Children’s Dreams: Notes from the Seminar Given in 1936-1940

            This new English translation of C.G. Jung’s seminar on the earliest remembered dreams of childhood marks a dramatic advance in the study of Jungian dream theory.  The book makes available to English readers a fascinating, informative, and thought-provoking source of insight into Jung’s practical approach to dream interpretation.  It will appeal to anyone who wants to learn more about how Jung actually worked with dreams.  The book will also serve as an important resource for teachers and researchers in their use and/or criticism of Jung’s psychology of dreams.  Although the title suggests a narrower focus, Children’s Dreams in fact provides the best single source for understanding the broader dimensions of Jungian dream theory.

            From 1936 to 1940 Jung taught the seminar at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich.  The participants included some of his brightest followers, including Marie-Louis Von Franz, Aniela Jaffe, and Jolande Jacobi.  Each meeting of the seminar involved one of the participants presenting and analyzing an early childhood dream report (or brief dream series), after which Jung would comment and other participants would ask questions and respond to Jung’s ideas.  We cannot know how faithfully the transcript represents what actually happened in the seminar, but the written text does give the strong sense of a lively, intelligent, free-flowing conversation among people who knew Jung’s theories very well and wanted his guidance in applying them. 

            Virtually no mention is made of the ominous political situation in Europe at this time, i.e., the rise of Hitler and the Nazis in Germany and the outbreak of World War II.  A Jung critic might take this as a retreat from the real problems of the world into the self-reinforcing fantasy world of dream symbolism.  A more sympathetic reader might wonder if the seminar participants found this work so compelling precisely because they knew that dark forces were afoot and they wanted to gain better practical insight into the deep psychological roots of the darkness threatening their civilization. 

            The first chapter, Jung’s introductory lecture to the class, is itself worth the price of the book.  In clear, straightforward language Jung lays out the basic principles and themes of his approach to dream interpretation.  He puts special emphasis on the earliest remembered dreams of childhood because these types of dreams often relate to primordial themes in the collective unconscious and thus offer an especially good view of archetypal dynamics.  In this Jung highlights a key notion in his overall psychological system: “[T]he unconscious is older than consciousness….The unconscious is what is originally given, from which consciousness rises anew again and again.” (7)   Children have less conscious superstructure than adults and thus more direct exposure to oneiric blasts from the collective unconscious. This is not always a good thing.  On the contrary, one of the remarkable features of the dreams presented in the book is their relentlessly negative, violent, frightening character.  Most of the dreams are nightmares, many of them recurrent.  This may reflect the fact that the seminar participants drew most of the dream reports from their clinical practices with people suffering psychophysiological problems.  It may also reflect what Jung considered the numinous power of the archetypes, their overwhelming energy and consciousness-stretching impact on people, particularly early in their lives.

            In the introduction Jung lays out his method of analyzing dreams in terms of a four-part dramatic structure:

             1. Locale: Place, time, ‘dramatis personae.’

            2. Exposition: Illustration of the problem.

            3. Peripateia: Illustration of the transformation—which can also leave room for a catastrophe.

            4. Lysis: Result of the dream. Meaningful closure. Compensating illustration of the action of the dream. (30)   

             Each dream in the book is analyzed according to this structure.  This creates a helpful unity across the length of the book, which at 468 pages requires an extensive commitment of time and energy to read all the way to the end.  For teaching and reference purposes the book can be read piecemeal, in selections of one or two dream discussions (each one goes for 10-15 pages).  But we found real value in reading the book start to finish because many of the most interesting exchanges between Jung and the participants pop up unexpectedly in reference to different dreams.  As the seminars proceed Jung refers back to previous dreams and their analyses, so there is definitely a cumulative quality to the text. 

            Jung’s Children’s Dreams will not, in all likelihood, satisfy contemporary researchers who ask about the reliability of memory processes in dream recall, particularly dreams that people are remembering from many years in the past.  Nor will those who question Jung’s assumption about the universality of the archetypes find any reason to give up their skepticism.  But for those who already appreciate and value Jungian dream theory, Children’s Dreams will be a cause for joy.  The book is comparable to Freud’s epic Interpretation of Dreams (1900) in providing a rich, complex, highly detailed exposition of Jung’s psychology of dreams and dream interpretation. 

