The Psychic Activity of Dreaming

Psychological Perspectives, 48: 274–287, 2005Copyright c© C. G. Jung Institute of Los AngelesISSN: 0033-2925 print / 1556-3030 onlineDOI: 10.1080/00332920500374994

The Psychic Activity of Dreaming

Joseph L. Henderson

D reams are usually mentioned as if they were tangible objects to be dis-cussed according to their function or their content. In the dream books

of olden times we find this tendency already well formed. You only have tolook up some dream content and find its meaning allegorically described; thusa lion in a dream is pride, a serpent fear, a wolf suspiciousness, a badger tenac-ity, while water refers to a phlegmatic mood, fire to a sanguine mood, and soon. The function of dreaming was linked to all kinds of physiological or astralinfluences. Bad dreams were supposed to come from overeating or eating thewrong things or were due to noxious vapors generated by the movements ofplanets around the earth or by the light of the full moon. All conscious psychicactivity was mobilized to fight against these evil influences, which reminds oneof the Christian prayer that sought to protect people “from all the things thatgo bump in the night.”

One can easily see from these old patterns how much psychic activityis projected into the experience of dreaming, which may not be capable ofdemonstration or disproof; each of us can have our own idea of the meaningof dreams and write our own dream book accordingly. We project our ownpsychic activity, conscious or unconscious, into the dream, thereby obscuringits real meaning. We see in it only what we wish to see or only what our personalcomplexes compel us to see. Fortunately, there are certain modern theoriesabout dream interpretation that help us to withdraw these projections and tofree the dream world from the prejudices we have inherited from the past orinvented in our time.

One of the commonest of our inherited prejudices concerns the functionof dreaming. It had usually been supposed that, however beneficial certain

Originally published in Psychological Perspectives, 1972, 3(2), 99–111. (Editors’ note:gender-inclusive language was not the style in the 1970s; hence the use of his ratherthan his or her, mankind instead of humankind, etc.)

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Hold me, 2005, oil pastel and acrylic, 22′′ × 29′′.

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dreams might seem to be, the function of dreaming was abnormal. That meansa perfectly normal individual would be so well adjusted that he would have noemotional flooding that could not be taken care of by his conscious awarenessand would therefore have no need for dreaming. Even until quite recentlycertain analysts spoke of dreaming as an involuntary activity of the psyche,which denoted that something must be wrong in the conscious mind.

Scientific studies of the physiological function of dreaming have ren-dered this viewpoint obsolete. I am referring to the studies of dreaming inwhich rapid eye movements during sleep denote a normal, rhythmical oc-currence of dreaming throughout every night. Let me quote briefly from aparticularly lucid account of this by John Davy:

There are four distinguishable stages of sleep, each with characteristicbrainwave patterns. The first stage lasts a few minutes; the sleeper iseasily awakened, the electrical waves from the brain are low voltage andirregular. Stage II is characterized by “spindles”—sudden bursts of elec-trical activity—with a slow rolling of the eyes. Then Stage III graduallysupervenes: large slow brainwaves emerge, about one per second, withfive times the voltage of waking rhythms. The heart rate slows, tempera-ture and blood pressure drop, the muscles relax somewhat.

Finally, the sleeper enters Stage IV, the deepest sleep of all, whenhe is most impervious to noise and disturbance. A large portion of thefirst part of the night tends to be spent in this deep sleep. . . . The mostdramatic events begin usually some ninety minutes after going to sleep.The dreamer begins to surface again, back through Stages III, II, and I. Butinstead of entering into a light Stage I sleep, there appears what is virtuallya new state of experience. It is signaled by rapid eye movements (REMs),quite distinct from the slow rolling of the eyes during deeper sleep. . . .

The whole REM state has proved, on investigation, to be quiteextraordinary. For instance, some muscles of the dreamer are, to beginwith, completely flaccid. Yet a host of physiological symptoms suggest thatthe REM state is one of intense emotional experience and inner concen-tration: hormones pour into the blood, the heartbeat becomes irregular,blood pressure varies considerably. Breathing may be shallow and rapid,oxygen consumption rises and so does the temperature deep within thebrain (as it does on waking).

