LECTURE II 22 May 1929

Today we are going to continue our Dream.

We got stuck somewhere near the end.

There is only one part to which I want to call your attention.

You remember the memories of the dreamer’s life are kept in compartments, and in the dream they are divided by strings from which hang marionettes of policemen and soldiers, and these mark the divisions between the compartments.

The dreamer has an idea which is a sort of interpretation, but he has no associations.

What do you think is the meaning of that particular symbol?

The fact that his compartment psychology is divided by policemen and soldiers who obviously guard the compartment walls?

Dr. Schlegel: The guardians of morality. Policemen are the symbols of Conventional Morality.

Dr. Jung: Yes, and at this point I’ll make a ‘joke,” like the old German professor.

It is the story of a Zurich father who when his son came of age, said to him, “Now you are entering life and you have got to know something. Stupid people believe that the Bible will tell you what is right and what is wrong, but for the more intelligent people there is the penal code, and that is all there is to it.”

That boy went into life convinced that policemen and soldiers stood for morality.

Formerly the police were enough to enforce it, but now people don’t believe in authority, so we have more soldiers and machine-guns.

The penal code is surely the idea in the dream; this man has the conventional notion of morality.

But why do the policemen and soldiers mark these compartments?

An interesting bit of psychology in itself, for according to the dream these compartments are due to the presence of policemen and soldiers.

How do you explain that?

Dr. Schmitz: I would say that he is now so far that he understands that the police and soldiers are not enough. Now he makes his own compartments, and the soldiers and policemen are merely marionettes hanging there. To have one’s own compartment is objectionable, but it is better than to believe in police authority. He has made progress.

Dr. Jung: Yes, marionettes are dead things, save for their manipulation by a living hand.

The soldiers and policemen are no longer important, and the unconscious sees that fact.

But my question is, why is conventional morality producing compartments, for obviously that is what it is doing.

Dr. Schmitz: But that is the idea of bourgeois morality. It says, “Have brothels, but keep them in compartments away from your wife, your sisters, and your daughters”; and moreover, the police protect the brothel.

Dr. Jung: Yes, it is a well-known fact that the police are in alliance with brothels and such places.

Compartment psychology is really due to conventional morality, which says that certain things are provided by the state.

Being a citizen under the law you are allowed to use that instrument.

I remember a long time ago meeting an American on board a transatlantic steamer.

He was a conventional married man, who had fallen in love with a young girl, and he wanted to fire his wife and marry the girl.

He asked my opinion about it, and I said: “Is your wife objectionable?” “No.” “Have you any children?” “Yes, five.” “And you are just putting her out into the street?” “But,” he said, “I married her under the law, and the law also stands for divorce. I can divorce her under the law.”

That is compartment psychology all right.

As long as you are under police protection, such morality produces a perfectly soulless condition.

Where there is no soul there is no synthesis.

A perfectly sane man once said to me: “You can do anything you please as long as the police do not know about it.”

However, he had terrible nightmares and neurotic symptoms because he did as he damned pleased, and he did not connect the two facts.

There is a law in ourselves which allows certain things and not others.

The expediency of a persona attitude in a conscious person can be conventional morality for one who is unconscious.

I have no use for a man who believes in conventional morality.

He can be a criminal just as well, but be within conventional morality and consider himself respectable.

The man who does wrong and knows that it is wrong can change.

He is not wronging his own soul. It is murderous for the human soul to help people to make these compartments.

It is a sin against the Holy Ghost to have such a morality.

There is no development under the law of conventional morality.

It leads to compartment psychology, and how can a man develop when he forgets what his compartments contain?

Such a man can do anything under the law, he can say, “Oh yes, but that was years ago.”

Dr. Bertine: Doesn’t an orgiastic scene imply conventional morality? Animals are not orgiastic.

Dr. Jung: Yes, the police and the orgiastic scenes are one and the same thing, but the orgiastic scenes are in compartments safely divided from the other compartments, in which other things happen.