(Originally published in DreamTime 2009, co-authored with KB’s mother, Patricia Bulkley)

     Bulkeley will explain how sleep and dreaming are natural processes hard-wired into the human brain, as well as universal portals into religious experience and spiritual insight. He will describe current scientific research on the health benefits of sleep and the evolutionary functions of dreaming. He will integrate these findings with philosophical and religious teachings about the healing power of dreams.

     Established in 2006 by the Siena Center of Dominican University, the Albertus Magnus Society pursues new information and insight in a setting that is both scholarly and congenial, and reflects the Dominican understanding of the compatibility of religion and science. The society was named for Albertus Magnus, patron saint of scientists, and thirteenth century Dominican famed for scientific discoveries and a theology reflective of the emerging science of his day. For more information on the Albertus Magnus Society, please call (708) 714-9105 or visit the website at http://www.dom.edu/ams.

“He [Lieberman] was feeling loose now, so much so that he began telling aides about a dream he’d had the other night in which long-dead Democratic Connecticut Governor John Dempsey had walked across a stage and waved at him.  Lieberman was puzzled by the dream.  It was hard not to wonder what his unconscious was telling him: Was this the Democratic organization from the past wishing the senator well or waving goodbye?”

“Joe Lieberman’s War: The Hawkish Senator Finds Himself in an Epic Battle—With his Own Party,” by Meryl Gordon, New York Magazine, August 7, 2006.

On August 8th, 2006, Joseph Lieberman, the incumbent Democratic Senator from Connecticut, lost the Democratic primary to newcomer Ned Lamont, whose anti-war campaign stirred up sufficient liberal opposition to reject Lieberman and his unwavering support for President Bush’s campaign in Iraq.  His defeat seemed to mark the end of his career, a dramatic and precipitous fall given that just six years earlier he was the Democratic Vice-Presidential candidate alongside Al Gore.

Lieberman did not accept defeat, however.  Instead he ran as an independent in the November 2006 general election and handily beat Lamont, retaining his senate seat for a fourth term.

From our vantage today, his puzzling dream visitation from the late Governor (Dempsey died in 1989) might qualify as a kind of prophetic anticipation of the political near-death experience he was about to endure  (Lieberman, an observant Jew, would likely know of his religious tradition’s long belief in the prophetic power of dreaming, especially in times of mortal danger).  Lieberman did indeed come within waving distance of his political demise.  A classic theme in visitation dreams is a welcoming gesture from the dead, which is often interpreted as a sign that the dreamer will soon depart this world and journey to the next.

After he lost the primary, Lieberman could have accepted the Democratic voters’ verdict, followed the path taken by Dempsey (a loyal member of the state’s Democratic party who retired in 1971), and left the political scene.  Instead he fought against the Democrats, and won.  He survived the threat to his political life, but perhaps at the cost of losing connection with his ideological ancestors.

[I wrote the above in the summer of 2008.  Recent days have given new reasons to wonder about the psychodynamics of the Senator's movement away from the Democratic party.]

Dreams have been a powerful source of revelation, guidance, and healing for generations of Christians and Muslims.  Dreams have also been an accurate gauge of the most challenging conflicts facing each tradition.  Dreaming in Christianity and Islam is the first book to tell the story of dreaming in these two major world religions, documenting the wide-ranging impact of dreams on their sacred texts, mystical experiences, therapeutic practices, and doctrinal controversies.

The book presents a wealth of evidence to advance a simple but, in the contemporary historical moment, radical argument:  Christians and Muslims share a common psychospiritual grounding in the dreaming imagination.  While careful, sustained attention will be given to the significant differences between the two traditions, the overall emphasis of the book is on the shared religious, psychological, and social qualities of their dream experiences.

Throughout their respective histories Christians and Muslims have turned to dreams for creative responses to their most urgent crises and concerns.  In this book the contributors apply that same imaginative resource to the current conflict between the two traditions, seeking in the depths of dreaming new creative responses to the global crisis of religious misunderstanding and fearful hostility.  Included in the book are chapters on dreams in the Bible and Qur’an; on the early history of Christian and Muslim beliefs about dreaming; on religious practices of dream interpretation; on the dreams of children, women, college students, and prison inmates; and on the use of dreams in healing, caregiving, and creative adaptation to waking problems.