Luce and Segal call it an “internal storm,” and there are usually fiveREM periods each night. They come roughly at ninety minute intervalsand last longer as the night proceeds. Most people spend about an hourand a half each night in this strange turmoil. . . .

But the most astonishing feature of these episodes (according toWilliam Dement, student of Klartman) began to emerge “. . . when peoplewere deprived of dreaming by waking them as soon as the REM periods be-gan. Some volunteers subjected to this treatment for a few nights becameirritable and forgetful, began to concentrate poorly, reported feelings of


uneasiness. . . . Personality changes began to show. . . . On the first night ofundisturbed sleep they were allowed, subjects spent an excessive amountof time in the REM state; they appeared to be catching up, not on sleep,but on dream. Control experiments with subjects awakened just as often,but from deep sleep rather than REM periods, showed far less ill effect.”

Hence we know that dreaming is a normal physiological and emo-tional experience and not some form of psychopathology. This discoveryalone permits us, for the first time, to withdraw many of our anxieties andsuperstitions—what we project of ourselves into the function of dreaming.

If now we turn to the content of dreams we find that our tendency isto ascribe certain ready-made meanings to them or else to prefer to let themremain as they are: unexplained curiosities of the imagination. We may wantto tell our dreams at the breakfast table, but we prefer not to be told whatanyone else thinks they may mean. It is as if the dream wanted to remainsomehow anonymous, and we leave it so unless it arouses a special kind ofsuperstitious interest as a warning of future danger. In the early period of theirassociation Freud told Jung that he dreaded the flood of superstitions thatwould be released by having opened the dream to psychoanalytic interpreta-tion. Freud avoided this by limiting his interpretation of dreams to the mostsuperficial level of the psyche—to those elements of the dream that containrepressed wishes or fears. Freud was right that in opening the dream world forinterpretation, he was inviting an uncontrolled irrational public response, but

Freud’s greatachievement . . . lies not inwhat he thought he saw indreams but in his empha-sizing the fact that the dreamis an integral part of thepsychic experience of theindividual dreamer.

instead of calling it supersti-tion he might have called itby a more acceptable term,since we know how frequentlydreams contain healing sym-bols. Freud himself spokeof “dream work,” which im-plies that dreams have a nor-mal, useful function to per-form. The psychic activitythat is generated in responseto dreams may derive fromwhat we know to be a mag-ical layer of the unconsciouscorresponding to what wasonce a consciously acceptable activity in all early primitive cultures. This mag-ical layer stirs people to project into dreams a mixture of hope and dread thatthey may find a secret power or learn their fate, like peering into the crystalball of a fortune-teller. As such, magic is neither good nor bad, but it becomesone or the other in response to a peculiar kind of selectivity. In response to the


growing knowledge of psychoanalytic literature with its theoretical concepts,a whole generation or two generations of people learned to see in dreams onlytwo things: the fulfillment of a sexual wish or a desire for death. So successfulwas this selectivity that in time it rendered dream interpretation imperviousto further exploration and really killed Freud’s original scientific approach tothe unconscious. It merely substituted a new form of magic for an old one.Freud’s great achievement, as I see it today, lies not in what he thought he sawin dreams but in his emphasizing the fact that the dream is an integral part ofthe psychic experience of the individual dreamer. Thus he rescued the dreamfrom the magical world of the occultist, who saw in dreams only a reflectionof universal images conjured into being through an exercise of their own vividimaginations, and this new perception of dreaming was an effective antidoteto superstition.

Jung, after his break with Freud, pushed his explorations of the dreamworld for the first time into real depth and saw that, for all their supersti-tious willfulness, the true occultists had seen something that was really there:a world of symbolism, which evoked emotions that were universally experi-enced by all people of whatever cultural conditioning, and he called it thecollective unconscious. But he, too, following Freud’s initial observations,mistrusted any interpretations of a dream that did not relate it personally,as well as impersonally, to the dreamer. On the basis of this viewpoint whichhe shared with Freud, he found that dreams only have the appearance ofexpressing wishes; what they really do is present images or actions that ef-fectively compensate “the conscious attitude” of the dreamer.

