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The Way of the Dream by Marie-Louise von Franz
How long have you been studying dreams?
Well, I think about thirty years. I have figured out that I have interpreted approximately something like sixty-five thousand dreams. That’s a minimum. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, The Way of the Dream, Page 9
If you analyze dreams of artists or creative scientists, for example, very often you find that new ideas are revealed to them in their dreams. They don’t figure them out in their computer. Rather they come from the unconscious as so-called “sudden ideas.” ~Marie-Louise von Franz, The Way of the Dream, Page 11
The dreams cannot protect us from the vicissitudes and illnesses and sad events of human existence. But they do give us a guiding line on how to cope with them, how to find a meaning in our life, how to fulfill our own destiny, how to follow our own star, so to speak, in order to realize the greater potential of life within us. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, The Way of the Dream, Page 11-12
When I first met Jung, he explained a case of a woman who had a vision, and he interpreted her vision to me. That gave me a shock, for I suddenly realized that for him inner events, like visions or dreams, were the reality. They were a reality as well as what we call the outer reality. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, The Way of the Dream, Page 12
I think it’s like all the sciences; only an elite will go into the intricacies and the scientific complications of dream interpretation and the questions it raises. It’s a profession and it needs professional skill. The man in the street cannot pick it up and know it as well. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, The Way of the Dream, Page 14
That’s why, in general, one should not interpret one’s own dreams. Dreams generally point to our blind spot. They never tell us what we already know. They tell us what we don’t know. But when people interpret their own dreams they tend to say, “Yes, I know what that means.” ~Marie-Louise von Franz, The Way of the Dream, Page 14
He himself often complained bitterly, “I have no Jung to interpret my dreams.” So he used to tell his dreams to his pupils, and even if they said something stupid, it might give him another slant on his dream and make him more objective. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, The Way of the Dream, Page 15-16
The trouble with interpreting your own dreams is that you can’t see your own back. If you show it to another person, he can see it, but you can’t. And dreams point to your back, to what you don’t see, and you have to stand on your head, so to speak, to understand your own dreams. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, The Way of the Dream, Page 16
We are now discovering that the dream world is the most beneficent thing on earth, and that attending to one’s dreams is the healthiest thing one can do. But the dream world can also devour a person by way of daydreaming, spinning neurotic fantasies, or chasing unrealistic ideas. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, The Way of the Dream, Page 16
The dream world is beneficent and healing only if we have a dialogue with it but at the same time remain in actual life. We must not forget living. The duties of real living must not be neglected. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, The Way of the Dream, Page 16
It was always a surprising revelation that lasted as long as I worked with him [Jung]. Later, when he got old, I didn’t tell him so many dreams because I saw that it tired him. (Dream interpretation takes a real physical effort. It’s not just a mental exercise.) But in the first years of my analysis, the work mostly consisted of unraveling those Chinese messages of the night. I remember going to analysis in a tense, nervous, often depressed mood, and coming back after the hour with a feeling of “Ah, now I know, now I see where the whole thing is going.” ~Marie-Louise von Franz, The Way of the Dream, Page 13
Yes, I have had many dreams which changed my life, which I experienced as a great revelation. There is one in particular which I think is the biggest dream I ever had. That dream I dreamt between meeting Jung and asking him for analysis. I was eighteen, and on Christmas night I had what Jung would call an archetypal dream, a religious dream. It was a very long mythological descent into the underworld. One could sum it up as a descent into Hades, finding the mystical water of alchemy, and coming back with it. A kind of shamanistic journey into the land of death. I still consider it to be the biggest dream of my life. I woke up deeply shaken. I was so shaken that for a few hours I couldn’t move. I had to stay in bed shivering until I had the courage to get up and put my clothes on again. I told that dream to Jung, but he never interpreted it in detail. He only said, “I knew you had something to do with alchemy. When I met you, I knew that was so. And now we see. ” And that dream laid the basis for a major work of my life, my collaboration with Jung on the symbolism of alchemy. ~The Way of the Dream, Page 17
In Jungian psychology, we have a technique. We compare the dream to a drama and examine it under three structural headings: first, the introduction or exposition-the setting of the dream and the naming of the problem; second, the peripeteia-that would be the ups and downs of the story; and finally, the lysis–the end solution or, perhaps, catastrophe. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, The Way of the Dream, Page 33
If you want to interpret your own dream, it’s best if you write the dream on one half of the paper, and then for every word in the dream write down your associations opposite. By associations I mean whatever comes to your mind spontaneously. ~ Marie-Louise von Franz, The Way of the Dream, Page 35-36
But there are also dreams in which the dreamer has no associations.
