1

Klaus Koeppe

KNOWLEDGE OF DREAMS
A guide to gaining confidence in your dreams

Berlin 2005

Translated into English by Joyce Nelson-Smith

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Acknowlegements

I would like to thank all those people who kindly agreed to let me use their
dreams as examples in this book. The abundance of dream material was
instrumental in describing the richness of the subject.
 3

For Marc Raffael

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Contents

I. Dreams and human personality

1. Dream interpretation as a science

Sigmund Freud‟s dream interpretation
Carl Gustav Jung‟s approach to dream interpretation
2. The eight facets or instances of human personality
2.1. The conscious or the ego
2.2. The body
2.3. The mental centre
2.4 The soul
2.5 The ego
2.6 The primeval sphere
2.7 The spirit
2.8 The self
2.9 The system communicates

II. Some basic principles about dreams and their interpretation

III. Types of dream

1. Body dreams
2. Mundane dreams
3. Compensatory dreams
4. Recurring dreams
5. Serial dreams
6. Nightmares
7. Great dreams
8. Spiritual dreams
8.1. Apparitions
8.1.1 Apparitions of dead people
8.1.2 Apparitions of other spiritual beings
8.2. Prophetic dreams
8.3. Visions
8.4. Astral journeys
8.5. Memories of earlier lives
8.6. Energy dreams
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IV. The interpretation of dreams

1. The cultural context
2. The individual context
3. The atmosphere of the dream
4. The ambiguity of dreams
5. The interpretation at the level of subject and object
6. Suggestions on methodology
7. After interpretation --- carrying out the dream

V. Some images and symbols and their possible interpretation

1 . The nature of symbols
1.1 Symbols in waking life
1.2 Collective dreams and symbols – fairy tales
2. Means of transport
3. Animals
4. Plants, fruit and food
5. Numbers
6. Elements
7. The house
8. People
8.1. The substitute
8.2. Supreme leaders
8.3. Lesser leaders: people in authority
8.4. Murderers & burglars
8.5. Spiritual figures
9. Colours & their symbolical meaning
10. The human body
10.1. The body in its entirety
10.2. Parts of the body & their meaning

Bibliography
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PREFACE

To my readers,
This book is the result of a seminar, so I would like to speak to you personally,
dear reader. Writing a book means my being in touch with you when you read
these lines. I have written this book so that you might gain the confidence to
believe in your dreams and, through them, to find yourself. They show up our
true problems, desires and longings and also our deep knowledge about our
selves and reality. A dream can be a remarkable revelation of the essence of
life and an entry into understanding reality. Dreams, I believe, support and
counsel us in our life.

Our view of the world today is rather limited in terms of emotion and
philosophy. We are dominated by the sciences which have given us a
multitude of technological advances, such as telephones, aircraft, computers,
the pharmaceutical industry and all its new medicines and even the cloning of
living creatures, to list just a few. Most of us are not at all conscious of the
extent to which our thoughts, emotions and actions are governed by the rules
of the natural sciences. In my experience, most people are far removed from
their own intuition and would prefer by far to trust some scientific study rather
than their own feelings. Since the end of the Middle Ages our western culture
has become sceptical about anything emotional. As a result, little or no
significance has been attributed to dreams. They are regarded as a bit of fluff.
But there are exceptions, such as you, dear reader, for whom I have written
this book.

It will be clear from the above that I make no claim in this book to scientific
evidence- which is not a disadvantage in my opinion- because I only wish to
describe an alternative approach to dreams. I shall not argue a case nor
present scientific experiments. I shall, however, draw on the rich source of my
own and other people‟s experiences. I shall not follow any particular school of
thought, but rather, I shall take on board and learn from all kinds of ideas,
theories, viewpoints and experiences. I am confident that you, dear reader,
will be able to decide yourself what you think is true or untrue.

I would like to help you to believe the messages and the meaning of your
dreams. I would like to equip you with the necessary confidence and basic
knowledge to enable you to interpret and understand your dreams yourself.
You will need to expand your outlook on the world to get closer to your
dreams and free yourself from the strictures of materialism and natural
science. The reality of dreams cannot be contained. You need courage to
pass beyond the confines of your own intellect and follow the phenomenon of
your dream.

Your dream belongs to you, it is probably the most intimate and personal thing
you have. Your personality produces the dream, it is your very own product.
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This means that you are its key. My confidence in dreams lies in this simple
truth. Just as your thirst requires you to slake it, your dream requires you to
interpret and understand it yourself. Why else would you dream? You have
legs in order to walk on your own. So you have dreams in order to understand
yourself better. Basically, everyone has been created with the capacity to
interpret and comprehend his or her own dreams, given the wish to do so.

I have interpreted dreams since I was a teenager. My mother was a

psychotherapist and she had a small but excellent collection of books on
psychology. I was often alone and loved browsing in them. I read Sigmund
Freud‟s “Interpretation of Dreams” when I was about fifteen or sixteen. At first
I hardly understood its meaning because of all the technical terms and foreign
words. So I wrote up my book of words and learned the vocabulary and
started to interpret my own dreams. It worked! But I was embarrassed by the
intimate discoveries that were thus thrust into the limelight of my
consciousness. I could not speak about them to anyone. Nevertheless – or
maybe because it worked- I was fascinated by dreams. Over the years I
learned to trust my own dreams and my intuition in interpreting them. Since
then, I have helped many people successfully to interpret their dreams.

The single most important condition for the interpretation of your dreams is to
be internally prepared to confront yourself. You need to be utterly honest and
open with yourself. The biggest help in interpreting dreams is self-criticism.
Wanting to deny or disregard disagreeable things is a comprehensible human
trait. The more we resist looking honestly at our selves and our problems, the
harder it is to interpret our dreams. Consequently, our own mental attitude
determines whether the interpretation is going to be laborious and possibly
useless or on the contrary, an interesting and illuminating process.

For me, the interpretation of dreams is one of the most exciting adventures
that we can still experience today. Just as Jules Verne aspired to voyage to
the interior of the earth, we can travel in our dream to the interior of our being
and delve even further.

This book is meant to challenge your outlook on life, expand it and perhaps
explode it. I therefore beg you to open yourself up to the multiplicity of reality.
Most people are afraid of expanding their concept of the world. They need
their security. But they will soon realise that this kind of security is only an
illusion. The more you know about yourself, life and reality, the more secure
you will feel.

So, I welcome you on this exciting and interesting trip into your self!

In order to open your mind to the dimension of dreams, I have written the text
on the next page, and I would recommend that you read it out loud a few
times so that you get a clear idea of its meaning.
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Dreams are all-embracing.

They are the fabric that our reality is made of

We human beings take years to awaken our consciousness from its

dream state and to make it grow, but after a short and intense upsurge,
it falls back lifelessly into its original state.
We are encircled by the reality of dreams; they are the beginning and the
end.

Dreams are like an enormous sea from which single drops of individual
consciousness splash out momentarily, only to fall back into the all-
encompassing sea of dreams.

As conscious human beings, we say we are dreaming when we mean an

inferior state of our existence as compared to our conscious state: we
think of it as an unreal and confused world of make-believe.

But before our physical existence, we were but a dream- and nothing
more- and after our life we will again become a dream. Our Creator
“dreams” us up.

Dreams embrace everything comprehensively and are thus imbued with

the power of reality.

Consciousness itself is the most secret and perfect form of dreaming.

Consciousness defines itself as pure reality and hence the antithesis of
a dream state, but it turns out to be the most perfect dream:
consciousness seems so very real that its true dream nature is not
recognizable.

Our daytime consciousness does not last. But the dream endures
because we are “dreamt “ up by God.

That is why we should value, respect, cultivate and care for dreams.

Dreams are a rehearsal for eternity.

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I.

DREAMS AND HUMAN PERSONALITY

Dreams have always played a part in the history of mankind. They were
mostly thought of as magical or spiritual events, revealing the future or
bringing messages from superior beings. They were not given any
psychological interpretation as such. A dream was a mystery full of
significance. The Book of Job gives us an indication of how the ancient
interpretation of dreams implied a spiritual communication with God:

“For God speaketh once, yea twice, yet man perceiveth it not.
In a dream, in a vision of the night, when deep sleep falleth upon men,in
slumberings upon the bed;
Then he openeth the ears of men, and sealeth their instruction,
That he may withdraw man from his purpose, and hide pride from man.
He keepeth back his soul from the pit, and his life from perishing by the
sword.” 1

Great leaders of ancient times used to be influenced in their decisions by their

dreams. The Bible provides extensive documentation for this. In the Book of
Daniel, for instance, King Nebuchadnezzar was so troubled and bewildered by
a dream that he called for wise men, soothsayers, astrologers and magicians
to interpret his dream.2

Legend tells us that King Clovis of the Franks (466-511) saw a Christian cross
in a dream before an important battle and had it painted on all the shields of
his soldiers. He won the battle and then –partly under the influence of his
Christian wife- he had himself baptised and converted to Christianity.

The history of mankind is full of such dream experiences. People have always
interpreted dreams and ascribed to them significant if enigmatic messages
from another dimension.
Dreams were always embedded in the prevailing outlook on the world. Their
meaning was and is always closely connected to the times and the
circumstances of the dreamer. This is of course still true today.

In modern dream interpretation, it is our concept of man and our basic ideas
of human personality that heavily influence our interpretation.

1
The Bible. Book of Job 33 14-18
2
The Bible. Book of Daniel, chapter two
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1. The interpretation of dreams as a science

Our current worldview is limited. In our western civilisation, we modern people
have become accustomed to accept as true and real only those facts that
correspond to the narrow prerequisites of a scientific view of life. The rules of
the natural sciences are applied as the basis for explaining our world. Other
realities which do not fit this scientific conception of the world are disregarded.
This is particularly true of our self-awareness. Feelings and the whole domain
of personality including the notion of the soul that cannot be defined
scientifically are rarely considered to be true and real. Fortunately, our science
of psychology still retains the root of the original word, “PSYCHE” which, in
Greek, means the soul. For past generations it was normal to acknowledge
and feel the existence of the soul, but for modern people, this is more difficult.
Since the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of modern times, man is
increasingly regarded as a combination of physics and chemistry. Natural
science has so far been unable to identify, weigh or measure the soul.
Therefore it does not exist. Consequently, it is not surprising that dreams lost
their importance dramatically in Western culture. For a long time they were
simply considered to be hot air, and most people today would still give them
little credence. It was Sigmund Freud‟s great merit to have revived our
awareness of dreams and even to have rekindled the interest of scientists in
our time.

Sigmund Freud’s interpretation of dreams

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) was the great pioneer of the interpretation of
dreams. He introduced an entirely new angle into psychology by using dream
interpretation as the corner stone of his entire psychological research. The
revolutionary impact of his new approach could probably never be repeated in
our times. The age in which he lived had a blind belief in science, it was
positivist, very bourgeois and moralistic in outlook. In order to convey a brief
picture of the spiritual climate and the reaction of the Viennese society to
Sigmund Freud in 1900, I quote Max Graf, a musicologist and friend of
Freud‟s, who said:
“If one mentioned Freud in those days to a group of Viennese, they would
laugh as though one had told a joke. They thought he was an oddball who
had written about dreams and who called himself an interpreter of dreams. It
was considered to be in bad taste to mention him in the company of ladies.
They blushed at his name.” 3

Discussing dreams was considered unscientific rubbish. So Freud had trouble

in gaining status in society, let alone in the scientific world. And yet his

3
Reminiscences of Professor Sigmund Freud/ 1942 : quote : Freud Essays III, 531
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theories and findings were revolutionary. He was the first psychologist to

introduce the concept and reality of the unconscious mind into science. For
Freud, the dream was the passport to the repressed material of man‟s soul.
This was radical thought! The concept and reality of the unconscious were
highly controversial. Freud argued that dreams were not a random succession
of pictures, but that they had a meaning that could be deciphered according to
some general rules. He preferred interpretation to the use of hypnosis, a
method of treatment he had initially adopted from his teacher. He researched
the language of the pictures, symbols and stories occurring in dreams. He
tried to find a generally usable key to unlock the structures, messages and
meaning of dreams. He came to the conclusion that dreams were essentially
an unconscious fulfilment of desire4

Freud saw in man and in man‟s psychological disturbances mainly a

repression of his instincts. In particular sexual desire played a very important
part in Freud‟s outlook. This over-emphasis by Freud on the sexual instinct
was later sharply criticised. However, within the context of the times he lived
in, and considering that most of his patients were from the upper middle class,
Freud‟s conclusions are wholly understandable. In the spiritual material of
those patients he found a multitude of repressed sexual urges. We need to
remember that the upper classes in the first thirty years of the 20 th century
were terribly moralistic and buttoned-up, so that Freud‟s bluntly charted
disclosures of unconscious repressed human desires were profoundly
shocking.

In fact, Freud was actually extremely courageous. In order to protect his

patients, he mainly used his own dream material to illustrate his findings in his
book on dreams. Although he divulged details of his own private spiritual life,
he was not deterred by embarrassment from verifying his research in this way.

The revolutionary aspect of Freud‟s interpretation of dreams lay not only in the
central position given to sexuality-which was scandalous to society of the
time- but also in the chief idea that every dream made sense, contained a
message and needed to be treated seriously. The many examples cited by
Freud, combined with his therapeutic successes bore out his theory. Starting
from the conviction that in essence all dreams are a means of fulfilling desire,
he divided them into three classes:

“Firstly, those that portray an un-repressed desire in an un-disguised way:

these are dreams of the infantile type which become rare in adults.
Secondly, dreams that portray a repressed desire in disguise; these are the
majority of our dreams which need to be analysed to be understood.

4
“The dream is the (disguised) fulfilment of a (suppressed or repressed) wish.” Interpretation of
Dreams, 111
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Thirdly, dreams that although they portray a repressed desire, they are
without disguise or only have partial disguise. These dreams are regularly
accompanied by fear that interrupts the dream. Fear becomes a substitute for
a distortion of the dream; although fear was likewise present in dreams of the
second type, the dream works through it and dispels it. It is not too difficult to
prove that the content of our imagination that gave rise to fear in the dream,
was originally a desire that has been repressed.” 5

Even if limiting the nature of dreams to a fulfilment of desire may seem to us

today too narrow a definition, Freud was nevertheless the first modern
psychologist to give dreams scientific credence, to listen to them and to
search in them for a specific language. He was convinced that understanding
the nature of dreams and the functioning of the unconscious would provide a
tool to unlock the language of dreams.

A decisive key to interpreting dreams was provided to Freud not only by

psychology and his own technical knowledge, but also by his patients‟ input
and their spontaneous association of ideas. His method consisted essentially
in combining psychological findings with the unconscious knowledge of his
patients. His patients‟ inspiration and association of ideas were fundamental
to deciphering the clues in their dreams. The psychologist thus became the
supporter and promoter of the patient who, in his turn, showed the therapist
how to construct a sensible entity.

Freud‟s image of man‟s personality is inseparable from his dream theory. His
interpretation of spiritual connections still provides the basis today for all
modern systems of psychology, albeit with a few alterations. This connection
between the image of man and the interpretation of dreams seems vitally
important to me, because we can only extract a meaning from that which we
have previously put in. The image of man is the framework within which
dreams can speak to us. By conducting research, we humans are creating the
conditions for dreams to speak to us and by the same token, for reality to be
perceived in all its forms. So, I should like briefly to sketch Freud‟s vision of
man‟s personality, without making any claim to being complete.

In Freud‟s vision of the human personality, the powerful unconscious stands

opposite the much weaker and more fragile conscious. The unconscious is
characterised mainly by instincts and instinctual desires, in particular sexual
urges which are of major significance to Freud. In describing the unconscious,
Freud uses the notion of „id‟. “This „id‟ is the dark, inaccessible part of our
personality. We get closer to the „id‟ through comparisons, we call it chaos, or

5
“About dreams” (1901) Quote from: Sigmund Freud: I. S.96
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compare it to a cauldron of boiling agitation.”6 We can imagine the „id‟ as

being a natural original state that we share with mammals: wild, instinctive
and devoid of culture and civilisation.

Standing opposite the „id‟ is the „ego‟, which governs the relationship with the
outside world and is therefore the actual carrier of culture but also negotiates
relationship with the „id‟, the strong and dark urges. Freud distinguishes
between the conscious and the pre-conscious ego. What our experience calls
our consciousness is that part of the ego that is open to the outside
world and conveys our external perceptions to the interior. Because Freud
sees the id as the defining, primary power of human beings, he imagines that
the ego develops out of the id like an outer layer and functions as its
connection to the outside world.

The conscious ego is that part of the id “which is modified by the proximity and
influence of the outside world, to absorb and protect against irritants in the
same way as a layer of skin or rind envelops a fruit or any living substance.
The ego must take on the task of relating to the outside world and of
representing the id in a salutary way, because the id, in its blind urge for
gratification, would discount the overwhelming power of the external world and
incur its own destruction.”7. The ego sets the reality principle against the
pleasure principle of the id. So, although it opposes the id, it ensures its very
existence. In other words, if we humans followed our blind, chaotic, base
instincts, we would not last. But by acknowledging the constraints of reality
through our ego, we create the conditions for our continued existence.
The ego represents reason, thoughtfulness and adult self-governance,
whereas the id represents untamed passions, instincts and desires. The
conflict between the ego and the id causes repressions. Desires and urges
emanating from the unconscious id are repressed by the ego and, conversely,
issues pertaining to the ego are pushed into the id. In order to explain the
mechanism of repression more clearly, Freud introduces a further
psychological component which he bases on the phenomenon of the
conscience. This means that the ego has the capacity to look at itself morally
and to be its own judge. Freud calls this internal and totally conscious
component the superego. The conscience is the main function of the
superego, with its own energy and relative independence. Basically, the
superego emerges from parental love. Every child learns quickly what kind of
behaviour receives love and what kind of behaviour receives criticism,

6
Lecture: Die Zerlegung der psychischen Persoenlichkeit. 1932, Essays III, 350 ff. Freud writes about the id,
saying: “ The id is filled with energy derived from urges, but it has no organisation, it has no will power and is
fuelled solely by the aspiration to satisfy its instinctual needs and thereby to follow the pleasure principle. The
laws of logic do not apply to the processes within the id nor can it deal with the notion of contradiction. Opposing
emotions exist beside each other without cancelling each other out or differentiating themselves from each other…
There is nothing in the id that corresponds to the concept of time…It goes without saying, that the id has no value
judgment, it recognises neither good nor evil, it has no morals.”
7
Freud, op.cit. 352 f
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punishment and a withdrawal of love. Simplistically, the superego represents

the internal parents and in particular parental values and moral dictates.
“The superego seems to choose one-sidedly the parents‟ strictness and
severity and their punishing and forbidding functions, whereas their loving,
caring side is not taken up and preserved by the superego.”8

The ego has a very difficult position between three elements: the instinctual
and powerful id, the critical and moralistic superego and the outside world.
“Pushed by the id, constrained by the superego and repulsed by reality, the
ego has the difficult task of creating harmony between diverse powers and
influences..”9

In Freud‟s complex view of the human personality, the ego and superego are
not consciously identical. Both are in fact mostly unconscious. But the
boundaries are fluid. Freud calls this fluid, dynamic part where unconscious
and conscious elements of personality meet, a system of pre-consciousness.
The superego is mainly pre-conscious, which means that it is capable of being
conscious. A person can make himself conscious of the precepts received
from his parents, if he wishes to do so. Likewise, only a small part of our ego
is fully conscious whereas the greater part is pre-conscious and in close
contact with our unconscious id.

According to Freud, life in our human soul takes place in this complex and
dynamic system of ego, superego and id. His intensive work on dreams
enabled him to advance his theory because it revealed the censorship that
exists between the unconscious and the conscious.

Problems and desires are repressed into the unconscious but they try to
regain the attention of the consciousness through dreams. For Freud, the
superego is the instigator of repression. In order that these unconscious
desires may resurface in the conscious, they are disguised, disfigured and
encoded in the working of the dream. Images and symbols disguise the true
but unconscious object of desire in order that the encoded and unconscious
desire may by-pass censorship and resurface in the ego through dreams.

Sigmund Freud was the pioneer and father of the modern interpretation of
dreams. He had the courage during a time of materialism to discover dreams
as a prime phenomenon enabling access to the human psyche.

