Thread: Understanding Dream Characters

Sorry to dredge this thread up again (actually I blame GordonFreeman - it was his Likes and quote that brought me back in.)

I just noticed what you said above Lenscaper:

Originally Posted by lenscaper

I have spent some time perusing Jungian philosophy. If my somewhat surficial understanding is correct, Carl sees the unconscious as kind of a storehouse of repressed memories.

Actually that was more of a Freudian thing, the repressed memories and all. And he was right in so far as it goes, the upper layer of the unconscious does hold repressed memories, but it was Jung who discovered the deeper part, that he called the Collective (or Objective) unconscious - the part that houses the Archetypes. Those aren't repressed memories, they're much more universal and - well, Objective! We all have them, and in the important ways they're the same in all of us - the Wise Old Man, the stalwart young Hero etc.

They will have different surface characteristics in the dreams of different people, and even show up superficially different from one dream to another for the same person, but they will have the same core traits, even across widely different parts of the world. This is a big part of what cements us together as humankind, we all share this same cast of dream characters, which serve as the foundations for all of our stories, movies, fairy tales, and religions. Otherwise, if all the unconscious held were repressed memories of the individual, we would possibly have no shared means to communicate effectively.

Ok, I'm harping on this again, aren't I? Sorry! I'll stop here, just couldn't help correcting that ("I can't go to bed now - somebody is wrong on the internet!!") Hey, possible good point for you though Len, maybe now somebody will pop in and post stuff like you actually wanted to hear!