There are so-called archetypal dreams that have a mythological meaning, and with them generally people have no associations. ~ Marie-Louise von Franz, The Way of the Dream, Page 36
Because the dream never tells you what you know already. It always points to something you don’t know, a blind spot. It’s like trying to see your own back. You can show your back to the doctor and he can see what’s the matter with it, but you can’t see it. And your own psychological blind spot is like your back or your ass, so to speak, you sit on it but you cannot look at it. ~ Marie-Louise von Franz, The Way of the Dream, Page 38
It’s very difficult to interpret one’s own dream. If one has to, one has to, but it is most helpful to have another eye on it, even somebody who doesn’t know about dreams. For while you’re talking and explaining the dream to the other person, often its meaning suddenly becomes clear. ~ Marie-Louise von Franz, The Way of the Dream, Page 39
Jung, for instance, had nobody to interpret his dreams, so he often told them to a man who knew nothing about dreams. Jung said laughingly, “Just the off-the-point remarks of this man made me feel, ‘No, it isn’t that, but I know now what it is.'” ~ Marie-Louise von Franz, The Way of the Dream, Page 39
I think these books [Dream Dictionaries] are very, very bad. They get you off the track because they give a static interpretation. A snake means an illness, or means the death of a relative; breaking teeth means the loss of parents or whatever. There are now modern dictionaries which are a bit more differentiated, but still they have a fixed meaning. ~ Marie-Louise von Franz, The Way of the Dream, Page 39-40
The great danger of all psychological helping professions is the potential to interfere with the other person’s life. Think, for instance, of the idea of what is normal. A therapist may have an idea of normality and think the other person should become normal. That’s interference, that’s a power attitude. ~ Marie-Louise von Franz, The Way of the Dream, Page 40
For instance, the other day, I saw dreams of a little seven-year-old girl which were the dreams of a dying person. Now, actually she had had a cancer operation and will probably die within two or three years. I didn’t know it when I saw the dreams. They were most unusual. She had the dreams of an old, wise personality. ~ Marie-Louise von Franz, The Way of the Dream, Page 40
There is, for instance, a whole symbolism in Egypt-and you have allusions to it in the Bible-that man is like wheat: he blossoms, he is cut down by death, and from the roots he sprouts again. So the cycle of life and death and returning to eternal life has been projected onto the wheat. ~ Marie-Louise von Franz, The Way of the Dream, Page 67
But more frequently, if we read the histories of gifted, outstanding people, they generally have trouble with other members of their families who misunderstand their outstanding fate. They are jealous of them and desire to hammer them into shape. ~ Marie-Louise von Franz, The Way of the Dream, Page 67
But as soon as he began to obey the dreams, his physical symptoms, including his impotence, disappeared. He was cured by completely changing his artistic style. He did not have to change his vocation. He had only to change his style. ~ Marie-Louise von Franz, The Way of the Dream, Page 68
The essence of a religious saying is that paradox which asserts the superiority of the spirit over matter. In the materialistic world, there is no such a thing as a virgin birth, but by asserting it is so, the religious saying asserts the priority of certain inner, spiritual things above outer, material things. ~ Marie-Louise von Franz, The Way of the Dream, Page 70
I remember the dream of a woman who dreamt that she saw a little mechanical animal. It was made of diamonds, but it was alive and walked around on the floor. She consulted Jung about the dream, and he said to her, “That is to prove to you that the impossible is possible. You are still too rational. You think such a thing cannot happen. You are not open to miracles, and there are miracles. In the realm of the psyche miracles can happen.” ~ Marie-Louise von Franz, The Way of the Dream, Page 70
Some people think that by attending to dreams, one becomes a solitary lunatic, a funny kind of autistic person who follows his own dream in an asocial way. But that is not true. Very often dreams suggest a relationship with someone or something which doesn’t occur to us at all in consciousness. They create social bonds and new social behavior just as they sometimes sever old social ties. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, The Way of the Dream, Page 71
Even now in the streets of Communist China there are specialists whom you can pay to have a dream interpreted, and from the interpretations I have read, they sound most modern. These interpreters are very good psychologists, and they have intuitions about the dreams of people which correspond completely to what we would say. ~ Marie-Louise von Franz, The Way of the Dream, Page 72
