Dreams:The Hidden Door to the Soul

Author: Christopher Chayban

Quotes-

[“The dream is a little hidden door in the innermost and most secret recesses of the soul, opening into that cosmic night which was psyche long before there was any ego-consciousness, and which will remain psyche no matter how far our ego-consciousness extends. For all ego-consciousness is isolated; because it separates and discriminates, it knows only particulars, and it sees only those that can be related to the ego. Its essence is limitation, even though it reach to the farthest nebulae among the stars. All consciousness separates; but in dreams we put on the likeness of that more universal, truer, more eternal man dwelling in the darkness of primordial night. There he is still the whole, and the whole is in him, indistinguishable from nature and bare of all egohood. It is from these all-uniting depths that the dream arises, be it never so childish, grotesque, and immoral. 45 : 304/” (Psychological Reflections pg.53)

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“I had to understand that I was unable to make the people see what I am after. I am practically alone. There are a few who understand this and that, but almost nobody sees the whole… I have failed in my foremost task: to open people’s eyes to the fact that man has a soul and there is a buried treasure in the field and that our religion and philosophy are in a lamentable state.1” (Encounter with Jung pg.158) ]

Surely, C.G. Jung, does not regard the word “Psychology” as it is meant today. In our contemporary times, the field of Psychology is a field is considered to be about “the mind” or in a more extraverted sense, the human brain. But for Carl, what is meant by “Psychology,” is exactly what the word, in its etymology, is intended to mean. Psyche, is the Greek word for “Soul,” and “Logos,” means the study of, the word of, or the language of something. Therefore, we come to what is meant by Psychology as, the study of the soul, the language of the soul, or the science of the soul. Here, we inch closer to tracking just what he (Jung) was “unable to make people see.”

How Jung wants us to “see,” is through the lens of two parallel systems. The first is the realm of the ego and consciousness, the second, the world of the dream and the unconscious. The unconscious and the dream are much older forms of intelligence indeed, and the ego is still in its infancy, so to speak in that regard. Consciousness, in the Jungian schema, is wedded to the functional complex that we call the ego. Jung says that during our cosmic day, consciousness always separates and discriminates, while during the cosmic night, the unconscious, tries to unite, and fill the holes that have been limited by or cut out by our scissoring ego consciousness (Psychological Reflections pg.53).

For every one-sided position that the functional ego complex seeks, there is in the dream, compensatory players competing for the same light that the ego basks in. These are the dysfunctional and autonomous psychic complexes, which obey their laws (Psychological Reflections pg.56) as they swim up to the surface, shoving the ego aside and constellating us into action. They contain the key the core (the archetypal core that is), of who we “wholly” are. The complexes are the royal roads to the unconscious and the unconscious speaks through the dream. Through careful attention to our dreams, we can follow these breadcrumbs hidden in the complexes, towards the center, the super psychic loaf of our daily bread, the Self, the buried treasure of the soul.

As I mentioned earlier, the unconscious utters it’s words through the dream (Psychological Reflections pg.56) the language of the soul. We know by now that this language the psyche speaks is in metaphors or in a parable (Psychological Reflections pg.68-69). The parable is a symbol that leads to the paradox, Jung’s buried treasure map, where “x” marks the spot on the island of union. The union (the Self) is the place of the conflicting psychic opposites. On the one hand, this “Self,” according to Jung, is a two million-year-old man (Psychological Reflections pg.76), and on the other hand, it has no age and is the eternal man within all of us. We make contact with him or her and the buried treasure that is the “age-old” and “unforgotten” wisdom within us (Psychological Reflections pg.76). Through this alter reality that we call the dream world, which is beneath the threshold of consciousness; we are to sink down with our psychic submarine to depths of the unconscious and link back to our primal “whole” or “eternal” man.  In doing this, we reclaim rather find our “Psychology,”

Learning about our psychology, our soulness, en route to greater wholeness starts by way of the dream. The dream is the back door where the secrets of our souls (Psychological Reflections pg.53) lie buried, hidden away from the light, dormant and sleeping in the cosmic night. It is a treasure that is not lost, but if we care to look, there lies hope, that it may be found.

Often psychology feels like a head game and the body is secondary. I like the notion that Jung gives of the archetype being psychoid, partly body and partly psyche. If we reframe the word archetype and use its definition, it becomes even more clear why the archetype is so. The archetype, in other words “the original pattern,” is partly body, and partly psyche. All things, be it physical or psychic have a pattern and it makes perfect sense that an archetype would have a physical correlate. What’s interesting is the third thing, energy. How does a psychic content cross the threshold and effect the body with affect and drain it of energy, and the reverse, how does it magically supply it with energy? I find energy peculiar, it’s part fuel, part intensity, part tangible, part intangible, everywhere, yet nowhere. Is the Self, our energy? Jung talks so much about the eternal man, hidden in dreams, the one who connects us back to nature and our physical instincts. James too talks about having that continuous flow of energy from the brain to body. I suppose energy, elementally speaking is fire, the only element that is hot, the rest are cold (earth, water, air, ether). That’s why for the symbols of the libido (energy), Jung attributes many fire symbols to most of the topics we investigate. Fire is related to the sun, consciousness, eros (love/affinity), emotion, affect etc. I know I’m back at the abstract now and somewhat got away from the tangible physical body, so to tie it back around I’d like to close by saying even the physical earth, has it’s fire in the middle and perhaps, our physical fire could tell us something about our psychic fire.

I’d like to elaborate a little more on an idea I have about this liminal state and the element of fire. One day I was contemplating the mind/body problem and I thought that well perhaps we can’t tell how psyche is body, or body is psyche or spirit is because it literally has to be digested, metabolized and transformed in order to enter the new realm. The food that enters your mouth does not look the same after you’ve digested it in your body, and I imagine the same goes for psychic content.

In Ayurvedic medicine, fire (Agni) is big and the deity “Agni” is both a deity, and the digestive power of your stomach. So I paralleled this concept to Jung’s concept of “psychization,” where somatic processes become “psychized” whenever they reach a particular degree of intensity for consciousness to notice. But the problem with that is, it is no longer the thing affected your soma (body) it, it has been digested/aka “psychized” and changed it’s form and it is now how your psyche perceives it to be, and not as it is in its original form. So perhaps, we can’t ever know (as much as we would like to know) about this liminal in between state, due to our psychic metabolism of the process. The interesting thing about dreams and the fire aspect of them is that they are self-luminous. They create their own light for whatever image that it chooses to cast. That would be a question for dream biologists. If I am sleeping and it’s dark in my room, then how can I see a well lit room in my dream?

Resources:

Jung, C. G., & Jacobi, J. (1971). C.G. Jung: Psychological reflections: A new anthology of his writings, 1905-1961. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Rolfe, E. (1989). Encounter with Jung. Boston, MA: Sigo Press.

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