Spiritual Dreaming: A Cross-Cultural and Historical Journey.

Animals of various kinds appear in spiritually meaningful dreams. Birds, dogs, bears, wolves, fish, and even insects have come in people’s dreams to deliver important messages from the divine. But the animal that makes perhaps the most powerful spiritual impact in dreams is the snake. People from cultures all over the world report dreams in which they have intensely vivid encounters with snakes. Content analysis studies performed by Robert Van de Castle indicate that even in the dreams of modern Americans, who presumably have little direct contact with snakes, these animals appear with surprising frequency. [i] Many reports of snake dreams emphasize their strange, uncanny quality; the dreamer feels both attracted to and yet repelled by the serpent. As the following examples suggest, many people through history have regarded snake dreams as deeply spiritual experiences–for these dreams reveal the ambivalent nature of the sacred, its capacity to be a force of joyful creativity and violent destructiveness in human life.

1) A fifty year-old woman named Rosie Plummer, of the Paviotso people living on the Walker river reservation in Nevada, told anthropologist Willard Park of her shaman father. Rattlesnakes frequently came to him in his dreams and told him how to cure snake bites and other illnesses. Eighteen years after his death, Rosie started to dream about her father. “She dreamed that he came to her and told her to be a shaman. Then a rattlesnake came to her in dreams and told her to get eagle feathers, white paint, wild tobacco. The snake gave her the songs that she sings when she is curing. The snake appeared three or four times before she be lieved that she would be a shaman. Now she dreams about the rattlesnake quite frequently and she learns new songs and is told how to cure sick people in this way. [ii]

2) Lilias Trotter, a Christian missionary who worked in Algeria in the early part of the twentieth century, had these two dreams reported to her by Muslims who were converting to Christianity. A) Trotter says that an Algerian she knew named Boualem had been involved in an angry conflict with a neighbor. She wanted to help Boualem, but didn’t know how; then she says, “now God has dealt with the matter. Boualem told us that a dream had come. ‘I dreamed that a great snake was coiling round my foot and leg, and you [Trot ter] were there, and in horror I called to you. You said to the snake: “In the name of Jesus, let go.” It uncoiled and fell like a rope, and I woke almost dead with joy.’ And the shining of his face told that his soul had got free.” B) Trotter says, “Blind Houriya came this morning with ‘I want to tell you something that has frightened me very much. I dreamt it Saturday night, but I was too frightened to tell you yesterday. To-day my husband told me, “You must tell them.” I dreamed that a great snake was twisting round my throat and strangling me. I called to you [Trotter] but you said: “I cannot save you, for you are not following our road.” I went on calling for help, and one came up to me and loosened the snake from off my neck. I said: “And who is it that is saving me, and what is this snake?” A voice said: “I am Jesus and this snake is Ramadan [the Muslim ritual fasting period].”‘” [iii]

3) Henry Shipes was the son of an English father and a mother from the Maidu Indians of the Sierra Nevada mountains of Califor nia. He grew up at the end of the nineteenth century, during the gold rush era, when the indigenous Maidu culture was coming into conflict with white culture. Henry told anthropologist Arden King of various dreams in which he fought against native shamans who were jealous of his power. In one of these dreams, Henry “had a dream contest with a shaman who was also the headman at Quincy [a Sierra Nevada town]. In this dream Henry and the shaman were contesting with each other to see who had the most power. This was a fight to the death. The shaman acted first. He loosed a snake which pursued Henry Shipes, but was unable to catch him. Henry then tried his white power. This was stated by him to be specifically white. By ruse he caused the shaman to attempt the lifting of a bucket. The bucket exploded and the dream ended.” [iv]

4) The Egyptian Pharaoh Tanutamon is reported to have had the following dream experience in the first year of his reign, as presented by philologist A. Leo Oppenheim in his work on dreams in the ancient Near East: “His majesty saw a dream in the night: two serpents, one on his right, the other on his left. His majesty awoke, but he did not find them. His majesty said: ‘Why has this happened to me?’” His interpreters told him that the dream means that both Upper Egypt and Lower Egypt now belong to him. “Then his majesty said: “True indeed is the dream; it is beneficial to him who places his heart in it but evil for him who does not know it.” [v]

