[Carl Jung: I have seen quite a number of people who have never been born, who still live in that original sphere]
I know another instance, the dream of a girl about ten or eleven years old, which also repeated itself rather often.
She is in empty cosmic space, walking on something like a path, and far in the distance ahead of her, she sees a round light, which as she approaches becomes bigger and finally is an enormous globe that comes nearer and nearer, and of course she grows afraid.
Then when the globe is close to her, the path bifurcates and she doesn’t know whether she should go to the right or to the left, and in that moment she wakes up.
It is a nightmare.
This is a very typical dream of that kind: I call them cosmic dreams of childhood.
They are the archetypal experiences of children with strong memories of what the Tibetans would call the Bardo life, a prenatal condition of the mind, the condition before the birth into this spatial world.
hat shows itself first under its absolute aspect, an empty, dead world to which life is absolutely strange-particularly human life-and it explains also why man has a mind or a consciousness at all.
He must have something different, not of the same kind, or he would not be conscious.
He must have something which is at variance with the conditions of our space, and it is a fact that the psyche is at variance with the conditions of our space. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Pages 1203-1204.
I have seen quite a number of people who have never been born, who still live in that original sphere.
Of course they had a most miserable life, as you can imagine, but they were always blissfully unaware of it.
They were physically ill because the body naturally reacts against such mental unreality.
The body has to live in this reality, and the mind is in a primeval condition.
Very often one finds cases where it is a matter of a partial or a sort of fragmentary birth, when a part of the mental personality has remained in the primeval world which then forms a sort of inclusion, a sort of enclave in the conscious world.
Such people are perfectly adapted and apparently normal, but they have peculiar dreams.
The more normal they are, the more they are afraid of that inclusion; and the more abnormal they are, the less it frightens them.
The inclusion is like an island belonging to another world which is included in their own world but in no way attached.
It is something perfectly strange.
One cannot say that such cases are frequent, but they are not very rare.
It is a fact which is hardly ever known, however-one seldom hears of it. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1202.