Children’s Dreams Seminars
Seminar on Children’s Dreams Lecture I (Winter Term 1936/37)
Papers and Commentaries on Dreams of Two Children
- DREAMS OF A BOY ABOUT NINE YEARS OLD
- Dream of the Three Young Women Presented by Dr. Markus Fierz
Text: I had a dream: From the street one could go down into a strange store. Richard and I went down. Three young women sat at a small table behind the counter. They gave us red sticks that we didn’t have to pay for: like sealing-wax that one could smoke. So we put them into our mouths and started to smoke. Then I staggered out of the store; I’d gotten all dizzy and sick.
Dr. Fierz: I structured the dream as follows:
- Beginning and locale: This is the part of the dream until the mentioning of the three young women.
- Development: The handing over of the red sticks.
- Peripateia: The smoking.
- Lysis: Staggering out, dizziness, nausea.
The locale: The street is the world of collective consciousness.
What happens there is common and normal. Now, from the street it goes down into a strange store. This store is called strange, and so deserves our attention. A store is a place for exchanging goods: for money, one gets some goods that one doesn’t have. Usually, these goods are not manufactured at the store itself, but the store acts as an intermediary between customer and manufacturer.
As this store is below street level, underground, it can be conceived as the location where goods, that is, contents of the Unconscious, are traded.
Therefore, I wouldn’t like to simply identify this store with the unconscious.
The store table is called a counter; the young women sit at a small table.
A counter is reminiscent of a place where people eat and drink, a tavern or a bar.
There adults enjoy inebriating beverages—with effects similar to those in our boy.
The analogous place for a child would be a candy shop, where one can eat sweets in excess.
Persons: Richard, the friend, can be conceived as a double, as a shadow of the Dreamer.
I also find it essential, however, that such company in this adventure indicates the common, harmless nature, the collectivity of this experience.
It also relieves the dreamer of his responsibility, following the principle: “Not me, he too” (I wasn’t the only one, the other was there too!).
Three young women sit in the store.
Putting them in analogy with the three Fates (Moirae), they are a new manifestation of the “iron woman” of a previous dream.
To understand it, the parallel with Hekate seems particularly important.
This goddess appears in three forms; she is triformis. Professor Jung: That the “iron woman” signifies fate allows us to assume that the three women—exactly because of the trinity—could have a similar meaning.
The number three is also “numinous,” a synonymous attribute.
The motif of the scissors in the previous dream, together with “Fate,” points toward the three Fates.
In this connection the figure of Hekate triformis also seems to be of importance.
Dr. Fierz: She opens and closes the underworld, for which she has the key. So this fits with the store, because in our view it represents an access to the unconscious. Her animal is the dog; let me remind you of the dream of the dog. The sacrifices offered to her were fishes; in the preceding dream, the fishing giants played the main role. Now, there are three shrines from antiquity that were dedicated to Hekate, at the same time being temples of Priapus—who is an ithyphallic river god.
Professor Jung: Even today, in Egypt, Priapus figures are put up as scarecrows in the fields.
Such a symbol was embedded in the St. Alban Schwibbogen in Basle.
In Nuremberg, too, there is such a curbstone, on the Dürer house near the city gate.
Dr. Fierz: Diana Luna Hekate: this is the old equation. So let us have a look at Diana (Artemis) too. Although virginal, she was a goddess who helped to give birth. Horace says: “Montium custos nemorumque, virgo! Quae laborantes utero paellas ter vocata adimisque leto, diva triformis!” In Sparta, the most infamous phallic cults of antiquity were dedicated to her. With these materials, one may also interpret the sticks of sealing wax as phallic symbols. Putting those into the mouth and smoking them can then be conceived as coitus.
Professor Jung: Even if the sealing wax sticks didn’t have a sexual meaning from the start, one could be led to the same assumption from the mythological context.
Dr. Fierz: Something similar is true for the number three. Here one would also have to mention the Graeae, the three of whom have only one eye and one tooth (female and male genitalia). Worthy of consideration as a further parallel are also the three ladies in the Magic Flute (Mozart) who, as we know, hand over the magic flute and the
enchantingly beautiful picture to the young man The Magic Flute will protect you,
Will support you during greatest bad fortune, Through it you will deal all-powerfully,
To transform the suffering of humankind.
The sad will become joyous, The old bachelor is captured by love;
Oh, such a flute is
Worth more than gold and crowns,
For through it human happiness
And contentment will be increased.
The three ladies of the Magic Flute are servants of the Queen of the Night; they appear as huntresses and can justly be equated, therefore, with Diana.
The Magic Flute also shows further curious parallels to our dream series: persecution by the snake; the bird-catcher; the three ladies; and fire and baptism with water—these are the images of the libretto.
In the dream series, this corresponds to the persecution by the dog; the fisherman; the three ladies; the fire in the hospital; and water.
As to the smoking: “Be a man, smoke cheroots and cigars!” is a well-known advertising line.
Smoking is, or has at least been considered for a long time, as specifically male: “The German woman does not smoke!”
The fact that what is smoked here are sticks of sealing wax, or better, sticks that look like these, shows that this is no normal smoking after all, rather we would interpret it as a specifically male activity, as procreation.
This is linked with strong emotions, as strong unconscious instincts are unleashed.
The bout of dizziness, the staggering, and the nausea are consequences of being overpowered by the unconscious.
Summary: In this dream the boy is being acquainted with the strange power of sexuality by a significant goddess (Anima).
