Dreams and Thoughts on Jung

I've begun to pay much more attention to my dreams, particularly after reading Jung's Memories, Dreams, and Reflections, an autobiography which seemed peculiarly organized for an autobiography--it was non-sequential, and Jung omitted events in his life that one would think to be significant, such as the time he got married and when he had children. Frankly, the content in his book was so material dense that I'm sure a large portion of the ideas contained within it must have went over my head.

But, I'd say that the part I enjoyed the most were the recollections of his dreams. I still remember many of the dreams and visions he recounted in his book, such as the dream of the ominous, dark figure of Jesus that he encountered underground in a childhood vision, and the vision of desecration of the cathedral, and the repeated dream he had about discovering different floors of a house.

Jung's writing portrays him as a very odd person who has weird thoughts and encounters abnormal experiences but doesn't seem to think of them as abnormal--after all, what normal child in the right mind sits for hours in silence on a rock thinking about whether he is sitting on the rock or the rock is sitting on him? Who puts their career on hold to begin studying old Latin alchemical texts from the 1500s for over a decade after only having a dream? Who builds a house over the course of many decades and then retroactively ascribes an unconscious motivation to the construction of each segment? Who really believes that dreams can tell the future, that they are robust enough to be able to predict the death of one's mother months in advance of its occurrence? Who dares to believe in the meaning of dreams to such an extent that if they don't understand the dream, they think that they have simply not understood the meaning of the dream, rather than that the dream is meaningless?

Despite this odd impression that Jung's writing seemed to create about himself, I was surprised to watch his 1950s interview and see how well he spoke and how normal of a person he seemed, despite his wild life. Here I was thinking of Jung as some weird, mentally disturbed eccentric, while his interview showed him to be a respectable, sophisticated gentleman.

Jung knew a lot of languages. Latin, Greek, German, English. He knew Latin well because of his several years spent reading old alchemical texts. He knew German well because even the English translation of his autobiography retained highly precise meaning that could be expressed only through a sophisticated vocabulary. He knew English well because, well, I saw his interview. This vocabulary made it easy for him to precisely capture highly specific thoughts and generate fitting names for his new ideas. For example, he identified some element of the unconscious that is the opposite gender of the rest of the mind. In a man, he called this the anima, and in a woman, he called this the animus. My guess is that if you describe the anima/animus to the average American and ask him/her to give a name to this weird unconscious identity, they wouldn't be able to create a name that so aptly captures the meaning of the described unconscious identity.

To me, there's something exciting about generating and interpreting well-developed ideas. It's like art in the sense that it can convey highly-developed meaning that can lead to understanding or unconscious resonance with the idea. Or it can be an amalgamation of loosely associated, weakly-developed ideas. I guess part of the reason that elementary school art paintings are not appreciated to the same degree as masterpieces like the Mona Lisa is that the painters of the former category of paintings lack the artistic sophistication required to capture and transmit an idea. Perhaps the student's paintbrush slipped on account of their limited digital dexterity. This is a limitation in his/her ability to transmit information through painting--their painting skills are not developed enough to capture highly complex details, such as human expressions, which can be so complex that a slight change in eyebrow shape can entirely change an expression. Maybe part of the reason that the Mona Lisa became successful is that da Vinci had the artistic prowess and skill to be able to faithfully capture and deftly render the immense complexities of an image that came into his head, perhaps in a fleeting thought or remembrance.

But, the meaning of art must lie beyond its mere transmission. Where does the idea come from? What does the idea mean? What is the art intended to capture and transmit? I believe Jung would say that a large part of the generation of art emerges from the artist's unconscious ideas, which are rich in meaning and require understanding and analysis. Ideas become more sophisticated as their generators grow older.

When I was younger, I believed that I could escape my problems by throwing them away and pretending they didn't exist. I don't believe that anymore, because I realized the importance of my conscience and how it can drag me down with guilt and push me up into the heights of bliss. Heck, it can even change the things I do and don't value. Annoying as my parents can be at times, I can't inculpably try to dispense of them from my life, though I probably have the capacity required to do so. For example, I have the choice of permanently walking away from my parents the moment I turn 18, though I probably won't do that. Here's a story from when I was seven or eight. I used to go to Kumon, a math and reading-based, highly organized tutoring center. As part of the Kumon teaching philosophy, students were made to correct the mistakes they made while completing worksheets. I had a strong aversion to corrections, probably because they seemed useless to me. Advancing to more complex worksheets was useful because I could learn new things, but revising my old mistakes? Why bother?