Now, all introverted individualists secretly envy the extravert because the extravert is more successful collectively. In general, introverts have a certain feeling of inferiority toward extraverts. Extraverts also have them toward the other, but they never admit it. ~ Marie-Louise von Franz, The Way of the Dream, Page 79
There are people who prefer to live their worst side, and then their shadow is positive. Criminals, for example, often live the worst side of their personality, and have a positive shadow. They have a well-meaning helper of man as a shadow figure. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, The Way of the Dream, Page 79
Aggression can also be completely split off. People then simply decide they have no affects, that they are not annoyed by anything. Feeling types do that. They like a harmonious surrounding, so even if their children and their partners annoy them madly, they just assume that they are not angry, that it doesn’t matter. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, The Way of the Dream, Page 92
But a man who has never freed himself from the mother cannot put the princess and the bitch together, so to speak. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, The Way of the Dream, Page 94
the princess Rapunzel is imprisoned by a witch. It’s the mother figure behind the scene which brings forth the constellation. And when this happens, both lovers cannot meet on earth. Only when Rapunzel has come down to earth from her tower and the prince has wandered around in the desert in misery and pain can they finally meet. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, The Way of the Dream, Page 94
Movies are our modern form of myths and fairy tales, and therefore movies which tell about the inner world, as fairy tales do, are attractive to the public, because we really need myths to have an orientation toward, a mapping out of, the dream world or the unconscious. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, The Way of the Dream, Page 94
Yes, wherever there is an institution, people tend to become infantile and wish to suck that institution for money, to ask for loans and stipends, to use it as benevolent mother. The universities are even called-or they were in the past called-alma mater, the benevolent mother. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, The Way of the Dream, Page 95
We are still living in an age, at the end of an age, where the opposites, Jupiter and Saturn, good and evil, spirit and instinctive physical drive, are in great opposition. We are torn apart by opposites, which in political terms would amount to having a war at any minute. We have even on one side of the Iron Curtain an anti-Christian principle ruling, and on the other side officially still, a Christian outlook ruling. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, The Way of the Dream, Page 97
That is one way certain men escape the devouring mother. They do not slay the dragon; they outwit the dragon. They build up a kind of mental, masculine realm of their own where their mothers cannot follow them. Nowadays, they might be the men who study theoretical physics and become very intelligent. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, The Way of the Dream, Page 99
Funeral rites are one of these great rituals. The symbolic performances are to help the dead person get away from this earth into the beyond and also to aid the survivors in reestablishing their psychic balance. The ritual has really a therapeutic function; it protects man from the dangerous invasions of the unconscious. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, The Way of the Dream, Page 103
And so all rituals on earth are healing gestures. They are symbolic performances which heal the psychic wounds and help us to make the great transitions in life. But through the activities of our missions and the giving up of our Christian rites we have destroyed the rituals, and more and more modern man is lost when he comes to such crucial situations as the death of a relative or making the step toward becoming adult or getting married. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, The Way of the Dream, Page 103
Well, we have not many sociological matriarchies. But I once read a book about a South American Indian tribe where there was actually a sociological (not religious but sociological) matriarchy. There the women were happy, fat whores ordering the men about, and the men were lean, submissive, nervous creatures who planted the fields and did the work for the women. On the positive side, there was earthly wealth and gratification of sexual drives. But on the negative side, there was no spirit whatsoever. It was a world of total stupidity, of only living; living very agreeably, but no thinking, no idea of spiritual realization at all. And the men, accordingly, were unhappy, submissive, rather poor creatures. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, The Way of the Dream, Page 104
Wisdom is closer to life. It is present when a man knows how to love women and knows how to relate to women and has wisdom at the same time, a wisdom which protects him from their devouring side. The highest form of love is also something with a grain of salt in it.
What do you mean by that?
I won’t say.
Psychologically, how do you explain love?