Professor Jung: The boy is here being initiated, for the first time, into sexuality, through women of a mythological nature who replace the mother.
Procreation, however, is here still in the stage of nibbling sweets. It corresponds to the nutritive stage of the libido.
Sexuality is still unconscious and makes itself felt only indirectly, in a way that is typical of the unconscious, through nausea, dizziness, and staggering.
The parallel with Hekate is quite valid.
But why are there exactly three young women?—When a trinity appears, this means that a fateful point has been reached, that something unavoidable will therefore happen.
The three Nornes, the Fates, or the Graeae appear.
The triads of Gods play a great role everywhere, for example: Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva. Osiris, too, is in the womb together with his two sisters Isis and Nephthys; so are the two brothers Jagannat and Balaram with their sister Subhadra.
The triad goes back so far in antiquity that it is difficult to make out something definite about it.
One of the most probable structures is “father, mother, son.”
The Christian trinity is in all likelihood originally based on such symbolism.
The Holy Spirit was originally female.
The symbol of the Spiritus Sanctus is the dove, the animal of the goddess of love.
Another probable origin is the very basic and quite graphic anatomical triad of the organ of procreation.
The transformation into a divine triad is affirmed, for example, by the lingam cult.
That we are indeed dealing with these things is also shown by the fact that the Graeae have one tooth and one eye.
This motif is also found in German fairy tales, as for instance in the tale of the three
spinners: one has a big thumb, the second a big lower lip, and the third a big toe.
The Graeae are goddesses of the underworld out of the darkest reaches of mythology.
It is possible that such archaic images are here involved, for we have to view this one tooth as an exquisitely phallic symbol and the eye as the corresponding female symbol.
In the dream text it says that the boys put those sticks into the mouth.
Undoubtedly, this is a sexual allusion, with the mouth representing the female organ.
The simultaneous appearance of the male and the female organ is an archetype, that of constant cohabitation.
Another aspect of this same type is the hermaphrodite or according to Winthuis, the bisexual being [Zweigeschlechterwesen].
Regarding the book by Winthuis, Das Zweigeschlechterwesen, I’d like to remark that I don’t completely agree with it.
Winthuis makes too much out of that motif, but he is right in his main idea that there
is a certain basic idea present in very many archaic images, namely, the idea of a being that fertilizes itself, that is male-female, that carries within itself the guarantee of its ongoing existence, of its own eternity; and that each human being originally feels identical with this archaic being, or hopes to become one again with this being by initiation.
Many ornaments and art symbols of primitive nature likely go back to this.
It is a curious fact that these images also appear in a place where I wouldn’t have suspected them, that is, in alchemy.
The basic symbol is the dragon biting into its own tail, the ouroboros.
The alchemists knew that the “tail eater” is a sexual symbol: ouroboros fertilizes itself.
Similarly, Ptah is the creator of his own egg that he also hatches.
He is the one who creates himself.
The phoenix rises again from his own, or from his father’s, ashes.
All these are images of a being that recreates itself again and again.
It is the dragon that impregnates itself, with the phallic tail that he takes into the mouth, “se ipsum impregnat.”
Ra, the sun god, fertilized himself through the mouth with his own semen, and then vomited the world.
The inside of his body would thus have been the uterus that he fertilized.
He reproduced the world as a creature.
As a consequence, most of the cosmogonic archaic beings are hermaphrodite.
This is connected with the fact that man, from the dawn of history, has had a notion of his double gender.
As a matter of fact and truth, we are of double gender, because only the greater part of the male genes decides whether the embryo becomes a male.
The female genes do not die away in the male, but are there in his structure, and function according to their femaleness.
This accounts for the peculiar fact that in certain men we can perceive certain female
traits that correspond to the feminine ideal (and vice versa, male traits in women).
There are persons who boast of their bisexuality because it is an archetype: “I carry Eve in me, so I am a god.”
God has His wife in him.
In India, goddesses are only the feminine form of a masculine god: Shiva is a point or a phallus, and it is enveloped by Shakti:
The active existence of these and similar archetypes in the unconscious of the child can, under special circumstances, give rise to “perversities.”
The children then do strange, disgusting things that, however, carry a symbolic meaning.
For they display a too orderly behavior on the one hand, and a too dirty one on the other.
A nine year-old boy, for example, eats a toad, because it disgusts him; a four year-old child from the city eats excrement on a meadow.
A child from the countryside would never do that.
Only very well brought up city kids do such things.
The motive for such activities is the unconscious search for the original unity.
One should rather not call them perversities, but educational mistakes that often balance out later.
This archaic image, therefore, leads not only to the most strange, painful, disgusting forms of satisfaction, but also acts as protection, for instance in persons who pick their noses, or who “copulate” with a fountain pen in the mouth.
These things are only used as protection: one makes a ring with oneself.
In fertilizing oneself one proves that one is absolutely round, the perfect round archaic being (the sphairos of Empedocles).
Nothing can touch it any longer.
The archaic being was once cut in two by the Demiurge.
The two parts are, however, one and the same being (Plato, Timaeus).
At the end of the dream there comes that strange drunkenness.
It refers to the fact that the unconscious gets out of hand and emerges.
It corresponds to the phenomenon of seasickness.
sick is the feeling of disgust that is connected with this bout of nausea.
In pathological cases, precisely those disgusting things have to be done to
reachieve balance.
What is disgusting is the unacceptable “other.”
When children are able to incorporate it, they will become inaccessible by this, meaning that they have attained “divine” independence.