After these scenes in the dream he goes downstairs with his wife and hunts for his hat, which he cannot find, so he takes one of a strange design; on the way out he looks in a mirror and sees that he is wearing a funny brown cap and not a hat.

That scene indicates a change.

Something must have happened in the last dream, so his outward appearance is changed, this is symbolized by the peculiar hat.

The patient has no associations with it so we cannot trace it. In such a case we must use our own wits.

The symbolism of the hat must be something impersonal, if it were something personal he would have plenty of associations.

The lack of associations in such a case can prove that it is a matter of impersonal symbolism, a sort of generally accepted metaphor.

Do you know anything of these caps?

Dr. Schmitz: The cap of Siegfried.

Dr. Jung: Yes, the peculiar cap of Siegfried which he took from the dragon to make himself invisible.

Do you remember other material?

Mrs. Schevill: You told us of mysterious little boys in brown leather caps appearing in a small German town, and the effect they had on conventional morality.

Dr. Jung: That was from a German book, the name of which I have forgotten.

I myself have never had this kind of symbolism, but it is very striking.

It was only when I came across that symbol again and again that I began to feel its importance.

My patient had never read this book.

It was a story of a highly respectable German town in which these mysterious boys with brown caps appeared and then strange things began to happen.

There were Vereins in those towns.

Wherever there are three Germans, there is a Verein.

Twenty Vereins come together and have an annual ball.

It was all very respectable, all the young girls there lined up for the marriage market.

Everybody was there but the parson, and later that proved to be fatal for him.

Everything was going on as usual, when behind a column in the gallery there appeared a youth with a brown cap.

Then things began to get gay.

The band began to play with pep, a flickering flame poured through the place, everyone got wild, and the ball finally became the wildest kind of a primitive orgy, ending in complete promiscuity.

Then the boy disappeared and tableau!

Everybody came back to consciousness.

There was the burgomaster with the waitresses, etc.

Now, our dreamer has the same symbolism, the brown leather cap.

He has never read the book, but he has obviously tapped an underground conduit of symbolic material, as did the author of this book.

We discover the boy in the brown leather cap who is probably responsible’ for the wild night in the story.

Such a ballroom in a respectable town is like the background of this man’s consciousness.

Suddenly a hole opens in the wall, and there he is with his wife in a terribly shocking place.

That is what these boys do, suddenly open up horrible possibilities like the magic bottle with the images of the lovers, which was so shocking to all the people at the party; the bottle simply
revealed the secret fantasy of those people.

This is what has happened in the dream, a piercing of the veil, of the compartment wall, and this is due to the boys with brown leather caps.

Do you know anything further about these boys?

Mrs. Crowley: Dwarfs.

Dr. Jung: Yes, and brownies.

In the history of this symbol the cap is the peculiar head-dress of all sorts of people, the pileus of Mithras or Apollo, the Phrygian cap of Attis or Adonis; and then the Greek Cabiri3 were adorned with pointed caps.

I think it was Pausanias who reported that two statues of Cabiri were placed out on the rocks at a particularly dangerous spot, to protect navigators.

Ordinarily the Cabiri were little things, and were kept hidden in cases, and always wrapped up carefully.

The spiritus familiaris of Aesculapius was also such a one, and was always found on the
monuments of Aesculapius as his guardian.

He was a special god of doctors-Telesphoros, the one who brings perfection or accomplishment. They all wore pointed caps, usually brown.

You may have seen on the arms of the city of Munich the “Miinchner Kindl,” who wears a long monkish robe which covers his feet, for you may not see the feet of a dwarf.

There is the story of a miller’s wife who was especially favoured by the dwarfs.

They did all her work.

She just left everything in the kitchen, and during the night she heard noises and knew that in the morning everything would be cleaned up.

She knew it was the dwarfs, but she was curious and wanted to see them, so one night she sprinkled flour on the floor.

In the morning there were the marks of duck’s feet all over the floor, but the dwarfs never came again, she had to do her own work.