8
Freud,op.cit. 338
9
op.cit. 356
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Carl Gustav Jung’s approach to dream interpretation

Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961) is like Freud one of the fathers of modern
dream interpretation. Whereas Freud was a rather severe and logically
rational kind of man, Jung was more inclined to be intuitive and mystic and an
all-rounder in thought and emotion. Jung was thrilled with Freud‟s
“Interpretation of dreams” and he became an avid supporter of
psychoanalysis. Jung gives an account of their first meeting in 1907:
“Freud was the first truly significant man I ever met. No other person in my
experience could compare with him. There was nothing trivial in his attitude. I
thought he was extraordinarily intelligent, astute and remarkable in every way.
And yet my first impressions of him were unclear and even slightly puzzling…
I could not accept his so-called scientific positivism, his rationalisation of the
psyche, nor his materialistic attitude… But most of all, Freud‟s view of the
human mind seemed highly questionable to me. Wherever spirituality was
seen in art or in a human being, he cast suspicion on it and intimated that it
was repressed sexuality.”11

This quote says a lot about the difference between these two men. Jung felt
that Freud always looked down on him. He rebelled against him like a teenage
son against his father. The final break between the two great psychologists
happened in January 1913 after Jung sent Freud a letter dated December
1912, saying among other things:
“I would like to draw your attention to the fact that treating your pupils as
though they were your patients is a mistaken technique. What you are doing is
turning them into slavish sons or naughty boys… I am sufficiently objective to
see through your trick. You establish proof of symptoms in the actions around
you, and you thus reduce the people around you to the level of sons or
daughters who blushingly admit to the existence of guilty tendencies.
Meanwhile you keep your elevated position as father. No one then has the
temerity to question the prophet and to ask you what you would say to a
patient who might dare to analyse the analyst instead of himself. You would
of course ask him: „Who is suffering from the neurosis here, you or me?‟” 12

After this blunt and open criticism, the break was final. Jung now followed his
own path delving deeper into the functions of the mind and soul of man.
Jung‟s main criticism of Freud was his antagonism towards spirituality. Jung
himself was not just an intellectual but also a deeply spiritual man, who
brought this aspect into his interpretation of mankind. Deep in his heart, Freud
was frightened of the id, the unconscious and its urges, and his method of
analysis basically served to dominate and control the unconscious and hence

11
Freud, Essays III,536
12
op.cit.. 536 f
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to provide safety for the ego,13 whereas Jung‟s research was much more
orientated towards a kind of reconciliation. Jung had a more positive image of
the human unconscious. Jung contended, “in addition to memories from a
distant conscious past, totally new thoughts and creative ideas can spring out
of the unconscious – thoughts and ideas which were never conscious before.
They sprout from the dark depths of the spirit like lotus flowers and become
an enormously important part of the unconscious psyche.”14
The depths of the human soul were not as destructive for Jung as for Freud.
Culture and nature were not opposed to each other but they supplemented
each other as partners. Freud saw man (the ego) battling against the threat of
nature.15 Jung saw man as a part of nature and not as enemies.16Freud‟s
motto might have been: the id must turn into the ego, which
means that unconscious urges must be transformed into conscious
awareness. Jung‟s motto would more likely to have been: acceptance and
reconciliation bring about healing but at the same time, he also considered
awareness to be an essential prerequisite of acceptance. Jung wrote: “You
cannot change anything unless you accept it.”17 He strived not only for
knowledge but also for wisdom. “When you use modern psychology to look
behind the scenes and see not only your patients but yourself, you have to
admit that it is terribly difficult, if not impossible, to accept yourself in your own
miserable essence. Just thinking about it can make you sweat with fear, so
that you prefer the complicated option, which is to ignore yourself and to busy
yourself with the troubles and tribulations of other people.”18

Although Jung worked with dreams and accepted their authoritative

significance which he adopted from Freud, Jung reached different results and
a different image of human personality. While Freud regarded the symbols of
dreams as an aspect of censorship and repression, Jung attributed to the
symbols a kind of reality of their own. By charting these images in peoples‟
13
“It is much more likely that every culture needs to be built on compulsion and renunciation of the
instincts; it is not at all certain that if compulsion were lifted, the majority of human beings would
accept to take on the workload required to provide goods for living. I think that we have to reckon with
the fact that everyone carries destructive tendencies, in other words, they are antisocial and anti-
cultural, and that these tendencies are strong enough in a large proportion of people to govern their
behaviour in society.” Freud, Die Zukunft einer Illusion. (The future of an illusion). 1927 Essays
III,240
14
C.G.Jung: Der Mensch und seine Symbole, (Man and his symbols) 37
15
“ Nobody would however dupe himself into believing that nature has been conquered; a few may
dare to hope that one day it would be subjected to man… Nature rises before us in all its violence and
grandeur, cruel and unyielding, and confronts us again with our weakness and helplessness that we
thought to overcome with our cultural developments.” Freud, Die Zukunft einer Illusion, Essays III,249
16
“Our psyche is a part of nature and, as such, as limitless as nature. We can define neither psyche nor
nature, we can but try to describe as well as possible how we experience them” C.G.Jung Der Mensch
und seine Symbole, 23
17
C.G. Jung: Die Beziehungen der Psychotherapie zur Seelsorge. 1932, 25 (The relationship between
psychotherapy and pastoral care)
18
Op. cit. 26
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dreams and in their waking state, he realised that they were not simply the
result of repressed desires but that they had a much wider and general
significance. Jung‟s research into man and dreams led to his most important
theory of archetypes and his theory of the collective unconscious.

a) The collective unconscious

Jung agreed with Freud that there was an individual unconscious whose
dynamic instinctual content Freud called the id. But Jung went further and
assumed an unconscious surpassing the individual and extending beyond the
existence of a single person. The further we penetrate into the unconscious,
the less the individual properties count and the more the collective experience
– particularly based on symbols – becomes apparent. “These are mythological
connections, patterns and images that can newly emerge any where and any
time without historical tradition nor migration. I call these experiences the
collective unconscious.”19 Jung meant to say by this that we do not create all
our experiences in our individual minds ourselves, in particular not the
symbols and images. In his terms, there is a common treasure of experiences,
knowledge, images, symbols and connections which all human beings share.
He came to this conclusion by making analytical comparisons between myths,
fairy tales, legends and symbols from different cultural backgrounds. The
unconscious is therefore not only the dark id that the conscious needs to
oppose in order to civilise it. From the depths of our collective unconscious we
also acquire knowledge, ancient experiences, wisdom and possibly new ideas
and insights. The deeper we delve into the unconscious, the more collective
and far-reaching the psychic content becomes. Every civilisation, whether it is
European, Arab or Indian, has its own experiences in the domain of the
collective unconscious, which are expressed in its own specific symbols. The
Christian cross is for instance a typical example of a collective symbol of the
West. At a deeper level, all human beings have the same issues regardless of
their culture. These are expressed in symbols, images and myths that are
found in all cultures and in all ages of human history.
The assumption of a collective unconscious is closely linked to Jung‟s theory
of archetypes.

b) The archetypes
Jung‟s work on dreams led him to believe that the collective unconscious
contained inherent tendencies that continuously produced similar mythological
symbols and images. He imagined a kind of basic structure or a primeval
imprint on the mind which would produce very varied outcomes but which
could still be traced back to the original structural elements. 20(20) We can
19
C. G. Jung: Psychologische Typen. 1921, 656
20
“I repeatedly come across the misconception that the archetypes have a defined content or that they
are a kind of unconscious “idea”. It must therefore be underlined that the archetypes are not determined
 18

illustrate this with the example of conscious thought and perception. The
philosopher Immanuel Kant recognised that the human reason was
characterised by certain categories. Our thinking is always conditioned by
time and space and we always automatically have to add the category of
causality to our thought process. The fact that every event has a cause is not
the subjective brainchild of someone or the other. It is a necessary aspect of
each thought process. Kant saw these categories (for example time, space
and causality) as purely formal prerequisites of any human perception,
regardless of the actual object of the perception (a tree, a person etc.). In
exactly the same way, Jung regarded the archetypes as the pure, original
forms of spiritual images and symbols. The realities of birth, death,
motherhood, fatherhood etc may serve as examples here. These are not
realities that we learn about through our conscious mind but they are formal
categories of life that we carry in our unconscious. Archetypes are sort of
deep imprints or programmes that determine the basic structure of life,
determining our feelings, reason and our actions. The symbols and images
produced by an archetype may vary considerably but they are rooted in the
same origin. So, for instance, the archetype of a mother may invoke very
different images in different cultures. The idea of a cow may mean a good
meal to some and a provision of milk to others. All these images are derived
from the same source, namely the archetype of a mother. Mother, father,
birth, death and similar notions about life are derived from imprints on the
collective mind. This is not acquired knowledge but the baggage we carry in
the form of archetypes. We have to follow our predispositions and live, feel,
emote and perceive accordingly. Archetypes are objective reality for Jung and
they govern our freedom of choice by being the categories of our soul.

c) The symbols
Symbols played a supreme role for Jung. The dream was in his view, the
living proof that man was able to create symbols. Jung considered that a
symbol was something mystical and great, far exceeding a sign. “What we call
a symbol is an expression, a name or an image which may be familiar to us in
every day life but which has special connotations in addition to its

in their content but only in their form and even then, only up to a degree. A basic image or idea can
only have its specific content identified if it is filled consciously and therefore contains material
obtained through conscious experience. Its form however, … is comparable to the coordinate system of
a crystal that kind of pre-forms the structure in the mother-lye without itself having any material
existence…An archetype is actually an empty, formal element which is nothing more than a possibility
… given a priori of a form of imagination. The imagination or ideas are not inherited but the forms are,
and they correspond in this respect to the instincts that are likewise formally determined.” C.G. Jung:
Die psychologischen Aspekte des Mutterarchetypus (1938), in: Archetypen. 79 (The psychological
aspects of the mother-archetype.)
 19

conventional meaning. It contains something undefined, unknown or invisible

to us.”21

Here again, Jung differentiates between individual symbols that every

individual person can create, and collective symbols that refer to a group of
people or even to all mankind. A symbol is special because it encapsulates
more and implies more than what our conscious mind perceives. There must
be some contact with the unconscious for the symbol to come into being. It is
sort of the gateway to the unconscious. Some kind of premonition, but not one
that has become conscious, is present in the symbol. In this sense, a symbol
is a kind of facilitator between the unconscious and the conscious, a “go-
between”:

The symbol is always a very complex structure because it is composed of

data from all our psychological functions. It is therefore neither rational nor
irrational. It has a side that complies with reason and another that is
inaccessible to reason because it is made up of both rational data and
irrational data based on internal and external perception. Symbols are full of
implications and significance which address our thinking and feeling, and their
peculiar imagery speaks to our emotions and intuition once they have been
given a sensible form.” (22)

Jung found that symbols expressed a complex compression of the mental

process. This fascinated him. None of his contemporaries attributed such
significance to symbols.
Jung‟s interpretation of dreams is situated within the theory of the collective
unconscious, the archetypes and the symbolic language of the soul.

In the last text he wrote he gave some very wise advice about interpreting
dreams.
Although he concentrated more than any one else on symbols, he told his
pupils: “Learn as much as you can about symbolism, but forget it all when
you analyze a dream.” (23)
My own feeling is that Jung focuses mainly on the dream itself and its
individual message whereas I find that Freud tends to try to find in the
symbolism of dreams an interpretation to support his own theory based on
sexuality. Jung only called for two premises: “firstly, the dream should be
treated as fact without making any assumptions, except that there is a
meaning in the fact; and secondly, that the dream is a specific expression of
the unconscious” (24)

Contrary to Freud, Jung did not let his patients indulge endlessly in free
association. He followed the dream rather than the dreamer, because he
believed that :”only the material that is clearly part of the dream should be

21
C.G.Jung: Man and his Symbols. 20
 20

used for interpretation. The dream sets its own limits. Its own form determines
what belongs to it and what is extraneous.” (25)
Jung believed in dreams, he trusted them and respected them as holding the
secrets of the human soul.

While Freud tried to draw out the unconscious contents of the soul into the
bright light of the conscious, Jung bravely endeavoured to find his own way
into the depths of the unconscious. I would like to end this short description of
Jung‟s view with this quotation with which I fully agree :

“It would be stupid to believe in ready-made systematic instructions for

interpreting dreams and to think you could just look up a specific symbol and
its meaning. The symbol in the dream cannot be separated from the person
who dreamt it; it is in fact impossible to give a generally applicable
interpretation of a dream.”

2. The eight facets of human personality

Freud and Jung were undoubtedly the greatest pioneers of modern, western
dream interpretation. But they were to some extent constrained by the
prevailing scientific attitudes. Freud more so than Jung, who followed an idea
of the collective unconscious and of archetypes and hence gave the dream a
wider spectrum. But both men and subsequently western European thinking
generally focussed on the psyche. Although the importance they attributed to
the extent and the energy of the human psyche varied, they based the
meaning of dreams on so-called scientific data. Considering that man has
always, as far back as we know, interpreted dreams, but mostly invoking
spirits, magic and mystery, it does seem a bit limiting to reduce dreams to the
human psyche. Their premise, however, corresponds to the modern Zeitgeist
which wants to tie reality to evidence in the natural sciences.

My contention is that the dream extends far beyond the framework of the
human psyche. I cannot dismiss the many thousands of years of history of
dream interpretation as being a primitive precursor of a more sophisticated
knowledge of dreams, so I try to take all the magical, mystical and spiritual
interpretations seriously and to find expressions of a wider reality in them. I
consider it to be extremely arrogant to believe that we are cleverer and more
knowledgeable about dreams than our ancestors were. Our rational abstract
thinking has indubitably brought us enormous technical progress and made
our lives easier, but in the process we have become estranged from ourselves
and our emotions. It therefore seems better to me to question our own
abstract reality rather than the old customs, traditions and experiences of
mankind, handed down to us over many thousands of years.
 21

My own path into the field of dreams started with Sigmund Freud, then
expanded to the theories of C. G.Jung, but my experience with people, myself
and dreams led me to believe that the field was too narrow and too small. I
was particularly struck by the utter neglect of spiritual reality in the
interpretation of dreams. Spirituality is not a part of our scientific view of the
world and therefore does not appear in theories about dream interpretation. A
giant sphere of human existence and reality has consequently been lost. This
is all the more astonishing as our ancestors in all cultures used to live and
interpret dreams primarily and almost exclusively as a spiritual experience.

For most other cultures, dreaming means an encounter with another

dimension, a spiritual voyage, a revelation by superior powers, prophecies or
information about the future etc. If we recognize that the traditional method of
interpreting dreams in the last 5000 years had this sort of content, then it
seems a great pity that in the last 100 years we have reduced the dream
exclusively to an expression of the psyche in terms of repressed problems
and urges.

In the course of my life and learning about life, I had to decide whether to
force the dream into my concept of the world and mankind or whether on the
contrary, I was prepared to learn from dreams about a wider image of reality. I
opted for the latter. My attitude towards people and reality was changed
through my work on dreams and my encounter with the Indian culture in
Montana USA where I became an adopted tribal member of the Assiniboine-
Indians.As a result, Freud and Jung‟s visions are not wide enough to describe
my approach to dream interpretation.

In the following text, I would like to present a model of the human personality
consisting of eight facets. Although I have a strong innate desire to represent
complex realities in the form of systems, images and definitions, I am
nevertheless very well aware that no reality can be totally understood or
pictured by us humans. Every kind of comprehension is necessarily
provisional and incomplete. I would ask my readers to keep this in the back of
their minds while I continue. Every theory is a crutch, a useful tool, but
nevertheless only a crutch.

The reason why, in philosophical terms, it is impossible to have total

comprehension is that, in so far as we mortals can perceive it, reality is a
dynamic thing, or as the philosopher Heraclitus said, a flowing thing (pantha
rei - everything flows). However, our human understanding is based on under-
standing. In other words, we make standing - or standing still- a prerequisite of
our attempt to understand, we pick pieces out of the flow to examine them.
So, in making them stand still (and having now understood them), we have
changed them and they are now longer flowing pieces of truth and reality. If by
understanding reality, we no longer allow it to flow, then it is no longer
 22

essentially true. Reality is only what it appears to be to us. We human beings

need understanding to seize reality, to give it a form, an order and a definition
and to orientate ourselves in our world. This fact is borne out by the
phenomenon of the dream: its flowing character is universally felt and
experienced by everyone. Dreams generally have many meanings and are
complex. Any attempt to nail them down to a single causal connection must
fail. So far, we have been trying to pull the dream out of the flow of its
complexity through our abstract, logical thinking, giving it order and
categories and pressing it into a system. I shall try to work the other way
around. I will submerge understanding or reason into the flow of the dream
even at the risk of drowning
it! But in my experience, our understanding can hold its breath for a long time
and when it resurfaces, it will bring treasures to the light of day.

In sketching human personality, I shall not aspire to scientific precision, I

make no claim to being exhaustive nor do I exclude any contradiction. Rather,
I regard my view of human personality as an invitation rationally and
emotionally to discover through various dimensions and stages the breadth of
reality with which we are in contact through our dreams. Any association of
ideas seems legitimate to me in order to lead the imagination into truth and
reality. My view of man should fulfill our need for order and understanding and
at the same time respect the provisional and flowing character of reality. This
will be an experiment full of contradicting tensions, but I shall attempt it
nonetheless.

My image of human personality is based on eight constituents or instances,

that each has its own function and significance and yet operates only in
conjunction with the others. The transitions between them are fluid and often
imperceptible. I have given each instance (constituent) a numerical value
which has no mathematical meaning but a philosophical one, denoting a
“magical” or “spiritual” entity.
I have also given the instances a spatial aspect by placing them under the
four points of the compass. Each instance is furthermore connected to one or
several elements that make up our earth. This provides a very complex,
holistic construct which also to some extent integrates the knowledge of
ancient civilizations. This model of human personality simply imposed itself on
me as a result of my experience. I cannot and will not give any other
justification for it.
 23

1.Conscious Me 2.Body 3. Mental centre 4.Soul 5.Ego 6.Primeval sphere

7.Spirit 8. The Self
 24

2.1. The conscious Me

In the North of my compass there is the conscious or what I call Conscious
Me. The conscious is our daily awareness. It is being awake and alert and
being in command of our actions.
It is the opposite of sleeping, dreaming, meditating, being drunk or under the
influence of drugs. I do realize that the concept of consciousness is basically
much more complex than that. Freud accorded the ego many facets of
unconsciousness because it is in constant contact with the Id and the super-
ego. All that seems acceptable to me. In fact, experience has shown me that
we use different parts of our consciousness at different levels of our lives. The
dream is a case in point. We are conscious in our dreams, we feel and act
and suffer in our subjective way. There are even some dreams in which we
are aware that we are dreaming. Sometimes we are so conscious of our
feelings, that there is no difference in the intensity of our dreamt experience
and our waking experience. Dreamt journeys can be very conscious. Even
after death we retain a kind of consciousness which is worthy of the name.
However, I am not going to follow this interpretation, but rather I shall deal
with our daily conscious.

My terminology of the conscious is based on child development, which will be

self-evident to anyone who has children. In the sense that I use the term, a
new born child has no consciousness, although of course he is awake and
indubitably senses his own perceptions clearly and deeply. The conscious I
am dealing with here is connected to language and reflection. The child grows
slowly into this conscious - through language and its correlated abstraction.
Language is abstract: by giving a name to an object, the word assimilates its
energy and we human beings make the object our own. In a pre-language
state, a tree could for instance be a magic person, a spirit or a god. However,
as soon as it is given a name, which is always a sort of definition and
conditioned by the conscious, the object loses its fluidity. Our conscious and
our language make up our world. Pre-conscious man has no world, but
something like original nature.

Back to the child. With language the child learns to give a name to objects and
thus to extract the original energy of these things, which we call abstraction.
The same process of separation only takes place within the child when it
learns language. Consciousness through language makes it possible to
reflect on oneself and hence to separate oneself from one‟s original state of
unity. As a child‟s consciousness grows, he begins to call himself by name
when he talks about himself because his parents do so. At first he talks about
himself in the third person like an object. He only really becomes aware of
himself when he says “I”. This is an enormous effort of abstraction. With the
help of his conscious, the child needs to detach himself from his self in order
to find his identity on a higher abstract level. This is the meaning of the term
 25

“conscious Me”. In a developmental and historical sense, I combine the ego

and the conscious because they belong together.

