A Horse Jumps out the Window

A seventeen year old girl dreams:

I was coming home at night. Everything is as quiet as death. The door into the living room is half open, and I see my mother hanging from the chandelier, swinging to and fro in the cold wind that blows in through the at night. I get up and discover that a frightened horse is tearing through the rooms. At last it finds the door into the hall, and jumps through the hall window from the fourth floor into the street below. I was terrified when I saw it lying there, all mangled.

Jung’s comments:

The gruesome character of the dreams is alone sufficient to make one pause. All the same other people have anxiety dreams now and then. We most therefore look more closely into the meaning of the two main symbols, “mother” and “horse”. They must be equivalents, for they both do the same thing, they commit suicide. “Mother” is an archetype and refers to the place of origin, to nature, to that which passively creates…. It also means the unconscious, our natural and instinctive life… The word “mother” which sounds so familiar, apparently points to the best-known, the individual mother, to “my mother.” But the mother-symbol points to a darker background which eludes conceptual form…

If we apply our findings to the dream, its interpretation will be, “The unconscious life is destroying itself.”

It is evident that “horse” is an equivalent of “mother,” with a slight shift of meaning. The mother stands for life at its origin, the horse for the merely animal life of the body. If we apply this meaning to the text of our dream, its interpretation will be, “The animal life is destroying itself.”

Both dreams point to a grave organic disease with a fatal outcome. This prognosis was soon confirmed.

Dreams, C.G. Jung, pages 106 – 109.

__________________

Similar to the dream of the minute mastodon in an earlier blog, Jung predicts a serious organic problem that becomes confirmed at a later time (although in this case there is no indication of what the disease actually was).

The interpretation of this dream is not as obscure as the one about the mastodon; both, however involved symbolic animals that were in trouble. The images of a mother hanging herself and a horse jumping out a window do not forebode well, whether or not one does a detailed analysis of the dream.

What is particularly interesting and valuable about Jung’s method of interpretation is that he goes far beyond the individual idea of the individual mother, and relates the dream to the archetypal level of the mother — the origin of life which is destroying itself.

Again, I find these dreams that are diagnostic of medical conditions quite astounding, and continue to wonder why dreams are not more part of the medical model of working with patients. Is there something missing in the model?

The Red Sun

I would paint the wind…

Arthur Dove

An artist friend, Barbara Tudor, told me last year that the drawings I had done after my heart attack reminded her of the work of Arthur Dove, the first American abstract painter.

I looked at his work on the Web, and came across his painting of the Red Sun. To me there was an eerie similarity with the Red Sun and something I had drawn and called The Spiral Maze. I read further about him — He thrived most in the out-of-doors, worked on a farm, lived on a houseboat. He sounded as if he would feel right at home in Alaska. To my astonishment, he made this painting four years before he had a disabling heart attack, in 1939.

A year after I saw this painting, I was visiting the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. I saw one of his works, and proceeded to tell my brother how one of Dove’s paintings was somehow similar to a drawing I had done.

I walked up to the next level, and suddenly there was the Red Sun. The Real Thing. I was stunned. I sat down and cried, and cried on and off for the rest of the day. These were not all unhappy tears.

Dreams and art (at its best) both are representations of the Unconscious. This experience for me was a confirmation of Jung’s theory of archetypes, that there are universal, underlying and connecting patterns within all of us.

Web Links

The Phillips Collection: The Red Sun
www.phillipscollection.org/american_art/artwork/Dove-Red_Sun.htm

Wikipedia: Arthur Dove
wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Dove

Wikipedia: Archetypes
wikipedia.org/wiki/Archetype

The Spiral Maze
www.heartak.com/(15)_high_anxiety.html

The Minute Mastodon

Someone beside me kept on asking me something about oiling some machinery. Milk was suggested as the best lubricant. Apparently I thought that oozy slime was preferable. Then a pond was drained, and amid the slime there were two distinct animals. One was a minute mastodon. I forgot what the other one was.

The doctor who heard this dream from a patient sent the dream to Carl Jung:

I thought it would be of interest to submit this dream to Jung to ask him what his interpretation would be. He had no hesitation in saying that it indicated some organic disturbance, and that the illness was not primarily a psychological one… The draining of the pond he interpreted as the damming-up of the cerrebrospinal fluid circulation.

When Jung was asked about this at his Tavistock Lectures in London in 1935, Jung commented:

The doctors of antiquity and of the Middle ages used dreams for their diagnosis…. It is really a matter of special experience…. The dream you mentioned was a dream of a little mastodon. To explain what that mastodon really means in an organic respect and why I must take that dream as an organic symptom would start such an argument that you would start an argument that you would accuse me of the most terrible obscurantism. These things really are obscure. When I speak of archetypal patterns those who are aware of these things understand, but if you are not aware you think, This fellow is absolutely crazy because he talks of mastodons and their difference from snakes and horses. I should have to give you a course of about four semesters about symobology first so that you could appreciate what I said.

(Analytical Psychology in Theory and Practice, page 74.)

When I first came across this dream and interpretation many years ago, I found it absolutely astounding that Jung could distinguish between an organic disturbance and a psychological based on dreams like this. I still do. If this is so, if there is such information available in dreams that could be so important in diagnosis, why is it still so ignored? This was written over eighty-years ago; what kind of progress are we making?

(I would also note that this interpretation is, indeed, obscure. The first two dreams mentioned in this blog were not this obscure; they were symbolically descriptive of bodily processes in a way that would not take years of training in symbolism.)