[Carl Jung’s dreams of the thorny problem of the relationship between eternal man, the self and earthly man in time.]
In one dream, which I had in October 1958, I caught sight from my house of two lens-shaped metallically gleaming disks, which hurtled in a narrow arc over the house and down to the lake.
They were two UFOs (Unidentified Flying Objects).
Then another body came flying directly toward me. It was a perfectly circular lens, like the objective of a telescope.
At a distance of four or five hundred yards it stood still for a moment, and then flew off.
Immediately afterward, another came speeding through the air: a lens with a metallic extension which led to a box a magic lantern.
At a distance of sixty or seventy yards it stood still in the air, pointing straight at me.
I awoke with a feeling of astonishment. Still half in the dream, the thought passed through my head: “We always think that the UFOs are projections of ours. Now it turns out that we are their projections. I am projected by the magic lantern as C. G. Jung. But who manipulates the apparatus?”
I had dreamed once before of the problem of the self and the ego.
In that earlier dream I was on a hiking trip. I was walking along a little road through a hilly landscape; the sun was shining and I had a wide view in all directions.
Then I came to a small wayside chapel. The door was ajar, and I went in.
To my surprise there was no image of the Virgin on the altar, and no crucifix either, but only a wonderful flower arrangement.
But then I saw that on the floor in front of the altar, facing me, sat a yogi in lotus posture, in deep meditation.
When I looked at him more closely, I realized that he had my face. I started in profound fright, and awoke with the thought:
“Aha, so he is the one who is meditating me. He has a dream, and I am it.” I knew that when he awakened, I would no longer be.
I had this dream after my illness in 1944. It is a parable: My self retires into meditation and meditates my earthly form.
To put it another way: it assumes human shape in order to enter three-dimensional existence, as if someone were putting on a diver’s suit in order to dive into the sea.
When it renounces existence in the hereafter, the self assumes a religious posture, as the chapel in the dream shows.
In earthly form it can pass through the experiences of the three-dimensional world, and by greater awareness take a further step toward realization.
The figure of the yogi, then, would more or less represent my unconscious prenatal wholeness, and the Far East, as is often the case in dreams, a psychic state alien and opposed to our own.
Like the magic lantern, the yogi’s meditation “projects” my empirical reality.
As a rule, we see this causal relationship in reverse: in the products of the unconscious we discover mandala symbols, that is, circular and quaternary figures which express wholeness, and whenever we wish to express wholeness, we employ just such figures.
Our basis is ego-consciousness, our world the field of light centered upon the focal point of the ego.
From that point we look out upon an enigmatic world of obscurity, never knowing to what extent the shadowy forms we see are caused by our consciousness, or possess a reality of their own.
The superficial observer is content with the first assumption. But closer study shows that as a rule the images of the unconscious are not produced by consciousness, but have a reality and spontaneity of their own, Nevertheless, we regard them as mere marginal phenomena.
The aim of both these dreams is to effect a reversal of the relationship between ego-consciousness and the unconscious, and to represent the unconscious as the generator of the empirical personality.
This reversal suggests that in the opinion of the “other side,” our unconscious existence is the real one and our conscious world a kind of illusion, an apparent reality constructed for a specific purpose, like a dream which seems a reality as long as we are in it.
It is clear that this state of affairs resembles very closely the Oriental conception of Maya.
Unconscious wholeness therefore seems to me the true spiritus rector of all biological and psychic events.
Here is a principle which strives for total realization which in man’s case signifies the attainment of total consciousness.
Attainment of consciousness is culture in the broadest sense, and self-knowledge is therefore the heart and essence of this process.
The Oriental attributes unquestionably divine significance to the self, and according to the ancient Christian view self-knowledge is the road to knowledge of God. ~Carl Jung, Memories Dreams and Reflections