The mentally ill, too, act in a way similar to the children.
This gives them a feeling of independence and of being cut off emotionally.
They make themselves inaccessible by incorporating the disgusting object.
The most unappetizing stuff is in the balms and magic potions of the medicine man.
When one takes them, one has incorporated the disgusting object and is then immune.
The first infantile autoerotism should not be viewed as immoral, but should be tolerated.
It shows itself in attempts at self-fertilization in order to transform oneself; these then give way to attempts to fertilize others.
Under the guise of caring concern, children are pushed toward masturbation and the like by educators.
For it is completely wrong when children get marked with conscious sexuality by adults
touching these things.
The dream just discussed is a case of an anticipation of puberty.
The number three belongs to the juvenile age and to the early days of humanity.
Being an odd number, it has been male since primeval times (for instance in China or Greece, but also see the Middle Ages in our region), and it points toward the male attribute and its function.
The speculations about the symbolism of numbers in the Middle Ages were concerned with the number three, the Ternarium, as a divine trinity.
Nonetheless, the connections with the primitive sexual image are clearly discernible.
Like any archetype, the triad or the Ternarium can be represented either primitively by sexual images, or philosophically by abstract notions.
An archetype is neither abstract nor concrete.
It can express itself in primitive “instinctual language” (for instance, sexually) or “spiritually.”
One can replace the other, just as sexual terminology can be replaced by a nutritional one.
The Song of Songs, for example, drastically bears witness to this.
This archetype in itself is plain “three-ness,” which can be filled with any content.
- Dream of the Burning Clinic Presented by Professor Jung
Text: This night I dreamed that there suddenly was a fire at the clinic Hirslanden, in the basement, coming from the heating.
We wanted to go down the stairs near the elevator for goods, but the staircase unexpectedly broke off.
We took the elevator to go up, but could no longer fetch the beds from the first floor, where the little kids are.
They must have got them out through the windows.
Professor Jung: The location of the plot is the clinic Hirslanden.
The child had been there as a patient.
The place where one is cared for often takes on a motherly meaning, in a figurative sense.
One gets a personal relationship with it, more or less as to a mother.
It then contains some directly personal quality.
A house where one is psychically and physically cared for, where one is caressed, becomes an extension of the family web.
So the clinic Hirslanden can become a dream figure for the boy and his psychology, which is situated in it.
In the case of neurotic children, the new environment is brought into relation to the mother.
The school, the church, and the like, become the mother in a too personal sense.
Through this, she grows out of proportion within the child.
The relationship to the real mother becomes impossible, because the child makes outrageous demands on her.
This is, as such, already a neurotic situation, namely, the well-known neurotic demand placed on a person that he or she should be everything to one.
Once such a demand is made, relationships no longer work.
This happens quite often; as soon as one makes the acquaintance of a person, all hell breaks loose.
One has made that person a part of one’s psychological sphere, and he becomes a pawn on one’s psychological chess board, until he complains or a misunderstanding arises.
That is why one often keeps people at arm’s length, because otherwise one would simply become a psychological object in their psyches.
Something unconscious settles down on one; one is included in a family matter, meaning one has to embody a father, a grandfather, or whoever.
This can be very bothersome.
As to our dream: a fire starts in the basement, originating from the heating.
The basement is the underworld, the abdomen of the boy.
In there is the heating, the stomach, the digestive system.
This produces heat.
From this area of heating the fire starts, threatening to destroy the whole system, to burn down the clinic Hirslanden.
The breaking out of a fire—as, for instance, in the phrase Feuer im Dach—stands for an emotional outbreak that threatens to mess up the whole psychical system. Here there is an emotion coming up from down below.
Here we could possibly also consider a preoccupation with sexual questions.
Es überläuft einen siedend heiß, when one is seized by a thought as by fire.
One blushes when one becomes aware of certain things.
Often one is caught in an embarrassing situation, or one notices, for example, that an idea leads further than one had thought.
The boy goes down. The staircase breaks off. He can’t go into the basement.
The elevator only goes up.
He can’t save the little children on the first floor. The little children are in danger.
At the time of the dream, the boy was still at the clinic.
If one is restrained in a place in a too infantile state, the unconscious will have a tendency to destroy that place.
On the one hand, the hospital should burn down, as one doesn’t want to be so infantile any longer.
On the other hand, one has sympathy for the little kid, that is to say with one’s own
childlike quality, and one hopes that this quality will be saved.
- A School Dream Presented by Dr. Pitsch
Text: I’ve had a “school dream.”
One morning I spilled Indian ink in school—no, it was ink—the sleeves of my pullover and the shirt were all full of it.
I had to take off the pullover; a band-aid was stuck all over the shirt.
I then went home with Ehrhard—we made a detour and came to a stable; it was pitch dark.
led up at the side, but it was so dark that I didn’t find the first step. Ehrhard knew this stable well.
Now a man entered with a dog, and the wall changed into a glass wall, there were vegetables and flowers behind it, and a lot of people shopping.
Ehrhard went home, and so did I.
When I ran past, upward, near the locksmith S., I saw a father with two boys in a garden; they wanted to make a well.
They drove a post into the ground.
Suddenly I realized that I didn’t have a coat; I was cold and ran back to get it.