A separation between subject and object does not exist until the Conscious
Me comes into play and this separation is often fudged in dreams. The
Conscious Me is a kind of assertion of man‟s self in opposition to objects.
Before the Conscious Me establishes itself, personality is fluid, it can become
an animal, a tree or another person. The energy boundaries between man
and his environment are mobile, fluid. The Conscious Me is a conscious
concentration of the person into a centre, holding him together and safe. A
loss of the Conscious Me leads to a split personality, even in adults.

In Buddhism for instance, the dissolution of the Conscious Me is a central aim

of meditation. Buddhism recognizes that the Conscious Me isolates the object.
Likewise, in other religions and cultures the aim is to overcome the Conscious
Me in order to attain communion with nature or superior powers.

The Conscious Me has a collecting and saving function. It subsumes energy

and power from objects and supplies these to the conscious human being. Put
very simply: more Conscious Me means more power to man over objects; less
means more power and energy to objects influencing man. Put differently
again: More Conscious Me, means a lesser flow of reality. Only the
Conscious Me under-stands, i.e. brings things to a stand-still. Less Conscious
Me means a stronger flow of reality.

I have given the Conscious Me or the conscious the numerical value of 1

because the conscious ego is the authority that achieves our conscious unity
and holds the many strands of our multiple personality together. If it is turned
off, our personality risks separating into many parts. The dream illustrates this
very well. In a dream, we can be anything, ourselves, other people, animals or
creatures. In dreams we lose the unity of the Conscious Me which generally
frightens the ego. People who have a high consciousness activity and rate
themselves as rational and logical tend to dream less, that is, they do not
remember their dreams because their Conscious Me is marked by fear. This
fear increases the conscious activity and gives it added energy. People with a
strong level of consciousness will call themselves “realists”, which means that
their world is relatively restricted because they can only perceive that which
falls into the framework of their conscious brain. “Realists” have a great need
for security, or conversely, they have a need to protect themselves from their
own fear.

On the other side of the spectrum, people who constantly try to extend their
consciousness either through drugs or other far reaching experiences run the
risk of losing their Conscious Me. Both extremes show up important needs of
the conscious: security in the world and stabilization of one‟s own personality .
 26

In order to describe the Conscious Me more fully, I shall include typical

processes and functions, such as: to analyze, reflect, deduce, systematize,
prioritize, comprehend, structure, organize and to make value judgements
(right/wrong, good/bad) etc.

The Conscious Me is extraverted, in other words, directed towards the outside

world. Its task is to regulate the contact between the outside world and one‟s
own personality as well as it can. A person‟s own personality (in my image,
the other 7 authorities) is a sort of back up of the Conscious Me. It has very
little or only a rather difficult access to the other parts of personality. In fact,
the greater the fear of the other parts of one‟s own personality (emotions and
problems), the harder it is to perceive them. Accordingly, I assume that
repression is primarily based on the activity of the Conscious Me and that
repression has its root in fear. I believe that the Conscious Me represents a
very small part of a person‟s personality. This assumption is derived from my
long experience with dreams and with people‟s problems.

In my interpretation of human beings, the Conscious Me is a provisional or

penultimate thing, in the sense that it starts up in the first years of one‟s life
and melts away in late age and finally changes in death into a completely
different kind of conscious which I would like to describe later. This Conscious
Me is also almost completely switched off in dream time although it is
nevertheless present and works as a censor, -- but not consciously.

The Conscious Me works like a computer which is after all a man-made

machine that operates by providing a technical copy of the human conscious
activity. The conscious works according to a simple logic of causality: right -
wrong; yes - no. The conscious requires reality to be logical, cause and effect
must be connected clearly and without contradiction. However, reality does
not appear to function according to this logic (“Everything is in flux”..) and so
the Conscious Me constructs its own reality with its own working methods and
rules. I call this the WORLD. The world in my definition is the result of
conscious activity .If the Conscious Me grows stronger, the real difference
between the WORLD of the conscious and what we generally call nature will
become greater, nature being in this context those very complex basic
connections and realities that function according to quite different principles
from those of the conscious.

This fact can be clearly seen in our present western civilization. Since the end
of the Middle Ages, the power of the Conscious Me has increased markedly,
bringing us previously unimaginable advances in technology which all work
according to causality, ( yes - no; right - wrong; 0 -1). This is called modern
natural sciences. It is the most powerful product of what I call the Conscious
Me. Our modern world is almost exclusively made up of the conscious. At our
individual level, this leads to a dangerous splitting off of the other elements of
 27

our own personality from the actual reality, and at some point we individuals
tend to fall ill - with the collaboration of our society.

In the “Criticism of pure reason”, Immanuel Kant defined the conditions (he
called them “categories”) of human perception and knowledge which include
time, space and causality. I attribute these functions to the Conscious Me.
Other instances in our make up have other categories.

The Conscious Me, in the sense it is described here, represents the male
principle. Its duty is to use rational analysis to make us capable of living and
acting in the outside world. It organizes and coordinates our survival. The
conscious is thus our security center. Danger is notified by fear. Fear is the
most important emotion intruding as an unconscious factor into the conscious.
Experience tells me that there is a direct correlation between rational
conscious and fear. I would even assume that the stronger the rational
Conscious Me, the stronger the fear although it may be a subconscious fear. It
is as though this fear were standing behind the Conscious Me which does not
see it nor notice it but actually even suppresses it. Here we have a snowball
effect: as the fear grows, the domination and output of the Conscious Me
increases and in the end this leads to a detachment from one‟s own emotions.
As a result, the rest of one‟s personality reacts with an upsurge of
unconscious demands which in turn increase the fear and finally also step up
the performance of the conscious.

In the process of finding a cure it is therefore generally necessary to sacrifice

first the rational analytical conscious. For most people this is a terrible
requirement, understandably. But the conscious itself, spurred on by
existentialist fear, created this detachment from the rest of its personality and
therefore needs to be sacrificed, but for anyone who is psychologically ill this
demand seems like a total surrender of one‟s self. The starting point
for a person‟s cure is the Conscious Me. Either we accept this and sacrifice a
large portion of our conscious activity or we block ourselves and insist on the
apparent safety of rationality and analysis. The biggest stumbling block for the
conscious is self abandon. It is felt like a threat and a deep loss.

I would like to describe the Conscious Me with a few typical terms: It focuses
on material and superficial things. It looks for structures and generalizations.
It controls, thinks, feels and acts according to external or internalized rules
and standards. It adapts to its circumstances in order to secure its survival.
This adaptation is made possible through learning. We learn in many different
ways. The conscious mind learns mainly according to its structure through a
rational evaluation of experience, by comparing, measuring, weighing,
checking , experimenting, understanding and by internalizing external rules,
laws, standards etc. Our scientific and technological progress is a direct result
of the conscious taken in this sense.
 28

Looking at history, we should be able to see where there has been

disharmony between the Conscious Me and the subconscious instances of
human personality. It is the point at which culture and civilization fall out of
kilter. Culture produces performances and results which have their roots in the
depths of human reality, such as great pieces of art, music, literature, painting,
architecture, philosophy and religion. If this balance is lost, the effects of
civilization gain the upper hand, such as scientific and technological
achievements, aeroplanes, cars, computers, mobile phones and all the other
paraphernalia of our technical existence.

In order to demonstrate my meaning, I shall now list a few free associations to

illustrate the nature and activity of the Conscious Me:

- the way computers work (0-1) - a General in military service - customs check
- police - authority - front - surface - matter - artificial light - traffic lights -
chemical and mathematical formulae - cause and effect - flat plains ( one
dimensional) - black/white - half moon (only the bright side can be seen) - etc.

To sum up:
- point on the compass: North
- numerical value: 1
- corresponds to the male principle
- associated elements: earth and air
- to the touch: dry and cold

2.2 The body

Our body is the material part of our existence, and as such, it is conditioned
by space and time and, at a first glance, by the laws of physics. However, our
body is also conditioned by spiritual constraints and is subject to both the
material and the spiritual spheres. By making a distinction between the spirit
and the body, or matter and non-matter, we are using our conscious ego and
saying more about our thought process than about the true essence of the
body. To have a body is to be a part of nature. In our body we face nature not
only as intellectual beings, as our western view of man would have us believe,
but we are nature ourselves. In our body we are subject to birth and death.
Our body is the shape of our existence, the house of our life energy and the
figure of our being. Our body gives us our space in the universe, the room
specifically attributed to us. Our body fences us in, it ties us down but gives us
unique experiences that are not achievable through purely spiritual activity.
Through our body we go through the same organic processes as any other
being; we grow, we blossom, we mature, we grow old, we wither and finally
we die. We can only experience this curve because of our body. As conscious
beings however, we confront our body, so I shall give it the numerical value of
 29

2. This indicates a split in our unity resulting in duality, and the simultaneity of
identity and difference.

In my vision of reality, the body is embedded in the totality of man. Just as in

every kind of reality, the spirit dominates matter. Our body is not
determined primarily by physical laws but by spiritual ones. Just as in every
type of matter, the human body is the expression of his inherent spirit. It
corresponds in a material way to the demands put on it in our life by our total
personality. Many people are dissatisfied with their body, not only in its
temporary state (too fat, too thin), but also with their own sex, their hair or skin
colour etc.. The ego would love to choose its own body and these days there
is an enormous industry providing for at least a partial fulfillment of that wish.

Although this wish is understandable, it seems a nonsense if we search for

the meaning of our lives. I believe that the meaning is closely connected with
our body and the specific form of our materiality. Our body and all its functions
help us to learn about life. Even though some of the most important
preconditions are given, such as sex and genetics, we still have an enormous
amount of influence on our own body, primarily in the sphere of health and
sickness, because our body is essentially a direct image of our internal
situation. Every facet of our spirit is mirrored in our body. This influence goes
so far that each organ of our body takes on the symbolic expression of non-
material processes and problems. We ourselves decide, albeit
subconsciously, whether our body is to be a source of strength and joy or a
deposit for our undigested negativity. Generally speaking, it is both. Every
conscious or subconscious thought affects the body. Every feeling influences
the body. Every problem finds its nook in the body. And the body has a
memory. Whatever we experienced, thought, said or felt is stored in our body.
We can get rid of some of it through intensive purification rituals, but
EVERYTHING leaves its traces. We could take the computer as an example.
Here too, there is the hardware (matter) and the software (the spiritual). Every
step leaves a trace, even deleted information, everything. The body is similar.
It is basically a passive system that serves us. However, because modern
people believe so steadfastly in the significance of matter, they regard the
body as an active system, because it develops symptoms, falls ill or produces
ulcers. The activity of the body is based on energetics and is finally spiritual.
Our body does exactly what we feed in as an energy command at a non-
material level. It reacts in accordance with spiritual and physical laws.

Modern people in the West are ashamed to let their body subject them to the
same processes as animals. So women remove hair on their legs or on the
bikini line, men shave and we avoid any kind of body odour. The further we
are removed from original bodily functions, the more sophisticated we are.
Belching and farting in Luther‟s time were deemed to be positively sensual
and healthy, while today even a sneeze is an embarrassment, and is best
ignored rather than drawing attention to it by saying “God bless!” The western
 30

beauty craze drives millions of people to fitness and slimming clubs and later
as anorexics onto the psychiatrist‟s couch.

The acceptance of one‟s own body is an extremely important criterion for

spiritual health and fulfillment. Our identity has to include our body. We are
our body although it only represents a temporary phase in this type of
materiality.

To sum up:
- point on the compass: Northwest
- numeric value 2
- corresponds to the male and female principle (sex)
- associated elements: earth, fire, water, air
- to the touch : warm, humid

2.3 The mental centre

My term of “mental centre” is traditionally called the “subconscious”. In my
view and experience, it is far more than the switchboard between the
conscious ego and the instinctual id. For that reason, and to underline its
significance, I have termed it differently. For me, the mental centre is the most
powerful instance or constituent of our human life. Sometimes this power
frightens me, because it is both creative and destructive. In my image, the
mental centre contains everything that Freud called the “super ego” , in other
words, it contains all the internalized values and standards of our parents and
our society and culture. I imagine it to be like a giant business operations
centre from which very many, very different programmes are siphoned off and
from which our individual lives are remotely controlled. But I do not assume
that the contents of these programmes are affected by tribal history like the
archetypes of C. G. Jung. According to my experience, the mental centre
most certainly contains distant and even ancient memories or it can at least
activate them, but its specific orientation is mainly formed by the earliest
experiences of childhood.

a) The mental centre is organized linguistically

The mental centre is special because it is largely characterized by language

and it might even be constituted by language. It is therefore capable of being
conscious. Its contents can in principle emerge into the conscious ego. This is
why Freud called this system the preconscious, as it is a very intensive and
specific type of conscious. This connection with the conscious ego is made
possible thanks to language and the thinking coupled to it. This phenomenon
is perfectly exemplified in hypnosis. A hypnotized person, whose waking
 31

daytime conscious is totally switched off, is still capable of speech. The

controller can converse with the person under hypnosis, ask questions and
receive answers. The power of the word, which can be creative or destructive,
has its roots in the mental centre. It is here that language acquires its healing
or destructive power. It is not surprising therefore that in all magic rituals,
words need to be spoken: magic formulas, curses, blessings or whatever:
words are needed. The magic of the word has its origins in the mental centre.

b) Beliefs

The mental centre is the seat of our beliefs. These are deep rooted
convictions that determine all our feelings, thoughts and actions. The beliefs
are themselves the result of our experiences and our evaluation of them. Our
emotions are determined by them. Beliefs lie deeper than most feelings and
they might in fact even produce certain feelings, particularly fears and needs.

There is a phenomenon that children, up to the age of about ten, never project
the cause of their experiences, especially negative ones, on to the
environment but always blame themselves as the cause. If a child of five is
unloved or neglected, he will never be convinced that his father is an idiot and
his mother a slut. Instead, he will have the strong belief that he is bad and
unlovable. Why else would his parents have behaved that way? This is the
early, original logic of the mental centre: a predisposition, an a priori attitude,
an orientation, a way of functioning before acquiring experience.

Some of the reasons for our most deep seated beliefs are formed by the
conditions of love. We human beings cannot love unconditionally. Any one
with a partner experiences this daily. It is only with regard to our children that
we find it hard to admit this truth. Of course we want to be the best possible
parents and we try to love all our children equally. But this is nonsense.
Nobody loves his children equally. Some people do not love their children at
all. Everyone has unconscious or subconscious expectations of their children,
these are the conditions of love. The father may wish for a son to continue the
family name or to share his enthusiasm for football. The mother may hope for
a sensitive, loving and understanding son to make up for a cool and distant
husband. Other parents have expectations that their children “will go up in the
world” and gain a better place in society. In this way we all have our secret
wishes and expectations of our children: the conditions of our love. Children
are aware of these pressures and they try, just as our pets do, to meet the
expectations of our love with all their might. Even in his mother‟s womb, a
baby knows whether he is desired or rather regarded as a burden. Children
know the conditions of our love more clearly than we do. When we were
children, we too knew what our parents‟ conditions of their love were and so
we based our beliefs on the conclusions we drew from that knowledge.
Unfortunately, many of these are negative and lead to problems in the course
 32

of our lives. As Freud noted, the superego only stores the critical and negative
aspects of parental authority, so we can imagine how strongly these beliefs
are implanted in our mental centre. In this sense, Freud‟s superego can be
interpreted as the internalized conditions of our parents‟ love and of the social
environment. There are numerous collective beliefs beside the individual
ones. These are cultural, social, religious value judgements of all kinds, ideas
about morals, social taboos, religious dogmas and all sorts of collective
opinions on the world. Our mental centre consists of BELIEFS and
convinced FAITH in the widest sense of the word. Whatever we think of
ourselves and the world we live in is programmed in the mental centre. The
conscious ego is just a weak subsidiary with the task of defending and
confirming the beliefs. Our conscious assumes that its own view of the world
is based on its own perceptions. This is largely incorrect. It is true that the
conscious ego perceives, but the way it works out these perceptions is based
on subconscious pre-programming, on preconceived interpretations of the
world, of life and of one‟s own person.

Language constitutes a part of this pre-programming. Every word is a

definition which takes on a specific perspective and contains a subconscious,
preconceived explanation of objects and the world. This becomes particularly
evident when you learn a foreign language. Language is our programme for
explaining our existence and our world without our being conscious of it.

Now, the conscious ego deduces that, because these assumptions about the
world are confirmed by experience, they are true and have an objective
reality. This concept of “objective reality” is lodged exclusively within the
conscious (ego). But looking at the history of mankind, we find that man‟s
faith has always prevailed. We must recognize that there is no such thing as
objectivity. It is an illusion created by our need for security. Modern man has
become a small-thinking materialist because his world works: planes fly,
telephones connect us with each other, electricity flows -so that is the way of
the world.

In short: The mental centre is a gigantic system of beliefs. I do not mean this
in a negative nor limiting sense, quite the contrary.

c) Power through energy

In my experience, the mental centre is one of the most powerful instances of
human beings. It is not only passive in receiving programmes derived from
parents, society, culture, ancestors etc. but it is also highly active and is
continuously creating and destroying according to its programmes. Its basic
nature is energy, mental and spiritual energy. I can only compare its power to
a nuclear plant. When I began to suspect the incredible power of the mental
centre, I came to understand this sentence in the bible:”So God created man
 33

in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female
created he them.” (Genesis 1,27).

Through the energies of the mental centre we create our own experiences
which are often contrary to the conscious aims and desires of the ego. This is
because the experiences created by the mental centre correspond precisely
to its beliefs. Many of these beliefs are negative, so we create negative
experiences. The special aspect about this system is that the energy of the
mental centre is compatible with the energy inherent in other objects in the
universe. The essence of the universe is spiritual. In this sense, the mental
centre not only communicates with things but there is also a feedback, a
mutual influence.

At times, these phenomena emerge into our daily consciousness. A common

experience is so-called telepathy: I think of someone and soon afterwards, he
calls. The conscious mind puts this down to an atmosphere, a premonition,
intuition or a brainstorm. The mental centre constantly transmits, receives and
digests the innumerable energies surrounding us. In doing this the mental
centre is guided by the same principles as a radio, so I call it the “radio
principle”. Actually, the radio is a technical copy of a deeply human function.
Just as the radio receives waves and transmits them in sounds, our mental
centre receives energy waves and vibrations that are being transmitted by
everything surrounding us. Contrary to the radio however, our subconscious is
also active, transmitting and receiving constantly. It also adjusts itself to the
frequencies, in other words, we attract specific things and experiences on the
basis of our wave length. At the level of the mental centre, opposites do not
attract each other, but identical or similar energies do attract. If a person
transmits many negative energies into the universe, he will also attract such
negative energies and experiences. The mental centre itself is neutral, it
simply serves the strongest impulse. This kind of energy communication at the
level of the mental centre is universal and not at all limited to living beings
such as people or animals. This is because of the spiritual essence of the
universe. We can communicate through the mental centre with inanimate
material: trees, stones, plants, technical tools. With the power of the
subconscious we can crash computers, disrupt telephones, move matter and
many other things. This communication, consisting of energy vibrations similar
to the physics of radio waves, has a magnetic effect. It attracts, therefore we
literally attract our experiences to ourselves. We attract quite specific people,
things, happenings and experiences into our lives. The “guiding light” which
directs and conditions the energy is our structure of beliefs. These beliefs
mould and govern the creative or destructive energy of the subconscious. If a
person has many negative beliefs, then he or she will create many negative
experiences: what a person sends out comes back as experience.

Being frightened of dogs illustrates this point well. If you are very scared of
dogs, you will soon find that dogs smell your fear and instead of ignoring you,
 34

they become all the more aggressive. The dog‟s reaction is triggered by your
fear. It attracts him. This is based on the general principle that we send out
and receive energies from our mental centre and are creative. Jesus said
“Everything is possible to one who has faith”(Mark 9,23) This is true and
should be taken literally. In other words: things happen to us because of the
way we think and according to our beliefs. If I think I am a fool, I shall
frequently make a mess of things. If I think I cannot be loved, I shall attract
partners who will lead me to experience this. If I think my partner is going to
be unfaithful, I shall work on him to be that - and it will happen. Many people
believe they will win in competitions, games or lotteries. And they do.