She should not know of the feet of the dwarfs!

There is a profound idea here.

This material should give us a clue as to what the cap really is.

The dreamer exchanges his ordinary hat for what seems a similar one, but which turns out to be this peculiar brown cap.

What is the hat then, his ordinary hat?

Dr. Bertine: The headdress of a conventional gentleman.

Dr. Jung: Why express it by the hat?

Mrs. Schevill: Very often a hat can stand for an attitude.

Dr. Jung: Yes, but why use it for conventionality?

Mrs. Sigg: The man goes into the street with it.

Dr. Schmitz: It is his roof, his covering.

Dr. Jung-:···· · Aman-wears-his-hat-in-the-street, where-other-people see him, when he is respectable, which means when he can be seen.

Therefore he is presentable.

If anyone should wear a Cabiri hat on the street now, we would think he was drunk, or some kind of a crank, or a musician!

A gentleman cannot allow himself any fantasies about hats.

In San Francisco if you appear on the street in a straw hat after a certain date, they will take you right off to the insane asylum.

When I went to America I wore my usual European hat, but a friend said at once, “Your hat won’t do. You must wear a bowler, because everybody does.”

Mr. Gibb: Dr. Bayness had to do the same thing.

Dr. Jung: Exactly. The hat is a symbol.

In a man’s dream it usually means that he is especially concerned with his street appearance or with publicity.

It represents a man’s particular prejudice or grievance.

Now, when the dreamer leaves the house he cannot find his hat, his outward appearance again, a serious loss for him, for he realizes that he cannot appear in public as he used to do, something must have gotten under his skin!

He finds another hat, one that he thinks is similar to his own.

This is again the soothing element in the dream.

The dream says, “Never mind, it is not quite yours, but it is a hat like everybody else’s.” To his amazement he discovers that instead of a hat he is wearing a peculiar brown cap.

So one could say that he leaves the house no longer the conventional gentleman who entered it, but one of those metaphysical naughty boys, or a Cabir. That proved to be such a shock that he woke up.

Dr. Schmitz: The cap is the sign of the peasant, so he is no longer the gentleman he thought he was.

Dr. Jung: Sure enough, but that idea of the cap does not suit our views any longer.

A gentleman in a golf suit can wear a cap but with our gentleman it won’t do,· he is exceedingly meticulous about his outward appearance, he dresses very carefully, his tie, handkerchief, and his socks must always be of the same blue.

The wearing of this common cap lowers his opinion of himself, he immediately becomes like any common person on the street, the butcher for instance.

A man so conventional must have some distinction, a fastidious appearance, otherwise he would not be different from his butcher.

So the wearing of the cap lowers him in his social standing, that is the first thing that troubles him.

Why is he lowered?

Mrs. Sigg: He is first identified with the father and son, then with the Puer Aeternus. He is too high so he must be lowered.

Dr. Jung: Perfectly true.

When we are unconscious of a thing which is constellated, we are identified with it, and it moves us or activates us as if we were marionettes.

We can only escape that effect by making it conscious and objectifying it, putting it outside of ourselves, taking it out of the unconscious.

That is exceedingly difficult for him to do.

Not knowing the Puer Aeternus, he could not remove it, concretize it, or objectify it as outside of himself.

I often see how hard this is for my patients.

I find it hard to see a thing that has been a most intimate part of my own psychology as objectively as this match-stand.

But the patient was identified with the Puer Aeternus, and this identification removed him from the human sphere.

How can I prove such identification?

I can only say one thing: a man who is identified with conventional morality is not himself, he is the police, he is the brothel, he is the penal code, he is everything else.

He is always regulated by laws, therefore he is always using that famous statement: “If you believe that sort of thing then any man or any girl could do so and so! What would become of our civilization?”

I always answer, “You are not concerned with the fate of the eleven thousand virgins, but with your own problems,” but of course it is much easier to be concerned with the case of the eleven thousand
virgins than with your own case; one is then a sort of Saviour concerned with the welfare of the world.

