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Jungian dreams, or dreams commenting on his ideas, or featuring Carl Jung personally...

A word on one common type of Jungian dream you won't find much here. Some archetypal dreams are just one step in a long developmental dance. Such dreams are rare in the Dreambank--and not because I don't dream them! When choosing what to write up, I went for vivid, satisfying, complete stories. Color, magic, sex, humor, bizarre images, yes, but I still wanted coherent stuff; not chapters in some immense murky saga. I had an agenda; I was out to show dreams are life, living experiences as real as any other; some of your best times. Not mere symbols, and certainly not universal symbols. How boring, if we all had the same inner life!

I wanted to counter a Jungian bad habit--archetype-hunting, treating all dreams as universal--in a way, impersonal. So I looked for focused, coherent dreams full of personality. And found them! But they're a biased sample too--just 3-5% of my own dreams, plus (as I write this) a hundred or so dreams from others. I could have built an equally big site of purely archetypal dreams! I didn't--it's been done. I also didn't build a site full of carefully average, incoherent dream accounts. It's been done too; see Bill Domhoff's Dreambank.net at UC Santa Cruz. Raw dream notes without explanation, by random dreamers--that's like snooping in random people's diaries and then saying "so this, then, is literature." Not!

But by picking lively dreams I made it seem like I always dream coherently, in neat little stories. My more cynical readers suspect I'm lying, writing fiction. Neither is true. I dream all sorts; I just typed up what I thought would interest you most--and which I saw the least out there. But based on my email, that's given others a false impression of my dream PROCESS. My dream-journal has blank nights (usually but not always sleep-short); nights of incoherent dreamlets; great isolated images; coherent dreams I can't clearly recall; dreams with messages I don't understand, now or ever; or messages I do get, that I judged uninteresting to others; and dreams that are mere recurring themes in a Jungian lifelong symphony... I just posted catchy tunes instead. That's all. WDB is biased. Toward quality and readability (and the real pain came when those were in conflict!)

Would Jung approve? Oh, probably not. "A dream is a private letter to the self, not posted all over the Internet" as he didn't quite say. But than was then, this is today. And dreaming itself can change. I think it has. I see far more lucid dreams, dreams about others, FOR others--because the knowledge-base about dreaming has grown, to include lucidity experiments and shamanic lore (and notions of community responsibility). Dreaming has grown. Or regrown--healing from the witch-hunts and the Enlightenment, I suspect. What with all that light, all those torches, you couldn't get a good night's sleep.

I like the new Dark Age. And no need to fear it coming; it's already here, our Age of Endarkenment. Thanks, in part, to Jung.

RELATED TOPICS: the four Jungian functions - Jungian shadow figures - dreamguides and animas - souls - shamanic dreams and shamanism in dreams - Freud - See also the full INDEX OF SUBJECTS.

The World Dream Bank has 1500 dreams and dream images plus 500 other pages on dreamwork and shamanism, creativity, genius, art, surrealism and fantasy. Unless otherwise noted, all material copyright Chris Wayan, 2001-2006.

What this site is - How to read these entries - Ratings: profanity, sex, etc - Add your dreams! - Copyright - Downloading -