My assumption is that owing to the enormous power of the mental centre, we

all live according to our unconscious program. Naturally our conscious ego
opposes this because so many experiences do not coincide with our aims and
desires. In my work I have met so many people who consciously wanted a
loving and sensitive partner and yet, every one they chose in reality turned out
to be an egotist who had no empathy with others. Bad luck? Not at all. This is
because the mental centre always has the upper hand. It is significantly
stronger than the conscious. And it works secretly. Most people are therefore
unaware all their lives that they create their own experiences as dictated by
their beliefs. From the perspective of the conscious mind, they are the victim;
from the perspective of the mental centre they are the instigator.

Many parts of the mental centre may be buried in a primeval past but they can
possibly be reactivated as the following example shows. A participant in my
seminar told me about his brother who had had a very severe accident putting
him in a lengthy coma. When he finally came out of it, he spoke fluent
Russian, not having ever learnt it in his lifetime. He had never even been to
Russia. When he awoke, his brother did not know who he was, he had lost his
memory and had forgotten his mother tongue. In this case, parts of the mental
centre had emerged from a primordial past as from a void. This man must
have had a previous life in Russia. So the language was still stored or saved
and could be reactivated. Similar stories turn up all over the world.(28) Such
examples show us that the coupling of the mental centre with language lasts
for a very long time and that it presumably can endure through several
incarnations. The conscious cannot however regulate this storage, this
process is removed from the ego, which is unfortunate, because so much old
knowledge and talent could otherwise be easily reactivated.

To recapitulate:
The mental centre is the seat of our deepest beliefs about ourselves and our
world. The features defined by Freud as the superego fall within the mental
centre. Its major part is organized by language. Language always contains a
definition of the world and of creation as a whole.
 35

The mental centre is not only a clearing house between the primeval and the
conscious, but it is also its own energy power house. As a spiritual energy it
communicates with the universe around us. The beliefs and the feelings they
generate provide the spiritual energy for the mental centre to attract and
create experiences.

I add some free associations to illustrate the reality of the mental centre:

Computer software, such as Windows - radio station and radio ( transmits and
receives radio waves) - all kinds of energy waves - radar - automatic pilot in
an aeroplane - roots of a tree - prism (light enters and is fragmented according
to the crystal‟s structure) - nuclear plant - power cable....

To sum up:
Point on the compass: Northeast
Dominant elements: Fire, air, ether
Numerical value: 3

2.4 The soul

The soul has, in my opinion of man, a very specific importance: it is the source
of all our emotions and sensations, and acts as a balance. Organically, one
could compare it to the heart which is constantly pumping blood through the
body and keeping the blood circulation in balance.

I place the soul right down in the South as opposed to the the ego in the
North. The soul corresponds to the female principle in our overall personality.
The soul has the task of preserving and securing our completeness and unity.
It does this by sending feelings and sensations of all kinds to the entire
system of our personality. It is a kind of seismograph, an organ of sensibility.
The soul shows us at which point we love, hate, hope, trust, mistrust, feel
frightened or threatened etc. Every single feeling comes from the soul and is
an expression of the soul‟s activity. If we compare it with a part of the body, it
would not only be the heart but also the blood and the nerves. The soul is the
source or the root from which feelings and sensations come. I do not concur
with the religious meaning given to the soul. For me, it is not the divine spark
given to man. The working term of soul has no superhuman properties nor
abilities. But my definition means that every creature capable of any kind of
emotion has a soul. Our soul can be compared to our nerves in that they send
our bodily pain and other sensations to our brain and make us aware of them.
Under this working terminology, the soul has a very general character. It is not
necessarily filled with goodness: a soulful person is simply very emotional or
sensitive, both in hatred or in love. A healthy soul, however will always try to
 36

achieve a balance of feelings. This is essentially its function and task. A

loving person would therefore be in balance if he felt loved. Were he unlucky
in love, he would not be in balance. He who hates is definitely not in balance
but he can achieve equilibrium if he finds an outlet for his hatred. If the soul is
sick as for instance in a depression, it is terrible. The balance is disturbed and
it feels like “bleeding to death”, but not within the body.

Cool, rational and controlled people are the furthest away from their soul,
because the soul is pure feeling. This means that our feelings are the most
important reality of our human existence. They alert us to what is happening
to us.

My sketch shows that the soul is so to speak the lowest point in our
personality. It is both the first and the last. In the beginning we were feelings
and in the end we shall only be feelings. Everything else is a kind of in-
between.

Considering that over 90% of our total personality is emotional and that our
personality is 100% led by feelings, moods and sensations, we cannot
overestimate the significance of the soul.

I have given it the numerical value of 4, because 4 represents the

completeness and unity of creation. We have 4 points of the compass, 4
seasons, 4 elements constituting the universe etc.

In order to approach the essence of the soul from another angle, I would like
to refer to a philosophical reflection by Martin Heidegger, who interpreted
human existence as a sequence of moods.(29) We are always, but always, in
some kind of mood, even in sleep, in a faint or in death. Through these moods
we have access to the non-ego of our surroundings. We step into a room and
and are influenced by its atmosphere. We meet another person and our mood
changes. This susceptibility to atmosphere which forms and determines our
human existence is the soul at work, communicating different moods without
interruption. And just as our nerves communicate pain when we suffer an
injury, the soul signals any disturbance we may suffer.. This is how we take on
a particular mood - of fear, worry, joy, thoughtfulness - or whatever.

Ever since man has been aware of the soul, it has been considered immortal,
and today, if people still believe in a soul at all, they probably think it is
immortal. Some cultures believe in the transmigration of souls. But whenever
the soul is invoked, it has a very high and immortal significance.

I too, make the assumption that the soul “survives” our physical death and
continues to exist. Because we continue to exist. So, even in death and after
death, there are sensations, moods and feelings. We human beings have
 37

brought our soul along with us into the world and we take it back again just as
all other creatures do that have a soul.

My free associations to illustrate the soul:

the womb - cloud - oven - lap - family - love and hate - hammock - spring
meadow - homelessness - sunset - crying and laughing - desperation - kind,
fat, wet-nurse - bubbling source - the human heart pumping blood through the
circulation - the body‟s nervous system...

To sum up:

points of the compass : South

Dominant elements: water - fire - air - ether
Corresponds to the female principle
Numerical value: 4

2.5. The Ego

The assumption that there is an ego became plain to me through my work on

dreams and people‟s problems. The ego represents the energy and
dynamics of all our shortcomings. The greater our flaws, the greater our
ego. I do not mean to treat the ego quantitatively like a depot or storage place
for our defects. It is much more, both in quality and in action, having its own
particular reality with its structures and working methods.

Essentially the ego is fed by the mental centre with negative beliefs, of which
it is not necessarily conscious. These beliefs are expressed in phrases such
as : “I am losing out”, “I don‟t get enough” “I am not receiving enough love,
recognition, affection, money...” etc.

The ego now tries to counteract these shortfalls by influencing every instance.
But this basically reasonable attempt is doomed to fail because according to
the laws of the mental centre (and the universe), similar energies attract each
other. Therefore all the ego‟s efforts to compensate for its perceived
insufficiencies will never lead to success. It is always the negative belief that
will be successful because it attracts experiences in its own image.

My favourite example for this is ambition. This human trait is based on a lack
of self- esteem and self-confidence. Wherever there is a lack or a shortage,
our reaction is to become miserly and greedy in order to protect ourselves
from losing even more and to make safe the little we have. Ambition is based
on a lack of self-honour or esteem. So this deeply held belief is expressed by
 38

saying: “I am not good enough, I am bad, I am worthless”. This person‟s ego

will now make an enormous effort to compensate and overcome this lack, so
he will increase his performance, he might become a workaholic or a driven
sportsman. The ego swings into action and dominates the entire personality,
taking its power from the qualitative energy of the perceived shortfall.

Although it tries to use every available measure to compensate for an

insufficiency, the ego is tragically doomed to failure. The ego itself excites the
very beliefs that increase the insufficiencies and this in turn triggers a higher
level of activity on the part of the ego, and so on. We human beings always
lack something, in fact we are a sort of loss-making concern. We get hungry
or thirsty, then we need sleep, or fresh air or sex. We need love and affection
from the first day of our lives. Our expectations, desires and needs are
constantly frustrated by all kinds of setbacks.That‟s normal, that‟s life. We just
have to make do, we all have unfulfilled needs. So shortfalls are natural and
inevitable. And everybody has an ego, but there are enormous differences
when we take a closer look.

In my experience, the ego grows whenever a person suffers from spiritual

need. Physical shortage generally has a much lower influence on the ego. If
you have travelled outside Europe, you will have seen people living in
circumstances that we would call desperately poor. They show very little sign
of having strong egos, on the contrary, they willingly share what little they
have, which to us seems almost nothing. The greatest lack and therefore the
strongest ego is generated in my experience by an absence of love,
recognition and value.

Both in our waking and our dreaming state, our ego works to compensate for
our insufficiency. It is a hard job. It manipulates our honest self knowledge, it
leads us to believe that we are something we are not, or it side-tracks us from
what we can be. It falls to the ego to contradict all the negative beliefs we
have about ourselves. But it is like running on a hamster‟s wheel because
there are always shortages, needs create other needs. So the ego cannot
compensate for the perceived shortage nor can it disprove the underlying
negative beliefs. The ego cannot win, which is why we experience daily
resignation, frustration, depression and aggression. Translated into the body,
this often means cancer, heart attacks or other self destructive illnesses.

The energetics and the enormous strength and might of the ego can
sometimes make it possible for it to take over the entire personality and
manipulate it.This mass phenomenon led, to my mind, to the spread of
national socialism in Germany. Germany was and is an emotionally poor or
even starved country. Traditionally, children were given far too little love and
affection and other positive emotions. Praise was hardly given, good
behaviour was demanded. Communication was limited to criticism when
some particular behaviour was wrong or insufficient. After Germany had lost
 39

the first World War, and the treaty of Versailles left the Germans feeling
humiliated as the losers of the war, their feeling of insufficiency or lack
became suffocatingly huge. In addition, there was a real lack of order and
security in the country. Hitler who was himself possessed by a perverted ego,
made the Germans psychologically underdogs by taking it upon himself to
look after their needs. Militarization of society gave everyone recognition. The
Fuehrer became almost overnight a super father figure. Recognition was the
key. Being himself an egomaniac, Hitler had a feeling for what the Germans
needed: recognition, and at last a strict (the Germans knew what that meant)
but also appreciative father. The Germans could again be proud to be
German. It was exploiting the egos which opened the psychological way to
almost absolute power.

What is threatening and dangerous about the ego is that, once it has fled to
this kind of compensating activity, there is often no way back. Because the
mental basis for the ego is a collection of negative beliefs about itself, the
discrepancy between the energy input to compensate for shortcomings and
the unchanged negative beliefs becomes constantly bigger. At the end of this
type of process, the ego comes to identify itself as a total loser because all its
endeavours have not succeeded in compensating for shortcomings nor to
change the beliefs positively. Consequently, the ego is always self destructive
because of its very essence.

All the old religions recognized this. The main purpose of most rituals or
ceremonies is to conquer the ego. This idea is most obvious in Buddhism
where the highest form of spiritual aspiration is to overcome oneself totally.

The ego has no proper position in a spatial illustration because it embraces

the whole human personality. It has contact with and access to all its facets
and lies like a ring around the self, which means that a strong ego is an
obstacle to reaching its own self. The stronger the ego, the less accessible the
self.

2.6 The Primeval Sphere

This facet corresponds basically to what others have called the unconscious.
The term unconscious is negative because it is seen from the perspective of
the conscious. But un- conscious is by definition not conscious and probably
never becomes conscious. I call this sphere primeval and hence I de-couple
its description further from the conscious. I concur with Freud in that I see in
this primeval sphere the instincts of our human existence which link us up to
the animal world. Freud called this uncivilized domain the “Id”: here,
sexuality, aggression, self preservation, death wish, ingrained fears (such as
getting lost) or basic desires (such as needing love and affection) lie dormant.
 40

I concur with Jung that the primeval sphere also contains many collective
features in varying stages of activity: memories, images and symbols of one‟s
own culture, and deeper down, images of all mankind. Like Jung, I believe it
encompasses ancient aspects that we take into our human lives. Contrary to
Jung, however, I do not regard the archetypes to be the contents of the
unconscious but of the self. In my image of humankind we are connected in
the primeval sphere to the deepest levels of human existence and with nature
as a spiritual power and energy. In the primeval sphere we are both animal
and vegetable, we have the same spiritual essence as nature and are
therefore also able at this level to communicate with nature in us and around
us. If you deal with animals you will know what I mean. Animals communicate
at the level of the primeval sphere, here is where we emit the waves denoting
fear, aggression, attraction and revulsion.

I do not regard the ancient aspects of the primeval sphere as some

rudimentary left-overs of evolution, but rather I consider them to be very
valuable and highly active, containing primarily old knowledge. The most
important symbols have their source in the primeval sphere. Symbols and
images are the language of the primeval sphere, there are no words. Nor is
there a logic, such as we need to have in the conscious. From the perspective
of the conscious, the primeval sphere is ambivalent and dense. Contradictions
line up against each other and interweave with each other. The Ying Yang
symbols show this up perfectly. Love and hate are not in opposition but are
energies of the same being. This insight is very valuable in discerning the
essence of dreams. Originating from the primeval sphere as dreams do, they
have this same structure: time loses its meaning, logic fails to apply,
contradictions become unified. I think that the primeval sphere corresponds
better and more truly to the essence of life than our conscious. That is why I
see it as a very important means of access to reality in general. The direction
given solely by the primeval sphere shows us a specific pathway, namely
“downwards and backwards” into all kinds of past and origins.

Apart from our instincts, fears and desires, the primeval sphere also stores all
the experiences we ever had. Things we learned or experienced through our
conscious or our mental centre fall down into a kind of cellar that is
unimaginably deep and dark. In here everything is conserved, I mean nothing
is ever lost. This includes insights, knowledge and images from earlier lives,
which are all deposited here. Sometimes, at certain points in our life, we fall
“by chance” into the primeval sphere: we might recognize a landscape
although we have never been there before, or, as I recounted earlier, a man
could suddenly speak a language he had never learnt. Previous lives can also
play an important role in dreams. I shall come back to this later.

The primeval sphere is also the place where repressions are stored. There is
a filter between the primeval sphere and the mental centre which censors
 41

access in both directions and makes interface difficult. The more disagreeable
the repression for the mental centre, and consequently for the conscious ego,
the stronger is the filter. Whenever the contents of the primeval sphere wish to
rise into the conscious they must be transformed from imagery and symbols
into words and hence into thought. Language, words and thought are derived
realities, they are abstract and therefore marked by a loss of reality. Being
used to perceiving and categorizing our reality in abstractions, we therefore
regard the primeval sphere as primitive and underdeveloped. The truth is
exactly the opposite: the primeval sphere corresponds much more closely to
the essence of reality than our conscious can ever imagine.

In consequence, I see three ways to encounter the primeval sphere:

The Freudian way which says that the id shall become the ego! - and all
possible contents of the unconscious, of the id, need to become conscious
and sublimated into the ego.
The Jungian way which says approximately: reconcile the ego and the id,
make friends with your unconscious and respect its secrecy.
My way, which I would illustrate with a fairy tale: the ego needs to dive into the
primeval sphere and be transformed there just as Goldmarie needs to jump
into the well to save the spindle and herself in Grimm‟s fairy-tale of Mother
Holle.

To sum up:
The primeval sphere has at least the following functions, activities or essential
properties:
- it is the location of our urges that connect us closely with nature
- it is the location of our repressions ( desires, problems, experiences)
- it is the location of our natural knowledge about order and structures
- it is the location of our knowledge of our previous lives

Here, I add some free associations to describe the unconscious:

Cellar - deep grotto - cavern - volcano full of lava - dark blue, black universe
- interior of the earth - deep blue sea with unimaginable storms, tidal waves
and sea monsters in its depths - deep spring - underworld - night...

Points on the compass: southeast

Numerical value: 6
Dominant elements: water - fire - ether
 42

2.7 The Spirit

This “organ”, to which I haven given the numerical value of 7, is probably the
least and most obscure to modern western man. However, before our
physical life we were spirit and we shall become spirit again after our death.
And our earthly life is of course determined in every way by the spirit. The
very essence of our being is spiritual, our spirit unites us with the whole of the
universe, with all the visible and invisible, material and immaterial things so
that we can relate to them and communicate with them.The spirit as such, has
nothing to do with conscious intelligence nor with the ego. It is an entirely
independent unit. If the spirit falls ill, this is in my view different from mental
illness, although all the facets in a human being are interwoven. But the spirit
is an instance of pure energy which is very powerful but often badly protected
and nurtured because of a lack of knowledge. The spirit is the gateway to
other dimensions. We can imagine it like a saloon bar door which swings open
to let us go “outside” but also admits other energies from “outside” into the
“inside” of our personality. Through our spirit we are a part of the universal
spiritual being of the universe, and we can commune with all the spiritual
essences that surround us. It equips us to be cognizant of and to re-cognize
spirituality and it lifts the veil of materialism that often deceives us. The spirit is
the compelling power of our cognition (not in the sense of understanding,
which belongs to the conscious ego).

I would like to describe the spirit in terms of the phenomenon of being

possessed . Modern people think this is pure medieval superstition, but being
possessed plays a role in our life, whether we want to believe it or not.
Negative spirits can take hold of us, they can penetrate through the spirit and
dwell in that person. These are negative spiritual parasites looking for a host.
What they need is a person with low self esteem, a feeling of insufficiency
although this is often not conscious, and a strong ego to find their niche.
Situations that might induce possession are for instance drunkenness, sexual
perversion, drug abuse, postnatal depression, illnesses that influence
consciousness, (such as meningitis), religious fervour and spiritualism (cult of
the devil or of the occult) etc.

If we take a look at the stories in the New Testament about Jesus‟ healing, we
find that the vast majority are about possession. A possessed person may
suffer in many ways, depending on the the area where the foreign spirit
intrudes and develops. If it is in the body, epilepsy might be the result of
possession. The spleen reacts on the body if negative beings try to, or
succeed in, taking hold of us. Possession may produce insanity and is, not
surprisingly, hardly curable by orthodox medical practice (viz. epilepsy,
schizophrenia). Insanity has to be healed through the spirit and some form of
exorcism is required, although this term has very negative connotations.
 43

Possession has very clearly some basic traits of the spirit: it is open like a
gateway to spiritual dimensions outside of us. So, in our dreams for instance,
we can and do let our spirit go on trips. We leave our body which is kept going
by the other six facets of life and we go to other places and dimensions. When
we die we take off in our spiritual body which is a spiritual energy structure,
and we leave our material body behind. It is also by way of the spirit that we
emerge from the divine world into the body of our mother when we are
conceived and begin to develop.

The Buddhist world, in fact all of the Asian world, can teach us a great deal
about the spirit: meditation is practiced here, serving to immerse the
practitioner entirely into the spirit. Here we find gurus who are able purely by
their spiritual activity to do things that are totally impossible for other people
(floating, leaving their body, walking on hot coals, sleeping on nails, going
without food for weeks etc.) These are expressions of the power of the spirit.
We all have some part of this power, but we do not know this anymore.

We can also communicate with all existence, both animate and inanimate. In
our spirit we can communicate with stones and stars or with animals and
plants. The spirit needs no words, no images no symbols. At the spiritual
level, communication is based on cognition and recognition. And what we
know, recognizes us because we are linked in spirit. Many people experience
this communing with nature, but they often doubt their own perception. Trees
and plants all try to communicate, and animals of course make it easier for
people to recognize this communication, particularly if they love their pet. This
establishes a spiritual connection.

A further special trait of the spirit is our spiritual body. We have not only a
physical body but also a so-called astral one. It does not consist of matter nor
is it defined by the four elements of water, fire, earth and air. This body is pure
spirit or ether, the element that Aristoteles called the fifth element. It is a
purely spiritual element. The word ether has become established since
Aristoteles‟ time. It appears in the Indian Ayurveda teachings and also in
Rudolf Steiner‟s “Anthroposophie”. We can imagine this ethereal body as our
spiritual figure that holds all the facets of our personality together at the
spiritual level. In other words, we also have a figure at the level. In and
through this spiritual figure we can travel and leave our physical body behind
in our sleep. At the time of our death we depart with our spiritual body and
leave our physical body behind.

The spirit is very important in dreams because dreams originate in and are led
by the spirit. Our life begins and ends with the spirit.

