I was the figure, himself deep in meditation
To H.A.F.
Dear Dr. F., 16 January 1959
Many thanks for kindly sending me your very interesting dream.
I found it especially worthy of note that you obviously felt this dream to be highly significant right from the start.
And so indeed it is, in so far as it pictures a phenomenon that is constantly recurring these days all over the world.
The motif of being “carried off,” for instance, occurs in widely believed reports in which the occupants of Ufos invite people to climb aboard in the friendliest manner and to make a round trip round the moon or to fly to Venus or Mars.
The occupants of these contraptions are either very beautiful “higher” men or else spiritual beings or angels.
These fairytale reports have the character of dreams of the same kind, such as yours.
The bird signifies the aerial, volatile spirit (in the chemical sense “spirit” is volatile, but it also designates the Spiritus Sanctus), whose physical and spiritual meanings are united in the alchemical spiritus Mercurialis.
The bird is a messenger of the gods, an angelus.
This image hints at some activity “in the Beyond” relating to your consciousness, which is thereby to be raised to a “higher” level, transported from the banal sphere of everyday life and wafted away from the rational world of the intellect.
In parallel dreams one is fetched into the Beyond, the “world of spirits, ” or experiences an illumination akin to a metanoia through the intervention of “higher beings.”
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.
The yogi would be a transcendental figure comparable to the meditant in the Chinese text of The Secret of the Golden Flower.
The crash is an indication that something coming down to earth from heaven, from the “Beyond,” is felt as a catastrophe.
According to other parallels this is the fire which descends to earth, like the outpouring of the Holy Ghost in the form of tongues of fire.
It produces smoke or fog, i.e., a “fogging” and obfuscation of consciousness, A disturbance of our orientation, turning eventually into panic and collective psychosis, a fall of the angels with apocalyptic consequences.
These symbolisms, which are cropping up everywhere nowadays,paint a picture of the end of time with its eschatological conceptions: destruction of the world, coming of the Kingdom of Heaven or of the world redeemer.
Finally a question: would you allow me to publish your dream in the event of a second edition of my UFO book?
With kind regards and again many thanks,
Yours sincerely,
C.G. Jung ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 476-477