All of a sudden there appears the image of Gl. [the former place of residence], the upper part near the Strenger Bach. Regula Z. comes. I ask her how late it is. Regula doesn’t know, she doesn’t have a watch. Then Ellen comes, and she’s got a wristwatch; in the beginning it’s very small, but then it suddenly gets so big that it has to be carried. Ellen says the time is half three. Then I quickly ran home. When I sat at the table—suddenly it was again the table in Z. [the present place of residence]—I wanted to start telling something, and said two strange names, like in the “Thousand and One Nights”; I wanted to say I’m one of them, and—finished—I woke up!
Dr. Pitsch: The dream can be divided into the following sequences:
- the scene in the school; 2. the scene with Ehrhard in the stable; 3. the man with the dog and the transformation; 4. the father with the boys who make a well; 5. the scene in Gl. with the two girls; 6. The scene in Z. at the table at home.
The dream begins with: “I’ve had a school dream.”
Actually this dream taken as a whole is a dream of school or apprenticeship.
The actual content is: the dreamer spilled ink; originally he says Indian ink, and then corrects this to ink.
The difference between Indian and ordinary ink is that the former, the writing material of the Far East, is blacker than ordinary ink, which is not as black and can, with some
effort, be removed again.
This is a kind of moderation, a subtle nuance.
The sleeves of the pullover and the shirt are full of it.
A dark spot developed that certainly has to be connected with a certain guilt feeling, owing to the fact that sexual processes and sin are only too often mentioned in one breath.
The dreamer has to take off the pullover.
In Swiss German one says:
Es hett eim d’r Ärmel ine gno, that is, that one has had bad luck,
which is partly one’s own fault. A band-aid is stuck all over the shirt.
Perhaps this is about sexual events of later puberty. Think of night emissions of sperm.
There is certainly a relation between the ink, the sticky shirt, and sexual processes in the present dream.
The dreamer is burdened with a certain guilt feeling.
The abovementioned topic is taboo.
It is not stated explicitly if he goes on walking without the pullover, but this seems to be confirmed when he is suddenly cold and looks for his coat.
In any case, taking off the pullover means giving up a part of oneself, specifically, of a particularly warm cover.
Such a cover can perhaps be seen as a mother symbol.
The boy entering the years of puberty will have more and more to live his own, increasingly manly, life.
Now he wants to go home with Ehrhard. Ehrhard, presumably a friend of his, is all one with the dreamer, his alter ego.
But they do not go home directly, as one should, but make a detour. Boys often
make detours, much to the chagrin of their upset parents.
Their fantasy
and investigative spirit let them often forget that there is a table set and waiting for them at home.
I know the dreamer and I know that coming home on time is not really his forte.
He is not one of the so-called well-behaved boys, he’s a real boy.
As it is, the school of life is always a detour.
How much is there
that we strive for, and that we reach only by detours!
They come to a stable, in which it is pitch dark.
This dark stable is the same as the dark forest, the caves, the “john,” very attractive places for boys, and places that stimulate fantasy to the highest degree.
There are stairs leading up at the side, presumably inside the stable.
The dreamer does not find the first step, however, but Ehrhard easily does.
This stands for the instinctual aspect that finds the right way even in the darkness of the stable, that is, the unconscious.
In reality, too, they are completely different types.
In my view, Ehrhard seems to be the more balanced one.
The motif of the first step still has to be considered.
It presumably represents the first step from childhood to the growing personality.
This step has to be made in darkness.
It is best made unguided, naturally.
In the healthy child one should let this develop more or less without interference.
If one introduces something artificial, the first step will not be found.
Then comes the man with the dog. “Through the mind of the dog
the world exists,” it says in the Vendidad, the oldest part of the Zendavesta.
Since primeval times, man has been unthinkable without the dog, and this all over the world.
Brehm says: “Man and dog complement each other a hundred and thousand times over, man and dog are the most faithful of comrades.
No single other animal in the whole world is more worthy of man’s friendship and love than the dog.
He is part of man himself, and indispensable for his thriving and well-being.”
“The dog,” says Friedrich Cuvier, “is the most remarkable, perfect, and useful conquest that man has ever made.”
Descending from the jackals or wolves, the dog has truly become “brother animal” to us; he just lacks language to become a fully adequate replacement for many a human comrade.
I have spent much time with animals.
Often the clever, questioning eyes of a dog have made me retract a stupidity or an idea, or to get off my self-made little throne.
My dog is always part of my own personality.
He knows his master’s language, he observes the master’s finest movements, he knows when his master is sad or glad or when he is in a bad mood.
He rejoices and mourns with his master.
I have observed that old dogs assume the posture and the facial features of their masters, and vice versa.
As a lover of dogs, I may say that the dog is a part of man, a kind of shadow.
Many famous persons are entities only with their dogs, for instance, Frederick the Great with his Bichée, Prince Bülow with his poodle, Bismarck with his mastiff.
There are less famous examples: the retired neighbor with his pinscher, or the drunkard whose equally shabby mutt accompanies his master from one pub to another.
So, in the present dream man and dog belong to each other.
In mythology, the dog has outstanding responsibilities.
I refer to the work of Professor Jung, Transformations and Symbols of the Libido.
The dog is the gravedigger who disposes of the bodies, as happened in ancient times in Persia.
There it was also customary to lead a dog to the bed of a dying person who then had to grant the dog a bite, presumably to appease him so that he spared his body.
Cerberus, too, is calmed by the honey cake of Heracles.
In the Mithras reliefs, a dog jumps up on the killed bull.
Cerberus is the guardian between life and death.