Free associations to illustrate the spirit:

 44

Brainwave - sudden insight - breath - wind - waft of air - storm - tornado -

breeze - electric current - flaming engulfing fire - burning glass - bright and
diffused light - inspiration - possession - ecstasy -David Copperfield flying...

Points on the compass : southwest

Dominant elements: ether - air - fire
Numerical value: 7

2. 8 The Self
I have not got much to say about the self. It is like the “divine spark” in us
which connects us everywhere and always with our creator. The self is our
cosmic identity, the guiding light that takes us through all incarnations. In other
words: the self is our eternal middle or an idea of God; it is what remains with
itself and stays itself through whatever change. Aristotle invented the Greek
word EN-TELECHIE which means to hold within oneself one‟s purpose. I
cannot find a better term for the self. Our beginning and our end and our
pathway are all unified and always present in our self.

The artificial term “the self”is not actually a noun and should be used as a
composite word, myself, yourself etc. It cannot stand alone grammatically, but
always refers to a person or a thing and defines it more closely.

The self is hidden and has no name, like the Creator himself. It is our centre
that cannot be named nor understood. We cannot enter any kind of
relationship with our self, because we cannot distance ourselves from it, not
even intellectually. The self is withdrawn from us because that is what we
already are. As an illustration, we can imagine the self like an atomic nucleus
with particles circling around it and holding everything together with its
incredible power.

The self holds our deepest knowledge about the course of our life, about all
our incarnations, about the purpose of our life, about our duties and
challenges. Within our self, and apparently only there, do we know about our
creator, about where we come from and where we shall return to after all our
incarnations.I do not believe, contrary to Jung, that the great archetypes
come from the unconscious, but from the self.

Some really great dreams come from the self or are inspired by it. These are
very different from all other dreams, and whoever had the luck to have one or
more such dreams will never forget them and always recollect them with awe
and emotion. I will give some examples of this type of dream later on under
the title of “great dreams”.
 45

Similar to this type of dream experience, there are many experiences of God
that come from the self, experiences that completely change our lives. When
people find redemption and are cured - and I do not mean simply returned to
good health- this happens through the self. There is a Hebrew word for this:
Shalom. This ancient Jewish word for peace means a state of being healed
which is rooted in the deepest contact with the Creator.

I shall give the self the symbolic value of number 8.

2.9 The system communicates

Considering the fact that all reality flows, we must imagine the 8 facets as a
dynamic system, a whole, within which the facets constantly and variously
influence each other.

My simple sketch shows clearly which facets are connected to each other via
the self, thus gaining particular energy and a special significance in our
personality.

The ego-conscious is connected to the soul through the self. The ego-
conscious could be the helmsman on a ship and the soul would then be the
engine room. The ego and the soul need each other and condition each other.
They absolutely have to be in harmony or else the whole system goes off
balance. The soul‟s duty is to inform the ego-conscious through feelings and
moods what the location and situation of the “ship” is, while the ego-conscious
is in charge of steering it through the cliffs of life. They need each other to do
this. Disturbances in communication spell disaster, making the ship of life sail
off course and collide with the outside world.

Another connection is provided by the axis between the primeval sphere

and the body. That too, goes through the self and thus gains special energy.
The body is the instrument through which the urges of the primeval sphere are
realized. If this axis is disturbed, the result is sexual abuse, perversion,
murder and mayhem. Instinct unleashes itself.

This axis is also extremely important for health, because the primeval sphere
uses the body as a symbolic system to express subconscious problems. If we
repress our true problems, we do not only dream in symbols, but we actually
fall physically ill. The type of organ that is affected or the type of illness can
alert us to the problem, just as dreams do.(30)This marvellous access through
the body to the repressed problems in the primeval sphere is not known to
many people, although it serves quickly and simply to show up deep-seated
problems especially when people dream very little or do not remember their
dreams.
 46

The axis between the spirit and the mental centre also crosses through the
self and represents the mightiest thing that we human beings can produce.
When these two facets connect, they bring forth both creativity and
destruction. When the Bible speaks of God creating man in his own image, it
must mean giving man this unimaginably strong mental and spiritual power
(31) . Ever since olden times, informed people were well aware of this human
trait, but the knowledge about these connections was hidden as a secret
knowledge, allowing access only to an initiated few. The word esoteric is
applicable here, meaning restricted to an enlightened or initiated
minority.Through imagination the mental centre has the power to create and
to destroy while the spirit is the gateway to the outside world and to other
dimensions. This combination of incredible strength and power give man his
highest meaning.

The last group of people in our civilization who recognized and understood
this combination were the Knights Templar. In using their knowledge
consciously and decisively as an instrument they became almost overnight a
very powerful force in the Christian West and were consequently forbidden,
persecuted and murdered because the rest of the people were rightly afraid of
this power. The knowledge of this axial energy is apparent in all old cultures,
particularly so in the so-called voodoo cult where medicine men are capable
of healing or killing people who are kilometres away. Witchcraft and devil
worship have appropriated and used this energy through the ages.

Even if no one in our present times in the West believes in such a high energy
connection, it continues to exercise its force. The slogan for our Western
world led by the U.S.A is “anything is possible”, and this is true. If we look at
our history we will find that whatever man wanted or imagined was created or
achieved by man, both good and unfortunately a lot of bad. In this axial
connection everything is truly possible.
 47

II.

SOME BASIC PRINCIPLES ABOUT DREAMS AND

.THEIR INTERPRETATION

As always in our lives, it is our internal attitude that dictates the explanation
and the degree of insight we achieve in interpreting our dreams. I mentioned
before that reality is in flux and that we Westerners are forever trying to
acquire knowledge and in doing so we expect to hold and stop the flow. This
attitude is basically counterproductive in relation to dreams. It would be best to
throw out all this baggage, which is of course impossible, but we should
nevertheless try. I recommend having as little prejudice as possible in
dealing with dreams. The more we think we know in the forefront of our brain,
the harder it is to interpret the dream. So my attitude is to approach each
dream as though I had no idea about dream interpretation. I do not find this
difficult in as much as each dream is an individual structure that amazes me
every time.

We should treat a dream like a free autonomous being. Any attempt to direct a
dream makes it retreat, hide itself and protect itself. A dream must be allowed
to be itself without any prior evaluation or interpretation. Our own dreams
seem alien to us, more so than those of other people. I see this as a piece of
luck, because it means that we refuse to adopt a hasty explanation. It is alright
for us to feel that our dreams are strange because this helps us to face them
without prejudice.

The suggested categories and types of interpretation offered in this book are
provisional and questionable, they are a kind of crutch, and should never be
mistaken for an actual answer. When in doubt, we should always err on the
side of the dream and not the theory. interpret the dream. So my attitude is to
approach each dream as though I had no idea about dream interpretation. I
do not find this difficult in as much as each dream is an individual structure
that amazes me every time.

We should treat a dream like a free, autonomous being. Any attempt to direct
a dream makes it retreat, hide itself and protect itself. A dream must be
allowed to be itself without any prior evaluation or interpretation.Theories are
limiting; we need them but at the same time they hinder us. In my judgement,
dreams represent a huge domain of reality, in fact that portion of reality that
cannot be perceived consciously which is about 90% of overall reality.We
should not presume to know about the universe while being such a small part
 48

of it. However, we may be confident that communing with our dream reveals a
deeper sense and gives us further help. We should always approach our
dreams with respect, awe and confidence.

Respect is required in the same way as in relation to a person whom we love

and value. We should never treat a dream from a position of arrogance or
theoretical superiority.
Awe is required because a dream is in direct contact with a comprehensive
greatness that we do not otherwise perceive as closely. Dreams represent
being as an entirety. Great dreams have a kind of holiness that is felt by
anyone who ever had the chance to experience such dreams. In this sense
the dream is like a mighty landscape or like a sea - something so grand that
we sense an even greater dimension somewhere.
Confidence is required because this is after all our own dream, coming from
us and to us. And this gives us the true key to understanding our dreams. Just
as we have the confidence to use our own legs to walk we should realize that
we can interpret our own dreams and understand their message.

Dreams can be inspired by any one of the personality‟s instances. Dreams do

not all have a psychological explanation. I differ from the psychologists in my
experience of dream interpretation, in that I consider that man is much more
than “just” his soul and dreaming implies much more than an encounter with
man‟s own problems, urges and desires. We can have all kinds of dreams,
such as spiritual ones which are not within the context of our modern
psychology. My theory of man‟s personality should serve to extend our view of
life. The more extensive our conception of the world, the better we are able to
understand the truth of our dreams.

When we look into our dreams, we must conclude that their content cannot
always be deciphered. So my urgent advice is not to analyze them to death!
There is a point when we know intuitively, if we are not under pressure, that
further interpreting is useless. The truth of the dream and its symbolic
language is often far too complex to be resolved by our consciousness. So at
a suitable point, we must be able to give up analyzing, even if we feel that we
have not brought everything into the conscious mind. Seeing that dreams are
very dynamic, we can always hope that the dream might continue to speak to
us; the next dream will come, especially if we have prepared ourselves in our
conscious mind to learn about ourselves.

The most important condition for interpreting dreams is to be internally

prepared to be totally honest with oneself. Theory and method are immaterial.
We have all grown up with criticism. Most people are not aware of all this
criticism and self-criticism, mostly because it feels entirely normal. The value
judgements of right and wrong, good and bad are deeply ingrained into our
mental centre, and this is a hindrance in interpreting dreams and in other
ways too. In most cases, our dreams confront us with repressed problems and
 49

expose unsuspected aspects of ourselves. This is often very difficult to accept

particularly for a novice in dream interpretation. It can be almost
unsupportable to discover a side of oneself one would prefer to hide and
forget. To be truly honest and without prejudice in these situations is a difficult
and real challenge of dream interpretation.

In my experience, the coding of the dream reduces proportionally to the

dreamer‟s willingness to look at himself honestly and objectively. Dreams are
therefore also a wonderful way to accept oneself. You could almost say that
your dream measures your degree of self acceptance. If you accept yourself,
your dreams will be wonderful friends and companions.

I have set up a few rules for the basics of my work on dreams:

- have confidence in your dream and in your ability to understand its message

- do without theory if possible

- as far as possible accept all dreams without prejudice

- have a simple and humble attitude to your dream

- respect the secrecy of your dream, for it is the secret of the comprehensive
greatness

- never exert pressure on your dream to speak to you, but learn to ask it kindly

- do not forget: only the dreamer holds the key to its interpretation. It is his
dream - no one else has any right to the dream nor to its interpretation.

- never interpret other people‟s dreams without the explicit permission of the
dreamer

- always put the individual before the general, even if this confuses you

- if you interpret another person‟s dream, never try to convince him of your
interpretation. It is enough for you to be the witness of what you understand.

- if you have a dream for another person, then tell him about it as soon as
possible.
 50

III.

TYPES OF DREAM

I shall now try to show different types of dream that I have encountered by
putting them in categories according to different criteria. I make no claim to be
exhaustive and I repeat that this attempt at classification is only a weak crutch
which should be thrown away as soon as possible. Practical work has shown
me that many aspects of different dreams listed here appear simultaneously. I
must also insist that my listing does not imply “either or” but rather “not only
but also”. This fact has made it rather difficult to provide good examples of
dreams because one dream can fall into a number of categories. Setting up
systems and categories means making concessions to our conscious ego,
which is our contact with the world around us. Reality is not, however,
necessarily as it is described.

1. Body dreams
In the narrowest sense, body dreams are for me those that are triggered by
bodily activities. These dreams are rarely spectacular and the dreamer does
not see any hidden message in them in my experience. Toilet dreams are
very widespread, in which a person feels a strong need to urinate in the
dream and might dream he has actually made it to the toilet. Upon wakening
he realizes that he does indeed need to empty his bladder. Similarly
widespread are dreams in which we fall from a height and suddenly find
ourselves on the floor because we actually did fall out of bed. Other dreamers
hear their alarm clock in their sleep and dream of bells ringing or of someone
ringing the doorbell. The actual ringing is woven into dream images. Such
body dreams are easy to explain and, upon awakening, the dreamer
immediately connects the dream with his own body or a physical explanation.
These dreams are relatively common and do not need to concern us any
further as they are self explanatory.

The situation is different with dreams where parts of our body or its organs are
involved. We might dream that we have contracted a disease, that we have
lost a limb, have become invalided or that some other thing has happened to
our body or its parts. These dreams are significant because they are using the
body in its symbolic function.

The primeval sphere uses the body by giving it a symbolic meaning.

Repressed problems are shown in specific parts of the body. Every organ or
part of the body has one or numerous meanings for the primeval sphere. The
 51

vernacular is full of such connections. If a person is angry or in a bad mood,

we say he is liverish; to be galled means getting extremely irritable. Liver and
gall symbolize repressed aggression and irritability. We speak of getting
something off our chest or of something getting on our nerves. In German one
speaks about things affecting one‟s kidneys in order to describe consternation
and sorrow. The kidneys symbolize a loss of love in the widest sense. The
duality of the kidneys represent the relationship of me and you. If our kidneys
malfunction, we subconsciously feel unloved, neglected or even abandoned
by those we love. These are only examples of a very simple connection
between the primeval sphere and the symbolic meaning of body parts. I shall
return to this later and meanwhile I refer to the books by L.Hay and Ruediger
Dahlke mentioned in the bibliography.

Seeing that there is a connection between problems that we repress into the
primeval sphere and the symbolic language of body, I would like to make
clear that there is absolute accordance between the symbols of the
waking and the sleeping state. It is totally unjustified to assume that dreams
have their own symbolic language which is detached from that of our waking
life. The symbols come from the primeval sphere and are equally active when
we are awake. For the body dream this means that whether I dream about a
part of my body being sick or whether I actually create the sickness and fall ill,
it is the same thing in terms of the primeval sphere. There is no difference
except that it is much healthier to dream about the illness than to be actually
ill. The symbolic content is however exactly the same.

As most of our life is spent awake, the connection between the primeval
symbolic language and our waking experiences should be given far more
importance. The body is just an example in this context, albeit a very
intensive and easily accessible one.

2. Mundane dreams
These very common dreams are almost always set in the mental centre. They
work out our problems, experiences, adventures, desires and our stress. They
are easily understood as they are hardly encoded. Such dreams contain
everyday images and settings from our lives that we recognize easily: our
work place, relationships, friendships and so on. Subconscious things are
transformed into dream images. Before an exam, for example, a student might
dream about the exams that he is dreading. A builder who is about to have an
official inspection of his building site in the next few days might dream that he
finds himself all alone on a deserted site where there is not one wall built yet
and he might then wake up in a panic. But he will immediately understand his
dream and not be surprised by the images.
 52

A mundane dream is always connected to a situation from one‟s present

every day life and is hardly encoded. The dreamer will immediately recognize
the connection with his every day life. So no actual interpretation is necessary.

3. Compensatory dreams
Sigmund Freud considered that compensation in the sense of a fulfillment of
desires was at the core of dreams. I agree that dreams always have a basic
compensatory or reconciliatory function. If we did not need to reconcile things,
there would be no need to dream. Although dreams try to restore a balance, I
do not believe, contrary to Freud, that dreams provide a compensation
through the fulfillment of desires. In my experience, dreams that have a
predominantly compensating role are relatively rare. The term compensatory
can mean a variety of things. However I only speak of compensatory dreams
in the narrowest sense when it is perfectly clear that a lack of balance needs
to be redressed.

Here again, I point to the correlation between the dreaming and the waking
state, because actual dreams and day dreaming in a waking state are both
able to compensate. For example: A young man who was approximately 15
years behind in his development had suffered for many years from having no
social contacts. He had no success, he was misused by others, he had no
real friends, no sexual relationships and no attention from women. In
comparison to others, he could only be a failure. He compensated for these
feelings of inferiority with fantasies of omnipotence and this was not just in his
dreams. He often tried to convince himself that other people were simply
afraid that he would overtake them on his fast track to success, a success
which was in fact illusory. Such compensatory thoughts delighted him by
giving him delusions of grandeur and they served to deflect his pain and
humiliation about his true situation. Such thoughts are clearly compensatory.

In the same way, many dreams show us our “other side” in order to regain a
balance which was lost. The dream may not always show us a fictitious
reality, but it might also divulge some important aspects of our true being.

A manager, for instance, who is convinced that his family is the most precious
thing in his life, might dream that his whole family dies. This dream might be
warning him that he is neglecting his family in favour of his career and his
professional ambitions. The dream is showing him a side that he does not
wish to see consciously.Compensatory dreams are not limited to
psychological causes. There are many spiritual dreams of this kind. (See
below). Here is an example of the different categories of dreams mixing
together:
 53

Comfort in sorrow
In October 1999 our son died suddenly and without any warning. I have no
words to describe how I felt. It was so incomprehensible, so unimaginable, so
deeply sad and despairing that I nearly lost my mind. During this unbelievably
miserable time, in the most terrible situation of my whole life, I dreamt the
most beautiful dreams. They were not actual dreams in the narrowest sense,
they were more a spiritual state into which I was removed. They were
reconciliatory because they gave me an incredible feeling of love and security.
I have never taken drugs in my life, but I can imagine that this type of state is
similar to a wonderful “trip”. I felt as though I were in heaven, surrounded by
angels I could not see but could feel intensively. The positive intensity of my
dream state was so strong that I was quite embarrassed in the morning
because my “heavenly” feeling was so utterly unsuited to the tragical
circumstances.

This dream was an actual incursion of the spiritual world and it therefore
belongs in the category of spiritual dreams. At the same time it compensated
for my terrible despair with the most beautiful and exalted feelings of joy.
Similar examples have since been recounted to me by other people who
found themselves in comparable situations. These too were spiritual
compensations.

4. Recurring dreams
Recurring dreams indicate a long standing problem. The configuration of the
leitmotif in the dream can change but the core stays the same. The dreamer
knows this dream already. It often recurs over several years. This is shown in
the following example from my practice:

Call up to military service

A man dreamt over a period of almost ten years that he was conscripted again
and again into military service. The action and the concomitant emotions were
always similar: he was being called up against his will. In his dream he felt
resistance, anger, sorrow and finally acceptance. In the end he always
accepted his fate, time after time. While he was still dreaming, the dreamer
remembered that he had already been called up and had served many times
already. This increased his opposition from dream to dream, but it was
useless: he continued to be called up. His reactions against conscription
became stronger and stronger. In his dream he hired a solicitor to sue for
being called up repeatedly. He tried to show with the relevant documentation
that he had already served many times. But it did not work: he had to go to
military service again.

The meaning of this dream is that the dreamer equated his family
unconsciously to military service and he had a deep-seated wish to put an end
to this service and to leave his family.
 54

In the primeval sphere there was the model that the family (= military) service
was a finite commitment, like a duty that needs to be carried out but with a
time limit. The inescapable fate in the form of military service as it presented
itself to the dreamer meant that he was facing a lifelong duty. The problem
could not be resolved through the primeval sphere itself, but it needed to be
dealt with through a conscious decision. Later, the dreamer separated from
his wife and family and the recurring dream disappeared and never came
back again.

Recurring dreams need intensive attention because they generally alert us to

a serious on-going problem. As long as the dream comes back, the problem is
not resolved and the task is not completed. Repetitive dreams are mostly very
helpful in understanding and overcoming significant problems and processes
in life.

In my practice, recurring dreams have almost always surfaced in connection

with long-running obligations placed on us by our lives. In particular, these
dreams seem to be associated with growing up and the problems of
adolescents distancing themselves from the parental world. People tell me
about their recurring dreams where the the parental environment is the main
recurring characteristic. The dreamer repeatedly finds himself in his parents‟
house or village. All the varied problems of letting go of one‟s childhood are
very often the subject of recurring dreams, according to my experience.

5. Serial dreams
Serial dreams are recurring dreams showing a clear development. The
subject-matter
does not only recur but it alters, grows and evolves.