Anyway, one day my mom was about to drop me off to the Kumon center, where we gave in our completed worksheets and were given new ones. I had not completed my corrections, which were due that day. Before getting in the car, I threw a bunch of old worksheets with incomplete corrections into the outside trashcan, and once again assumed a happy mood, thinking the problem to be gone. I was at once caught by my mom, but I think I still believed that I could emerge unscathed by pretending a problem didn't exist. On another occasion in middle school, I had an unpalatable and scandalous encounter with academic dishonesty, the motivations of which are similar to the first example. (There are a few reasons why this type of dishonest and conscience-evading motivation is scary, not least of which is the tendency for such motivations to be associated with psychopathic behavior. See the YouTube video "Jennifer's Solution" by the channel JCS Criminal Psychology.) In addition to being reinforced to avoid such actions, my development as an adolescent compelled me to realize the intrinsic value of actions. I consistently scored at the top of my grade in 10th grade calculus, but this event didn't feel particularly well-earned. Not nearly to the extent that I enjoyed receiving a 5 on my AP Euro exam, which was a tough exam.

Back to art. My point is that the ideas conveyed by art become more sophisticated with a) a developed mind and b) better developed rendering capacity. It's a similar process with words and expression through language. I enjoy books now that I could hardly understand in 8th grade. When we were assigned to read The Grapes of Wrath in middle school, I didn't understand it. I didn't even read it except for the first few chapters, despite having written an essay on it funnily enough. Now, reading it creates an emotional resonance within me, probably because I have a glimpse at the sacrifice, loss, and misery that is endured on a quest for something valuable, such as a better life. In tenth grade, weekdays were usually busy with homework. I often had to sacrifice more appealing opportunities, such as going out on walks or excursions with my dad and brother, to finish homework. Now, that's not to say that I couldn't have done better by managing my time more efficiently. But, it does mean that homework made me sacrifice something that I otherwise wouldn't have sacrificed. It's a similar story for the winter quarter of my first year of college, which was the busiest of the three quarters.

But this adoption of responsibility is a gateway for meaning. Discipline and dedication enable the mind to create things way more beautiful than would emerge in their absence. In Pinocchio, the consequence of Pinocchio and his friend's decision to abandon responsibility and travel to a world of never-ending fun is that they both turn into donkeys. That doesn't seem particularly meaningful or beautiful. Donkeys are ugly, not beautiful. Conversely, the beautiful thing in that story, Pinocchio's blue-haired fairy sister/mother/goat, asks him repeatedly to do things he doesn't like to do, like drinking bitter medicine and dedicating oneself to studies.

I've also often heard a connection between discipline and freedom (see book Discipline Equals Freedom and Peterson's personality lecture on Pinocchio's transformation into a donkey), but I don't quite understand this. I don't get how lack of discipline is similar to slavery. I'm not contesting this at all, I'm just saying I don't understand it.

I had a dream a couple days ago in which my mom asked me to paint a door. Rather, she asked me to "touch-up" an already painted door, which had colorful text and design on it. As I began painting, which I didn't enjoy doing at first, I realized that I had mistakenly painted over the text that was on the door. As I kept painting, I at once realized that I had covered the entire door in a solid shade of royal blue. At that moment, I began planning to paint a beautiful design on the door I had just painted blue. At first, I was planning to paint a mandala, which as discussed by Jung in his autobiography, symbolizes fullness or unity. Then I thought of a beautiful, colorful design that looked similar to a rangoli often drawn in front of Hindu temples, though only the border of it. At this point I awoke.

It seems to me that this dream is an indication of the beauty that often unexpectedly arises from the adoption of responsibility. It's a complex idea, and one that I've understood gradually over the past 5 years.

Sentences follow regular structures that allow them to be represented in diagrammatic form. But what about their meaning? You can take a given sentence, substitute every noun for a different noun, every verb for a different verb, and the sentence would be syntactically and semantically identical. But its meaning would be transformed. If you replace the almost-neutral smile on the Mona Lisa with a grin or a slight frown, the meaning of the art would change its meaning drastically, even if the brush strokes were made deliberately and with the utmost care. Even the eyes of the Mona Lisa can be changed, even slightly, to radically alter the impression of the art (when you look at the Mona Lisa, what do you look at most of the time? her ears or her eyes? oh wait, she doesn't have any ears). Language is the means through which ideas and meaning are communicated are captured, while thoughts are ideas and meaning in their purest form that emerge spontaneously if an effort is made. For example, if someone is asked to write a story about a stray cat, they can create a sensible story by simple concentrating on the idea of a cat.

Jung argued that dreams are manifestations of thoughts and expressions of meaning that emerge from the unconscious. Like stories, dreams are distillations of events that occur rapidly. They lose their clarity but retain the emotions associated with them. If one makes a mistake in a dream and immediately feels remorse, which becomes terror, they would remember the emotion, but maybe not the clarity of the dream's events.