The Return: A Book for Frances about Life and Death
             Preface
            Back Cover
      You're in Charge: A Guide to Becoming Your Own Therapist
            Introduction: The Art of Self Observation
             On Dreaming
            Foreign Editions
   Since the New Deal: An Annotated Chronology of the Events That Have Changed the United States
             The C.I.A. (excerpt)
             Origins of the Cold War (excerpt)
             Some Quotations that Demonstrate the Underlying Philosophy Since the New Deal

 
      Afghanistan, "Terrorism," and Blowback   About Anthrax
     Some Thoughts on 9-11-2001

You're in Charge: A Guide to Becoming Your Own Therapist
Chapter 6 (an excerpt)                    1 2 3 4 5 6 8 9       p.7

On Dreaming

My Critic subpersonality got very annoyed at this point. Not only was this not my definitive dream, but also it sounded like one of what I call my "show-off" dreams. So I angrily said to myself, "Jan, you know you don't speak German. If you were really speaking German in that dream, I'd like you to reproduce just one sentence of dialogue." And then the word "bleiben" popped into my head. I knew I had heard the word, but couldn't think what it meant. I was on my way to look it up in the dictionary when I remembered the situation in which I had heard it, and realized it meant "to stay". This was too powerful a message for even the most adamant stage-trooper to ignore, so I cancelled the workshop and stayed in Germany. And fortunately so, because the next few days I was far too sick to be traveling or working.

Your Dream Sender is a very creative person and can be helpful to you in your waking life in a variety of ways. There are innumerable inventions and artistic creations that were initiated by dreams. Elias Howe had begun to despair of designing a sewing machine that would work until in a dream he saw his sewing machine needle with the eye at the bottom, rather than in the middle or at the top, as in his previous models that wouldn't sew properly.

August Kekule had been wrestling with the problem of how to conceptualize the benzene molecule. There weren't enough hydrogen atoms to satisfy the valence of the six carbon atoms when they were placed in a straight line (which is how organic compounds had been arranged up until this time). He fell asleep. Then, as he later reported to a scientific gathering: "The atoms flitted before my eyes, wriggling and turning like snakes. One of the snakes seized its own tail and the image whirled scornfully before my eyes. As though from a flash of lightning I awoke. I occupied the rest of the night in working out the consequences of the hypothesis. Let us learn to dream, gentlemen." And this is how Kekule conceived of arranging the carbon atoms of the benzene molecule in a ring, a discovery that was the foundation of the chemistry of dyes and pharmaceutical compounds.

Otto Loewi received the Nobel Prize for a discovery that was the result of a double dream. He had been puzzling about how the nervous system affects the heart beat. During a dream he "discovered" the principle of the chemical action on the nervous system and designed the experiment that would demonstrate it. He scribbled some notes and went back to sleep. However, tragedy! The next morning he couldn't decipher his notes. The following night he slept fitfully, but in the middle of the night he redreamed his solution. This time he didn't take a chance on writing notes, but went straight to the laboratory to start the experiment.

Individuation Dreams and Their Symbols
Individuation is Carl Jung's word to describe the process by which you become the definite and unique being that you in fact are. There are two growth processes needed to accomplish it.

First you must rid yourself of the false wrappings of the persona, which is Jung's term for your facade, social roles, and games. Many of the exercises and suggestions given so far in this book--- journal writing, the Evening Review, subpersonalities, disidentification exercise, self-observation, and gestalt dreamwork in particular--- should help you to discern your self (who you really are) as distinct from the social roles that you play in the world.

You need also to come to terms with the primordial images (or archetypes) of the collective unconscious so that they will no longer be able to influence your behavior. These are myths and symbols that, according to Jung, seem to be universal for all people in all cultures and in all historical periods. Unlike the personal unconscious, whose contents were originally conscious but then were forgotten or repressed, the contents of the collective unconscious have never been conscious, but are a racial inheritance. Examples of such archetypes are the eternal child, the witch, the mother, the hero, and so on. It could be a mythological figure of which the dreamer has no conscious knowledge. For

Next Page     Previous Page

© Janette Rainwater 1997-2004

All rights reserved.