5) In Carthage in 203 A.D. Vibia Perpetua, a newly married woman of twenty-two years, and mother to an infant son, was imprisoned and sentenced to death for refusing to renounce her Christian faith. As she waited in prison for the day when she and other Christians would be cast into the arena and killed by wild beasts, her brother came and told her to ask God for a vision to reveal her fate. Perpetua agrees, and says she’ll tell him what she learns tomorrow. “And I asked for a vision, and this was shown to me: I saw a bronze ladder, marvellously long, reaching as far as heaven, and narrow too: people could climb it only one at a time. And on the sides of the ladder every kind of iron implement was fixed: there were swords, lances, hooks, cutlasses, javelins, so that if anyone went up carelessly or not looking upwards, he would be torn and his flesh caught on the sharp iron. And beneath the ladder lurked a serpent of wondrous size, who laid am bushes for those mounting, making them terrified of the ascent. But Saturs [a fellow martyr] climbed up first… And he reached the top of the ladder, and turned and said to me: ‘Perpetua, I’m waiting for you–but watch out that the serpent doesn’t bite you!’ And I said: ‘He won’t hurt me, in Christ’s name!’ And under that ladder, almost, it seemed, afraid of me, the serpent slowly thrust out its head–and, as if I were treading on the first rung, I trod on it, and I climbed. And I saw an immense space of garden, and in the middle of it a white-haired man sitting in shepherd’s garb, vast, milk ing sheep, with many thousands of people dressed in shining white standing all round. And he raised his head, looked at me, and said: ‘You are welcome, child.’ And he called me, and gave me, it seemed, a mouthful of the cheese he was milking; and I accepted it in both my hands together, and ate it, and all those standing around said: ‘Amen.’ At the sound of that word I awoke, still chewing some thing indefinable and sweet.” Perpetua tells her dream to her brother, and they both understand that she is to die for her faith. [vi]

]]> http://kellybulkeley.com/dream-intepretation-snake/feed/ 1 http://kellybulkeley.com/dreams-society-politics-reference/ http://kellybulkeley.com/dreams-society-politics-reference/#comments Mon, 30 Nov 2009 12:23:19 +0000 kb http://kellybulkeley.com/?p=1397

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However, just as much as James was interested in seeing what psychology could teach us about religion, he also wanted to explore what religion could teach us about psychology. Toward the end of the Gifford Lectures James brought the concept of the subconscious into his analysis, and he concluded that in psychological terms religious experiences are expressions of subconscious feelings, thoughts, energies, and desires. “[I]n religion,” James said, “we have a department of human nature with unusually close relations to the transmarginal or subliminal region [of the mind]….In persons deep in the religious life–and this is my conclusion–the door into this region seems unusually wide open; at any rate, experiences making their entrance through that door have had emphatic influence in shaping religious history” (James 1958, 366). What this means, James suggested, is that the further development of psychological knowledge will require us to explore experiential realms that have traditionally been regarded as religious or spiritual in nature. If we truly want to expand our psychological understanding of the human mind we must continue to examine in a careful and respectful fashion what the world’s religious traditions have taught about those mysteriously non-volitional, non-conscious powers that have guided, inspired, and sometimes radically transformed people’s lives.

In the twenty lectures he gave at the University of Edinburgh James mentioned the subject of dreams but once, noting only that they are one of the most common expressions of that subconscious realm of the mind where religion and psychology come together (James 1958, 366). I imagine, though, that James might have devoted more attention to dreams if he had given the Gifford Lectures a few years later, after having what he described as one of the most “intensely peculiar experiences of my whole life”:

San Francisco, Feb. 14th 1906. The night before last, in my bed at Stanford University, I woke at 7:30 a.m., from a quiet dream of some sort, and whilst “gathering my waking wits,” seemed suddenly to get mixed up with reminiscences of a dream of an entirely different sort, which seemed to telescope, as it were, into the first one, a dream very elaborate, of lions, and tragic. I concluded this to have been a previous dream of the same sleep; but the apparent mingling of two dreams was something very queer, which I had never before experienced.

