Meditate with Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961)

Nothing is more useless than the dream. Apparently at least. Because, with their quest for unconscious structures, psychologists and psychoanalysts gave honor this strange part of our night activity. All the great spiritual traditions had already foreseen for millennia that the dream had an important function, even if it was difficult to interpret.

Sometimes he is premonitory, revealing to come to coming. Other times, it is explanatory, enlightening real, complex situations and without apparent exit. The biblical text thus evokes, in the first book of the Torah, the young Joseph, who has the art of annoying his brothers with his night visions. Visions which, however, will save them later. For his part, the prophet Daniel will go to King Nabuchodonosor in order to interpret his nightmares, he who nevertheless oppressed the Jewish people. Job goes even further: “In a dream, (…) God opens their ear to them and addresses their summons to them, to divert the human being from his works, and to protect the hero of pride. (JB 33, 15-17).

Centuries later, the Swiss Carl Gustav Jung, a disciple of the Austrian Sigmund Freud, will broaden his field of study to the dream and the collective unconscious. The work he wrote in the greatest secrecy between 1913 and 1930 evokes the exploration he led to listening to his own dreams, and which he illustrates by dreamlike and symbolic drawings. A rigorous and poetic attempt to name the archetypes that cross us all. And who can, in the end, open us more, higher, deeper than ourselves.