But the real thing is to look to your own Self!

Henri IV of France said, “My ideal is that every French peasant has his chicken in the pot on Sunday.”

I say, “Every man must be concerned with his own morality, and not with the welfare of other people.”

He cannot solve the problem of the eleven thousand, for he could move a whole lifetime along that line and nothing would happen, he would always be safe.

Since the man is the penal code, he is also conventional morality; and since he is secretly moved by the Puer Aeternus he is the Puer Aeternus, and also the boy with the brown cap, the opposite of the
Puer Aeternus, a brownie thoroughly brown, coming from the earth, the colour of the earth.

He is no longer in the world of beautiful general ideas, he is now under the earth, covered by the brown earth cap, by dirt.

As he was above himself, now he is below himself, hopelessly caught by the magic power of the earth.

This naturally has a lowering influence on his psychological constitution.

He comes down to the primitive man, the caveman who is literally living under the earth.

We come now to the important question, what is the meaning of the whole dream?

I want to have your opinion of what it conveys, how it functions? What should the dreamer conclude from this dream?

Mr. Gibb: Doesn’t it mean that he is beginning to know more of himself? To see all the compartments at once? He takes his whole party with him in the dream.

Dr. Jung: That is highly important. How would you value that?

What does it mean that he takes the whole crowd there, family, friends, and relations?

Mr. Gibb: They are parts of himself.

Dr. Jung: Yes, a man is never represented by himself alone.

A man is only something in relation to other individuals.

You only get a complete picture of him when you see him in relation to his set, as you do not know about a plant or animal unless you know its habitat.

So when the dream says he is going with his whole set it means going together and putting them into his life.

In our conscious language we would say that he calls all these people together and for twenty-four hours there is nothing but the truth.

It is a sort of feeling statement of his whole psychology, of what he ought to do.

So in the beginning of the dream we have this sweeping criticism of his compartment psychology.

It is as though the dream said, “Now take your whole bunch, and go into that well-known show and let them see the whole thing.”

Mr. Dell: Are the compartments like a panorama side by side?

Dr. Jung: Yes, and that means he should look objectively at the whole of his life, put the compartments together and sum up.

It is just what such people do not do, they keep things well apart, so that there will be no short circuit.

The dream then gives him a panoramic view, an account of his whole life, lets every side of himself become acquainted with his life as a whole.

That is pouring all the different contents into the melting-pot and seeing what will come out, then he can have a synthesis.

Mr. Dell: The short circuit gives the nightmare quality?

Dr. Jung: Certainly, and the shock here is that the dreamer comes out with a brown cap!

He is lowered, he comes down from his respectable position where nobody knew what his life was, not even the police.

He wears the brown cap, and now he gets an idea of what he really is.

Many people never realize what they really are, because of their compartment psychology.

They always have the marvelous good conscience of the criminal; they do not sum up, do not contemplate their lives as a whole.

I have often heard people listening to accounts of themselves from friends or rereading their diaries say: “I was dumbfounded when I heard all that!”

But more often people won’t let it come to that-they fear it too much.

For instance, a man who was very extraverted came to me.

He always kept busy from early morning until late at night, and I said to him, “You should sit still for at least an hour every day, and consider what you are doing.”

He replied, “Well, I could play the piano with my wife, or read to her, or play cards.”

He couldn’t get away from the idea that someone should be with him.

Finally when I made him see that I meant he should be alone, he said, “Then I get quite melancholy.”

I said, “Now you see what kind of company you are to yourself. I want you to be quite depressed and realize what you are living.”

He wouldn’t do it. That man was living an amazing life in compartments.

When he was alone with himself he was in the worst possible company, one part of his life after another came up and he simply could not bear it.

There are people who just funk their whole lives.

Mr. Gibb: Wouldn’t you say the dreamer is beginning to do something toward giving up his life in compartments?

Dr. Jung: Yes, I should say that something was happening.

He evidently got something from thebrown cap.

