory meaning of these dreams, to which the little girl obviously attributed so much importance that she presented them to her father as a Christmas present?

If the dreamer had been a primitive medicine man, one could reasonably assume that they represent variations of the themes of death, of resurrection or restitution, of the origin of the world, the creation of man and the relativity of values. But one might give up such dreams as hopelessly difficult if one tried to interpret them from a personal level. They undoubtedly contain "collective images" and they are in a way analogous to the doctrines taught to young people in primitive tribes when they are about to be initiated as men. At such times they learn about what God, or the gods, or the "founding" animals have done, how the world and man was created, how the end of the world will come and the meaning of death. Is there any occasion when we, in Christian civilization, hand out similar instructions? There is: in adolescence. But many begin to think again of such things like this in an old age, at the approach of death.

The little girl, as it happened, was in both these situations. She was approaching puberty and, at the same time, the end of her life. Little or nothing in the symbolism of her dreams points to the beginning of a normal adult life, but there are many allusions to destruction and restoration. When I first read her dreams, indeed, I had the uncanny feeling that they suggested impending disaster. The reason I felt that was the peculiar nature of the compensation that I deduced from the symbolism. It was the opposite of what one would suspect to find in the consciousness of a girl of that age.

These dreams open up a new and rather terrifying aspect of life and death. One would expect to find such images in an aging person who looks back upon life, rather than be given them by a child who would normally be looking forward. Their atmosphere recalls the old Roman saying, "Life is but a short dream," rather than the joy and exuberance of its springtime. for this child's life was like a ver sacrum vovendum (the vow of vernal sacrifice), as the Roman poet puts it. Experience shows that the approach of death casts an adumbratio (an anticipatory shadow) over the life and dreams of the victim. Even an altar in Christian churches represents, on one hand, a tomb, and on the other, a place of resurrection- the transformation of death into eternal life.

Such are the dreams brought home to the child. they are preparation for death, expressed through short stories, like the tales told at primitive initiations or the Koans of Zen Buddhism. This message is unlike the orthodox christian doctrine and more like ancient primitive thought. It seems to have originated outside historical tradition in the long-forgotten psychic sources, that, since pre-historic times, have nourished philosophical and religious speculations about life and death.

Originally posted by Thurisaz
Sometimes the symbols are hard to understand but I feel the more you focus on trying to understand, the quicker answers come.

(from MAN AND HIS SYMBOLS, page 17)

It is easy to understand why dreamers tend to ignore and even deny the message of their dreams. consciousness naturally resists anything unconscious and unknown. I have already pointed out the existence among primitive peoples of what anthropologists call "misoneism," a deep and supersticious fear of novelty. The primitives manifest all the reactions of the animal against untoward events. but "civilized" man reacts to new ideas in much the same way, erecting psychological barriers to protect him from the shock of facing something new. This can easily be observed in any individuals reaction to his own dreams when obliged to admit a surprising thought. Many pioneers in philosophy, science, and even literature have been victim of the innate conservatism of their contemporaries. Psychology is one of the youngest of the sciences; because it attempts to deal with the working of the unconscious, it has inevitably encountered misoneism in an extreme form.

Originally posted by masqua
It takes a brave effort to go against the grain, especially when it puts into jeopardy thousands of years of accepted dogma.

To publicly state something which has become obvious to a researcher, but which also turns accepted dogma on its head, is a dangerous game which even today can easily become a life threatening experience.

Their findings threaten promoters of long established doctrines. They will fight tooth and nail to keep their stranglehold on anything which might somehow undermine their power.

Originally posted by Shar_Chi
So yeah, Jung is the 'swiss army knife' of psychology and the esoteric

by masqua
"For me to have had such a dream at age 5 is not normal. There is no way I could have known about the gas chambers, but the actuality of how people reacted in the gas chambers is well documented; small children often survived if they were covered in such a way that the gas could not reach them. I was born in 1946, in Holland.

This dream, to me at least, proves that something passed between that unfortunate young soul who suffered death and myself. Their consciousness was passed on to me."

CG Jung never denounced the primary belief which all Christians hold, but was no Christian himself even though his father was very involved with the Church (a parson). I am of the same mind, being an agnostic. I believe in God but do not believe in the seperation of God and the human soul. God, whether referred to as a male, a female or an asexual being, is the product of our desire to make deity in our own human form. This is also wrong, imo. God can't be defined because God is everything at once- past, present and future.

The Church assumes, not altogether without reason, that the fact of semel credidisse (having once believed) leaves certain traces behind it: but of these traces nothing is to be seen in the broad march of events. Christian civilization has proved hollow to a terrifying degree: it is all veneer, but the inner man has remained untouched and therefore unchanged. His soul is out of key with his external beliefs: in his soul the Christian has not kept pace with external developments. Yes, everything is to be found outside- in image and in word, in Church and Bible- but never inside. Inside reign the archaic gods, supreme as of old.

In other words, how can we say God is in everything but humans? God is not seperated from us, to be accessed only through the Church and the Bible. It makes no sense.

Once again, IR, we share something. We are BOTh artists and 'off-the-wall'.