525 I particularly remember the case of a man who was himself a
psychiatrist. He brought me a handwritten booklet he had received as a Christmas present from his ten-year-old daughter. It contained a whole series of dreams she had had when she was
eight years old. It was the weirdest series I had ever seen, and I could well understand why her father was more than puzzled by the dreams. Childlike though they were, they were a bit uncanny, containing images whose origin was wholly incomprehensible to her father. Here are the salient motifs from the
dreams:2
1. The "bad animal": a snakelike monster with many horns, that
kills and devours ail other animals. But God comes from the four
corners, being really four gods, and gives rebirth to all the animals.
2. Ascent into heaven where pagan dances are being celebrated,
and descent to hell where angels are doing good deeds.
3. A horde of small animals frightens the dreamer. The animals
grow to enormous size, and one of them devours her.
4. A small mouse is penetrated by worms, snakes, fishes, and human beings. Thus the mouse becomes human. This is the origin of mankind in four stages.
5. A drop of water is looked at through a microscope: it is full of branches. This is the origin of the world.
6. A bad boy with a clod of earth. He throws bits of it at the passers-by, and they all become bad too.
7. A drunken woman falls into the water and comes out sober and renewed.
8. In America many people are rolling in an ant heap, attacked by the ants. The dreamer, in a panic, falls into a river.
9. The dreamer is in a desert on the moon. She sinks so deep into the ground that she reaches hell.
10. She touches a luminous ball seen in a vision. Vapours come out of it. Then a man comes and kills her.
11. She is dangerously ill. Suddenly birds come out of her skin and cover her completely.
12. Swarms of gnats hide the sun, moon, and stars, all except one star which then falls on the dreamer.
526 In the unabridged German original, each dream begins with the words of the fairytale: "Once upon a time . . ." With these words the little dreamer suggests that she feels as if each dream were a sort of fairytale, which she wants to tell her father as a Christmas present. Her father was unable to elucidate the dreams through their context, for there seemed to be no personal associations. Indeed, this kind of childhood dream often seems to be a "Just So Story," with very few or no spontaneous associations. The possibility that these dreams were conscious elaborations can of course be ruled out only by someone who had an intimate knowledge of the child's character and did not doubt her truthfulness. They would, however, remain a challenge to our understanding even if they were fantasies that originated in the waking state. The father was convinced that they were authentic, and I have no reason to doubt it. I knew the little girl myself, but this was before she gave the dreams to her father, and I had no chance to question her about them, for she lived far away from Switzerland and died of an infectious disease about a year after that Christmas.
527 The dreams have a decidedly peculiar character, for their leading thoughts are in a way like philosophical problems. The first dream, for instance, speaks of an evil monster killing ail other animals, but God gives rebirth to them through a kind of apocatastasis, or restitution. In the Western world this idea is known through Christian tradition. It can be found in the Acts of the Apostles 3:21: "(Christ,) whom the heaven must receive until the times of restitution of ail things . . ." The early Greek Fathers of the Church (Origen, for instance) particularly insisted on the idea that, at the end of time, everything will be restored by the Redeemer to its original and perfect state. Ac-cording to Matthew 17:11, there was already an old Jewish tradition that Elias "truly shall first come, and restore ail things." I Corinthians 15:22 refers to the same idea in the following words: "For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive."
One might argue that the child had met with this thought in her religious education. But she had had very little of this, as her parents (Protestants) belonged to those people, common enough in our days, who know the Bible only from hearsay. It is particularly unlikely that the idea of apocatastasis had been explained to her, and had become a matter of vital interest. Her father, at any rate, was entirely unaware of this mythical idea.
Nine of the twelve dreams are concerned with the theme of destruction and restoration. We find the same connection in I Corinthians 15:22, where Adam and Christ^ i.e., death and resurrection, are linked together. None of these dreams, however, shows anything more than superficial traces of a specifically Christian education or influence. On the contrary, they show more analogy with primitive tales. This is corroborated by the other motif-the cosmogonic myth of the creation of the world and of man, which appears in dreams 4 and 5.
The idea of Christ the Redeemer belongs to the world-wide and pre-Christian motif of the hero and rescuer who, although devoured by the monster, appears again in a miraculous way, having overcome the dragon or whale or whatever it was that swallowed him. How, when, and where such a motif originated nobody knows. We do not even know how to set about investigating the problem in a sound way. Our only certainty is that every generation, so far as we can see, bas found it as an old tradition. Thus we can safely assume that the motif "originated" at a time when man did not yet know that he possessed a hero myth-in an age, therefore, when he did not yet reflect consciously on what he was saying. The hero figure is a typical image, an archetype, which has existed since time immemorial.
531 The best examples of the spontaneous production of archetypal images are presented by individuals, particularly children, who live in a milieu where one can be sufficiently certain that any direct knowledge of the tradition is out of the question. The milieu in which our little dreamer lived was acquainted only with the Christian tradition, and very superficially at that. Christian traces may be represented in her dreams by such ideas as God, angels, heaven, hell, and evil, but the way in which they are treated points to a tradition that is entirely non-Christian.
