Reading Carl Jung’s Man and His Symbols has done wonders for my dream world. It was like carrying a torch from the center of the brightly lit, conscious mind down to the precipice of the unconscious and holding that torch up to the void in order to illuminate the symbols rising up out of it. Symbols that had long been lost on me, or not remembered. I’m skeptical of much of Jung’s analysis of those symbols—it is in no way a ‘science’—but nothing has ever so deeply encouraged me to at least recognize the forms that arise therein, to look for patterns, and to at least try and grapple with their meanings. I think the attempt at analysis is the most important part. Every morning now begins with this fascinating puzzle of trying to understand the purely symbolic in a world not meant to handle it. Where I once had nothingness—a dim crawl out of blind sleep—I now have intimidating jaguars, talking eagles, and snakes of an ineffable holiness, among other things.

11/11/23, 05:45 a.m. — I am just now waking from a dream in which I found myself in the midst of an indigenous group as a witness to a rather extraordinary sacrament of theirs, though the setting was a planet other than Earth.

On this planet, there is some atmospheric oxygen but no naturally occurring wind. The creatures of this planet, seemingly more or less the same creatures that live on Earth, live perpetually near the bare minimum of their metabolic oxygen requirements.

I find myself in a vast sandy white plain with blindingly white skies, standing near the edge of a large burrow that had been dug into the ground. It is the burrow of a large boa constrictor around the same size as an anaconda, I judge, based off the width of the hole, though I never actually see the snake itself. There are people all around the hole praying or chanting. They have laid down offerings to the snake—beautiful, metallic gifts that completely cover the ground around the burrow. I don’t know what the gifts are, but they are beautiful things that glint dazzlingly blue and white in the sunlight. Somehow I know that the snake itself is a shimmering blue and white creature when seen in the bright light of this world. It is clear the snake is a deity figure to this society, perhaps the sole deity figure.

I am told that the windwalkers are coming, and without it being explained to me I understand their purpose. In this oxygen-depleted world, the inside of the burrow of the great snake is an uncomfortable, almost anaerobic environment, and so the worshippers began a tradition long ago of journeying on foot from many miles away over the desert sands and walking without pause to the burrow’s entrance. By their movement they create eddies of air in the otherwise stagnant sky that build upon themselves as the windwalkers converge like spokes on a wheel from all around, bringing oxygen rich gusts of wind with them in their wake. Once at the burrow these winds are somehow funneled down into its depths, essentially bringing the gift of breath, of rich air, to their deity curled up in its lair beneath the ground.

I think that Jung would have had fun with this one. He may have even described it as a “Great Dream,” a term he used for those dreams that are particularly rife with potential meaning and symbolism, rare dreams that leave the dreamer awestruck and the analyst perplexed. He definitely would have noted the mandala shape made by the overall arrangement of the parts of the dream, with the windwalkers converging from distant radii upon a central point. There would have been a lot to say about the symbolism of the snake itself, and the hole down into the ground where the snake resided. The overall dichotomy between the airless, dark, snake spirit underworld and the bright white upper world is also of some consequence. But the society worshipping the snake? Jung would have said that the individual worshippers each represented parts of my own psyche, but it’s interesting that they all behaved in unison because the psyche is normally represented in a very heterogenous (if not outright combative) way. Much of it eludes a deeper interpretation, at least for someone untrained in Jungian analysis like myself.

My favorite thing about the Jungian take on dreams is the belief that the symbols which arise come not from an individual’s unconscious creations, but from a deep ancestral past—the collective unconscious, as Jung called it. In Jung’s view, the archetype of the snake didn’t enter my mind when I first saw a snake as a child. It came along for the ride somehow, through countless generations, by some mechanism of information storage and transfer we can’t yet explain, nor disqualify. If Jung is right, the snake as an idea, as a symbol, within the human mind stretches way back into deep time—to a time in which my ancestors’ relations to snakes were far more intimate than mine are today. Today I know the snake only in passing. It is far from something that need occupy much of my thought—not so for those who sleep in open air huts and spend all day trekking through tall grasses. And so, if Jung is right, to spend time with one’s dreams is to tie a conceptual knot of sorts: to unite the present and the past, to recognize that the deep past is still very much alive within each of us.