There are cases in which neither the doctor nor the patient can do very much, the analysis must depend on the goodwill of the unconscious, and the final realization must come from the strange world of the unconscious.

You may be sure that, when things come up out of the bowels of the earth like this brown cap, something has happened, though nobody understands it.

The greatest ideas of mankind have happened for years and years and no man has understood.

I can give you a simple example:

When I asked the Elgonyi in Africa about their religion they denied any belief in a god or ghosts or spirits or anything of the sort.

They could tell me nothing and it took me three weeks to discover why every morning just at sunrise they came out of their huts, each man put his hands to his mouth and blew into them, then stretched them up to the sun and after that they went off to work.

I asked, “What is that?” They answered, “I do!!’t know, my father did it, my grandfather did it, so I do it.”

I asked many of them and they all gave me the same answer.

I persisted and grilled them.

Finally I asked an old man what it was, and he said, “Our fathers did it; we are glad that the night has passed.”

That kind of forced breath is called roho, corresponding to the Arabic ruh, which means “rushing,” hence “wind” or “spirit.”

In the New Testament wind and spirit are both expressed by the same word, pneuma. “The wind bloweth where it listeth”(John 3:8).

At Pentecost pneuma descended on the disciples as a great wind which filled all the house.

In Swahili there is an onomatopoetic word for the death-rattle-roho (related to both the Arabic ruh and the Hebrew ruah).

The breath that escapes the dying man is his spirit, and therefore the eldest son must put his lips to his dying father’s in order to catch his last breath.

So the Elgonyi custom means that they are offering life-breath or spirit to the sunrise.

It is a thanksgiving, they offer their souls to God.

So we express it in words, but they don’t know why they do it.

That idea is operating in them in a prepsychological state.

I know that they have many ceremonies, circumcisions, markings, etc. and they do not know why.

We say, “Aren’t they primitive and unconscious? These people don’t know what they are doing.”

Dr. Leavitt: In modern religious symbolism, do people know any more?

Dr.Jung: I could ask you, “Why do you have a Christmas tree?

Or what does the rabbit laying eggs at Easter mean?”

No one knows what these things mean, we must go back to folklore to find it.

Now, you know how the unconscious works.

It is the spirit or the Heaven-born thing!

The spirit was there before man’s consciousness.

It makes people do certain things in certain ways that you can never explain.

Animals do not lift their paws to the rising sun, but men do.

The Elgonyi call it a spirit that moves them; the concept of spirit does not exist for them, they simply do it, a spiritual agency moves them. Only on our plane do we give our souls to God.

Mr. Gibb: In northern India the natives must always die where the air and water are “right.” They call it “Abo hawa,” which means “at home.” “Climate” is our translation, but it is much more important
to them than that.

They must go where the air is right, is theirs.

Even in epidemics, we could not prevent them from travelling and thus spreading cholera and plague, this idea was so strong in them.

Mr. Dell: Do they spit on their hands or just blow?

Dr. Jung: They blow hard; it is the same thing as spitting. Saliva is the water connotation of the spirit.

Christ used spittle in making the ointment, mixing it with clay to heal the blind man. Spitting or blowing has a magic significance all over the world.

Mr. Gibb’s example uses wind and water, both symbols for the life-spirit, the pervading thing. Earth is not moving, not spirit, but wind and water are. In astrology, for instance, the sign for Aquarius (a spiritual sign) has been taken from the Egyptian sign for water. Originally it had a denser part and also a more ethereal part, the upper part being the more spiritual. Are there any questions connected with
this dream?

Mrs. Sigg: This is the third dream that says the dreamer’s ego is not in accord with his wife’s. At first it was the sewing-machine which he could not give to the poor girl, because it belonged to his wife; then in the dream of the Puer Aeternus, where he said that his wife did not bring the right kind of food; and now in this dream his wife asks him to wait for the others and he does not. Three times she is a hindrance. I don’t know the connection unless it is her objection to sexuality. He seems to have something against his wife, he doesn’t have the right attitude, he does not realize the anima.

