Carl Jung > Dream Interpretation

We post here two examples of dreams interpreted by Jung.

More examples have been published in our email course Jung and Dreams, treating of Jung's mrethod of dream interpretation. Click here to learn more.

The following quotes were taken from Psychology and Alchemy*, one of the basic works of Carl Jung.

The dream is posted in italics.

8. Dream


On board ship. The dreamer is occupied with a new method of taking his bearings. Sometimes he is too far away and sometimes too near: the right spot is in the middle. There is a chart on which is drawn a circle with its center.

Obviously the task set here is to find the center, the right spot, and this is the center of a circle. While the dreamer was writing down this dream he remembered that he had dreamed shortly before of shooting at a target: sometimes he shot too high, sometimes too low. The right aim lay in the middle. Both dreams struck him as highly significant. The target is a circle with a center. Bearings at sea are taken by the apparent rotation of the stars round the earth. Accordingly the dream describes an activity whose aim is to construct or locate an objective center - a center outside the subject.

9. Dream


A pendulum clock that goes forever without the weights running down.                                              

This is a species of clock whose hands move unceasingly, and, since there is obviously no loss due to friction, it is a perpetuum mobile, an everlasting movement in a circle. Here we meet with a "metaphysical" attribute. As I have already said, I use this word in a psychological sense, hence figuratively. I mean by this that eternity is a quality predicated by the unconscious, and not a hypostasis. The statement made by the dream will obviously offend the dreamer's scientific judgment, but this is just what gives the mandala its peculiar significance. Highly significant things are often rejected because they seem to contradict reason and thus set it too arduous a test. The movement without friction shows that the clock is cosmic, even transcendental; at any rate is raises the question of a quality which leaves us in some doubt whether the psychic phenomenon expressing itself in the mandala is under the laws of space and time. And this points to something  so entirely different from the empirical ego that the gap between them is difficult to bridge; i.e., the other center of personality lies on a different plane from the ego since, unlike this, it has the quality of "eternity" or relative timelessness.

=> See also Dream 16 here

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* Psychology and Alchemy, Bollingen Foundation, N.Y., 1968, p. 104-105.

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