I flatly refuse to explain that! It’s above me. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, The Way of the Dream, Page 108
The constellations in the sky represent the background constellations of great historical events, as if in our deep unconscious we are not isolated, but we are somehow linked up with the whole of mankind and mankind is dreaming an ongoing dream. This is what accounts for the changes in politics and religions. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, The Way of the Dream, Page 111
Christianity was thought to have originated in a time of these extreme contrasts coming together, the dark and the light and the body and the spirit. Everything was torn apart into enormous opposites and conflicts. The whole idea was that the age of Christianity would be characterized first by the domination of Christ, the Jupiter spirit, and then by the anti-Christ, the Saturn spirit. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, The Way of the Dream, Page 112
The prominence of the moon in the sky in this dream can be seen as reflecting a collective situation, namely, the coming up of the feminine archetype. A typical characteristic of our time is the emergence of a strong feminine element. It can be seen both in the liberation of women and also in the psychology of men. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, The Way of the Dream, Page 114
His fate will have to do with an integration of the feminine principle, which is the moon. That fate is different from the Gilgamesh epic. At that time, the matriarchal world of unconsciousness had to be over¬ come by the hero. Nowadays, some four thousand years later, the situation is reversed. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, The Way of the Dream, Page 118
Jung called the male personification of the unconscious in a woman’s dreams the animus, which is the Latin word for “spirit.” ~Marie-Louise von Franz, The Way of the Dream, Page 143
Like the anima in a man, the animus exhibits four stages of development. In Man and His Symbols, Dr. von Franz outlines these stages:
He first appears as a personification of mere physical power, for instance, as an athletic champion or “muscle man. ” In the next stage he possesses initiative and the capacity for planned action. In the third stage, the animus becomes the “word” . . . and finally, in his fourth manifestation, the animus is the incarnation of meaning. On this highest level he becomes (like the anima) a mediator of the religious experience whereby life acquires a new meaning. He gives the woman spiritual firmness, an invisible inner support that compensates for her outer softness. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, The Way of the Dream, Page 143
On this highest level the inner man acts as a bridge to the Self. He personifies a woman’s capacities of courage, spirit, and truth and connects her to the source of her personal creativity. But, like the vampire anima in a man, the animus in his negative form is a parasite. He personifies brutality, coldness, and obstinacy, and paralyzes a woman’s growth. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, The Way of the Dream, Page 144
To transform the animus involves immense suffering, for it means nothing less than forsaking an old identity for a new one. It takes a great deal of courage. But the journey is well undertaken for the rewards are immeasurable. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, The Way of the Dream, Page 144
Well, I would say the modern style in Western societies, and beginning also now in China and in the Marxist societies, is to organize the masses with computers and discourage every personal feeling. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, The Way of the Dream, Page 152
It reminds us of what Jung once said, “There is no difficulty that does not ultimately stem from ourselves.” We are our own difficulty. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, The Way of the Dream, Page 151
In other words, the animus, her own masculinity, would be a problem to her. Such a woman would tend to behave toward herself as her father behaved toward her. If the father was tyrannical, even after his death, -the woman would still tyrannize herself with ideas and opinions which came from the father image. . ~Marie-Louise von Franz, The Way of the Dream, Page 156
the cat often is an image of something feminine, independent and sure of itself, just what modern women so often lack. That’s why the cat goddess comes up in women’s dreams as a positive model of feminine behavior. It is not brutal; it does not display any masculine features. It is feminine and, at the same time, very firm, very identical with itself. The cat is not very amiable, but very true to itself. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, The Way of the Dream, Page 157
The negative animus behaves here like a jealous lover. He wants to keep the woman for himself by cutting her off from all men. When she has some loving feelings toward any man, then up comes this “You should not do that” animus. Or it’s projected. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, The Way of the Dream, Page 158
Now, the animus is the most frequent form of possession in a woman. She is suddenly entered by a mood of cold male determination, taken over by abstract, opinionated thinking, and driven by an impulse toward rash, brutal, determined action-none of which is at all in her feminine character. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, The Way of the Dream, Page 160
When a woman gets possessed by the animus, the feminine character of her face changes, her eyes and the expression of her mouth become hard. I notice that when I get in the animus I pull up my shoulders like somebody who is preparing for battle. When I do that, I say to myself, “Oh, oh, stop and relax.” ~Marie-Louise von Franz, The Way of the Dream, Page 161
Men say that when a woman is possessed by the negative animus she seems to have one goal and one goal only-to create an argument and then win at any cost, no holds barred. But, when the man fights back, the woman changes into a hurt little girl. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, The Way of the Dream, Page 161