Encounter with a shadow

A man in his thirties dreamt over a period of a number of years a series of
dreams that repeatedly put him in confrontation with a seemingly bad man. In
his first dream he found himself in a kind of cellar or vault. He knew that an
evil, menacing man lived down there. Although he was very frightened, he
climbed down the stairs and looked around in this odd cellar. There were
rocks, debris and rubbish strewn about. Corridors opened like a maze. The
bad man would have the advantage of knowing his way about in them. Maybe
he was secretly watching the dreamer... It became increasingly scary. The
dreamer picked up a cudgel like a heavy baseball bat to arm himself. He took
a few steps into the cellar, determined now to hit out if necessary. Suddenly,
he saw against the wall the shadow of the bad man creeping away. Should he
follow him? The dreamer woke up full of fear.
 55

The dream comes back. The surroundings and the images are different but
the theme is the same: The dreamer chases the bad man although he only
sees his shadow. From dream to dream he manages to close up on the evil
man. But then he had a dream that was different, and it was the last. He again
chases the bad man in his dream, but with confidence and fearlessly. He
really wants to get him. He feels strong. The dream takes place between
rocks or in a rocky cave. The shadow is running away again. The dreamer
runs after the shadow, desperately determined to get him, and he actually
catches the man and grasps him by the shoulder and is sparring for a fight or
some kind of physical struggle. The man turns around. The dreamer sees a
good-looking amiable young man who looks straight into the dreamer‟s face
with clear, honest eyes. Still in his dream, the dreamer knows that he has
reconciled himself with his own shadow. That was the end of the serial
dream.

It is again not possible to differentiate strictly between the categories. I would

call some of the serial dreams also great dreams because their subject-matter
was of prime importance to the development of the dreamer, as the following
example shows:

The lion serial

1. Dream: lions waking up
A man dreamt about a kitchen where there was a large freezer. He opens the
freezer and finds four lion cubs frozen in four ice blocks. He takes them out
and puts them on a large table. He assumes that the cubs are all dead, deep
frozen in the blocks. After a bit, however, the the blocks melt and the lion cubs
begin to move. They are alive! They have woken up to life. The dreamer is
amazed but also anxious because they are after all wild animals.

2. Dream The lion with a mask

After after a few weeks the lion dream returns. This time the dreamer is infront
of an apartment in a large house. The apartment has a metal grille with a kind
of open window in it. Other people warn the dreamer not to go into the
apartment because there is a - dangerous? - lion in it. Frightened but curious,
the dreamer peers through the open grille window and looks for the lion. He
can‟t see anything. Then suddenly, a large, fully grown lion emerges from a
side room and comes towards him. He can hardly believe his eyes: This lion
has the face of an old lady, beautifully made up with powder and paint. He is
amazed and very suspicious. This must be a trap - a wild lion with make-up on
a lady‟s face- this is very fishy! The dreamer speaks to the lion. Lo and
behold! the lion answers politely in a dignified ladylike voice. The dreamer
suspects that the lion wishes to entice him into the apartment in the guise of a
lady in order to eat him up. Nevertheless, he takes a step into the apartment
towards the lion, leaving the safety of the grille. The suspense mounts. The
dreamer wakes up before he is eaten or even attacked.
 56

3. Dream: The lion and the wild man

After about a year the dreamer had a third and last dream. He found himself in
a wild, natural landscape, partly open and partly jungle. He went into this
jungle apprehensively and alone. He met a man who had a fully grown wild
lion walking beside him like a friend or a pet. The dreamer knew very well that
this was a ferocious primeval animal. So he was amazed by the friendship
and peace between the man and the lion. The man motioned kindly to the
dreamer to join them and so the two men and the lion walked through the
jungle together. The dreamer was constantly terribly frightened that the lion
would attack him. But the lion never did. The unknown man, the dreamer and
the lion all became fast friends.

These three dreams show a wonderful development. The first dream of the
waking little lion cubs shows the dreamer that his masculine side with its
animal, wild aspects is waking up. It also tells him that he had frozen these
parts of himself. In his dream he thought that they were dead and deep frozen
and is amazed when they come to. He had put his instinctive maleness,
symbolized by the lion, “on ice”. Indeed, this man in his waking life, was a
quiet, accommodating, gentle person who always tried to fit in. He had
suppressed his aggression and his instincts. The fact that there were four
cubs symbolizes the unity in this dream. It was a great dream because the
cubs really woke up in that night, in other words something real had actually
happened to this man and changed him for life. These cubs really did come to
life - and they developed.

The second lion dream is about an adult lion, albeit camouflaged as a woman.
This corresponded very closely to the dreamer‟s situation: He camouflaged
his “lion parts “with his feminine side. His masculine parts were disguised and
suppressed behind the mask of femininity. The dream expressed this truth
wonderfully well.

The third dream completed the internal development . The dreamer reconciled
himself with his own “wild man” who had a lion as his animal friend. The lion
became integrated. The dreamer had finally become a true man. The serial
dream ended.

Serial dreams are a marvellous mirror of our internal development. They are
extraordinary companions and for me, they are one of the great treasures of
our unfathomable spiritual reality.

6. Nightmares

Nearly everyone has had a nightmare. That is why the word is used
idiomatically to describe any kind of bad experience. I have put this type of
dream in its own category although here too, there is a mixture. Some
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nightmares are also spiritual but most are derived from the primeval sphere.
One thing is common to all nightmares: They highlight a very urgent and very
important problem in our life, of which we have so far not taken sufficient
conscious notice. The emotional intensity of the dream indicates the huge
energy and urgency of the problem. If these problems have been repressed
into the primeval sphere over a long period, then psychic energy accumulates
there which discharges itself as a nightmare. A nightmare is a signal that tells
us very clearly that it is now high time to confront these problems at once.
That is why I always follow the basic inner wisdom of the dream: If there is a
nightmare I try rigorously to make the underlying problem emerge into the
consciousness of the dreamer, no matter what his circumstances are.
Nightmares are like SOS - signals from the primeval sphere or from the spirit.
They need to be resolved urgently. The great fear they engender
simultaneously indicates that their resistance to being brought into the
conscious will likewise be great and strong. A nightmare is a highly
energized expression of the battle between a significant problem pushing itself
forward and of the conscious repelling it.

In my practice, nightmares play an important part because many people, and

in particular those who do not or hardly ever remember their dreams, have
very conclusive nightmares in times of crisis.

A few years ago a young woman of twenty-three came to me. She told me
about a nightmare that afflicted her every night for about four weeks so that
her sleep had been seriously impaired. She asked me to interpret this dream
so that she could be rid of it and find her sleep again.

The interpretation showed me that the basic problem was a case of sexual
abuse which created a difficult family situation. The young woman was
extremely reserved about any kind of information, but the interpretation was
charged with enormous energy. So much so, that on the day after my
interpretation, the young woman broke down, both physically and
psychologically. It turned out that the woman had been violated for the first
time at the age of fourteen - outside the family. She was violated again at the
age of eighteen, again outside the family. I had been the first person with
whom this woman who was by now 23, had ever spoken about it. Even that
revelation was not volunteered but came to light compellingly through the
dream interpretation. The dreams ceased immediately because the problem
had pushed its way through into the conscious. She then attempted suicide
and was given psychiatric treatment followed by two years of psychotherapy.
Although the suicide attempt was a very bad reaction of the conscious to the
problem, it was this young woman‟s soul that decided through the nightmares
that it was now high time that the problem should be confronted consciously in
order finally start the process of healing.
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The tidal wave

A man dreamt repeatedly about a tidal wave threatening him. This nightmare
had different images but always the same basic situation. The sea swelled up
(we can now envisage this vividly after the tsunami in December 2004) that
with its terrifying violence destroyed everything on the shore and in the
vicinity. Sometimes the tidal waves were like huge walls and sometimes the
sea just grew until everything was flooded. The dreamer was always in fear of
his life and he had to run to higher ground or up hills to save himself. He
would wake up bathed in sweat and in deadly fear. This nightmare recurred
over a long time.

This dream was very general and had no specific images, symbols or other
details, so it had to be a rather general problem. The sea is a basic symbol of
the primeval sphere. Something gigantic and primeval was raising itself here
and threatening the dreamer. The tidal wave was telling the dreamer that
huge forces were involved that would inevitably triumph and destroy him if he
did not succumb. Something was pushing forward from the primeval sphere.

In order to understand the image of the tidal wave, we should look to the
peoples that inhabit coastal regions. Since time immemorial the sea has
demanded its sacrifices. When fishermen lost their lives in storms, the fishing
communities said that the sea had taken its sacrifice. In ancient times living
sacrifices were offered up to the sea to placate it and to ask it to let fishing
and seafaring flourish.

This is exactly what the dreamer needed to do. I challenged him to find out
what he could sacrifice to deter the primeval sphere from its menace. Looking
at the axis of the primeval sphere - body, we can see that it is a question of a
real and massive threat which can -and does - truly kill us if we are not willing
to learn and to change. The dreamer found out what he needed to sacrifice.
Deep in his mental centre he had a model shaped in his childhood which
required him to always be good, well-behaved, polite, understanding and
ready to keep the peace. According to his set of negative beliefs, these
attitudes were more or less the conditions of his existence. The nightmare
confronted him with a challenge from the primeval sphere to jettison this
model, to “sacrifice it to the sea” in order to live. The dreamer needed to give
up his “Mr. Clean” image and try to integrate the instincts, desires and
conditions of his primeval sphere. He needed to show his “other side” and be
morally guilty and risk hurting others. It took him years to adapt to the
demands of the primeval sphere. He succeeded, although his old life fell apart
and he lived through awful crises, but the nightmare never came back.

Other nightmares are memories of previous lives, especially of previous brutal

deaths (murder or accidents). Nightmares may also be encounters with
negative spiritual beings. The “normal” nightmare however almost always has
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a highly energized content with a problem pushing up from the primeval

sphere.

7. Great dreams
As the name indicates, these dreams are truly great, significant dreams that
have such potency and influence that they are never forgotten. Great dreams
accompany important steps in our development or big decisions affecting our
destiny or they highlight turning points in our lives
Great dreams occur mainly during those big transition periods, such as during
puberty when we evolve from childhood to adulthood, and later during crises
in our lives when important decisions have to be taken. They appear in times
of great change, they deal with times of readjustment, such as birth, growing
up, leaving people or places, coping with upheaval, accepting death and its
wide-ranging implications that extend far beyond our earthly lives.

Great dreams are rare and their strong symbolism makes them remarkable.
They give us a new perspective or they confront us with our innermost fears
or they show up some huge problem that needs to be resolved urgently. A
great dream is always a dream concerning our destiny, a destiny that we can
of course generally help to steer ourselves. Its energy is enormous and
impressive, even though the dream images may not always seem so. The
atmosphere of the dream is overwhelming. Everyone will recognize a great
dream intuitively because it provokes an incredible atmosphere and strong
sensations that last.

In my interpretation, a great dream is always related to the self. In the dream,

the self speaks to us, it interferes, it points to a new angle, a duty or a decisive
situation. Sometimes the self intervenes by leading, ruling or teaching. This is
what makes the great dream so powerful and so remarkable. Something
actually happens to us in a great dream. It develops such intensity and force
that even people who have very little dream experience will have an enduring
memory of a great dream.

A man of about sixty told me about the following great dream. It happened
when he was seriously ill and feverish.

Journey through life

The dreamer finds himself in a strange (Asiatic?) country in a dusty, barren,
desert landscape. He feels like a foreigner here. He follows a path upwards
and reaches a village. There is no one to be seen. On his left there are some
buildings, long stables that lead into each other. He goes into one of these
stables. Again, there are no people nor animals to be seen. However, on the
ground, laid out like a floor covering there are lots of heads and wings of white
cockerels. In small hutches made out of chicken wire the inhabitants (?) seem
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to be boiling blood or internal organs. The dreamer believes this boiling bloody
stuff to be some kind of feedstuff - but there are still no living beings to be
seen. The sight of this boiling bloody stuff makes the dreamer feel sick and
disgusted. He turns away and continues walking upwards through the middle
of the stables. He goes on through many long sheds without seeing any signs
of life. Right at the end he sees a door. He goes through and is in an inn. The
room is low with wooden beams. An elderly couple of about fifty are sitting at
a table. They welcome the dreamer greeting him warmly like a friend. The
woman embraces him and asks him where he comes from. He says that he is
travelling without luggage and without a camera, which the woman finds a
pity. She gives him a small gold coloured camera and encourages him to take
photos with it. Surprised but very touched, the dreamer retrieves his steps
through the long stables. He wakes up bathed in sweat but he feels light and
much happier than for years. An elated feeling continues to envelop him for
quite some days.

The interpretation showed that this dream illustrated the dreamer‟s whole life.
His arrival in a strange, dusty desert symbolizes his feeling of having been
dropped into life or even having been left exposed to it. Indeed, the dreamer‟s
childhood was an emotional desert - no loving affection and a cold
unapproachable mother and father. The absence of people in the dream
symbolizes a deep unconscious feeling of loneliness and desertion. The white
cockerels whose heads and wings were lying on the ground in the stables
were images in the primeval sphere of his childhood during which these
animals did indeed play an important part. The boiling blood and the
undefinable bloody internal organs represent the numerous spiritual wounds
the dreamer suffered as a child, but which are not in his conscious mind.
People seem to play no part. Even the wounds he suffered are transmuted
into animal symbols. The primeval sphere shows here the level of
development involved, saying that without the human touch we cannot be
human beings in the fullest sense.

Life for the dreamer is a stable, not a human place. Becoming a full human
being has (so far?) not succeeded. Life is a stable for animals. Life‟s journey
is hard and goes upwards.

The long stables end with the end of life. The door represents death, and
stepping through it means entering a different, new and higher dimension. The
inn is an image of life after death. The dreamer had indeed lost his will to live
and he had an unconscious desire to die. In his dream this wish is granted
and he enters the domain of the “afterlife”. The couple there corresponds to
Jung‟s category of the archetypal image of positive parents.At the spiritual
level I would call these two figures leaders of the spirit. As I see this dream,
they come from the self and are not creations of the man‟s own soul. The
woman gives the dreamer a camera and encourages him to take photos.
Photography is a hobby of the man. It represents a need to hold on to
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experiences and impressions. And this is what the dream is about. The
friendly woman (leader of the spirit) encourages the dreamer to regard his
experiences as valuable (golden camera) and to take more of them. This
leads the dreamer to turn around. He goes back into his earthly life,
strengthened and encouraged by the meeting with the leaders of his spirit. His
life acquires a new sense thanks to the golden camera. This means that every
experience, even the hard ones, have a true, great value. We should not try to
shed these experiences but we should preserve them, value them and finally
take them with us to the other world that follows our earthly life.

In this apparently simple dream, the dreamer had travelled through his whole
life, from his birth to his death and further. But it was the meeting with his
leaders of the spirit that encouraged him to return to his life and to continue it.
The dream and its interpretation were indeed of paramount importance. From
the moment he woke up, his will to live was strengthened.

I remember a great dream of my own when I was about sixteen or seventeen

and in my puberty:

The old man and the mountain

I am in a lovely landscape. The sun is shining, and I am in front of a large hill
or mountain with birch trees growing on it. I walk towards the mountain and I
meet a very old wise man there. He looks at me kindly and amiably and
apparently he has been expecting me. The old man is standing to the left of a
shaft that seems to lead into the mountain. It reminds me of some vineyards
where doors or gates open into the interior of the mountain. This shaft is
covered with some kind of garden gate made with fence slats. The old man
smiles kindly at me, opens this slatted gate and gives me to understand that it
is now my duty to go into or through the mountain via this shaft. I have every
confidence in the wise old man, I look up to the bright blue heavens, see the
clouds moving in the sunshine and I hear the old man say the following words:
“The sun keeps the promise made by the heavens”. I take this saying with me
into the mountain, the old man shuts the gate behind me and I wake up.

This dream was my transition into real life. It was my duty to go into this
mountain and to work my way through it. I had to leave the beautiful meadow
of my youth and enter the dark corridor alone. It was a big step. But the self
gave me a wise companion that symbolized ancient wisdom about life and
inspired me with confidence and courage. The saying he gave me united
heaven and earth and lifted my transition to a higher spiritual horizon.
This saying played a part again in my life about 25 years later. It appeared
when I had so to speak passed through my mountain. It was not my dream,
however, but that of a woman who had lovingly entered my life. Although she
knew nothing of my youthful dream, this saying came to her in a kind of vision.
She knew immediately that it had something to do with me and told me about
it. I was flabbergasted to find that this saying had turned up again and from
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such an unexpected quarter. At the same time, I was immediately aware that I
had now passed through that mountain.

8. Spiritual dreams
This category of dreams is not given much space in modern so-called
scientific books on the interpretation of dreams because our world view
negates them. Nevertheless, many people do have spiritual dreams without
knowing or believing it. While great dreams are always connected to the self
and its influence on us, spiritual dreams are created by the spirit. In the history
of all mankind, most dreams were interpreted in a spiritual way, including
some that were not spiritual dreams at all. These days the situation is quite
the opposite: everything is interpreted psychologically or scientifically, but not
spiritually any more. In the following I shall try to point out some of the criteria
that differentiate a spiritual dream from a psychological dream. As always
there is a mixture of types of dream. It will not always be possible to separate
the different aspects that have an influence on the dream.

8.1 Apparitions
Among spiritual dreams those with apparitions are the most widespread in my
experience.These are actual apparitions of other beings that have penetrated
our personality via our spirit and show themselves to us. Apparitions are
therefore not some imagination of our psyche but actual encounters with
spiritual beings.

8.1.1. Apparition of dead people

In my practice, when there were apparitions, they were of dead people. Most
people have experienced such apparitions but remain unaware because of
their limited view of the world.

There are a few criteria that differentiate the apparition of a dead person from
other dreams about a dead person. In an ordinary dream, the dead person is
generally part of the action, he speaks and moves as though he were alive
whereas in an apparition he is mostly passive, quiet and reserved. He sort of
comes into the dream from outside. The dream is a kind of stage or backdrop
into which he appears, but he is not part of a larger dream event. As a rule,
the dead person hardly speaks at all. Sometimes gestures or mime are the
way he tries to communicate. In some rare cases there is a message, but it is
very brief and poignant.
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There is another fairly frequent phenomenon: The dead person seems much
younger. This is particularly the case if the person was already of some age
when he or she died. Small children seem to be older in the apparition than at
the time of their death, but this is much rarer than the rejuvenation of older
people.

If a dead person appears looking much younger, this indicates that he has
already stepped over into the other world. It is a good sign for him, so there
must be a very special reason why the dead person has appeared. Often,
those who have passed away try to show or tell us something that is important
in our own present lives. They come, not on their behalf, but on our behalf.

If a dead person appears to us at the age at which he died, it may mean that
he has not found the way yet into the other world. It may be difficult for many
of the dead to make the transition from the world we live in to the spiritual
world. They then drift between the two, but stay closer to our world. This
situation can be very bad for the soul of the person who has passed away.
The deceased then appear to us because they generally expect some kind of
help. They wish to communicate because they cannot orientate themselves in
limbo, in this state between two worlds.

I have had many apparitions of dead people myself and many have been
recounted to me through my practice. In my experience the most usual cases
are of a farewell by someone who is dying which is recognized even by
people with no particular spiritual gift. A dying person leaves his body at the
time of his death and travels in his spiritual body to take his leave of those
closest to him. By means of the spirit he arrives directly in the dream of the
other person. When the dreamer wakes up in the morning, he or she knows
already that the person who visited their dream has died.

After our son died our friends and relations created a veritable network of
information about his various appearances in their dreams. It went so far as to
include our family doctor who called me up one day after she had seen an
apparition of our son that worried her a great deal. Through these different
apparitions, we gained a picture of how long our son was taking to enter the
other world and how well he was faring. After two years of prayer and
mourning my father-in-law was rewarded with the following apparition:

The Indians and the Grandson

He found himself in a gentle landscape in a meadow by an imposing river. He
could see Red Indians on the other side of the river wearing leather clothing
and impressive headgear. The Indians waved to him and called to him in a
foreign language. He thought they wanted to greet him. He was not scared, he
considered it an interesting but strange meeting. The Indians repeatedly
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shouted something to him but he did not understand. Then the Indians left
and his grandson, our son, appeared in a dark suit and hugged him
affectionately and warmly. While he was still dreaming, my father-in-law
started crying with emotion because he knew that this really was his
grandson.

The Indians were messengers from the other world. The river between my
father-in-law and the Indians symbolized the other world. Our language uses
similar allegories , such as “to cross over the Jordan” as a synonym for death
and dying. The subsequent apparition showed us all that our son had
successfully concluded the journey into the other world. With the help of the
Indians, he was reporting back to us to tell us this.

