Insights from Ireland: My Associations to the Dream
Now that I’ve related my dream from the night we arrived at the Jungian conference in Ireland, I’d like to use it to demonstrate how I work on my dreams. Every year I start a new file on my computer and write out dreams in the order of their arrival, giving each one a number, date, and title. I try to include every detail, image, event, color, plot change, behavior, thought and emotion I can remember.
Should You Trust Your True Emotions?
Emotions are the body’s expressions of our instinctual, archetypal selves. If we’re hungry we feel anxious or irritable. If we see blood we feel fear. If someone says something mean to us we feel hurt or angry. If an object of our affection rejects us for another we feel jealousy and pain. If someone thwarts our desire we resent them. If someone dies we feel sad. These are powerful physical realities.
Dreams About the Creative Instinct: Part II
In my previous post I shared a dream from 22 years ago that dramatized a conflict between my ego’s career ambitions and the Self, the central archetype of my psyche that was “encouraging” me to trust my creative instinct. I didn’t understand the meaning of the dream because of my ego’s resistance to change.
Dreams About the Creative Instinct: Part I
Carl Jung believed we have five instincts: nurturance, activity, sex, reflection, and creativity. Sometimes our dreams contain images and activities suggesting how we feel about them or how well-developed they are in us.
Three Perspectives on Dream Symbols
My dragon dream took place in a house that felt just like the one my husband grew up in. I knew that house well as it was only a few miles from my own house. When Fred and I started dating in college I was invited there for many meals, and after our marriage it was the setting of numerous family gatherings and celebrations.
How's Your God-Image Working For You?
Our ideas about God come from us. For approximately the last 5,000 years the West and Near East have projected our masculine archetypes—King, Warrior, Magician/Scholar, and Lover—onto a male God who is…
Following Bear: Seeking the Beloved
In their simple willingness to shake off their unconscious sleeps, abandon the dark caves of their births and hibernations, and make their solitary ways into the forest, bears demonstrate that transitions from known to unknown are not to be feared as obstacles or punishments, but embraced as thresholds to enriched living.