	ANSWERING JUNG: by Wayan; 2005/7/5, a dream mocking one of Jung's key dreams After reading Jung's dreams, I have a counter-Jungian dream. So different from his! And mine has some pointed advice... CAUTION: NUDE STATUES
	THE ASILOMAR OF DREAMS: by Wayan; 1986/3/5, a dream about dreams. Jungian angels at a conference of dreams test my progress. But I'm all backwards: did the hard stuff first...
	A BEAM OF FLIGHT: by Wayan; 135K, 1992/4/19, a dream of love and shellshock. I'm a dance teacher, I'm King Kong, I'm a shell-shocked elf, I'm a wild bird flying... CAUTION: GAY-POSITIVE ROLE MODELS, OH NO!
	Tarot: THE BUILDER: by Wayan; 1974/5/19, a Tarot card illustrating a dream. I met a god. Unmistakably a god. The Builder, hard at work--making Utopia, by hand.
	CHARACTER ISOLATED BY A DEED: by Wayan; 1992/3/13, a dream's eye view of waking minds. People SAY they like realistic characters they can identify with, but they don't ACT like it...
	DRIVER'S TEST: by Wayan; 1984/1/8, an illustrated Kafkan dreamtale. It's not easy to get a California driver's license, ever since the Dept. of Motor Vehicles went Jungian...
	THE EDUCATION OF A DREAM: by Wayan; 1998/7/7, a dream on dreams. A young, naive, ethereal dream gets an Animus to guide her through the crazy material plane... CAUTION: GRATUITOUS WILLIAM SHATNER
	FISHEL AND FRISH AND FIREBIRD: by Wayan, 2003/12/4, a seven-year dream. Why do the guests arriving for our seven-year reunion include part-time giants and dog-headed gods? They tell me...
	GREENBIRD SAVIOR: by Wayan; 1983/6/2, a divine comedy. Time-travel the Navaho way! But our bread-pipe gets hijacked, so we call the Bird. Who shows up, all right... CAUTION: NON-STANDARD SAVIOR, EVIL DREAM PUNS
	HILLMAN ON DAIMONS: by Wayan; 1998/9/7, on Greco-Roman and Jungian ideas of a life-goal James Hillman and my own experience suggest we enter life with an agenda. But what if our goals are sick?
	THE ILL-FORMED TALE: by Wayan; 160K, 1981/4/7, a wild dream anti-epic . To reach the Peak of Happiness on the Isle of Dreams, I must pass four Perils--but they're all backwards... CAUTION: RELIGIOUS NUTS, KNIVES, NUDE ALIENS, BACKWARD PLOT...
	THE IRRATIONALITY OF DREAMS: by Wayan; 1989/12/31, a New Year's dream. On TV, the first Jungian anima to leave the unconscious is granting an interview. But the questions are...
	JUNG'S DENIAL: by Wayan; 1994/12/16, a journal extract on Jung. Jung's dreams and interpretations show he's a thing-guy not a people-guy. All that architecture!...
	JUNG'S PREMONITIONS OF WORLD WAR I: by Carl Jung, 1913-1914; five ignored warnings. Jung was told in dreams and visions that Europe would soon drown in blood. But he just couldn't believe it...
	THE LIMIT OF HUMAN EXPERIENCE: by Wayan; 1974/3/13, a dream of madness. Deep in the caves, a Voice announces I've gone as far as the human mind can stand. But ahead, I see...
	LITTLE NEMO: by Wayan; 2005/2/6; a little rant on the first dream-comic. Windsor McCay's dream-comic "Little Nemo" is spectacular, but plotless and passive. Or is it? Dreamwork is gradual...
	MANDALA DURING A TIME OF WAR AND DISINTEGRATION: by Jenny Badger Sultan; Jan-Feb 2003, painting of a dream-series My dreams were troubled by war. So I painted them in concentric rings--lotus, fire, children, animals, and nightmares...
	THE MAN-EATER: by Carl Jung, 1879; a precocious formative nightmare. Jung (at age three and a half) sees a terrifying god deep underground, and is told "That is the man-eater!"...
	THE NIGHT OF CHANGE: by Wayan; 1994/2/8, a dream on the order of deep changes. Festival night in a strange town, where, one night a year, dancing in the street transforms you into... CAUTION: SEX TALK
	PURE LOVE: by Wayan; 1986/10/9, a dreamtale on the truth. A tangle of time travel, as two shapeshifters meet and fight and love over the centuries...
	RAVENNA: by Wayan; 83K total, 4 images, 1994/12/25, a psychic Jungian dream. In a church-tent, I find glowing pictures of mine I've never seen awake. One's half-done; I work on it. I wake, and read how Jung, in a Ravenna church, saw luminous images he later learned burned centuries ago! CAUTION: NUDE STAINED GLASS
	RING OF WHITE WATER: by Wayan; 350K total, 14 illustrations, 1983/1/30, a major dreamtale. I'm a raft guide on a circular river that may just be reincarnation. One of my tour group jumps ship: she's scared of the white water of rocky relationships ahead... CAUTION: METAPHYSICS, SEX, WEAK SOULS...
	THE SHADOW OF FREUD: by Wayan; 1982/3/28, a psychological dream. I find a lost book of Freud's with a radical idea: Jung's Shadow is real, but there's a second Shadow:
	THE SKULLS AND CORN: by Jenny Badger Sultan; 1989/1/10, painting of an initiatory dream. I'm shown corn plants growing from skulls, and it seems like I must plant some skull-corn myself...
	STEP THIRTEEN: by Wayan; 1997/7/8, a rebellious dreamtale. Two realities pester me like big spoiled babies to care for their mythic figures, till I go on shamanic strike...

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