At first it may seem that this renders dream interpretation rather easy;all you have to do is find the conscious mental content of the dreamer’s reac-tions the day before the dream, look for its compensation in the dream, andlo, you have the meaning of the dream. Sometime, it is true, the meaning ofa dream does reveal itself simply as this. Here is an example: Suppose I readan article in a magazine that convinces me that I should vote for a certainpolitical candidate. I am quite exhilarated and pleased that all doubts havebeen silenced, and I think I now know my own mind. But I have done no realthinking on my own; I have simply accepted the writer’s article as the truthand am relieved that I know for whom to vote. That night I dream that I stepout of my house on the way to the polls to vote and I fall, seriously sprainingmy ankle. My dream tells me that my point of view concerning the candidatearrived at from reading the article is too intellectual, too in the head, andI suffer an injury to my sense of reality expressed as an injury to my basicstandpoint, that is, my foot.

Such examples may be found in even more complex cases. I used toknow a young man who was extremely attractive to women, as they wereto him. He was not a true Don Juan, but his initial enthusiasm for the latestcandidate for conquest came close to what we find in the typical stereotype of


this character. He was really also trying to find the girl who might become histrue wife and settle down at last. In Paris on his way to Italy he met a girl withwhom he fell in love at first sight and for the remainder of his stay there couldthink of nothing else. She must surely be his fate! It is interesting to note,however, that he did not cancel his trip to Italy because of this encounter,but he made it the occasion for a farewell party with her, together with somefriends, promising soon to return. What the lady was feeling about him, I neverfound out, but I suspect she was a good deal less sanguine about their futurelife together than he was. On the train to Italy in his sleeping compartmenthe dreamed that he had a violin case in his hands of beautiful workmanship,and he was convinced that only a Stradivarius of the finest quality would beplaced in such a case. Trembling with anticipation, he opened the case onlyto find a very ordinary mandolin.

This man knew enough about the language of the unconscious to seethe main point of his dream instantly. He had made a mistake about his feelingfor the new woman in his life. He had assumed he was genuinely in love andthrough her could realize his highest nobility of feeling, but the dream says hewas merely carrying on a light though enjoyable flirtation with her. So far sogood. There was, however, a lot more to the dream he did not see at the time.Later, he realized that it was compensating not just for this brief encounter butfor a whole area of his personality that tended to depend upon his intuition—that is, upon his immediate concern with the future possibilities of a situationin contrast to its immediate reality, and that he always elicited support of hisfeeling function to add conviction to these hunches. That is why the dreamexpressed itself in terms of musical instruments, since they convey the ideaof communication through feeling rather than thinking. So you see his dreamshowed him this picture together with its correction for his functional bias.There was another aspect of the dream compensation he did not notice untilstill later. The actual woman he thought he was in love with did not appearin the dream—instead of her he had fantasied a musical instrument that onlyresponds to a skilled musician. This meant that he was not really interestedin women for themselves but mainly in his own power of playing on theiremotions. The expression resulting from this would not be their expressionfor him but only an expression of his feeling embodied in this form throughthe anima, represented by the precious musical instrument. This explainedwhy, for all his apparent success with women, he had not found one whoshowed any tangible wish to become his wife. He was still more interested inthe woman in himself, the anima, than in any real woman, and in this respectwe have the classical picture of this kind of extraverted autoeroticism.