When women are in the animus, they love to do that double play on a man. First they brutally attack, usually viciously with their tongues, and when the man hits back they become delicate, frightened little children being attacked by a brutal man, even though they attacked first. I call that the gangster animus. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, The Way of the Dream, Page 161
One comes to families where there is a happy family life and one can’t understand why the children suddenly become neurotic and go wrong, but if one digs up the situation, there are invisible affects behind the back of all the participants. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, The Way of the Dream, Page 162-163
Every woman in our society is bombarded with instructions telling her how to best raise her children. The television tells her, the magazines tell her, even her own mother has a list, “You should do this. You should do that!” The whole world tells her what she’s doing wrong. That’s the negative animus. Those collective opinions rape the woman of her own individual thoughts or feeling reactions. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, The Way of the Dream, Page 163
There is great psychological danger in the figures which Jung called animus and anima. These contrasexual elements can estrange a human being completely from reality and society. The animus, like the anima, is a very ambiguous, very dangerous inner figure which must be approached with great wisdom. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, The Way of the Dream, Page 165
Because we make friends with people who live out our shadow. Friends can do the things we cannot do. Tell me who your friends are, and I have the whole panorama of your good and bad qualities. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, The Way of the Dream, Page 172-173
The positive animus is an innermost instinctive awareness of the inner truth, a basic inner truthfulness which guides the spiritual woman in her individuation, toward becoming her own self. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, The Way of the Dream, Page 176
A modern woman with children has a difficult task, for on the one hand she wishes to fulfill the demands of her maternal nature and, at the same time, develop her own personality. I feel she should maintain a balance. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, The Way of the Dream, Page 179
Now, here is the symbol of the inner Christ in the depths of the soul. He is not out there in the sky, as Christian teaching wants to have it, or in some metaphysical spiritual realm. He is in the depths of the earth, and the earth is an image of matter, of our body, of our physical existence. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, The Way of the Dream, Page 180
In former times the dog was probably accepted by man because of his hunting ability. He helped the hunting societies in their hunts, and later became the sheepdog who protected and kept the herds together, and also the watchdog, protecting man from robbers and burglars and danger. So the dog has become a cherished helper of man. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, The Way of the Dream, Page 181
Symbolically, dogs have a strange relationship to the other world, to the land of the dead, the land of the ghosts, the land where the dreams come from, to what we call the unconscious. This relationship stems from their instinctive nature. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, The Way of the Dream, Page 181
Gold is the only metal ancient people knew which is not corroded by old age or by acids. Gold can be buried for five thousand years and be absolutely unaltered, while silver, copper, and iron rust and disintegrate. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, The Way of the Dream, Page 182
In this case it is a male voice, but very often in the dreams of women, male angels direct the dreamer. If you think of the French saint Joan of Arc, for instance, she was guided by the archangel Michael, who advised her in her political and heroic career. That is the positive animus, whom I would call an innermost instinctive awareness of the inner truth, a basic inner truthfulness which guides the spiritual woman in her individuation toward becoming her own self. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, The Way of the Dream, Page 183-184
Well, certainly a woman should be educated and have a career, but she should not be possessed by it. She should not be carried away by it. Otherwise she loses her feminine identity. But if she keeps her feminine identity, then her career adds a spiritual dimension of activity, intelligence, and willpower to her personality, all positive qualities. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, The Way of the Dream, Page 185
Jung was always very much in favor of women studying. He said that women who don’t have a career or study or have a profession have generally a very negative animus. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, The Way of the Dream, Page 185
A woman who has no animus has no pep, no enterprise, no intelligence, no initiative. She is a very poor creature. She is just a womb producing children and a hand cooking in the kitchen. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, The Way of the Dream, Page 185
The whole spirituality of women is connected with the animus. So you can say that in a woman, the animus, her masculine side, extends from Devil to Holy Ghost. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, The Way of the Dream, Page 185
The whole rhythm of North American life is too hectic for a woman. It damages women more than men. It’s not good for men either, but it damages women even more. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, The Way of the Dream, Page 193
Men fear the woman’s earthiness. Her earthiness is her power, her connection with earthy reality, and men fear it because, as Jung realized, women are really the tougher sex. That’s why men are afraid of the earthy side of women. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, The Way of the Dream, Page 195