On the following night (Feb. 12-13) I awoke suddenly from my first sleep, which appeared to have been very heavy, in the middle of a dream, in thinking of which I became suddenly confused by the contents of two other dreams that shuffled themselves abruptly in between the parts of the first dream, and of which I couldn’t grasp the origin. Whence come these dreams? I asked. They were close to me, and fresh, as if I had just dreamed them; and yet they were far away from the first dream. The contents of the three had absolutely no connection. One had a cockney atmosphere, it happened to someone in London. The other two were American. One involved the trying on of a coat (was this the dream I seemed to wake from?) the other was a sort of nightmare and had to do with soldiers. Each had a wholly distinct emotional atmosphere that made its individuality discontinuous with that of the others. And yet, in a moment, as these three dreams alternately telescoped into and out of each other, and I seemed to myself to have been their common dreamer, they seemed quite as distinctly not to have been dreamed in succession, in that one sleep. When, then? Not on a previous night, either. When, then, and which was the one out of which I had just awakened? I could no longer tell: one was as close to me as the others, and yet they entirely repelled each other, and I seemed thus to belong to three different dream-systems at once, no one of which would connect itself either with the others or with my waking life. I began to feel curiously confused and scared, and tried to wake myself up wider, but I seemed already wide-awake. Presently cold shivers of dread ran over me: Am I getting into other people’s dreams? Is this a “telepathic” experience? Or an invasion of double (or treble) personality? Or is it a thrombus in a cortical artery? and the beginning of a general mental “confusion” and disorientation which is going on to develop who knows how far?

Decidedly I was losing hold of my “self,” and making acquaintance with a quality of mental distress that I had never known before, its nearest analogue being the sinking, giddying anxiety that one may have when, in the woods, one discovers that one is really “lost.” Most human troubles look towards a terminus. Most fears point in a direction and concentrate towards a climax. Most assaults of the evil one may be met by bracing oneself against something, one’s principles, one’s courage, one’s will, one’s pride. But in this experience all was diffusion from a centre, and footholds swept away, the brace itself disintegrating all the faster as one needed its support more direly. Meanwhile vivid perception (or remembrance) of the various dreams kept coming over me in alternation. Whose? whose? WHOSE? Unless I can attach them, I am swept out to sea with no horizon and no bond, getting lost.

The idea aroused the “creeps” again, and with it the fear of again falling asleep and renewing the process. It had begun the previous night, but then the confusion had only gone one step, and had seemed simply curious. This was the second step–where might I be after a third step had been taken? (James 1910, 88-89, italics in original)

What strikes James more than anything else here is the overall form of his experience, the way it profoundly shakes his understanding of the ordinary structures of consciousness and personality. James provides few details about the dreams themselves, and no particular associations to the images of the lions, the cockney atmosphere, the coat, or the soldiers. Rather, it is the dizzying plurality of the dreams that unsettles him so deeply. Each of the dreams engages him in a vivid and distinct reality of its own, and yet he does not see any means of relating the dream realities to each other or to his daily life. James’s “self,” the customary center of his highly cultured and brilliantly intelligent waking life identity, is incapable of making sense of these dreaming experiences–the dreams carry him some place far beyond the boundaries, the “braces,” that have always defined and protected his selfhood.

I find many things to admire and wonder at in James’s narrative. One is his ability simply to describe what has happened to him. Despite the frightening confusion he feels, he still manages to write an evocative portrait of an experience that is utterly alien to ordinary rational thought. I’m particularly taken with his comparison of the dream experiences to the feeling of being “really lost” in the woods, as I have often drawn on wilderness metaphors when trying to describe the more extraordinary aspects of dreaming. Another remarkable element here is James’s willingness consider a variety of possible explanations for the dreams. They could be telepathic interactions with other people’s dreams, they could be products of a physiological malfunction in the cerebral cortex, they could be the beginnings of a mental breakdown, they could, perhaps, be an opening toward a kind of mystical insight or revelation. James isn’t sure what exactly has happened to him. And although no single explanation seems to fit, James clearly feels a strong impulse to understand the experience, to “attach” the dreams to someone or something.