Summarizing this case, the dream is not just a mistaken thought orimpulse but effectively compensates a mistaken value-judgment resultingfrom an exaggerated development of two functions of the personality, and


a tendency of the dreamer to identify unconsciously with his contrasexualcomponent. A lot of psychic activity therefore precedes the dream that was

The dream compensates notonly a conscious attitude but

a psychological complex ofthoughts, observations, and

emotions that are uncon-scious to the dreamer as well

as conscious.

not to be found in his con-scious attitude alone. There-fore, the Jungian definition ofthe dream needs correctionor modification. The dreamcompensates not only a con-scious attitude but a psycho-logical complex of thoughts,observations, and emotionsthat are unconscious to thedreamer as well as conscious.In fact, if he were not uncon-scious of the psychic activity

of the dream, he would not need the message the dream conveys but wouldhave corrected the situation consciously by himself. It is therefore a good rulein interpreting a dream to ask oneself what the dream is saying that one doesnot know. If one thinks one has the whole meaning of it straight away, it isalmost certain that the real meaning remains concealed. The interpretationof a dream then involves a search for those areas of unconscious activity inwhich the psyche may reveal more of its secret workings than is ordinarilyperceived in waking consciousness.

For this reason, when I conducted a seminar for psychiatric residents ondream interpretation, I occasionally told them the dream of a patient and askedthem to tell me what kind of person would have such a dream. I was fishingfor a description that would bring to light something of the life situation, thepersonality of the dreamer, and the particular psychic activity that producedthe dream. I only gave the dreamer’s sex and age. The rest was left to theimagination of the students. I found this a very helpful way of getting them tothink in a psychological way that could utilize the actual content of the dream,which was itself what we might call an imaginative statement correspondingto a certain psychic or psychophysical state.

This leads me to try to determine what kind of psychic activity is involvedin the interpretation of dreams. It is not at all a behavioral or psychoanalyticreductive technique that allows us to perceive the meaning of dreams. A trueinterpretation is only made possible by mobilizing certain psychological func-tions of perception whereby the dream content, together with the dreamer’sassociations, can be lifted from a subliminal to a manifest position. In terms ofJungian psychology there are two functions of perception: intuition and sen-sation. If these are outwardly directed, that is extraverted, they are functionsfor perceiving the outer world of things and people. Intuition perceives the


variety and the possibility for developing or exploiting these things, whereassensation perceives the specific identity of each person or thing in relationto each other person or thing in present time. If these functions are directedinwardly, that is, introverted, they perceive the activity of the psyche in muchthe same way. Introverted intuition perceives the variety and possibility fordevelopment of the inner images, whereas introverted sensation perceivesthe specific image that defines the psychic activity that needs immediateattention.

If now we apply this kind of functioning to the perception of a dream,we meet both of these functions in a state of collision, and this is one reasonwhy attempts at dream interpretation are frequently so difficult and theirresults so unsatisfactory. The intuitive function sees many things the dreammight mean and is highly productive in summoning forth a wide variety offree associations, especially of the kind Jung has called amplifications, andhe encourages the interpreter of dreams to look for as many of these astime and the capacity for doing it may allow. But no amount of amplificationscan give the true meaning of a dream. This must come from the introvertedsensation that can single out from all the possible meanings, that one meaningthat tells us what is the specific psychic activity behind the dream and how itcan be brought into the foreground of consciousness.

In this process many beautiful jewels that intuition gathers to makea glittering necklace of interpretations may have to be sacrificed, and theone interpretation of the dream that survives is like a humble, rough fieldstone. Yet this single stone may become more important symbolically than

Many beautiful jewels thatintuition gathers to make aglittering necklace ofinterpretations may have tobe sacrificed, and the oneinterpretation of the dreamthat survives is like a humble,rough field stone.

all the others put together.Having said this, the intuitivefunction, however, may arguethat no interpretation of adream is ever final and thatthe one interpretation whichseemed so immutable looksdifferent at different timesand in different lights. Thereis no absolutely final interpre-tation to a dream, and I of-ten find it easier to see whata dream means by reading itover days, weeks, or monthslater. Its meaning has a way ofchanging in the light of fresh insights and new experiences. Therefore, in-tuition and sensation seem to set up a kind of functional dialectic that doesjustice to the mysterious nature of the psyche.


In a letter reprinted by Aniela Jaffe in The Myth of Meaning, Jungstates:

The language I speak must be ambiguous, must have two meanings inorder to be fair to the dual aspect of the psyche’s nature. . . . Clarity makessense only in establishing facts not in interpreting them.