Anubis with the jackal head helps Isis to gather the dismembered and scattered body of Osiris, so that he can be incorporated by Osiris and reborn.
The dog helps with dying, and consequently also helps with rebirth. In the present case, a man comes with a dog, and their appearance causes a transformation.
Unity, agreement, and evenness can work wonders.
Man and dog stand for a harmonious unit between man and animal, that is, between consciousness and less consciousness, to put it cautiously.
Strangely enough, by the way, one often speaks about human characteristics while meaning animal ones.
In this man-dog pair the unconscious (the consciously domesticated dog) is, so to speak, bound, and so the miracle can happen.
What was dark and opaque is suddenly seen through; a glass wall appears, and with it brightness, light.
The boy looks through the window like a yearning child pressing his nose to a shop window.
Already once, the dreamer was in a store in a dream, in a shop below street level, where he then got sick because of smoking the wax sticks.
Here he is separated from the store by the glass; he looks in, but quite reasonably
he himself is not yet in there, presumably he needn’t buy anything yet. He sees many people buying vegetables and flowers.
The transformation took place before his eyes.
It was the dog, the helper
in dying and being reborn, who caused this—from the unconscious to consciousness.
Out of the eternal cycle of nature, products of the earth emerged before the dreamer—once he saw in a dream a transparent mouse, a microcosm within the macrocosm; now he sees creation, a synthesis.
Our body, decomposing after death, serves again to create beauty, usefulness, and the products of the earth and so, again, life.
Darkness, the first step, has been overcome.
It further says: “Ehrhard goes home, and so do I.”
That means they separate.
The dreamer is in a hurry, because he runs past the house of the locksmith S. Locksmith and smithy represent archetypal symbols that, for adults, could stand for a regression but, for the boy, are rather the “black man” or the bogeyman.
Then higher regions are reached.
But very soon there is again something to be seen.
Three persons—a father and two boys, so to speak a Laocoön group without snakes—want to bore a well.
We have already talked about the number three.
Notice the ambiguity of the expression in the dream text: “They wanted to make a well.” “They drove a post into the ground.”
Here we are dealing with a phallic symbol, as in the sealing-wax sticks.
The “male” is incorporated into Mother Earth. This creates a source, a well.
Similar ideas are frequent in mythology.
Wotan, Baldur, and Charles the Great let sources flow in this way.
A blow with a rod—or a horse’s hoof—makes the ground yield water.
A saint puts a branch into the ground, Pegasus made the Heliconian hippukrene with a hoofbeat.
Rhea created a source in Arcadia with a staff, as did Moses for the thirsty Israelites.
In Old High German, source is called Unsparing, which means something jumping or bubbling out.
The staff makes something bubble out.
So the dreamer is seeing the act of procreation in symbolic language.
But now he has eaten from the tree of knowledge and knows that he is “naked.”
He gets a fright, and he is cold. He shudders at reality. He has to go get his coat.
Again he puts a warming maternal cover around himself, and promptly goes through an abaissement du niveau mental: all of a sudden he is at the place where he lived in earlier childhood, in Gl. at the “Raging Brook,” where untamed water, still uninhibited, not yet having become a more or less large river, bubbles over stones.
There Regula and Ellen, who would actually have to be at the present home, come toward him.
Thoma would not have been able to depict “yearning,” in his beautiful picture of the same name, by the body of a woman.
Woman is more related to Mother Earth than man is.
She floats much less in higher spheres.
So these girls are the animas that have to bring back the boy as a consequence of his outing.
He also asks them for the time.
I know Regula and Ellen, two sisters, rather well.
Regula is corpulent, phlegmatic, slow, sleepy, also always comes late; Ellen is the opposite: sharp, always ready, quick, and perhaps less likeable than Regula.
Two completely different temperaments.
Asked for the time by the dreamer, Regula has no watch.
Ellen does have one, however, a special one that gets bigger and bigger, so that one “has to carry” it, meaning, presumably, that one has to hold it in one’s hands.
If in a dream something gets bigger to the point of unnaturalness, one should pay particular attention to this symbol.
The clock is man’s memento of the flow of all time.
It transmits the structure of the day and, with that, our tasks.
One says: “You will know it when the bell tolls for you.”
The so impressively swollen watch in the dream says: it is half three.
To his fright, one of the animas makes him realize that the time is half three.
Both girls show him, however, that he should actually be in Z.
The number half three is not easy to interpret, if we do not simply see it in a concrete way, as the actual hour it stands for.
The symbolism of numbers is something special.
I refer to the article by Professor Jung, Beitrag zur Zahlensymbolik.
One often does not succeed in getting to the bottom of the numbers appearing in a dream.
Frequently, one sees the most obvious thing only at the very end, and needs the most detailed knowledge about the dreamer’s environment for a more exact interpretation.
An example: In a dream in which traveling and a train station played a role, the numbers 2.10 and 2.30 appeared.
An attempt to break down these numbers in all possible ways failed.
Only later was it found out that 2.10 was the phone number of the local train station,
and 2.30 the phone number of the inn The Three Kings.
The connection could be established.
The dreamer did not consciously know these numbers.
It fits in with the previous dream, however, that the dreamer had failed—as often before—to appear for lunch.
So he runs home quickly, that is to say, guiltily.
Everything experienced so far pathetically collapses, for he has to take his place at home at the table, which is the father’s table, meaningful insofar as one cannot move away from it as long as one is young, not yet grown up, and dependent.