Dr. Jung: Surely, there is much real trouble between himself and his wife, but we can only discuss the main issues of the dream.

He is not yet ready to take up the anima problem.

Mrs. Sigg: Is it not dangerous for him to identify himself with the brownies?

Dr. Jung: That is not for him to say.

I had to make him see that now he identifies himself with the earth, as before he identified himself with the collective idea.

It is far better to go under the earth than under the conventional code.

Dr. Binger: Has he no conception of the anima?

Dr. Jung: No, not yet. It is very difficult to have the conception of the objectivity of our psychology.

To objectify the anima would seem a mystical thing.

Most people have not the faintest capacity to see what a psychological non-ego can be, or what degree of autonomy or reality certain facts have.

They have never given it any consideration.

Formerly the so-called autonomy of psychological phenomena was denied entirely.

This permits of the projection of figures which leads to spiritism and theosophy.

You get such figures as “the guardian of the threshold” and all such hobgoblins.

That won’t do either.

There is a middle path of psychic autonomy, a conception that has not entered the philosophical mind of our time. To make people understand this “middle way” has been my particular effort.

Dr. Leavitt: These are all dreams, aren’t they? Not fantasies?

Dr. Jung: They are all dreams.

If the patient were able to lift all that material up into active fantasy, he would not dream it.

He cannot do that, for he would be too much hampered by the idea that he was producing it.

The idea “I am making my own mind” is a God almightiness! That is his prejudice.

Dr. Schmitz: Could the patient not learn something from this dream? The dreamer says, “If you go to this brothel, then you are a man who goes to such places and you must know it.”

Dr. Jung: Yes, he must see that he is below his own estimation of himself.

After a while all these things became disgusting to him, he felt he could not afford it anymore.

He has tried several times since to raise hell, but somehow he finds that he always falls down on it.

The sensation type has to learn by actual experience.

He has sometimes thought that analysis conveyed nothing to him, but then certain things happened, and he had to admit that his dreams did something to him.

He had to realize that he had changed when he discovered that he could no longer go to a brothel.

Mr. Dell: The spirit is working in us without our consciousness?

Dr. Jung: Even though we do not understand the dream, it is working and causing changes. If we understand, however, we have the privilege of working with the timeless spirit in ourselves.

Mr. Dell: This allusion to the cap as a sign that he has lowered himself is very indirect; without analysis he would have missed it completely. Is there anything in dream psychology that would prevent
a direct allusion? He might have dreamed that he fell into the gutter, or something of that sort.

Dr. Jung: He just dreamed it like that.

Mr. Dell: Freud would speak of the censorship in the choice of the symbol, wouldn’t he?

Dr. Jung: Yes, and I see your point now. The dream could say, “Now you are lowered,” but what it does say in this case is “Now you wear a brown cap.”

Whether we analyse it or not, the spirit is operating in us without our consciousness. Something has happened to the man.

I myself have had dreams that I could not understand until later events happened.

The dream does sometimes prepare for a concrete event.

So it does not matter if we do not understand the cap symbolism, but it matters if we do we get a chance for a tremendous widening out of our consciousness.

That is why we analyse dreams.

If we are unconscious we are always running the risk of being manipulated by unconscious factors, in an enantiodromic way, as winter follows summer, etc.

The unconscious is not really concerned with human aims, with the building up of our civilization.

It has a peculiar movement, as though there were no such thing as time.

Mr. Dell: The change in the personality is always accompanied by consciousness, is it not?

Dr. Jung: You can be made to change by unconscious factors.

You can wake up in the morning a different man, but such changes have no merit, you cannot gain anything by it for our civilization.

Our aim should be to increase our consciousness.

Things happen to us whether we are conscious or not, but when we are unconscious, life has no meaning; so many people come to me without any idea of what it all means.

People need an understanding of things, of why they live.

Dr. Binger: The store of unconscious life is limitless, is it not?