A woman who comes to my practice for counselling had had apparitions of her
dead father for many years; he had not been able to make the journey to the
other world and was seeking help from his spiritual daughter. At first, the
woman was upset by these apparitions, which is understandable when a dead
person is standing at the end of the bed at three o‟clock in the morning! Over
time, the woman managed to speak to the apparition as though to a living
person and to advise him to turn to the light. This helped. The dead man was
able after a while to take the journey into the other world and go. The
apparitions have not come back since then.

Dead people do not always need dreams to become apparitions. I was once
called on a home visit because the mother who had just died was seen by
several members of the family sitting at the supper table. Independently from
one another, they were able to see and describe the mother sitting at her
place at the table. The family was thrown into such a panic that I was called.
After three days, the apparitions disappeared and the mother was gone.

Not only humans but also animals can appear to us. In my practice I once had
to deal with a dead cat that stayed on for quite a while in the flat where it had
been living. This cat was even able to produce sounds. Its energies and
vibrations could even be felt by outsiders. The owner of the dead cat was
asked more than once whether she had a cat in her flat. A lot of cleansing and
mental realignments were required before the cat finally left the flat and made
its way into the other world.

The dead always have a reason for appearing to us, they don‟t just do it “for
fun”. I have experienced cases where the dead have tried to interfere in the
life of the living and to influence their decisions.

The bust in the castle

A lady whom I know very well and who is a totally rational person with both
legs firmly planted on the ground told me about the following example of an
apparition:
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The lady lived for a short while after the war on a large estate in North Bavaria
belonging to a count. She was a personal friend of the young count, having
served with him in a military hospital on the Eastern front, he as a doctor and
she as a sister in the operating theatre.They were just friends and there were
no sexual overtones nor any question of marriage.
One evening she was given a room in the castle where there was a bust of
the old count, the dead father of her friend, the living count. In the night she
woke up because of a terrible pressure on her chest. Terrified, she felt the
stone bust of the old count lying cold and menacing on her chest. The weight
and the pressure of the bust caused her to have great difficulty in breathing.
This procedure repeated itself three times, each time accompanied by
breathing problems and a state of terror. She groped desperately for the light
switch and each time the light came on, the apparition disappeared.
The dreamer interpreted this apparition as a threat by the dead count to put
her off marrying the young count.

8.1.2. Apparitions of other spiritual beings

All kinds of beings can appear to us: angels, spirits, luminous beings as well
as dark evil beings that threaten us. The dark, evil beings are likewise
autonomous realities that do not originate from the depths of our primeval
sphere. It is difficult to see the difference, especially for a beginner, because
our own fears can create truly demonic beings, primarily murderers, robbers,
burglars, murdering soldiers or wild animals.

A spiritual being that is not the expression of our energies and imagination
may appear to us but we can never discern its face. It is of no consequence
whether these beings are positive or negative, their faces are almost never
seen. That alone will give us a clue as to whether we are experiencing a true
apparition.

Apparitions of angels and luminous beings are well documented although

here too, the emotion and the atmosphere created by their presence tends to
blur our faculty to see the figures in clear outline. Unfortunately, apparitions of
negative spiritual beings are seen just as frequently, and these are often
perceived as shadows, dark and menacing fog or simply as an atmosphere of
evil and foreboding.

The most spectacular apparition of spiritual beings happened to me and a

group I was in charge of in the Negev desert in Israel. I was leading a spiritual
seminar in a beautiful desert camp there in May 1996. Its purpose was to
support the participants to unblock themselves and to find new and positive
strengths for their own development. As this part of the desert is full of stones,
I used them for our work. For every internal blockage that a participant owned
up to, he had to find a stone and carry it around with him. Quite close to the
camp, there was an ancient crater that looked like a huge canyon. I intended
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to have each participant go to the edge of the crater on the fourth day and to
throw his stones down into it, shouting out each time he let go. In the morning
of that day, a very sensitive girl told me her dream, which I quote below from a
letter she sent to me for the purposes of this book:

Black figures are coming

“I was standing on a large rock (near the crater) and looked around. Suddenly
I felt uneasy. Something eerie seemed to be behind me to my right. In front
and to my left, the desert was bright yellow with some tender green colouring.
I felt that there were some beings there who were neutral. But over my right
shoulder I could see figures dressed in grayish, brown- black with ropes
around their waists like monks. They were faceless and they were coming at
me.(They were creeping out of the crater and approaching our camp.) I felt
that they were putting me in mortal danger. They grouped together and
threatened me. At first I thought: “Why are you after me? I haven‟t done
anything!” But they came closer. I was seized by panic and could not move.
Finally I screamed in my head - because I could not utter a word -: Help me,
Father, Father help! Light, please light!!! - Light came in a wonderful golden
beam, at first it was like sunshine and then it became brighter and brighter
until it was like white gold. It shone on the side where the danger lay. The dark
figures melted away in the light. I felt as though the light was lifting me up. It
was also beneath me. It finally enveloped me entirely. I know that it came from
our heavenly father, from God, and God was very near, in me and around me
and around us. I was given this wonderful experience of God‟s grace and
even now as I write this dream down, I have an overwhelming feeling of
gratitude.”

So that was the girl‟s dream in her own words. On the following day I
continued with my plan and had the participants take their stones charged
with the negative energy of their blockages to the crater and throw them into
its depths. This was the crater from which those dark threatening beings in the
dream had crept out. In the following night, the girl‟s dream vision actually
happened to all of us: The dark spiritual beings crept out of the crater and
streamed through our camp. We humans were terrified and the animals went
totally berserk - there were at least 3 dogs and two donkeys in the camp. The
dogs rushed through the camp barking wildly all night long, chasing the
spirits. Animals sense these beings particularly intensively and maybe they
can even see them. None of us dared to set foot out of our tents. No one
slept. Calm returned at last at dawn.When we saw the big tent where we did
our work in the daytime in the morning light, we had a ghastly shock. The
dogs had mauled and bitten everything in the tent and all the mattresses and
the blankets and cushions were destroyed. Even the tent canopy was ripped
off. The dogs had just defended the camp. Against the spirits.
Since that event, I never held a seminar in the desert again.
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Through my counselling practice I know of many other cases of spiritual

apparitions. In other cultures such experiences are considered quite common
and natural, but they are not the order of the day and only represent a tiny
proportion of our normal work on dreams.

In general:
All kinds of spiritual beings can appear, some that we recognize and many
more that we do not know nor even believe possible.

Wherever there is a threat, I advise praying to God, our Creator. Visualizing a

circle of light helps to protect against negative beings. It is very important to
know that in a spiritual context, help through light is only given if we ask for it
directly. This may seem strange, but that is what general experience has
persistently shown. The dream I quoted above shows this very clearly too.
Help does not come automatically and this surprises and upsets many people,
especially if they are good Christians. So, my advice is, that when you are
dreaming try to be as active as possible and ask God intensively for light and
protection. Such a plea has always been heard in all the cases I have come
across. Unless you actively turn to God, you may experience some very
disagreeable dreams that might even result in trauma, the worst case being
possession. However, for this to happen, the dreamer‟s constitution and
situation have to be quite extraordinary.

8.2 Prophetic dreams

Prophetic dreams are difficult to identify. As in most prophecies, the accuracy

of these dreams can only be verified after the event. Many such dreams have
been recounted to me, so they do indubitably exist, and remarkably, they
mostly contain negative predictions. In fact, in my practice, I have not had a
single case of a positive prediction. These dreams are rarely passed on, both
because of their negative aspect and because hardly anyone believes in
prophecies these days. This is a pity because it is just possible that some
misfortune could be avoided or even perhaps a life saved.

In my experience prophetic dreams pop up suddenly and without cause and

vanish rapidly.They happen often to “very normal people” who do not have
much truck with dreams or prophecies. These dreams appear only in specific
periods in life.

A woman told me that she used to have prophetic dreams in the time of her
puberty. They all referred to negative events in the town she was living in and
all the dreamt predictions came true. It was a shock to the young girl to read
about them time and again in the daily newspaper. Just as suddenly as they
had cropped up, they disappeared again, never to reappear.
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Basically, it is difficult to distinguish prophetic dreams from other “normal”

dreams, but there are a few criteria, such as:
- an intense emotion on awakening. Something feels different than after
a “normal” dream, a kind of foreboding or unease.
- in general the prediction is about other people, so there is an urge to
tell others about this dream, and possibly to warn them.
- a prophetic dream is always grounded in everyday reality. The
prophecy appears to be perfectly realistic to the dreamer.

8.3 Visions
There is no conscious awareness of visions in our culture and they are
consequently very rare. By contrast, Indians have a tradition of seeing visions
and they actively look for them, calling upon the spirits and the Creator to
grant them visions to guide them through their lives. This collective
expectation makes the incidence of visions understandably higher.

A vision is a spiritual message which generally needs to be decoded. It has a

prophetic character pointing to the future. While a prophecy shows the
impending event clearly, visions take on very varied shapes and often present
encoded symbols and images. In the Bible there are visions which were called
“faces”. People see something but this thing needs to be interpreted.

All kinds of elements may appear in visions: The deceased, spiritual beings,
symbols from the primeval sphere, moods, colours, odours, landscapes,
strange and unknown signs.

I hold a seminar in which I work on visions. I plead by means of a dream

journey, with the spirits that lead people to give them signs and symbols to
help them meet their obligations better or to give them information that they
might urgently need. The participants often tell me about these symbols and
ask for my guidance. I am able to interpret some of these, but others are
totally unknown to me. Some are derived from other cultures. These signs and
symbols have a visionary character and we can learn a lot from them.

A vision is like looking for the “Holy Grail” - an image attached to the legends
surrounding King Arthur. A sign, a symbol or an enigmatic message is
presented to us and this sets us on our quest. We set off, we lead and we are
led. A vision takes us to some unknown end. A vision requires work,
searching and enterprise. It is the beginning of a process, a kind of call to
arms. It is in this wide sense that we use the term “vision” in our colloquial
speech.

In my experience, visions appear in a meditative state rather than in dreams.

But the basic rule is that a vision recognizes itself. He who has a vision will
know this intuitively. But that does not mean that he knows what the vision
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implies nor what course of action to take.Visions often throw up more

questions than answers.

8.4. Astral journeys

During some dreams it can happen that we leave our physical body by means
of the spirit and visit other places and dimensions. Such journeys are not
simply dreams but real happenings on a spiritual plane. Our personality has at
least eight facets, making it possible for the primeval sphere to produce a
“normal” dream while the spirit goes on an astral journey. So , we can
simultaneously dream “normally” and go on an astral journey - involving two
different parts of our personality. As a result, we very rarely remember our
astral journeys because they are overlaid by other dreams.

Astral journeys are, however, experienced quite frequently in my seminars,

while the participants are not really sleeping but are in a so-called “alpha
state”, meaning a state between waking and sleeping during which we are
closely linked to our mental centre.This is a kind of meditation that I call dream
journeys. Dream journeys are the nuts and bolts of my work. Again and again,
people find themselves making amazing and sometimes shocking
experiences. Shocking, not because of negativity but because of the totally
strange and different quality of the experience.

I vividly remember a middle-aged man who had a very rational scientific

background and considered himself to be a dyed-in-the-wool realist. On the
third day at my seminar, he had a dream journey, leaving his body and
travelling to another dimension. We took a long time bringing him back to our
reality. He woke in a state of shock and told the group that he had been far
away in another dimension of the universe. There he had seen vivid colours
and various beings moving about. He felt elated and on a “high” but at the
same time deeply shocked by the experience. This state continued for a
number of weeks and changed this man‟s view of life.

When a person has become aware of his own spirituality, living and using it
actively, then it is also generally much easier for him to recognize and
remember astral journeys.

In recent years I have had a lot of feedback from participants in my seminars

who thank me for coming to them in their dreams. It happens more and more
frequently that I move in my spirit to help others, but I cannot as yet
consciously perceive these journeys. I simply feel in the morning that I have
been working intensely in the night. I am tired and shattered as though I had
stayed up all night.

Astral journeys often leave the dreamer with a strong feeling of having been
far away. They are often associated with experiencing a different dimension.
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In many ways an astral journey resembles the return from any trip: we need a
little time to readjust to our home and at first our old routine seems a bit
strange.

8.5 Memories of earlier lives

It is a naive illusion to believe that we only live once. Our modern view of the
world only allows us the one life, but nevertheless we do live many times in a
multitude of reincarnations. The philosopher Plato assumed that a single soul
was reborn 10 000 times before the circle was completed. I cannot vouch for
the number, but I know that it is many times and that everyone, in one way or
another is affected. We might not always have been humans, our earlier lives
may have been as animals or plants. We may have been on other planets or
come from other dimensions, anything is possible. I have met people who
have had many lives. These are old souls who are wise and knowledgeable
and bring a lot of life experience with them into this life. Then there are others
who are on this planet for the first time and have never before lived as
humans. I was particularly fascinated by a man who asserted throughout his
childhood that he was not from here, saying with childish certainty that he was
not from this world. Much later, as an adult, he fortunately regained this
certainty. Wherever we have come from, whatever life or experience we have
had, this is stored within us. From time to time, this gigantic store releases
some information that can show itself in dream images.

The historical context surrounding the dream is critical for memories of an

earlier life. The stage setting and the background of a “normal” dream portray
our present life -for instance our childhood - although landscapes that we
have never seen may pop up, but it is very rare for historical images to be part
of a “normal” dream. If this happens, it may be an indication of a previous life.
The circumstances of the dream are generally associated with an intensive
feeling of familiarity. The dreamer can have a different sex, speak a different
language and do things that he never learned. Often fragments of images
appear which are not imbedded in a lengthier dream action. There are
sometimes details which point clearly to a time, place or culture of a previous
life: weapons, clothing, buildings, landscapes or food. It is also possible to
have dream images of a future life, but here again, these are generally brief
snapshots and only refer to a single scene.

It is not by chance that memories of an earlier life are rekindled. Such

memories are in fact always connected to our present circumstances and are
generally triggered by a problem that the dreamer is currently dealing with but
it is one that has its origin in a different, earlier life.

Children are especially likely to have dreams about a previous existence.

Happy memories play an important role, but sometimes a child will dream
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repeatedly of the last death, especially if it was a traumatic one. Such dreams
about death can keep resurfacing for years, but they come to an end when the
dreamer reaches puberty.
I can remember that when I was about seven or eight I had this dream about
my last death:

The execution
I am sitting in a Nazi army truck. It is night. We are driving through a large
town. We stop and I am pushed out. We are under a large railway bridge,
possibly in an industrial zone. The cobbles gleam in the diffused light of a
lantern, it is wet, it must have rained. I am pushed against a brick wall under
the bridge. A man points a pistol at me and shoots me. Everything goes black
in front of me. I urinate and wake up frightened to death, in the true sense of
the word. Then I discover that I have actually wet myself, and this is the only
time I can remember doing this as a child.

At that age I had no or very little knowledge about the time of the Nazis, nor
did I know until many years later that it is a normal reflex to wet oneself if one
is shot dead. I now know that that dream was a memory of my last death
which presumably took place in the „30s.

A man who took one of my business seminars told me about his childhood
dream that kept recurring. He flies as a bird over trees, villages and the
countryside. He is a bird, not a human being. He has proper wings, he feels,
sees and flies like a bird. He could describe this bird feeling very well. The
dream always gave him a sense of well being and it recurred quite often until
he was eighteen and then it never came back to him again.This man was far
too rational, logical and critical to believe for one moment that he had once
lived as a bird. Nevertheless, his own memories provided him over many
years with a source of information from his earlier life.

It is of no importance in interpreting and understanding the significance of a

dream to differentiate between a “normal “ dream or a memory of a previous
life. In either case, we need to look for the meaning and the message of the
dream. Both are dreamed in order to support the dreamer, to give him
pointers for solving current problems and to help him to learn and develop in
his life.

8.6 Energy dreams

This kind of spiritual dream is very difficult to describe because it is more of an

energy charge than an actual dream. People who have consciously
developed their spirituality are most likely to experience this state.
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Having an energy dream is being in a state in which the spiritual world can
work on us from outside. This “work” takes place along the axis spirit - mental
centre. Information is fed to us or energies altered in us through our spirit.
Energy dreams are an external spiritual intervention in our favour which we
may “choose” to accept. I would like to compare these activities to a computer
(the mental centre) that has new data loaded from outside onto its hard disc.
Something very similar happens in an energy dream.

These dreams generally have no images. There is no dream action, no

landscape, there are no figures, people nor anything similar.This state often
induces an intense internal strain, and a very high level of subconscious
concentration. The accompanying feelings vary according to the type of
dream state and the aim of the energy charge.Energy dreams can bring
wonderful happiness, as I was told by a woman who found herself in a terrible
crisis that threatened her life when she experienced such an energy
intervention in which spiritual beings charged her mental centre through her
spirit with positive, healing or even divine energies. When she woke up, she
was filled with new and different energies and she could describe a real
internal change that had taken place. These energies were supplied from
outside during the night.

Others who have had these experiences have had information loaded into
their mental centre that they needed badly for their work, in particular when
their work involved healing or caring for people. In these energy transfers,
intensive learning takes place, but not at a conscious level. These states can
be so strong that it is as though we were plugged in to a power cable. As a
result, the dreamer often awakes totally wrung out and exhausted in the
morning. In these phases he feels he has been only half asleep. The mental
centre is so powerfully activated that the primeval sphere cannot take over our
sleep, so that although we do sleep, it just does not feel like it. Our mental
concentration is half conscious.

Typical criteria for energy dreams are:

- absence of dream images or any content and symbols that can be
interpreted
- feeling of huge spiritual activity and strain
- a feeling of some external spirituality intervening
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IV.

THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

Dreams show us the complexities of our human conscious. Strange images
and incomprehensible figures turn up as from nowhere, we are puzzled and
intrigued and yet we know that these strange pictures of the mind are our very
own creations. We look at ourselves and do not understand the expressions
of our own personality. So, perplexed by our own dreams, we are tempted to
ask the experts to interpret them for us. This is entirely plausible but at the
same time, it throws up difficulties. Every one of us is an individual with his
own special background, emotions, thoughts, images and symbols. This
means that the interpreter necessarily puts his own stamp on the explanation
of the other‟s dream and cannot therefore do justice to the uniqueness of the
person.

Of course help is needed and welcomed to explain our dreams -- that is why I
hold seminars and have written this book -- but the full interpretation should
never be ceded entirely to another person. Your dream is yours. You must
take responsibility for its interpretation. You are the final arbiter for its
explanation. You are, in other words, the most important criterion for the
interpretation of your dream.

1. The cultural context

The cultural context is very significant for the interpretation of dreams.
Different cultures produce different images and symbols. A “normal” dream
relies on images derived from everyday life - for instance planes, computers,
cars, telephones, trains, high-rise buildings etc. - or from a deeper level of our
personality, in the primeval sphere. These latter symbols and images are
likewise formed by our culture. On top of this, there are collective images and
symbols which are common to all mankind and I will talk about those later. At
this point, I particularly wish to pay attention to the difference in cultures when
dealing with the interpretation of dreams . It can be very important to have
intimate knowledge of the dreamer‟s culture in order to understand the
symbols and images of his soul.

Example: Red Indian dreams

Through my personal contact with North American Indians, I gained some
insight into the world of dreams of the Indians there. Their images and
symbols are often very different from those in a European context, although
they live today in a modern westernized environment. Animals play an
important part in their dreams. Animals are not only the expression of the
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urges of the primeval sphere, but also spiritual relatives, messengers or

possibly spiritual leaders. If an Indian dreams about grizzly bears, coyotes,
eagles, buffaloes or rattle snakes, their spiritual significance will be of prime
importance in my dream interpretation. What Jung calls the collective
unconscious of the Indians produces different images and different
interpretative horizons.

This of course applies to all modern cultures. For this reason I am seriously
opposed to using books on dream interpretation from other cultural
backgrounds.(32) Although they are interesting as an insight into the soul and
images of these cultures, they do not advance us in explaining our dreams if
we are not part of that culture.

Every culture has a fund of mythological images that supply our dreams.
These images are derived from folklore and legend, many of which were
collected in Grimm‟s fairy tales and have entered our culture with their
images, patterns and symbols. Christian tradition has likewise given us very
specific images and symbols, in particular the cross.

If images, symbols and patterns from a foreign culture suddenly appear in our
dreams without our having any knowledge of that culture, then such dreams
are likely to be spiritual dreams: memories of a previous life or an encounter
with spirits from other cultures or times. I came across this phenomenon
recently where a Canadian Indian woman dreamt in such specific terms that
she had to use a dictionary to understand them. Some of these words were
technical terms for subjects she had never heard of.

