The archetypes always appear as mythological figures or motifs.
A. CHILDREN’S DREAMS
Further remarks on the interpretation of dreams1
(Professor Jung)
Professor Jung: We are dealing here with children’s dreams of a particular
kind, which are very often not understood correctly, because
it is thought that these dreams are being observed in children—that
is, are directly recorded by the father or the mother. We are not dealing
with such dreams, however, but with children’s dreams that have
been remembered by adults. So a selection of these dreams has already
been made. These are dreams that have stood the test of time
and persisted. If someone had written down the dreams of your childhood,
for instance, and you read these notes again later, they would
be completely foreign to you, and you yourself would not be able to
remember them. But some of the dreams have lingered on, as fresh as
on the first day. This is the kind of dreams we are dealing with here.
Partly I have collected these dreams myself, partly they have been
told to me by participants in the seminar.
As soon as the problem of
a dream is no longer acute, that is, it is solved and outgrown, the
dream vanishes from memory. If it still persists in memory, however,
the problem has not been solved, or the dream touched on something
that one perhaps still hasn’t understood yet, or never will. Phenom-
ena and contents are touched on that are completely unconscious for
ordinary mortals. And these things exert an enormous influence on
the shape of subsequent destiny and, therefore, get stuck in memory.
Such dreams are of special importance, because in a way their content
anticipates a problem of later life.
These dreams in particular make us understand why the ancients attributed a pronounced prognostic meaning to their dreams.
Throughout the whole of antiquity, and to a large extent still in the Middle Ages, it was believed that dreams foretell the future. Our consciousness is directed only outward, light only falls onto this world, but it throws no light backward, on the thinker of the thoughts and the doer of the deeds.
If consciousness does do it, however, it throws light on the basis of consciousness, on the unconscious, and there things may be brought to
life, just as we can enliven reality by observing it.
As far as the work with the dream is concerned, we first of all structure
the dream as a story, as a course of events; the dream is a drama
taking place on the inner stage, and a true drama of course always
has—like any course of action—a beginning, a middle, and an end.
So, to begin with, we determine the exposition of the dream, in which
the specific place, the time, specific persons, and a specific problem
are exposed.
Usually you can already find it in the first sentence of the dream. For you have to break down the text into sentences and thus work out the problem—it is about this and that. This is the first part. The second part is the development of the problem. This means: the problem stated at the beginning starts to have an effect, it gets complicated, the plot thickens, a certain development occurs.
This leads, in the third place, to the peripateia, a certain escalation that
may become truly dramatic: it leads to a climax in which the turn of
events then happens. The latter constitutes a change—it can be a
decision, for example, or something occurs that throws a completely
different light on the problem. This leads us to the fourth part, the
lysis, the result of the dream that, of course, is not final or complete
as in a conscious drama.
Most of the time, the end is somehow enigmatic,
not really satisfactory to our taste. But, in any case, this is the
result for that moment. In series, the end usually presents a new problem.
One is dead, or somebody else is dead, or something completely out of the way has happened. This then remains as a question. Some
impossible situation presents itself, and then we have to ask ourselves:
what will happen next? What can be done? An answer is given
by the next dream, perhaps the same night, after a hiatus. The second
dream takes the problem up again in a different form.
Once this structuring has been done, we can start to truly work on
the dream, that is, to look for the corresponding context for each
motif.
This is not the same as free association, which just leads you
from one thing to another; one doesn’t need a dream for that, but one
might as well let someone associate about a button, and one will of
course also arrive at the complexes. This does not prove at all that
these complexes are also represented in the dream. By free association
we won’t know yet what the dream means; because the dream
does not consist of the complexes, but represents the way in which
they are dealt with.
It represents what the unconscious does with the
complex and how it tries to solve the dilemma. Our look at the complex
is a look at the associative connections to the dream image. We
have to know what it means for somebody to dream of an elephant,
not what I as an analyst think about an elephant, but what connections
it has for the person who had the dream. Perhaps one had been
to a zoo the evening before, the other had been in the wilderness and
had an experience with an elephant, or a third had been told by his
wife: you are such a clumsy elephant, and so on.
For each of them the
elephant means something different. You have to carefully inquire
about the events of the previous day. In recording these contexts, you
have to encourage the person whose dream you analyze not to make
free associations, but always to stay with the image. For the dream
image is nothing accidental, otherwise we’d have to say that anything
in nature is accidental, a chaos, and that there is no explanation.
We have to assume that the dreams take place in a world according
to laws, that there exists a certain causality, not just pure
arbitrariness. There are specific reasons why the dream is precisely
what it is, and not something different. Now when you investigate
the single dream images with regard to the context, you will find that
certain contents—not in all dreams by far—are of an archetypal nature,
meaning that these latter forms of ideas are of a collective nature and can be found everywhere.
Naturally, you will not be able to recognize them if you aren’t already knowledgeable about such ideas. One has to have the corresponding material at one’s fingertips in order to recognize archetypal figures. This gives the dream an additional, very special character. You can then determine into which depths the dream reaches.
The archetypes always appear as mythological figures or motifs. ~Carl Jung, Children’s Dream Seminar, Page 379-382
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