Dr. Jung: Yes, there is no end to it. You can say-never mind the Einstein theory-space to us is as good as infinite.

Mr. Gibb: You would say that many things happen without dreaming, or is the dream itself the happening?

Dr. Jung: I think you are wise to take the dream as a happening.

Then you can say, “I am so glad to have had this dream, now things have happened.”

Mr. Gibb: But must one not allow that things happen even if one does not dream of them?

Dr. Jung: Of course we must allow that all things of fundamental importance are probably dreamed of.

Dreams are messages sent up from the unconscious and show what is actually going on there.

Dr. Binger: Do you think that this is something like a character transformation? Do you think it is directional, moving toward an end?

Dr. Jung: I am inclined to believe that only where there is consciousness, awareness, can this prove to be true.

In the dreams of the incurably insane you will find the same quality as in those of normal or neurotic people.

The dreams of the insane are full of colour, very hopeful, and contain symbols of growth, so you feel that if you could talk about them, there is no reason why the patient could not be helped.

But you cannot talk, they will not listen.

These dreams reach a certain summit and then begin to go down, all the symbols become destructive, and you see that everything is going dead wrong.

If a normal person had such dreams you would say, “This is very bad.”

But with the insane, after a while it begins over again. It is just a process of nature, with no intervention on the part of consciousness.

So I conclude that for such a process as the building up of the individual, consciousness is indispensable.

Dr. Binger: It is like making a garden out of a jungle.

Dr. Jung: Yes, like making a garden out of a jungle.

Only man makes a garden, nature never.

So you see how our development depends on the intervention of the conscious.

There is the factor of development, of evolution in nature, but it is slow, it takes millions of years.

See how the primitive has for centuries remained in the same condition, while civilized nations have made enormous strides in a short time by the intervention of consciousness.

Dr. Binger: Can you dream and derive the benefit of consciousness without understanding the dream? Is it of constructive value?

Dr. Jung: To a certain extent.

It is the tidal wave that lifts you up, but you are in danger of being swept down again with it.

If you can cling to a rock and stay up, all right.

Mr. Dell: If the dream is a picture of a psychic situation, of something that has happened, how can it also be a compensation?

What does it compensate?

Dr. Jung: The dreamer’s idea of respectability.

Mr. Dell: , The dream reports a change in attitude, but I don’t quite see the compensation.

Dr. Jung: That is simple. He is a conventional man and having had this panoramic view something is changed in him.

Before he had this dream he was too high and nature won’t stand for that, and she has pulled him down. Now he is lowered.

That is compensation.

It is peculiar symbolism, why doesn’t the dream say he is lowered?

Mr. Dell: Freud would say it was disguised by the censor as a protection to the sleeper, but as a matter of fact he wakes up.

Dr. Jung: Freud would say it was disguised by the censor, I would say that we have not yet arrived at the full explanation of the soothing character of the dream nor of why it expresses it in
such a cryptic allusion.

If the dream said, “Now you are lower down, before you were higher up,” it would not be quite true, for from

a spiritual point of view he is higher up, he is a far better man than he was when he was too high.

When nature uses that peculiar term, a hooded figure, like a brownie, something earthy that must be hid away, something lowered, disreputable, it can also mean like a spiritual being, a monk with the Cabiri hood.

The monks took on the brown hood of the Cabiri. It is a double-edged symbolism; when he is lowered, he is really being lifted up.

Cabiri is from Arabic el kabir, “the great one,” and Cabiri are really quite small, the “small ones yet so great in power.”

The Dactyl, or thumbling, the size of the thumb, is small but very powerful.

In Hindu philosophy he is Purusha, the small mystical man dwelling in the heart of everyone yet covering the earth, “smaller than small, yet greater than great.

When you pursue the symbolism a little more closely you will see that the man’s unconscious is trying to bring out the relativity of things.

When you understand this you will see that the unconscious is going to put him into the centre of things, that is what it is after! ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Pages 212-226