While we are asleep in this world, we are awake in another one.
– Jorge Luis Borges
Carl Jung, that humanist with imagination back in the day, placed a very heavy importance on dreams and dreaming. This stress on the dream life (and the discovery of Freud’s tumbling of Jung’s wife, and Jung’s tumbling of an acolyte) caused a huge rift between himself and his mentor Sigmund Freud.
Freud held the opinion that all dreams were sexual in nature, but Jung saw them as the subconcious finding ways to encourage the organism to grow, heal and develop spiritually.
In this I am with Jung.
I am particularly interested in my own dreams, because there always seems to be some kind of message there; however, sometimes dreams I think can be flights of the imagination and nothing more.
For me, my dreams are mostly either prophetic, full of message and metaphor, or in terms of Jung’s assertion, rich with archetype.
It has been interesting to say the least. Whereever possible I’ve been recording the dreams. I’ve created this new category for my blog’s entries, that encompasses this new delving into the internal landscape of me.
I am particularly interested in my dreams, because it seems like understanding them, or at least acknowledging them, is showing me the road, showing me things how they are.
I have mentioned before that the Yoruba believe the Egun, (the Ancestors) speak to us through our dreams. I believe this is because there is a group subconscious, a subconcious with no beginning and no end, that connects all of us together, as well as with all of those who went before. This group subconscious holds the keys to understanding one’s self and place in the Universe. Since they can only whisper to us in the waking world, they often choose to shout in ‘images’ in the sleeping world. I believe this is the closest we can come to understanding the messages they are sending for us, and well for me at any rate.
My dream life has been vividly interesting all my life, but particularly in the last year or so.
I realise now in retrospect, that I’ve been guided by them, without really realising it, yet being fully aware of it at the same time.
Chalk it up to intuition, or spirits, or whatever you like; SOMEONE is looking out for me.
Starter links for dream research:
http://www.thezodiac.com/mundus.htm
http://www.paralumun.com/dreamjung.htm
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