So now he would like to give an account of his experiences at that table, to his probably not all too pleased parents, presumably to distract them—something that’s just like him.
He can’t quite utter something intelligible, however, but just a kind of a slip of the tongue.
Only two names out of A Thousand and One Nights come to his mind, names so strange as to fascinate him.
But he finds it preferable to keep them to himself; otherwise, he could make a fool of himself.
Perhaps he identifies with Aladdin, perhaps as a consolation that a little good-for-nothing can still become a king.
In most of the stories in A Thousand and One Nights there is eventually a happy end.
Partly the dreamer is ashamed, partly he consoles himself.
I want to try to bring some structured coherence into this dream by means of a curve. [See the illustration.]
After the school and the ink blot, there is a lowering of the niveau mental.
The man and the dog have to help to raise it again so that everything becomes “transparent” again.
Then again there is a lowering, through the father with the two boys.
The dreamer needs a coat und seeks shelter in a previous place of his childhood.
There the animas tell him how late it is, and where he really belongs.
Professor Jung: Indian ink blots happen inadvertently.
This is about something dark, opaque, for which one might also get punished.
It is about the secret of puberty that was already then announcing itself.
That is normal, but naturally it is an anticipation.
Band-aid: This dream can no longer be explained quite as well with the help of archaic material.
This material is replaced by personal relations with the environment.
These are normal phenomena that are to be expected, and that occur regularly.
The boy is of an age in which the archaic world of mythical conditions gradually subsides, and the figures begin to get contaminated with those figures whom we meet in everyday life.
Those three young women are now replaced by less archaic figures, namely, by these two girls.
The “three-ness” of the young woman now blended into something male, the father plus two boys.
The two-ness as a “female,” even number is more appropriate for the girls.
And after the dream of the clinic Hirslanden, in which the little children, childhood, could no longer be saved, there now follows a dream about the personal relationship to the environment.
And that is why we would actually need the personal associations of the dreamer.
One could really ask him about them, and for a thorough analysis of the dream we would actually be forced to let the boy himself speak.
In the case of the dream of an adult, we actually ought not to proceed this way, that is, to bring it in parallel with archaic material only; with the one exception when we are dealing with a so-called great, that is mythological, dream, to which people
very often have no associations at all.
The band-aid, for instance, is a very modern image.
It probably means that which sticks, it could be that which sticks something on something.
The dreamer still has too few personal experiences, he is still too little; but he knows about using a band-aid on a wound.
The sticking, something that adheres to one, and that one cannot easily get off again, would also refer to the blots.
These refer, as mentioned by the speaker, to the sexual sphere.
As to young Ehrhard, with whom he experiences the adventures: here again one would have to know which kind of boy this is.
The role in the dream seems to point to a perhaps somehow more balanced, more grown-up personality.
In any case, we can presume that the dreamer projects a leader, an ideal, onto his friend.
In every school class there is usually one leader.
He is the one for fights, and so on.
It’s always someone who shows off; he’s always one for the show.
These leader figures regularly appear in dreams and fantasies, similarly in the case of girls.
You wouldn’t put anything past those figures, anything you yourself would never presume, or have presumed, to do; this is the soil from which rumor epidemics arise, in which everything imaginable is attributed to these heroes.
I assume that the boy Ehrhard plays such a role.
He is the figure within the dreamer who is already a bit more grown-up and mature, who is already “in the know.”
This Ehrhard is about one to two years older than the dreamer (information from the mother).
We always have to be aware of the fact that children also contain a future personality within themselves, the being that they will be in the following years.
The experiences of the coming years are, so to speak, there already, but only unconsciously, as they have not yet been made.
The children already live in a tomorrow, only they are not aware of it.
This figure exists in potentia, naturally in a projected form.
This is quite distinctly so in pathological cases, linked to the fact that these persons remain below their level, below the line.
They are living a couple of years behind themselves: a twenty-year-old behaves, in consciousness, like a fifteen-year-old.
In this case, the second personality is nevertheless already present, has even been lived, but unconsciously.
Such people then cling to a more mature personality in their environment, attach themselves, so as not to be forced to live their own maturity.
This is a neurotic condition.
In the case of children, the imitation of a role model is normal and quite all right.
Children cannot yet be truly original; they are not yet mature personalities, they still have to search tentatively for the ways of life.
They do it by taking hold of the hand of the leading person.
So it is all right for children until the age of twenty to have their ideal figures.
Later, it becomes more difficult.
In certain cases pathological inadequacies may develop.
But given that most people are immature and lack independence, it is good for them to have leaders.
As to the interpretation of the stable: A relation to Christ, born in the stable, seems to be a bit far-fetched.
This motif, the birth amidst ox and donkey, means: being born in the world of animals, low as animals.
Nativity has taken place in a cave, and this cave in Bethlehem is still being visited.
Even today people partly live in caves together with their animals.
This is an extraordinarily archaic place, reaching far back into human history.
The cave is the most original of all places to live.
The savior is born amidst the animals.
This symbolism recurs at the end of the life of Christ: the thieves, here again the lowest of all men, among whom he dies.
It is also the lowest of all births: an illegitimate birth.
This, however, is the most meaningful: the low, sad human life, beginning in lowness and ending in lowness, as the highest possible symbol.
It means: remember that you came from the stable, from the world of animals.
There is a (possibly Gnostic) bust called sotér kosmú, the savior of the world; it exists in a double form, sotér, the savior, and the phallus.
Our development begins in the unconscious.
If we do not realize this, we forget that we are descended from the animal world.
