Dreams: A Way to Our Subconscious

Carl Jung

In his book Memories, Dreams and Reflections, Carl Jung lets us know what it is like to experience life as a traveler. During his journey through Africa, Europe, America and Asia he was not a mere tourist, he intended to reflect and get to know a culture so different from his that he considered it inferior. Although he consciously resisted to the idea at first, he admitted that unconsciously, the assimilation process had already started. So intense was this battle between the conscious and the unconscious, that the conflict manifested itself to Carl on

a dream, a dream he deemed a warning and as a form to “bring the unconscious to conscious form”.

Too often, our emotions and experiences of our surroundings manifest themselves through dreams just as it happened to Jung. His interpretation to the dream served him as an aid in the conquest of his internal conflict. Usually dreams represent something we deeply desire, our deepest fears or maybe even something we want to forget. There are people and books that help us find the meaning of our dreams, these interpretations usually serve as foreshadowing of a future event or maybe as a way to know our inner conflicts.

I have had a couple of dreams that I will never forget. Although the exact details may be a little blurry, the overall of them are hard to forget. Most of them are bizarre and the happenings don’t entirely make sense, but I believe these are the factors that make them unforgettable. Two of them I very clearly remember. One of them was a nightmare; the other was a dream. The frightening emotions I experienced during the nightmare are enough to make me remember it; I was paralyzed and couldn’t wake up. The other dream happened when I was a child, a few months after my father died. I used to keep a diary back then, so I wrote about it. He went to pick me up after school and we went to take a ride on a boat. Clearly these were the emotions I was feeling back then.

Dreams

As we see it is easy to understand Jung and his traveling dreams. They were the emotions that were tied with his experiences as a traveler. Whether they happened exactly as he wrote them, we may never know. Memories decay over time and if there is nothing to trigger their recall they are bound to disappear.