DREAMS and the UNCONSCIOUS
Our conscious mind is far from understanding everything, but the
unconscious always keeps an eye on the age-old sacred things.
(Jung, Collected Works, Vol. 12, para. 85)
Through the assimilation of unconscious contents, the momentary life
of consciousness can once more be brought into harmony with the law
of nature from which it all too easily departs, and ... [the person] can
be led back to the natural law of his own being.
(Jung, Collected Works, Vol. 8, para. 351)
From materials of the unconscious ... there arises the edifice that reaches
completion in the restoration of the total personality. It leads in the end
to that distant goal which may perhaps have been the first urge to life:
the complete actualization of the whole human being, that is individuation.
In these remarkable quotes, C.G. Jung speaks of the relationship of the conscious and the unconscious. That word, "unconscious," travels like a stranger in our present-day land of hyper-consciousness with its titillating surface values -- superficial entertainment, superficial relationships, superficial politics, superficial religion, superficial "management of wealth."
This hyper-consciousness is ever with us. The lights never go off, the muzak never stops, the blaring urge to buy, buy, buy, spend, spend, spend, hurry, hurry, hurry ... it's incessant. Except for the time of sleep! And even there, we seem to resent that we have to take a break from the stream of images and sensations in order to "get a night's rest." Interesting isn't it, that in spite of the caffeine and uppers we consume addictively, we cannot avoid falling into the foreign world of Hypnos, the mythological god or spirit of sleep in whose dark cave the sun never reaches but in whose peaceful solitude we also find his twin brother, Thanatos (death), and brothers Oneiroi (dreams)! Thanatos visits us only at the end of our life, Hypnos each night (hopefully), but the Oneiroi? --- Their work is a very demanding one of assimilating and working through the various events of our conscious life and then gifting us with a dream each ninety minutes of our sleeping life in efforts to restore sanity and offer a way to find meaning in all that we are going through in our waking life.
But I am perhaps getting ahead of myself. Before saying more about the Oneiroi and our dreams, let me return briefly to the idea of our "unconscious." We tend to think about it -- if we think about it at all! -- as something we have forgotten, or a kind of bucket that holds all the "stuff" we once were aware of but have "forgotten." Maybe some of us even go so far as to think of the unconscious as a room in our mind, perhaps an out-of-the-way closet, in which unpleasant thoughts, feelings, experiences, and deeds have been hidden away "out of sight, out of mind."
But, then, we also have to deal with those times in school when we could not figure out the answer to a stubborn math problem, gave up, went to bed exhausted, fell asleep, and woke up the next morning with a sublime solution to the unsolvable math problem! How did that happen? It was definitely not our conscious mind that solved the problem. So here we come face to face with that mysterious "Other" that dwells somewhere outside our conscious awareness. This is the work of that mysterious part of our personality, or psyche to be more particular, that which is not conscious, in other words, the unconscious. The unconscious, then, is to be understood as more than a depository for things forgotten; rather, as Jung said in the opening quote, it "keeps an eye on the age-old sacred things" and brings light to consciousness in order to restore balance to our waking life. And it is within and from the unconscious that the Oneiroi work to bring us our dreams -- speaking symbolically and mythologically.
I stand in the side yard of my grandparents' house beneath the chinaberry
and oak trees. The old well is behind me. I become aware that the sky in front
of me is changing. It seems to be on fire and is collapsing like a piece of
paper burning in the fireplace. This is the end of the world.
That is a heavy dream for a five-year-old child, too heavy. And, indeed, within two years of the dream, his mother will die of leukemia! It was the end of the world he had known and in which he felt secure. But there was more. On July 16, of that same year, 1945, the atomic bomb would be tested in the Jornada del Muerto ("Journey of Death") desert, at a site named "Trinity," outside Los Alamos, New Mexico.
The so-called "father of the atomic bomb, J.Robert Oppenheimer (1904-1967), in an interview with Edward Murrow (available on YouTube) described the moment of the explosion like this:
We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed; a few
people cried. Most people were silent. I remember the line from the Hindu
scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita: Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he
should do his duty, and to inspire him, takes on his multi-armed form and
says, "Now I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds." I suppose we all
thought that, one way or another.
The collapse of other worlds followed: the bombing of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, killing 90,000-166,000 people; the bombing of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, killing 60,000-80,000; the eruption of the arms race that brought the aiming of rockets toward a mutual destruction of Russia and the United States, possibly the entire world; the absurd public policy of teaching and drilling school-age children to "duck and cover" through-out the last half of the 20th century, considered by many to be a propaganda ploy directed against the Soviet Union which was engaged in its own propaganda; and the climatic moment of the cold war that witnessed a chilling confrontation between the Soviet Union and the United States over the Cuban missile crises. I could list other incidents, civilian and military, that helped to serve as the prevailing, ongoing reminder of massive destruction to human and natural life, all sentient beings and the planet itself.
This brief description of horrific scenes of death and the hovering prospect of death is not intended to address the matter of public policy and warfare since 1945, with the development of means of mass destruction. I am calling our attention to the dream of the five-year-old boy who dreamed the end of the world The point is not that he had a prophetic dream which, in my opinion, it was not. I suspect there were many other dreamers with similar images because something was "in the air," so to speak. In any case, the young dreamer who dreamed the end of the world lived all his life under the heavy, dark umbrella of Thanatos; collectively and personally, he experienced the end of many worlds as well as the threatening destruction of others.
Might it be, then, that the unconscious acts like a receiver/transformer picking up signals of many different kinds. This likely is a survival process evolving through the centuries that made possible the human brain and the role of dreams acting to bring into narrative form all we are, but also all that we have been and all that might be in the stage of becoming.
Jung stretches the boundaries of our understanding of dreams with this summary:
Dreams may contain ineluctable truths, philosophical pronouncements,
illusions, wild fantasies, memories, plans, anticipations, irrational
experiences, even telepathic visions, and heaven knows what else
besides. One thing we ought never to forget: Almost half our life is
passed in a more or less unconscious state. The dream is specifically
the utterance of the unconscious.