This week’s readings include Carl Jung’s ideas about the unconscious mind. Jung was a Swiss Psychiatrist and the founder of Analytical psychology. He explores the powers and importance of the unconscious mind as a way of healing and developing as an individual. Jung was always very fascinated by the human state of unconsciousness and devoted his life and studies to exploring this phenomenon to greater depths.
Humans can experience unconsciousness through dreams, art, religion and other important symbolic experiences. The unconscious mind is a reservoir of feelings, thoughts, urges, and memories that are outside of our conscious awareness (Sigmund Freud). It is believed that communication between the conscious and unconscious state of the psyche is very important for creating a sense of completion and wholeness as an individual. Dreams are a crucial element of revealing ideas, feelings and beliefs, which we as humans may not be aware of in our conscious state. Our unconscious mind stores memories, which then manifest in behaviour or within our dreams. Dreams can be explained as a series of images, ideas, emotions, and sensations occurring involuntarily in the mind during certain stages of sleep. Jung explains that the dream is a series of images, which are apparently contradictory and nonsensical, but arise in reality from psychological material which yields a clear meaning (Carl Jung). Personally I find the unconscious state of dreaming very fascinating.
As a little child, my dreams were mostly nightmares which were very frightening, recurring scenes of witches, monsters and the night. Looking back, I see that it was simply my fears of darkness manifesting into my dreams at night. As I grew and matured, so did my dreams. My recurring nightmares slowly faded away as new experiences and challenges developed in my dreams. As a child, I felt trapped in the nightmare with no escape however as I got older I learnt how to simply wake myself up and escape the bad dream. At this same point, the fascination of flying became quite interesting to me. Like a bird first learning to fly, I would try to take off, then fall down and try again. This went on for some time, until one night I finally took off into flight. I was flying up higher and higher, looking down upon the land and city. A sense of satisfaction and happiness came across me as I realised that I could finally fly! It seems strange, however it’s almost like I knew at that point that I had tried to fly in dreams many times before but had never succeeded. It is at this point that your realise you have left reality and entered your dream world.
The conscious state of knowing you are dreaming is known as lucid dreaming. In this state people can take control over their actions, the environment and the characters within their dreams. There are various levels of lucid dreaming, from dim awareness of dreaming to being fully aware that you are asleep. Many people practice techniques for lucid dreaming, to control and create their own dreams. This pretty much gives you the opportunity to be as creative and innovative as you want. While being lucid you can fly, have magical powers, turn into anything you want and pretty much create whatever you desire. The movie Inception, explores a sense of lucid dreaming to an extraordinary state. While dreams will never be fully understood they remain an incredible world of creation and endless possibilities within our unconscious minds!!!
References
Sigmund Freud (n.d). The consious and unconsious mind. Retrieved, April 4th, 2011 from http://psychology.about.com/od/theoriesofpersonality/a/consciousuncon.htm
Carl Jung (n.d) Psychology of the unconsious. Retrieved, April 4th, 2011 from http://www.notable-quotes.com/j/jung_carl.html
Carl Jung. (1997). Jung on active imagination (pp. 1-17, 28-33). (Ed. Joan Chodorow). London: Routledge.
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