In our dreams we inhabit an interior world without being aware that we do so
When we plunge back into the world of dreams, our ego and our consciousness, being late products of human development, are broken down again.
In our dreams we inhabit an interior world without being aware that we do so, for all the figures in the dream are the images, symbols, and projections of interior processes.
Similarly the world of the dawn man is very largely an interior world experienced outside himself, a condition in which inside and outside are not discriminated from one another.
The feeling of oneness with the universe, the ability of all contents to change shape and place, in accordance with the laws of similarity and symbolic affinity, the symbolic character of the world, and the symbolic meaning of all spatial dimensions -high and low, left and right, etc.-the significance of colors, and so forth, all this the world of dreams shares with the dawn period of mankind.
Here as there, spiritual things take on “material” form, becoming symbols and objects.
Light stands for illumination, clothes stand for personal qualities, and so on.
Dreams can only be understood in terms of the psychology of the dawn period, which, as our dreams show, is still very much alive in us today.
The phase in which the ego germ is contained in the unconscious, like the embryo in the womb, when the ego has not yet appeared as a conscious complex and there is no tension between the ego system and the unconscious, is the phase we have designated as uroboric and pleromatic.
Uroboric, because it is dominated by the symbol of the circular snake, standing for total nondifferentiation, everything issuing from everything and again entering into everything, depending on everything, and connecting with everything; pleromatic, because the ego germ still dwells in the pleroma, in the “fullness” of the unformed God, and, as consciousness unborn, slumbers in the primordial egg, in the bliss of paradise.
The later ego deems this pleromatic existence to be man’s first felicity, for at this stage there is no suffering; suffering only comes into the world with the advent of the ego and ego experience ― Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness, Page 276-277
