Healing Within the Blur

Dream is “a fragment of involuntary psychic activity, just conscious enough to be reproducible in the waking state. Of all psychic phenomena the dream presents perhaps the largest number of “irrational” factors.”

…reflects the autonomy of the unconscious; not only fails to obey will, but often stands in flagrant opposition to our conscious intentions. As such COMPENSATION expresses perhaps the single point of the dream. suggests attempts to balance and compare different data or points of view so as to produce an adjustment or a rectification.

The essential content of the dream-action, as I have shown above, is a sort of finely attuned compensation of the one-sidedness, errors, deviations, or other shortcomings of the conscious attitude.

Analysis, including a systematic dream-analysis, is a “process of quickened maturation..”

Must have knowledge of mythology and folklore and understanding of the psychology of primitives and of comparative religion to grasp the essence of the individuation process, which, according to all we know, lies at the base of psychological compensation.

CW8 p. 561-566 Jung

Big dreams carry energy and images from deeper level, reflecting individuation process, where we find the mythological motifs or mythologems I have designated as archetypes.

…Such dreams occur mostly during the critical phase of life, in early youth, puberty, at the onset of middle age (thirty-six to forty), and within sight of death.

At these times, when the collective level breaks into consciousness, “expectations , and opinions of the personal consciousness, are stations along the road of the individuation process. This process is, in effect, the spontaneous realization of the whole man. The ego conscious personality is only a part of the whole man, and its life does not yet represent his total life. The more he is merely “I,” the more he splits himself off from the collective man, of whom he is also a part, and may even find himself in opposition to him. But since everything living strives for wholeness, the inevitable one-sidedness of our conscious life is continually being corrected and compensated by the universal human being in us, whose goal is the ultimate integration of conscious and unconscious, or better, the assimilation of the ego to a wider personality….(in understanding big dreams)…they employ numerous mythological motifs that characterize the life of the hero, of that greater man who is semi-devine by nature. Here we find the dangerous adventures and ordeals such as occur in initiations. We meet dragons, helpful animals, and demons; also the Wise Old Man, the animal-man, the wishing tree the hidden treasure, the well, the cave, the walled garden, the transformative processes and substances of alchemy, and so forth…”

Jung “On the Nature and of Dreams”, CW Vol. 8 p. 281-297.

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