More than anything, I marvel at James’s ability to live with the exquisitely sharp emotional tension generated by his dreams. He rejects the seductive simplicity of quick, reductionistic answers, and he chooses instead to hold all the different possibilities open, hoping that with time a better understanding will emerge that will do full justice to the mysterious complexity of his experience.

The Varieties of Religious Dream Experience is not intended to be a “Jamesian” analysis of dreaming. For one thing, I am interested not only in developing the dialogue between religion and psychology but also in expanding that dialogue to include voices from the fields of philosophy, anthropology, sociology, neurophysiology, history, literature, and film criticism. For another thing, I am motivated in my research by somewhat different questions than those which guided James in his investigations. My key questions can be briefly stated as follows:

1. What is the role of dreaming in human development, and particularly in the development of our capacities for imaginative play? Given that all humans are “hard-wired” with a psychophysiological need to dream, what can or should a society do to educate its members (particularly its children) about the nature and the potentials of dreaming experience?
2. Why do certain dreams respond so directly and so creatively to waking life experiences of crisis, trauma, suffering, and loss? How have different cultural traditions made practical use of these “healing powers” of dreaming?
3. What is the relationship of dreaming to politics, authority, and rebellion? In what ways do dreams both reflect and challenge the structures of power that govern a dreamer’s life (at intrapsychic, geopolitical, and cosmic/theological levels)?
4. Is it ever possible to know with certainty if our dreams are revealing valuable spiritual truths or are simply deceiving us with alluring but vain fantasies? Can we develop trustworthy hermeneutic principles to guide us through the epistemologically confounding process of dream interpretation?

These four broad questions are woven throughout the thirteen chapters of The Varieties of Religious Dream Experience. Although each particular chapter uses a different interdisciplinary framework to study a different set of issues, all of the chapters are efforts to develop new perspectives on these four questions. Readers who expect a book to have a precise linear argument, marching point by point toward a specific concluding destination, may be disappointed by kaleidoscopic array of views presented in this work. Again, I can only appeal to the infinitely diverse nature of dreaming itself, and suggest that the best way to increase our understanding of dreaming is to engage in the kind of free-ranging interdisciplinary dialogue that is offered in the following chapters.

The specific focus of the first three chapters is on different ways of interpreting the religious or spiritual dimensions of dreaming. Most contemporary scholarship on dreams, even if it is friendly to religious issues and concerns, relies on conceptual models of religion that are narrow at best and erroneous at worst. In these three chapters I draw on resources from contemporary theology, the history of religions, depth psychology, and hermeneutic philosophy to promote a more sophisticated understanding of the numinous power and rich spiritual diversity of human dream life. In chapters four to six I consider the ways in which dreams relate not only to the dreamer’s personal life but to his or her social world as well. These chapters show how dreams reflect significant features of the dreamer’s cultural environment and sometimes even motivate moral and political actions that aim at the resolution of particularly troublesome problems in the dreamer’s community.

In chapters seven and eight I respond to the dream theories of Sigmund Freud and J. Allan Hobson, both of whom share a deep but in my view misguided hostility towards religion. I argue that their theories, despite their triumphant scientific reductionism, in fact provide valuable resources in helping us better understand the profoundly creative nature of dreaming.

In chapters nine through twelve I turn to the interplay of dreaming and artistic expression, and study different cultural representations of dreaming in myths, plays, and films. All of the dreams analyzed in these chapters are fictional, i.e. they are all experienced by people who are characters in an artistically-rendered narrative. My argument is that careful reading and interpretation of these “fictional” dreams can reveal intriguing new aspects of the “real” dreams we experience in our own lives.

I conclude the book with a personal narrative of my experiences at a dream studies conference I attended in Moscow, a conference that by coincidence began the very day (August 19, 1991) that a group of Red Army generals tried to seize control of the country from then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.

A postscript offers some thoughts on where this book fits into the ongoing scholarly discussion about the field of religion and psychological studies, a field which is in the midst of (yet another) period of transition and reorientation.
An annotated bibliography on dream research is included at the end of the book to aid readers who want to pursue the study of particular issues and themes. I have been writing regular book reviews on dreams for ten years now (first with Dream Network Bulletin and now with Dream Time) and this bibliography is intended to provide readers with a broad critical overview of the current state of dream literature.