This mystery includes the relativity of the REM state with its strangeparadoxical combination of psychic commotion and physiological memory.Here I am suggesting that there is a duality in psychological functions withwhich we observe these phenomena, whether psychic of physical, and we arein no position yet to interpret dreams without recognizing the basic insepara-bility of these antinomies, whether in the psychic content of the dream or thefunctions by which we observe them. In The Influence of Archetypal Ideas

on the Scientific Theories of Kepler, Aniela Jaffe quotes Pauli as speakingof the

. . . postulate of a cosmic world order independent of our choice and dis-tinct from the world of phenomena or more precisely, an order of thoughtto be objective, to which both psyche of the perceiver and that which isrecognized in their perception . . . are subject.

Speaking of physiology and its relation to psychic activity, however, Ifeel we may be on the threshold of new discoveries that will allow us stillgreater understanding of the function of dreaming than we have yet had. Towhat extent do dreams, for instance, represent patterns of the brain and ner-vous system? To what extent does the dream work that we know to be sonecessary and so beneficial in the REM state have the function of repairingsome physiological dysfunction due to fatigue or stress or possibly an in-nate imperfection in the psychophysical mechanism of coordination betweendifferent areas of the brain and their relation to the spinal cord? This imper-fection may be due to an overgrowth of the human cerebral cortex in com-parison to the older midbrain and hindbrain that humans have in commonwith the lower animals. Does the human upright position and the develop-ment of the cerebral cortex render us unstable and subject to a sense ofdisharmony between higher and lower centers of the brain? Does the activityof dreaming try to return us to our original animal condition before ideationand instinct parted company? Or does it encourage us to transcend this re-gressive tendency and push us toward a higher and stronger acceptance ofour human state, possibly even with an ambition to transcend our human-ity in grandiose fantasies or visions? In The Ghost in the Machine, ArthurKoestler summarizes “the so-called Papez–McLean theory of emotions” asfollows:


. . . Man finds himself in the predicament that Nature has endowed himessentially with three brains which, despite great differences in structure,must function together and communicate with one another. The oldest ofthese brains is basically reptilian. The second has been inherited from thelower mammals, and the third is a late mammalian development which,in its culmination in primates, has made man peculiarly man.

Speaking allegorically of these three brains within a brain, we mightimagine that when the psychiatrist bids the patient lie on the couch, heis asking him to stretch alongside a horse and a crocodile. The crocodilemay be willing to shed a tear and the horse to neigh and whinny butwhen they are encouraged to put their troubles in words they cannotdo so. . . .

Little wonder that the patient who has personal responsibility forthese animals and who must serve as their mouthpiece is sometimes ac-cused of being full of resistances. . . . The reptilian brain is filled with an-cestral lore and ancestral memories and is faithful in doing what its ances-tors say, but it is not a very good brain for facing up to new situations. . . . Inevolution one sees the beginning of emancipation from the ancestral su-perego with the appearance of the lower mammalian brain which Naturebuilds on top of the reptilian brain. Investigations of the last twenty yearshave shown that the lower mammalian brain plays a fundamental role inemotional behavior. . . . It has a greater capacity than the reptilian brainfor learning new approaches and solutions to problems on the basis ofimmediate experience.

The cerebral cortex in man may then be said to provide the logic, to-gether with the language that communicates this logic and also probably thewill to action that transmits the logic, into all the constructive devices we callcivilization. But just as the lower reptilian and mammalian brains do not at-tain this logical position, so the human cerebrum seems at times to overreachits capacity for logical induction and becomes a threat to the whole systemin much the same way as an overcomplicated system of freeways tends tooppress the cultural enjoyment of the cities and towns through which thefree-ways pass.