532 Let us take the first dream, of the God who really consists of four gods, coming from the "four corners." The corners of what? There is no room mentioned in the dream. A room would not even fit in with the picture of what is obviously a cosmic event, in which the Universal Being himself intervenes. The quaternity itself is a strange idea, but one that plays a great role in Eastern religions and philosophies. In the Christian tradition it has been superseded by the Trinity, a notion that we must assume was known to the child. But who in an ordinary middle-class milieu would be likely to know of a divine quaternity? It is an idea that was once current in circles acquainted with Hermetic philosophy in the Middle Ages, but it petered out at the beginning of the eighteenth century and has been entirely obsolete for at least two hundred years. Where, then, did the little girl pick it up? From Ezekiel's vision? But there is no Christian teaching that identifies the seraphim with God.
533 The same question may be asked about the horned serpent. In the Bible, it is true, there are many horned animals, for instance in the Book of Revelation (ch. 13). But they seem to be quadrupeds, although their overlord is the dragon, which in Greek (drakori) means serpent. The horned serpent appears in Latin alchemy as the quadricornutus serpens (four-horned serpent), a symbol of Mercurius and an antagonist of the Christian Trinity. But this is an obscure reference, and, as far as I can discover, it occurs only in one author.3
534 In dream 2 a motif appears that is definitely non-Christian and a reversal of values: pagan dances by men in heaven and
good deeds by angels in hell. This suggests, if anything, a relativization of moral values. Where did the child hit on such a revolutionary and modem idea, worthy of Nietzsche's genius? Such an idea is not strange to the philosophical mind of the East, but where could we find it in the child's milieu, and what is its place in the mind of an eight-year-old girl?
535 This question leads to a further one: what is the compensatory meaning of the dreams, to which the little girl obviously attributed so much importance that she gave them to her father as a Christmas present?
536 If the dreamer had been a primitive medicine-man, one would not go far wrong in supposing them to be variations on the philosophical themes of death, resurrection, or restitution, the origin of the world, the creation of man, and the relativity of values (Lao-tze: "high stands on low"). One might well give up such dreams as hopeless if one tried to interpret them from a personal standpoint. But, as I have said, they undoubtedly contain representations collectives, and they are in a way analogous to the doctrines taught to young people in primitive tribes when they are initiated into manhood. At such times they learn about what God or the gods or the "founding" animals have done, how the world and man were created, what the end of the world will be, and the meaning of death. And when do we, in our Christian civilization, hand out similar instructions? At the beginning of adolescence. But many people begin to think of these things again in old age, at the approach of death.
537 Our dreamer, as it happened, was in both these situations, for she was approaching puberty and at the same time the end of her life. Little or nothing in the symbolism of the dreams points to the beginning of a normal adult life, but there are many allusions to destruction and restoration. When I first read the dreams, I had the uncanny feeling that they foreboded disaster. The reason I felt like that was the peculiar nature of the compensation that I deduced from the symbolism. It was the opposite of what one would expect to find in the consciousness of a girl of that age. These dreams open up a new and rather terrifying vision of life and death, such as one might expect in someone who looks back upon life rather than forward to its natural continuation. Their atmosphere recalls the old Roman saying, vita somnium brève (life is a short dream), rather than the joy and exuberance of life's springtime. For this child, life was a ver sacrum vovendum, a vow of a vernal sacrifice. Experience shows that the unknown approach of death casts an adumbratio, an anticipatory shadow, over the life and dreams of the victim Even the altar in our Christian churches represents, on the one hand, a tomb, and on the other a place of resurrection-the transformation of death into eternal life.
Such are the thoughts that the dreams brought home to the child. They were a preparation for death, expressed through short stories, like the instruction at primitive initiations, or the koans of Zen Buddhism. It is an instruction that does not resemble the orthodox Christian doctrine but is more like primitive thought. It seems to have originated outside the historical tradition, in the matrix that, since prehistoric times, has nourished philosophical and religious speculations about life and death.
In the case of this girl, it was as if future events were casting their shadow ahead by arousing thought-forms that, though normally dormant, are destined to describe or accompany the approach of a fatal issue. They are to be found everywhere and at all times. Although the concrete shape in which they express themselves is more or less personal, their general pattern is collective, just as animal instincts vary a good deal in different species and yet serve the same general purpose. We do not assume that each newborn animal creates its own instincts as an individual acquisition, and we cannot suppose, either, that human beings invent and produce their specifically human modes of reaction with every new birth. Like the instincts, the collective thought-patterns of the human mind are innate and inherited; and they function, when occasion arises, in more or less the same way in all of us.
* [For another analysis of this case, see Jacobi, CompkxlArchétype!Symbol (1959), Part
'!---- EDITORS.]
3 [Gérard Dorn, of Frankfurt, a i7th-century physician and alchemist.]
