dreams as messages from collective unconscious

[shadowofwind]

According to Jung, dreams are unconscious material, and the further we go back into the collection unconscious, the more similar our dreams become. Further, dreams come to tell us something we are consciously ignoring. With that in mind, i would extend it to say that if a society's culture ignored an archtype, *everyone* would have the same dream, because everyone's unconscious would be sending the same message. I'm giving this a new thread because I think its an interesting point which veers a little off topic from the thread it appears in.... It appears to me that if everyone ignored the same archtype, the corresponding message would appear in metaphor in waking life. Life is a shared dream both in the 'common message' sense, and in the shared-interactive-experience sense that other people were talking about. I get as many personalized dream-like messages in waking life as I do in dream as it is. This also appears to me to be the case for other people, whether its always obvious or not, particularly when the 'messages' are shared or universal. It appears to me that everyone in our world is ignoring something having to do with balance or justice. In one way or another, everyone is trying to steal from one side of experience to give to another side, attempting to stay immersed in the enriched side while pushing away or burying the impoverished side. Maybe there are more subtle and fundamental disfunctional patterns also, but they're harder to see from our current vantagepoint.

[chacham]

Oops. I just post what comes to mind. I guess i can get caught-up in it and veer. Thanx for the new thread. I would like to add that an archetypical dream, that is, a pure one that is remembered, is rare. The same people who have one may have many, but most people have a balanced, healthy, psyche. Or so is the theory. I would be interested in knowing if we have those archetypical dreams anyway, but are ignored due to poor recall and societal norms. I'm currently reading this stuff (slowly), and this is just something i was thinking about.

[saltyseedog]

wtf. Ok I was seriously thinking about this this morning. I am realizing that the content of many of the dreams we have is not just our own. Is is content of the collective consciousness of humanity and the earth. I'm not completely sure if thats exactly what you mean. But I am finding this true. Many messages that dream carry are not necessarily symbolic of whats going inside of us as individuals but rather things that are going inside of a collective energy.

[wana]

i do not agree because i am able to analyse many of my dreams with how the dream content is related to my reality (sorry for not posting them one day i might post a lot of them)

[shadowofwind]

For me, there is usually some metaphorical intersection between my situation and someone else's, where the dream has a meaning for both of us. This intersection actually seems to be necessary to create the stronger dreams, particularly ones with paranormal effects in waking life. Without that, I don't get strong dreams. Note that 100% of your dreams could be related to your own reality, but this doesn't make it true for someone else. I've been having vivid dreams for more than 35 years, but I didn't start getting obvious content from other people in my dreams until about three years ago. And its been less than a year that there have been obvious cases of messages aimed for me showing up in relative's dreams.

[kenietz]

I saw the thread yesterday and had some thoughts about it. The first post about Jung gave me strange feeling. From these 4 lines it follows that our society ignores some important archetype/going back to the collective unconscious cos most of the population have the same dream, the one called reality. Its even getting worse cos the dream is becoming more and more similar everywhere excluding the people who are searching for themselves in whatever way and some really isolated places of which not so many are left. The dream about getting rich/to have more and all the complications around it. I'm sorry if it doesn't fit in the thread but that is what i felt.

[shadowofwind]

