[Marianne]

Hi James,

Thanks for responding and expounding on this fascinating subject. I like that quote also; I have that same book on a shelf of library at home. With subject and object being the same, Shaahayda and I just had a conversation on this topic before I saw your writing on it here. I do also know that Jung said that all the characters and objects in a dream can be representations of various aspects of the dreamer-self and that they are interchangeable. What is always nice is when the dreamer is someone who lives close enough to the unconscious to decipher their own dream meanings. For some people it comes quite naturally and for others practice makes perfect, as is often said. I think Joseph Campbell has as much to say about dreams and the dream language as any Jungian analyst has done. Freud, Campbell, and Jung each studied and talked about dreams and dream language and myth in their own ways in their own languages, and I figure that is pretty much what all of us are doing when talking about dreams in this forum, whether we have studied Freud, Jung, or Campbell or all three! I enjoyed very much all your input into the dream thread and topics.

I would have nothing really to add to your comments which seem quite whole all in themselves. I am in a place in my life these days where my psyche gets overloaded quite easily and often and then I cannot always get to all the responses I would like to make. Thank you for addressing me in this post, and I will try to come up with more to respond to it later if I can. I think a part of this is that my eyesight even after cataract surgery is not so good as it used to be and I cannot read for long hours on end like I used to and sometimes it gets even difficult to type longer passages like long responses or lots of paragraphs–easiest thing for me to read and type these days are the quick comments on things like Facebook. In any case, I am at that point in my life where if I order hard copy books they will have to be in big/bold print and when I read or type online I have to enlarge the font. And ever since Covid Times, I do get psychically overloaded more often due to the after-effects fatigue of having Covid. This too is sort of like a dream world in which all things have slowed in pace.

I have been familiar with the quote of Jung which you quote Campbell as repeating,

Jung says life is like the day of a solar journey. The first part of it is up; moving from birth to the society. And the second part of it is down, moving from participation in the world and the society to death. And whereas the threat of the first half of life was life, the threat of the second half is death., and all the symbols are changing meaning.

–I forget where it is in Jung’s Complete Works, but I retrieved this from your post.

Many people when older and retired or more semi-retired find more and more of their life being lived in more and more of a dream world–myself included. Also, to me “dream world” includes what I like to call my “day dream world.” Even waking life feels much like a dream these days, and I wonder how much more that way it has felt for most all of us during “Covid Times” of social distance, more isolation, staying home with family members or even staying home alone, etc. I think it possible that our dream worlds are very important if not vital to us all right now. I hope to write about my pre-Covid and Covid dreams at some point.

Reminds me of the Australian “Dream Time” myth in a way, walking the dream-lines, our dream-paths, our paths of individuation each in our own dream worlds but also in the collective.

~ Marianne