| Throughout history, many discoveries and much knowledge have come to individuals through dreams. Dreams illuminate, create, and inspire. Dreams are the sketch pads for innovative scientific breakthroughs and ingenious inventions. Freud believed that dreams helped individuals get more in touch with their past and their emotions. Jung concentrated on the universal symbols that reflected man's life stages and the underlying energy of the collective unconscious. Alfred Adler believed that dreams move dreamers to action, solving problems. Look to your dreams.
Jung's Dream House Anticipatory dreams, mentioned earlier are by no means unusual and most people have had them. Jung had many dreams of this type and for years they were a mystery to him. In one of them a new wing had been added to his house. "The unknown wing of the house was a part of my personality... it represented something that belonged to me but of which I was not yet conscious..." The library, a large and attractive room, was full of wonderful manuscripts. Jung had this dream many times and could make nothing of it untill he began to study alchemy. In 1926 he had another dream of a similar type and in trying to understand it he read "ponderous tomes" on religion and philosophy and some on alchemy, without enlightenment. " I regarded alchemy as something off the beaten track, rather silly..." A year or two later Richard Wilhelm sent him a translation of an ancient text on Chinese Alchemy entitled The Secret of the Golden Flower. Reading this remarkable book aroused Jung's interest in alchemy and he began to collect the writings of alchemists. Bit by bit he acquired a large collection--probably the largest in private ownership--of sixteenth and seventeenth century alchemical texts. His knowledge of Latin, including medieval Latin, enabled him to read those old books. At first he thought it a lot of rubbish, but he persisted. Working along philological lines he made a lexicon of key phrases with cross references, and very slowly he got the meaning of these obscure texts. He was thrilled by his discovery: "I had stumbled upon the historical counterpart of my psychology of the unconscious...when I pored over these old texts everything fell into place: the fantasy-images, the empirical material I had gathered in my practice, and the conclusions I had drawn from it...The primordial images and the nature of the archetype took a central place in my researches, and it became clear to me that without history there can be no psychology, and certainly no psychology of the unconscious..." He writes: "There was an 'alchymical' philosophy, the groping precursor of the most modern psychology...the transformation of personality through the blending and fusion of the noble with the base components, of the differentiated with the inferior functions, of the conscious with the unconscious." Jung's Interest In Alchemy from the book What Jung Really Said |
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