By binding the feet of the upper-class Chinese girls, they transformed them into butterflies, into delicate, unearthly, romantic creatures. But for the women this was a mutilation, and naturally the geishas are completely mutilated. They had to repress all their natural feminine reactions in order to play the geisha role. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, The Way of the Dream, Page 192
People move about too much; women have very little chance to establish their roots in the earth, in a garden, in a house, in a community, in a surrounding where they can stay. This constant moving rather pleases men, but is very unfortunate for women. It damages their instincts. Then women want to replace it by sex, because that is their last possibility of having a connection with their own bodies, a confirmation of their own physical existence. But it’s a desperate move which is a surrogate for something quite different. It’s a surrogate for having no feminine life, no feminine rhythm of life. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, The Way of the Dream, Page 193
If a woman has not a strong connection to her own instinctive feminine nature, she falls for that kind of nonsense. And then she runs her relationships by trying to conquer men. She puts them in her pocket and then boasts to her girlfriends about it. This, of course, has nothing to do with her real feminine feelings. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, The Way of the Dream, Page 194
A woman can now live her sexual life as she likes; that is no longer a problem. Now comes the much bigger problem: the liberation of the heart. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, The Way of the Dream, Page 195
I think that is the number one problem of the Aquarian Age. The only thing which might save us, in the East and the West, from falling into an overly rational, overly organized mass society which suffocates the individual is a reevaluation of the importance of personal feeling. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, The Way of the Dream, Page 196
There is still a lot of research to be done, but I have noted my own dreams for forty years, and some of my analysands have taken down their dreams regularly over years. I also have about three thousand eight hundred dreams given to me by a patient who died. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, The Way of the Dream, Page 210
Between thirty-five and forty, dreams shift to an adaptation toward the inner life, to finding the meaning of one’s own life. Nowadays, however, the inner life sometimes becomes urgent even for young people. We are so crushed by the mass-mindedness of our civilization due to the problem of overpopulation that many of us feel superfluous. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, The Way of the Dream, Page 211
But by reading the pattern, by making it conscious, by interpreting the dreams, we cannot escape our fate, but we can give it a more positive meaning. It makes a difference whether we say yes to our fate and fulfill it positively, or say no and are dragged by it against our will. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, The Way of the Dream, Page 213
Well, I have just started a study of the last dreams of people before they enter the coma. The dreams of dying people are not about death, but generally about a journey. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, The Way of the Dream, Page 213
It’s only the warm-blooded animal body which is going to decay, but not you yourself. ” Jung made this interpretation because the dreamer’s consciousness still existed in the dream. He was able to look at the corpse. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, The Way of the Dream, Page 213
The dream seems to tell her, “Yes, the candle of your life is flickering. It’s going out. But life will continue in another medium, in another sphere. Beyond the isolating threshold of the window, that very same life will be going on.” ~Marie-Louise von Franz, The Way of the Dream, Page 214
Many psychological schools don’t bother about old or dying people, because they think they have no further need of adaptation to life. After all, sex problems don’t exist when you’re on your deathbed. But you can see that the voice of nature or the voice of instinct, which is the dream, helps the people to die in peace. It comforts them. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, The Way of the Dream, Page 214
After that experience I would say that even if people have death dreams, it might only mean that they should face death. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, The Way of the Dream, Page 215
Sometimes I get a gruesome shiver when people tell me a death dream, as if my sympathetic nervous system is saying, “Watch out, this really means death.” ~Marie-Louise von Franz, The Way of the Dream, Page 216
I would say that it seems to me from the dreams that there is a life after death. I think that dreams do not cheat, and because they are not wish fulfillments, there must be an aspect of life or the psyche going on. The question I would not dare to answer unequivocally is, “Does life go on impersonally, or does individual identity continue?” The dreams give contradictory evidence about that. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, The Way of the Dream, Page 216
Dreams are the voice of our instinctive animal nature or ultimately the voice of cosmic matter in us. This is a very daring hypothesis, but I’ll venture to say that the collective unconscious and organic atomic matter are probably two aspects of the same thing. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, The Way of the Dream, Page 217
This inner wife who is crucified is the dreamer’s soul. It is his anima. The anima in a man is his feeling personality, his sensitivity, his awareness of inner things. If a man has a positive relationship to his anima, he is receptive to the spiritual processes in the depth of the psyche. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, The Way of the Dream, Page 221
Why should we not wake up and be somebody else? We are completely continuous with ourselves. So there is something which apparently carries our identity through all our life. Even though our body changes its cells every seven years and we have practically no old cells left in our body after seven years, we still remain ourselves. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, The Way of the Dream, Page 222