If humanity's thought is a tree, its true that the branches are consolidating. But I think the trunk has remained the same. A modern dream is to obtain money for a good home through stock market investments, without caring where the money is coming from. A similar dream 200 years ago was to own a family farm, without caring who got pushed off the land by one's national army. Or maybe the dream was to acquire more land for grazing one's goats through an arranged marriage of a relative. A modern counterpart might be to fund a child's college education for the sake of one's own retirement security. Or maybe using the child's college fund to feed a heroin addiction. The drug culture may look different than the greed culture, but I don't think its fundamentally different, it still embodies a similar kind of hedonistic short sightedness. Likewise, although the European strain of thinking has conquered the world, but I don't think it was ever fundamentally different from what everybody else was doing. For instance, Europeans didn't invent war, even though organized it more effectively. Regarding the seeking of self knowledge....Although this is my chosen purpose, it looks to me like there are a lot of old patterns there also, and to a large extent these aren't what they seem to be. Deep, intelligent people I've known have apparently devoted themselves to the cause of self-knowledge and personal transformation for many decades, and yet by their own testimony have learned nothing new for many years, and have also changed remarkably little, even by comparison to ordinary people and as measured by their own values. Furthermore many people close to them have gone insane. It seems to be a project of estrangement and self-destruction as much as a project of health and positive transformation. Obsession with 'end times' bullshit would be one symptom of this, and one that's been going on for thousands of years at least. It seems to me that somehow we must understand this pattern or otherwise free ourselves from it. Otherwise, the culture of spiritual growth is much the same as the greed culture, but with an even shorter fuse.

[Sageous]

Okay…I’ve read this thread three times now, end to end, and I’m still having a lot of trouble absorbing just what it is you guys are talking about -- not a bad thing, BTW; it happens to me a lot. So here’re a couple of thoughts I hope someone might address to tie all this fascinating stuff together: First, I think you might be off on the very premise of the conversation. When Jung spoke of archetypes and collective unconscious, he was speaking of symbols that all humans by their nature share within each of their individual psyches. In other words, a bird appearing in a dream of a woman from Japan will have the same symbolic meaning as one that appears in the dream of a man from Texas. Jung didn’t mean the two people were dreaming of the same bird. By extension, I believe Jung put forth his collective unconscious term to describe how all humans tend to have their unconscious functions organized in the same manner. He did not mean that there was some magical net of consciousness enshrouding all humanity. And that we are all plugged into that net. That’s a fun concept, and one I’m very willing to sign on to, but I do not think it is what Jung meant. Next, by Jung’s definition, Chacham’s initial statement is right on the money. If society led itself down a path that was contrary to its nature (ie, ignoring the guidance of a common or vital archetype), nature would find a way to fix that, and that repair might come in the form of many or all individuals having dreams replete with markers reflecting the wayward archetype. Perhaps trends in popular culture are actually bursts of “archetype adjustments” made by society: entire genres of music, books, movies, etc, often seemed keyed to a specific societal age and carry very similar themes. The gist of these trends are misunderstood by future (or past) generations, simply because their themes, or archetypes, were specifically “dreamt” to heal a particular universal problem -- think "the 60's" for instance. Dreams could certainly go the same way. Then you guys wandered off. Shafowofwind, I too have had many dreams, especially in the last few years, that seem to have no relation at all to my waking life, and are peopled with folks I’ve never met (see my stillborn “Other people’s dreams” thread on this forum). That phenomenon could be tied to many things, including cool ones like cosmic consciousness, soul mates, thought energy projection, and more; but it could just as easily be my dreaming mind simply conjuring images from day residue that I have consciously forgotten about, or perhaps my mind got really bad at assembling images, so I simply cannot recognize anything. There’s currently no way to prove, even to myself, which is true (I like the first list much better, BTW), but I firmly believe that none of that has anything to do with archetypes, or Chacham’s initial statement. Though that was an excellent tree analogy, Shadowofwind, it may draw more from the third or fourth dictionary definition of dream, namely the wish to fulfill certain desires. Not much about archetypes or collective unconscious there, I really do think. Okay, that’s more than enough for this post. Sorry so long.

[Sageous]

