Carl Jung Depth Psychology Facebook Group

Children’s Dreams Seminar

Professor Jung: This Dream was dreamed by a boy between four and five years old.

This dream, too, was not told by the child, but remembered by the adult.

As I mentioned in the first session, we are dealing only with such dreams here.

Childhood dreams still remembered by adults are not just any dreams, but have been preserved by memory because they completely contain human life in either longer or shorter periods.

When we have a cursory glance at such a dream, at first we do not understand why it has been remembered.

If we are able to trace it back, however, we can in most cases find clues as to why it has gained such importance.

If things have made a deep impression on us in childhood, we may assume that something highly important lies within what impressed us as such, or that a very important event happened in the neighborhood of what we kept in our memory, something which is meaningful for the whole later course of life.

There are such childhood memories: suddenly there is a smell of bread in the air, or of bread or milk, or the memory of a scene when the mother let a plate fall on the ground—all of them seemingly completely unimportant in themselves, but in whose proximity there are events or conditions that are very important for the later development of the child.

If we cannot reconstruct these events with the help of the parents themselves, it is not always possible to verify them.

Even then it is extremely difficult, because these are often things the parents do not want to remember.

Also, often the parents cannot contribute anything because such dreams originate in a sphere of which they themselves are not aware.

In the case of such material we have to realize right at the beginning that we are not able to tackle the dream with the usual means.

As we have seen in one of the previous sessions, we have to use the ethno-psychological method with dreams that cannot be solved by personal questioning or personal amplification.

Nature itself speaks in such dreams.

The wisdom of the child is the wisdom of nature, and it needs the utmost cunning to follow nature.

You know the saying: “Children and fools tell the truth.”

The truth is hard to understand, for the simple is difficult, and the simplest of all is the most difficult of all.

You’ll have to have studied all there is to study to reduce such a dream to a simple formula. ~Carl Jung, Children’s Dreams Seminar, Page 135-136