Then we will imagine that we live in a two-dimensional world without depth, the newspaper world for instance, or the paper world.
The body is an animal, our body soul an animal soul. One must not forget this.
This is the great difficulty: that we have to reach, from the completely unconscious animal soul, the stairs on which we can ascend to the heights.
The Pueblo Indians have a mythical image for this: in the development of mankind, one cave on top of the other has to be reached.
We are descendants of cave dwellers.
There is within us an immortal memory of the time in the cave world.
The dark blots of Indian ink are those dark memories of the cave world, in which one was unconscious.
The inevitable inner growth of the animal soul creates the big, dark spots in human life: “To earth, this weary earth, ye bring us, To guilt ye let us heedless go.”
It is quite necessary to ascend from this unconsciousness.
The boy/leader Ehrhard shows the way up; then things become transparent.
The glass wall appears.
The glass wall is a typical symbol, one often comes across it.
One needs this image when one is emotionally separated from the object.
You can look through it, but nothing else passes through it.
One is cut off from contact.
This means that the dreamer is now separated from that underworld store, where he got the sealing-wax sticks from the Fates.
It is the idea that now there exists a wall between him and the mythological archaic world.
He sees flowers and vegetables.
Flowers usually stand for emotions, while vegetables play with erotic innuendo.
In the stable an adult has to enter as the leader: the man and the dog. He is the master of the dog, which obeys him.
The unconscious is correctly integrated.
The man, accompanied by the dog, is a unity, just like horse and rider.
The man is consciousness, the dog obeys him, or the horse carries him.
This is the ideal solution in the relationship toward the animal unconscious.
In Persia, the dog is the companion of the dead.
To give it bread is a ceremony: one gives it bread instead of the body, meaning, don’t
tear me apart, don’t tear my soul apart, but guide it to the destination through the desert of Hades.
Anubis, the Egyptian jackal god, helped Isis to gather the pieces of Osiris.
This jackal is a son of Osiris and Nephtys. Isis and Nephtys are characterologically separated.
Isis is the beneficial goddess of vegetation.
Nephtys is identical to Hathor; her later form is Venus/Aphrodite.
She has one doubtful aspect; therefore, she is not the wife of Osiris, but the wife of Osiris’s evil brother, Set or Typhon, who also represents the shadow of Osiris.
Due to a little misunderstanding, Nephtys became pregnant from Osiris.
The jackal god was the son: brother dog is thus a descendant from the gods.
Symbolically speaking, he came from the liaison of consciousness with the unconscious—even with the unfavorable side of the unconscious.
Nobody, therefore, has a good relation to his unconscious if he cannot impregnate the dark.
This is actually possible only through a misunderstanding. Something to meditate on!
The locksmith: he really stands for the smith.
He is a magic figure; the black man dealing with the fire, the evil one who knows how to
do it; the sorcerer, the medicine man, the enigmatic man working in the underworld, practising secret arts. He often stands for the devil.
The father with the two boys: here it is quite useful to think of Laocoön and his two sons.
Laocoön dared to come too close to the sea—the unconscious—and was gripped by it, in the form of a snake.
In sexual, primitive terms: the male is captivated by the female (coitus); abstractly speaking: the unconscious overpowers consciousness.
The essential point is the number three, here as in the further course of the dream, the time “half three.”
This could mean: it is not yet quite three o’clock, there is still a half hour left until then.
All over the world the number three has a male meaning; this is in connection with male anatomy.
The number three is not yet complete; there is no ripe fruit yet, no sexual maturity.
The post bringing forth a well: this is the motif of boring a well, conceived of as an act of impregnation.
This is a parallel to the numerous traditions of fertilizing a field, of the phallic plow, the fertility gods who should fertilize the fields.
Priapus too was simply a post of fig wood.
He is the ithyphallic Hermes, simply represented by a wooden post.
He also exists already in megalithic form, because the menhir too has a phallic meaning.
It makes us shiver to sense connections that point far into the future.
These insights are “shivery,” they cause a feeling of coldness.
A cold wind is said to always blow before the appearance of ghosts: “Sharp spirit-fangs press from the north.”
A cold, ghostly draft is always a concomitant of a being that essentially has no body.
When we are mentally taken by somebody into a region where we no longer feel at home, we speak of “ice-cold heights of the intellect,” or about him, “a cold person.”
Whenever something is taken too far, we at once have the idea of coldness.
When we can no longer humanly empathize with something, we get cold and sad at heart.
So when we have an idea we cannot yet grasp, we sense a shivery draft; we are instinctively afraid of new ideas that somehow go too far, because instantly there is the fear of being driven insane by them.
And with the fear there also comes the coldness.
A cold shiver runs down our spine, and our hands and feet are cold.
This feeling makes our dreamer put his coat on.
What makes him shiver is the realization or the view of a future in which he himself is
not yet present.
The coat is a protective cover giving him warmth.
Wrapping himself into the coat corresponds to going back to a warm, safe place where one still is surrounded by the feminine and the motherly.
The motherly is represented by the two sisters, Regula and Ellen.
Here again we have the Osiris situation!
In the dream, the two girls are different, that is, opposites (information from the parents), with compensatory differences, as is often the case in sisters.
We have already talked about the contrast between Isis and Nephtys, the two sisters of Osiris.
The two girls have a watch, and this watch is getting big and heavy.
Heavy is gravis, meaning that something is serious, a difficult matter.
“This is a weighty issue”: such figures of speech convey important relationships.