Regarding the seeking of self knowledge....Although this is my chosen purpose, it looks to me like there are a lot of old patterns there also, and to a large extent these aren't what they seem to be. Deep, intelligent people I've known have apparently devoted themselves to the cause of self-knowledge and personal transformation for many decades, and yet by their own testimony have learned nothing new for many years, and have also changed remarkably little, even by comparison to ordinary people and as measured by their own values. Furthermore many people close to them have gone insane. It seems to be a project of estrangement and self-destruction as much as a project of health and positive transformation. Obsession with 'end times' bullshit would be one symptom of this, and one that's been going on for thousands of years at least. It seems to me that somehow we must understand this pattern or otherwise free ourselves from it. Otherwise, the culture of spiritual growth is much the same as the greed culture, but with an even shorter fuse. All true, Shadowofwind, because seeking self-knowledge, if that is truly what you are seeking, can be a very destructive thing to do. I feel this is so because to seek self-knowledge is to first assume that there is something inside you that is bigger and better than anything around you, or perhaps that the answers to all of your problems lie buried deep within your own mind, just waiting to be dug up. Those are both inherently false assumptions (as those pesky archetypes keep trying to tell us, BTW), and would indeed lead a self knowledge seeker down some bumpy paths. This was a real problem when the concept became popular in the late 1960's (and the 1920's, and the 1850's, and the 1690's, etc, etc), because people simply covered themselves in very thick blankets of narcissism, and smothered. That smothering could indeed be manifest by drugs, greed, and hate. For me the real spiritual goal should be self-awareness. This might sound like a semantics issue, but it is not, because self-awareness is the exact opposite of self knowledge. A highly self-aware person is deeply conscious of the world around him, and his influence on it, and is willing to accept the true level of importance his soul carries in relation to all things (as opposed to believing that, once self knowledge is perfected, all things that need to be known will be). Just a thought....

[shadowofwind]

Regarding what Jung thought....In his preface to Wilhelm's translation of the I Ching, Jung is clear that he regards his experience with the I Ching to be inconsistent with the assumption that the subconscious can be explained in terms of causal and random elements. He doesn't explicitly declare it to have a supernatural foundation, but he characterizes the western idea of natural as insufficient, and leaves it open. In any case, what Jung might or might not have thought has no direct bearing on the idea that I suggested, since it's true or not irrespective of what Jung thought. Of course I took his vocabulary and went somewhere else with it, and the words don't perfectly fit. But I don't have words that perfectly fit. More later.

[shadowofwind]

As somewhat of a side note....Natural selection can improve a species by selecting between traits which are relatively advantageous or disadvantageous for individual members or very small groups within the species. But it can't select for traits which do not empower some individuals relative to others, even if those traits benefit the species as a whole. So, for example, the story of lemmings plunging off of cliffs to relieve population pressure was a Disney fabrication, and such behavior can't exist in a natural population because it would be strongly selected against. My point here is that there are ways in which a society or a species can self-destruct, such as by overpopulation, or overspecialization (like with Cheetahs), where nature does not provide corrective feedback. In those cases, if there is any corrective feedback, such as in dreams, it has to come from outside of the mechanisms of physical cause and effect and chance. Later, probably in about two weeks, I'll post four 'shared dream' experiences that I had with my sister this year. Sageous, although our experiences had some things in common with what you describe for yourself, for us there were also other additional elements which provided objective evidence. I've also had experiences where part of a dream image comes in a dream, and another part comes subsequently in an event in waking life, as if they were hatched together. This is one reason I believe in something like fates for physical events. I don't fault your skepticism, since your experiences have been different so far, and of course the testimony of other people isn't always entirely trustworthy. But of course I must continue looking for the next step forward in understanding, from where I am now with what my experience has been, even though a lot of other people are not on the same page in every particular.

[Sageous]

Regarding what Jung thought....In his preface to Wilhelm's translation of the I Ching, Jung is clear that he regards his experience with the I Ching to be inconsistent with the assumption that the subconscious can be explained in terms of causal and random elements. He doesn't explicitly declare it to have a supernatural foundation, but he characterizes the western idea of natural as insufficient, and leaves it open. In any case, what Jung might or might not have thought has no direct bearing on the idea that I suggested, since it's true or not irrespective of what Jung thought. Of course I took his vocabulary and went somewhere else with it, and the words don't perfectly fit. But I don't have words that perfectly fit. More later. Very fair characterization, I think, and that second paragraph represents a wonderful choice of direction, I know. I think, Shadowofwind, that the words that fit will one day find you... 'nuff said!