[jamesn.]

Marianne; (as I was attempting to post a reply I noticed after I posted it several other entries had already been given; so with that in mind I don’t think there is any variation of relevance so I’ll leave what I originally posted just the way it was).  I came across something else of Joseph’s on page 123; from Diane Osbon’s: “Reflections on the Art of Living – A Joseph Campbell Companion”; that was very insightful concerning how to read this language of dreams we are trying to decipher.
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” The secret of dreams is that subject and object are the same. The object is self-luminous, fluent in form, multivalent in it’s meanings. It’s your dream, the manifestation of your will, and yet you are surprised by it. This is the relationship of ego-consciousness to the unconscious. Ego-consciousness has to learn about the unconscious, and dreams are the vocabulary of the unconscious speaking to the conscious mind. Yet, in dreams and visions, subject and object are the same.”

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Not to over simplify what Joseph is describing concerning how the language dreams speaks to us; but since so much of it is rendered through symbolic imagery we have to have some kind of starting place from which to access what they are communicating. Because dreams are so personal and that there is so many more elements to this internal landscape I think this might be a good place to consider as we go further into how the psyche and it’s different components interplay as we enter this separate world of which we know very little. (Then there is the matter of age and the way symbols change their meaning over time concerning the way they are interpreted by the dreamer.)

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In “Pathways to Bliss” on page 80; Joseph says this:

“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.

Through the remaining part of life, Jung says, the great problem is integrating the inferior with the superior functions. That’s the great task of your later years.”

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As far as going further into the width, breadth, and depth of this subject volumes have been written; but concerning this little portion I have taken from these two texts my main purpose was to share a couple of insights of Joseph’s I thought might be of interest for I am certainly no Jungian Analyst. I did however want to leave a short clip of Joseph’s here. This was part of a lecture – (Volume 6; II.6.I Modern Myths of Quest); available for purchase from the JC Foundation Audio Lecture downloads section; that Joseph was delivering concerning enantiodromia and the individuation process; and his point about the voice of: “Too Late” definitely makes itself known in dreams in later life.