The question then is whether we can find in dreams some evidenceto support this theory and what it may tell us about the psychodynamicsinvolved. Although I have never explored this subject systematically, I mustsay there are certain dreams that seem to refer to some problem analogous towhat has been described as the three brains. I remember a young man who hadembarked on a scientific career and in so doing had abandoned temporarilyhis interest in poetry and his love of nature. He had the mistaken notion thatin order to be successful in his new calling, he had to dedicate himself to itbody and soul with the ascetic zeal of an anchorite. In spite of hard work and


study, he failed an important examination. The night before this failure hehad the following dream:

A white horse is galloping over the surface of a dark sea. A black eagleflies down from the sky, alights on the back of the horse, and severs itsspinal cord at the back of the neck with its beak. The eagle flies away; thehorse dies.

We might say that the horse represents the mammalian brain with itsemotional capacity for valuing life, in contrast to the eagle that represents thedangerous power of the scientific intellect, the purely cerebral activity thathas power to sever the vital connection between man’s rational consciousnessand his animal nature. The young man in question did learn to understandhis dream in this way. He made the correct emotional adjustment by recog-nizing that he owed as much to life as to science and there need be no reasonfor sacrificing one for the other, and even that if he were going to be suc-cessful in his career, he had better keep himself alive. Then he had anotherdream:

From a small cave on the bottom of the sea there emerges a lively redsnake that rises swiftly upward to sever the spinal cord of a sluggish blackfish in exactly the same place as the eagle had bitten the horse.

By way of association he said, “In the dream I felt that the snake’s bitewas life-giving in contrast to the eagle’s bite, which had been death dealing.”Here it seems we have reference to the power of the lower reptilian brainto perform an act of liberation of that same vital spinal system which hadbeen, as it were, cut off by his former attitude. His change of attitude and therecognition of the danger of identifying with his conscious intellect liberatesa feeling (red equals feeling in a symbolic sense) for life that has its own typeof instinctive intelligence and knows its goals as clearly as the logical cere-brum thinks it knows its goal of achievement. The intricate play of oppositesin this dream introduces us to another realm of psychic activity that makesme doubt that any purely physiological theory can do justice to the dynamicsinvolved. Reviewing his dreams this man added to them the products of hisown fantasy concerning the animal images of the dream, and he came to theconclusion that a much more universal picture of life was being displayed thananything that could be limited to his personal problem of passing examina-tions and getting on with his scientific interests. This amounted to the rudi-mentary creation of a philosophy of the unconscious in which the consciousmind of the dreamer played a no less important role than the dream imagesthemselves.


He saw in the white horse a freedom-loving response to nature which,lacking direction and purpose, had a way of going over into its polar opposite,a sluggish black fish that represented laziness and inertia. As long as his lifeor, so he thought, any life is limited to these two poles of experience, theresult can only be a state of confusion or conflict in which neither of theseopposites effectively opposes the other. The solution to this problem did notlie in a mere reversal of one into the other but the creation of a totally new andstronger polarity represented by the eagle and the serpent. As this polarizationbecame more solid, he then had a further series of dreams or fantasies inwhich the eagle lost its blackness and became grey, blue, and white. Theserpent seemed to be modified also, combining some black with its red color.This meant to him that the dream images were trying to find a balance ofopposites rather than maintaining an opposition to each other. Meanwhile thetension between them, as between high and low, or light and dark, is whatseemed to instigate a new harmony rather than the irrational movement ofswinging from one to the other and back again (enantiodromia). To put it

Dreams stop producing freshsolutions of this kind unlessthe conscious activity of thepsyche takes them up anddevelops them further.

physiologically, the simpleprocess of nightly dreaming,with its function of com-pensation, may maintain arough balance between theactivities of the three brains,but it cannot bring aboutany new psychic developmentwithout the intervention ofa certain consciousness thatpartakes both of intellectual and emotional centers accepting the psychictask of synthesizing and unifying them. Presumably this cannot be doneby the unconscious alone, even though the study of cybernetics has cer-tainly shown that it can help. There is no doubt that the dream work hassome power of synthesizing the imagery of dreams for the increase of con-sciousness as well as for resting the psychoneural organism, but dreams stopproducing fresh solutions of this kind unless the conscious activity of thepsyche takes them up and develops them further. Then the dream worldmay respond with dramatically accurate answers to the most paradoxicalquestions.