The watch swells.
Reducing this to its sexual meaning, one
may interpret this as early sensations of intumescence.
However, this is also an image describing how an unimportant matter becomes “weighty” (similarly Faust: “It’s growing in my hand! It shines and glows!”).
In the Christophorus legend the little child gradually becomes too heavy for the giant, because he is carrying the king of the universe.
Similarly, in a legend of the Mahabharata the (unrecognized) Hanuman makes himself so heavy that not even a god can lift him.
What makes the watch so heavy?
It is the problem of time; it is a problem that becomes important in the course of time.
The two girls are the two anima figures (Osiris myth).
It is the anima, split into a positive, active side, and a more negative, passive side.
The watch is in possession of the anima.
This watch is something that looks very far ahead: it is the watch we carry within ourselves, the Self.
It is the iron wheel, the machine of fate. Just a tiny wristwatch!
But it tells the time that the whole fate carries in its womb.
It is a mandala and represents the dynamism of fate, it is heaven’s watch, the zodiac, the twelve signs standing for the houses in the sky.
Therein fate is inscribed.
Men have been convinced of this since time immemorial.
These two anima figures carry fate.
They are impersonations of the unconscious that holds our own peculiar fate.
Woman is man’s fate.
Otherwise he is suspended in the air and has no roots.
Woman is always the bearer of fate; the woman to whom a man is bound is his
fate, she makes him take root in the earth.
It is from this world, then, that a foreboding of his fate approaches the boy.
The girl will be fate for him; something unforeseeable, improbable, ungraspable. He wants to tell about that, he happens onto A Thousand and One Nights, “Contes des Fées,” age-old stories.
This points back to the impression he received from the watch and from the girl as anima.
These are mythological themes, a faint impression of something long gone.
In Goethe’s poem Erlking, the king tries to lure the soul of a boy away from his real father, to become a playmate for his own daughters!
In the end, he takes it with force.
Those mythological themes also pull the dreamer back from reality.
He therefore has to tell “fairy tales” to get away from this.
That’s quite similar to the glass wall!
He even no longer knows the names of those people.
Presumably, the two names only refer to the two girls.
The real name, however, is the real innermost nature as it is given in the unconscious in its totality already at birth.
But it is also the watch, because the human character is determined by the point of
time of birth.
This is a wonderful thing, just as a wine specialist knows when and where a wine is “born.”
This tiny watch is his fate, developing out of the course of time; it seems to be light at first, only to become unbearably heavy in the end.
We ourselves are our fate, as Seni says to Wallenstein: “In your bosom are the stars of your fate.”
The Self revealing itself in time is represented by the instrument that determines time and fate, the watch.
As a mandala, the circle also expresses the deity unfolding in space.
Hence the circle metaphor of St. Augustine for the deity: “God is a circle whose center is everywhere, and whose periphery nowhere.”
The archetype of the circle, the mandala, means concentration on a midpoint, meaning either the Self, the deity, or both simultaneously, for example, “Atman.”
- DREAMS OF AN EIGHT- TO NINE-YEAR-OLD GIRL
- Dream of the Lion, the Bread, and the Magic Mirror Presented by Margret Sachs
Text: I went into the forest, then a lion came. I wasn’t afraid of the lion, I wanted to stroke him and ride on him.
But I fell off. Then he ate me up, and I was dead.
Now my mommy came and took me on her arm.
She went home with me and laid me on the bed.
Then I discovered a magic mirror in the pocket of my apron, which I turned toward myself, and then I woke up again; I had enchanted myself.
I had also put a spell on the whole house, and there was a store down stairs, and everything was completely different now.
The people walked all slanting, me too, and I kept thinking I’d fall over, but I didn’t.
I went and got a loaf of bread in the store, and the woman said: “You have to hold on to the bread.”
But I let the bread fall, and then many worms came out of it.
Now she had to give me another loaf of bread, and then I walked up the narrow staircase and fell over myself.
There was a hole in the stairs; I stuck the bread into the hole (I don’t know why), threw the money away, and brought Mommy a couple of stones.
She was angry with me and beat me with a switch. Then I woke up.
Additions, context, and fantasies associated with the dream:
In the mirror, I saw, for instance, a burning house and people running out of the house; but they were very small people: little men, women, and kids.
On the other side of the mirror there stands a tree, and a kind of string and a head are tied to it; a head like a skull, with four things like horns or legs protruding from it, no eyes, just holes, no nose, everything decayed, just teeth, and that scared me.
Then the magic mirror turned its light toward me, and I had to throw up.
Then I climbed up the tree and I clung to the skull; then my legs and arms fell down, and also the body, but then the legs and arms came up again, only the body stayed down.
(In the Wesemlin church such arms and legs hang in the chapel, what is that?)
Mrs. Sachs: The dream is of a girl eight-and-a-half years old.
In the year she had the dream she had to repeat the second grade.
The teacher complains about insufficient results, absent-mindedness, and superficiality. Her intelligence is—according to tests—quite adequate for her age.
The girl comes from a lower-middle-class background, and has three brothers.
The mother claims that she has not been able to get the girl to help in the household at all for a half year or so.
The dream is long and seems very complicated.
In a work of Professor Jung we read: When there are a couple of scenes in one dream, each of the scenes usually shows a specific variant of dealing with a complex.
This seems to be the case here too.
As to the individual motives:
The forest: it is the unknown, the dark, the place of danger where the mysterious happens, as