The problem of the opposites as reflected in dreams, that is, in theunconscious, is described by Jung as follows: “The coincidence of oppositesis the normal thing in a primitive conception of God, since God, not being anobject of reflection, is simply taken for granted.” But if the problem is forcedinto consciousness, as it was in the case of the young man whose dreams Ihave just described, the following statement of Jung applies:


. . . At the level of conscious reflections, . . . the coincidence of op-posites becomes a major problem, which we do everything possi-ble to circumvent. . . . When there are such gaps in our collectiveideas, in the dominants of our conscious orientation, we can countwith absolute certainty on the existence of complementary—or to bemore precise—compensatory developments in the unconscious. (Aion,p. 124).

The tension of the opposites created by an appropriate act of reflectiongives rise to another type of image that we may call a reconciling symbol. If

The tension of the oppositescreated by an appropriate act

of reflection gives rise toanother type of image that we

may call a reconcilingsymbol.

this too becomes in the courseof time an object for reflec-tion, it produces symbols thatappear to have a specific,unifying effect; instead of astrife of opposites we get a“union of opposites, ‘immuneto all injury,’ ” representedin its basic form as a circleor circular movement. Thiscircular movement refers tothe psychic activity which,

when awakened by the power of reflective meditation, brings about a cyclicinteraction between the symbols associated with heaven and earth. One par-ticularly vivid image of this in religious iconography is found in certain statuesof the meditating Buddha, protected from behind by a semicircular crown-like halo of seven cobras with their hoods expanded to the full. What cansuch an image possibly mean? The symbol of highest consciousness, the en-lightened detachment from all that is earthly, the Buddha, is sitting therein a state suggesting the attainment of Nirvana, is protected and symbol-ically identified with the lowliest, least conscious of earth’s creatures, theserpent. This is a true mystery and perhaps must remain so. We do, how-ever, have a term for it in analytical psychology. The appearance of a deepunconscious image, such as the serpent in the dream I mentioned, may her-ald an increase in conscious awareness and creative effectiveness in thedreamer. This also may be represented by creatures that function in twoor more media—for example, the wild duck that swims in the water, walkson the earth, and flies in the air—but it is more often represented by ser-pents, lizards, even dinosaurs, which suggest form, of animal energy comingfrom the most primitive levels of organic animal life. They all correspondto, or represent symbolically, what Jung has called the transcendent

function.


Neither REM sleep research nor the Papez–McLean theory of the threebrains can be regarded as satisfactory psychologically as long as the emphasisis placed on function alone without equal attention to the content of dreams.Equally questionable is the initial research done in the study of electricalbrainwave activity and the effects of the shift from alpha to beta to thetawaves. No doubt the claim that these waves may be consciously influenced bymeditation, so as to provide instant serenity, similar to the states achieved byZen masters, is appealing to the imagination and may become useful, just ashypnosis has been in allowing postoperative patients or sufferers from chronicanxiety to find relief. But still we do not know the archetypal content of thesechanges and their ultimate psychic effect. I think they must all be taken astheories, analogies, or hypotheses still in an experimental stage. Perhaps theywill come, in their different ways, to illumine the content of dreams and tohelp us verify, from the psychobiological point of view, the phenomenon withwhich we are so well acquainted during individual analysis: the transformingpower of the archetypal image, the transcendent function.

Joseph L. Henderson, M.D., a centenarian, practices as a Jungian analyst in

San Francisco. This distinguished analyst is the author of numerous books and

articles and a former consulting editor of Psychological Perspectives.

FURTHER READING

Davy, J. Dreams. Reprinted from The Observer. (1967), London.

Jaffe, A. The Myth of Meaning. (1970). Hodder & Slaughton, London.

Jung, C. G. Aion. CW, Vol. 9, 11. (1959). New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

Kamiya, J. The Conscious Control of Brain Waves. (April 1968). Psychology Today.

Koestler, A. The Ghost in the Machine. (Chap. XVI). (1962). Macmillan.

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The Psychic Activity of Dreaming