2. The individual context

I consider the individual context to be more significant than the cultural
context. I would say that the individual always takes precedence over the
collective. Almost every dream I have heard of is very closely linked to the
dreamer‟s real life, with childhood, people and places playing an important
part. Dreams use the dreamer‟s memory, dredging up long forgotten faces of
old school friends, play-mates or chance acquaintances. The symbolism of
the dream is imbued with the concrete reality of every day life, so that without
knowing the individual‟s background and especially his associations, it is
impossible to make any sense of a dream. Those forgotten experiences and
memories enrich the dream material and point to the meaning and message
of the dream.

I have often found that through a dream, a person suddenly remembers

people whom he has not seen for ages or who played a very marginal part in
his life. These remembered people often indicate a specific era or represent
the dreamer himself in that period. But it is always necessary to know the
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individual‟s personal situation. When I interpret a dream, I therefore need to

spend a lot of time asking about personal matters and memories. At the same
time, great care must be taken to respect the limits that the dream itself has
set as to how far the context needs to be involved. The danger is to get
bogged down in too much detail. Each association must therefore relate
closely to the dream to avoid an excess of information.

3. The atmosphere of the dream

I find that the atmosphere of the dream is very important for its interpretation.
Every dream puts us in a specific mood produced by our soul. Although we
often cannot remember a dream when we wake up, we are generally aware of
a positive or negative emotion that might accompany us all day. The
atmosphere gives the dream its background or basic colour. Sometimes the
action itself is not at all threatening and yet the dream creates intense fear.
Conversely, a dream with a most exciting development can be accompanied
by a very serene emotion. This is why I attribute as much significance to the
dream‟s atmosphere as to its action.

A dream with very little action can have an enormous influence on us because
of the mood it induces. This phenomenon surprises people when for instance
they awake in a state of dread although their conscious cannot find an
explanation on the basis of the dream‟s story.

In my interpretation of the human personality, the soul itself does not produce
images and symbols but feelings and moods. This is why I regard the dream‟s
atmosphere as the soul‟s expression and message, giving its very own
commentary on the dream. As the soul is our innermost organ providing us
with balance, I always rely on its voice and I consistently follow the
atmosphere of the dream in my interpretation.

4. The ambiguity of dreams

Our every day life works according to a simple mechanism: Yes - no; right -
wrong; good - bad etc. This enables us to orient ourselves in a very complex
world. We simplify our world in this way because we would not otherwise be
able to deal with its variables. This means of course that we are reducing and
flattening out reality. Our conscious likewise tends to decide for one or
another option when it is faced with opposing interpretations or contradictory
meanings.

We should resist this impulse when we interpret dreams. Dreams teach us to

see the ambiguity of everything and the contents of dreams are generally
condensed. The concept of ambivalence has been coined in psychology to
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describe the simultaneity of two different and often contradictory feelings.

Ambivalence in love is for instance particularly striking. Love is often
shadowed by hate. Love and hate flow into each other, combine together,
alter each other or coexist. Love sometimes even leads to murder - the victim
may even be the lover. Love and hatred go hand in hand like light and
darkness, day and night, man and woman. The contrasts make up a whole
and create a reality. This is an underlying fact of life. However, our conscious
would like to separate the many facets of reality and order them, structure
them, and analyze them. I would hence discourage any attempt to rationalize
a dream to its analytical end, because although this would satisfy our
conscious, the dream would not have been given its due. It is much better to
discover the different paths of the dream, to follow them and to let their
contradictions stand although our conscious rebels against this.

I have come across dreams in which one single symbol had at least three
meanings for the dreamer, and they were all important for understanding the
dream, although they were connected illogically to each other. In the
interpretation of dreams it is not a question of “either - or” but rather “not
only - but also”.

One could compare a dream to a prism in which light breaks in many different
ways and produces a variety of colours, but nevertheless constitutes a whole.
For me, this structural ambiguity is not a sign of underdevelopment but a
return to our origins. Thanks to the dream, we can see deeper into the
essence of things and our world. Real life is composed of so many layers, so
many angles and contradictions when considered by the conscious mind. So I
try to submerge my analytical mind in the dream rather than to try to give it
consistency by pulling the dream up into the light of my daily consciousness.

The vast majority of dreams that I have interpreted left a feeling in the
conscious mind that we had understood the main gist but that we had not
been able to fathom out many other elements. But it is a great success if we
can discover the thread of the dream and decode, recognize and interpret its
essential message. And it would be a presumption to think that we could ever
totally explain the richness of a dream because the realms of possibility we
are faced with are so very complex and diverse.

5. Interpretation at the level of subject and object

Considering the ambivalence of dreams, we should always at least find out
whether the people or animals etc. appearing in the dream play the part of the
subject or the object.
The dreamer, as the subject, will see himself as an acting, perceptive person
just as in his waking life. He lives his dream from his subjective perspective.
As a rule, other people or beings will appear in his dream, whom he sees as
objects standing opposite him, such as his mother, a neighbour, an old school
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friend or anyone. One way to interpret this is to accept the dreamer as the
subject and the others as the objects.

A second interpretative perspective is also to see the other acting participants

as a hidden expression of some aspects of the dreamer‟s personality. In other
words, the mother might not only be the dreamer‟s own mother but his
motherly feelings. The old school friend may be the dreamer himself or some
one else who appears in “disguise” maybe a brother or a sister. This does not
only apply to humans in the dream. Animals, in particular, give our dreams a
deeper sense. I have already recounted the dream about the awakening lions
which is a good example of this kind of substitution. The lions represent the
animal or lion-like side of the dreamer.

The sleeping dogs

A man told me about the following dream: He finds himself in a forest with big
old trees. It is an ancient forest. Large sleeping dogs lie under the trees. They
are mostly sheep dogs. They seem to be drugged or anesthetized. The
dreamer is amazed that so many large dogs are lying in groups of four or five
around the trees.

These dogs, of course, represent the dog in himself, the animalistic,

instinctual, primeval part of him which is drugged or anesthetized. He also
regarded himself as a “poor old dog” which was splendidly illustrated in the
imagery.

Another dreamer often chose his brother as a substitute for himself in his
dream. It soon became clear that this brother represented both the brother
and the relationship between the dreamer and his brother. Here, one
interpretation should not be played off against the other.

Dreams reveal in other people or animals certain parts of our own personality:
our attitudes, our ways of thinking, our problems which we perceive easily in
others but only with difficulty or with resistance in ourselves.

We can also learn a lot from dreams in the double perspective of subject
versus object. All our relationships, whether with people or animals or other
beings, revolve around ourselves.
They are all a mirror of ourselves, and yet they are more than just ourselves. If
we only sought to find ourselves in other people, we would be pitiable
narcissists. If on the other hand we never tried to learn about ourselves in our
relationships with others, we would be lonesome, dumb and limited. Dreams
show us this and in their interpretation we should remember the following:
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1. Be yourself in relation to others

2. Recognize yourself in others
3. Look at the relationship yourself and what it says about you

6. Suggested Methods
Every one should work out their own method of interpreting dreams by
following their intuition. I shall present my own method that has served me
well over thirty years, but even I do not simply follow a plan but let myself be
led by the peculiarities of the dream and the dreamer.

1. Write down the dream

To start with, I write down the dream as precisely as possible, if it is my own
dream or I ask the dreamer to write it down. I always note the mood, such as
fear or joy.

2. Give it a title
When the dream has been written down I give it a title like in a newspaper. I
make myself or the dreamer imagine that the dream will be published as a
news article and needs a title.
This too should be spontaneous.

3. Divide the dream into scenes

The third step is to divide the dream into various scenes. They are often
presented to me like this already, but I make sure that long dreams are
divided into sequences. In this way lots of little islands are created both on
paper and in the mind.

4. Brainstorming
I then move from image to image, from symbol to symbol and write down
anything that occurs to me spontaneously. This brainstorming is the most
important part. What is most difficult here is to avoid making a value
judgement and to make sure that even the least significant thoughts are
noted. Very often these apparently trivial associations help the most to find the
sense of the dream. So we should give heed to any thought that springs to
mind, no matter how insignificant.

5. The interpretation work

The cognitive process often already starts up in the brainstorming stage so
that it then becomes difficult to follow a sequence while working through the
images and symbols. No matter. Although I normally start at the beginning of
a dream, sometimes a symbol or an image has such energy or importance
that the dreamer wants to start there. I let it happen.
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The collected ideas and associations are now worked through, scene by
scene and image by image, until we discover a thread going through them. I
regard the first dream image as having prime importance. It is like an
introduction to the subject. For example: If the first image is the parental
home, it gives a clear indication, (if the dreamer is an adult), that we are
dealing with an old problem that probably originated in childhood. The first
image or scene is like the stage set in a theatre. The stage gives me my first
intimation of the subject matter of the play.

After we have gone through all the scenes, images and symbols, the main
thread generally appears. We then connect the various elements to make a
whole.

I always feel that the intuitions of both the dreamer and an experienced
interpreter must be followed. This is why the mood of the dream is so
important. Our head immediately jumps to the quick and obvious solutions,
but it is our intuition that feels best whether the meaning of the dream has
been caught by the interpretation.

Interpreting dreams is a learning process, moving from logical, rational

thought to the insights of our heart. The first premise is that what I am
looking for is here already. What seems strange to me is familiar, it is my
own. Recognition, in the true sense of the word, means knowing again. Our
“head” or our reason must recognize once more what has been a reality within
us for a long time. Dreams show us the real relationship between the
conscious and all reality: reality precedes our conscious both in fact and in
time. Our head is secondary. Dreams confront us with this natural order of
things which is difficult for our reason to accept and is often perceived as an
insult by our narcissistic ego.

For me, interpreting dreams means getting involved in and surrendering

myself to the dream. Psychology in the 20th and 21st century believed and
still believes in interpreting the subconscious and making it conscious,
whereas I treat dream interpretation as a process of letting the conscious
descend into other dimensions. Of course, the conscious should resurface to
the level of clear reason - but after having been altered and enriched. In
travelling into other dimensions of its personality and reality, the conscious
ego will be able to overcome its own fears better and better and to develop
more confidence.
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7. After interpretation - carry out the dream

Every significant dream worthy of interpretation has a message. Whatever we

are conscious of calls for action and change. When we say “ignorance is
bliss”, we are talking about repression. When we repress a problem, we do
not need to deal with it any more, and most of all, we do not need to act upon
it any more. But when a dream has been interpreted, things look different: we
now know more clearly what our problem is. Often, it is a matter of making a
concrete change in our life. Some dreams confront us with such big problems
that it takes years for us to undertake the changes and translate them into
action.

He who understands his dreams understands himself. Dream interpretation is

self- knowledge. But what should I do with this knowledge? This is a question
I am often asked and it is not generally easy to answer. Some dreams do
indicate solutions, but this is relatively rare. A dream usually points to the
problem and threatens the dreamer with the consequences of not solving it.
(viz. the dream about the flood). In my experience, dreams show us mostly
what might happen if we fail to act rather than what steps to take. Here is an
example to show this well:

How do I overcome the frog?

A thirty-two year old man dreamt twice about frogs in the same night. In his
first dream he was at school, when he was about nine years old, and his
teacher was dealing with frogs. He had to hold a frog and found the animal
disgusting and ugly.In the second dream, there was another frog, a female
frog, who was not half as revolting and disgusting as the first frog. She was
definitely female (lipstick, long eyelashes), she had charm and attracted the
dreamer‟s positive reaction. She waddled to a heap of brightly coloured Easter
eggs from which sweet little chicks emerged and the frog and the dreamer
were delighted.

The interpretation revealed that the first frog represented the dreamer himself,
and in particular, his undeveloped male sexuality. His negative reaction to the
frog was the way he felt about himself and sex. The school class meant that
the dreamer was backward in his development. The second dream showed
that he treated women at a “frog level”. The female frog combines subject and
object. The female frog mirrors how he only reveals his feminine side to
women, because he is more comfortable with that. But at the same time, his
attitude transforms women into “frogs.” His wish for children is presented in
infantile fantasies (eggs, chicks). Just like in the fairy tale about the “Frog
King”, in real life he is first used and then refused by women because he
deals with them at a “frog level”.
The dreamer recognized the significance of his dreams and asked me what
he should do. The dream did not give any advice, but pointed out the problem.
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Only the dreamer himself can answer such questions. It would be wrong to
suggest solutions, but it is clear that the dreamer should do something
urgently to enable him to enjoy sex and a fulfilling partnership.

Knowledge about the message of dreams calls for change. Once the
interpretation has brought the dream into the open, our conscious, our ego, is
put on the spot. We are challenged to find a responsible and conscious
solution to our problem and to act upon it. The dream can be our helping
companion on the way, because it might show us in future where we stand,
how far we have come and maybe even what else should be done.

A few dreams become reality instantly. By this I mean that something can
actually happen to us during the dream causing a true change. This is the
case with great dreams and with most spiritual dreams. In these dreams, what
we dream is actually taking place in reality within us. I mentioned before the
dream about the awakening lions. In that dream the lion cubs really woke up
in the dreamer, which means that at the moment of his awakening he felt a
real change. An internal energy-laden change, or even sometimes an actual
step up in quality takes place. But even these real internal developments
generally require subsequent execution. The external execution generally
happens by itself after a real change has taken place within us as in a great
dream. We instinctively carry out what needs to be done without thinking
about it.
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V.

SOME IMAGES AND SYMBOLS AND THEIR POSSIBLE

MEANINGS

In the following, I shall make some suggestions for interpreting a few

collective images and symbols. I do not, however, wish this list to be treated
like a handbook where the reader can simply look up this or that to find the
“proper” and “true” interpretation for his dream. That would be too simple and
shortsighted. Working with symbols must always put the individual
before the collective. A dream is always a unique and individual creation and
cannot be dealt with satisfactorily with preconceived generalizations. I would
therefore request my readers to treat the following interpretations only as
temporary tools and to apply the utmost care. They can only give a direction,
but each individual case must always be linked to the dreamer‟s associations.

1. The nature of symbols

Symbols and symbolic images are the language of the primeval sphere.
Elemental nature has no words. A symbol encapsulates a concentrated
reality. A symbol is the gate-way to this reality which is normally not
accessible to the conscious mind. At the same time, the symbol represents
this reality itself. To me, this is how it is different from a sign. A sign
represents a single reality, indicating something that is clearly defined. A sign
is created and comprehended by the conscious mind. Symbols are not.

Example: traffic lights give clear, unambiguous information about their

meaning. If they didn‟t, they would be useless as signs. We find signs
everywhere: at airports, in instructions, on the Internet, on the roads and
anywhere where people have to communicate with each other and orientate
themselves. What makes a sign useful and practical is the fact that it is clear
and unambiguous for the conscious mind.

A symbol is totally different. It communicates directly with the primeval sphere.

It emanates from there and addresses itself to it. Hence, the conscious mind
either cannot recognize a symbol as being one or it mistakes it for a sign.
Most symbols are not understood nor identified as such by the conscious.
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I have already discussed the difference between understanding and

recognition. Reality flows. The conscious mind tries to bring this flow to a
standstill and builds its world on understanding, in other words on what it has
brought to a standstill. The sign is a perfect example for this. A symbol relates
to reality which is in flux. That is why we cannot actually understand a symbol,
but we can recognize it. Whenever we recognize a symbol, it will seem like a
sudden insight or an “aha-experience”.

Thanks to, and through our primeval sphere we encounter a reality contained
in the symbol.That is why symbols are so powerful. Reality itself is present
within them. A sign is not the carrier of its own reality, but it points to a reality;
whereas a symbol is a kind of mysterious energy channel which unites us
quite literally with the reality present within the symbol.

Example: A warning sign on the roads indicates a possible danger, which is

not inherent in the sign itself but in the road conditions. However, provided
my father‟s ring becomes a symbol, both my father and my relationship to him
are present within this ring. A symbol is a carrier of energy.

Religion provides many good examples of the reality and effectiveness of

symbols:
Communion in the catholic faith was, in the Middle Ages, and is still today,
an act full of wonderment. During the ceremony the priest transforms bread
and wine into the true body and blood of Christ. Although bread and wine
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continue to be what they were for the conscious mind, their character has
changed for our symbolical perception of them. Bread and wine are not simply
a sign (because they would then be pointing to a different reality ) but they are
true symbols, in other words, bread and wine have now actually become the
body and blood of Christ.

A symbol can only be grasped by the energy of the primeval sphere and not
through the conscious mind alone. This is why the conscious frequently
attributes completely different meanings to a symbol from what it really
represents. Here is a good example of these very different interpretations:

The Christian cross:

At the beginning of Christendom in the first centuries, the form of the Cross
was represented with two equal sides with a ring around them. This
equilateral cross, encircled by an outer ring, was a symbol of wholeness,
unity, harmony and redemption. Christ was portrayed standing in the middle
as the ruler of the world, the saviour, the risen Christ. This old cross is an
elemental symbol of mankind occurring in every culture known to us. In
Buddhism in Asia it appears as the Wheel of Being. The North American
Indians call the same cross a medicine wheel. Likewise, the early Christians
considered this equilateral cross in a circle to be a symbol of their faith which
was resurrection, redemption, wholeness, health etc.

The Christian cross changed however, in the Middle Ages. The old, encircled,
equilateral cross was replaced with the cross of crucifixion and death and this
still seems to be the symbol of Christianity to this day.:a long vertical post and
a shorter horizontal beam.This cross no longer symbolizes wholeness, health
and redemption but suffering, dying and death. The symbol of death has led
the church since at least the high Middle Ages, although the church was quite
unaware of this itself. In fact, Christians and theologians would hotly deny this
in spite of the fact that most crosses are adorned with the figure of the
suffering Jesus. Nevertheless, in our conscious mind the cross still has a
completely different meaning.

Symbol of suffering and death Symbol of wholeness and

completeness
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In my experience, the Conscious Me does not normally recognize the symbol

or gives it a totally different and often
erroneous interpretation. Of course,
repression and the underlying fear of
own‟s own truth play an important
role here.

1.1 Symbols in our waking life

Our everyday life is full of symbols and there is absolutely no difference
between the symbols in dreams and those in our waking state. This is one of
the most important conclusions I have drawn from my work with dreams.
Anything can become symbolic for us, but there is always a reason for
choosing a particular symbol.

There are many collective and generally accepted human symbols rooted in
our primeval sphere that are part of our existence. In addition there are
countless individual symbols. And again, there is no difference between those
relating to a waking or a dreaming state. Ultimately, everything, any object
can become an individual symbol for us. We only need to connect it to a
specific reality.

A good example for the effect of symbols in our waking state is the
phenomenon of allergies. Although growing numbers of people suffer from
allergies these days, it has not been recognized that the background for these
health disturbances lies in the effect of symbols. Whether, for instance, you
constantly dream of cats that threaten you or touch you disagreeably or
whether you develop a cat allergy, the interpretation remains the same. In
either case, the cat is an absolutely identical symbol. It indicates that there is
a problem with femininity and female energy and power. Whether you dream
of nuts or develop a nut allergy, the symbolic background is again the same:
this indicates a problem with male sexuality. Nuts are a symbol for the testes
and represent the male principle.

These two examples deal with allergies based on collective symbols. Other
allergies refer to individual symbols that a person has created himself
because of certain experiences.

A woman who came to me for counselling had an allergy to mother-of-pearl

buttons. Just as I do in interpreting dreams, I asked her to associate her ideas
freely and to think what or who in particular she thought of in connection with
mother-of-pearl buttons. It did not take her long to alight on her father which
made her suspect that there had been some sexual interference in her
childhood.
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An understanding of symbols is very important in treating allergies because

when the underlying problem can be made to surface from the primeval
sphere into the ego-conscious, the allergic reaction ceases.

I always work with symbols in my seminars to help people to understand and

overcome their problems and blockages. In doing this, I use exactly the same
methods as in the interpretation of dreams although I am working with
symbols of the waking state. I ask the participants to bring along symbols
representing their main blockages or their ambitions for the future. I request
them to choose these symbols intuitively and not with their conscious mind. I
remind them that they need not understand their chosen symbols but that they
should simply listen to their feelings and intuition. In this way, there have been
some wonderful surprises in the course of our interpretation where the
participant, just as in dream interpretation, associates freely and is himself the
arbiter of the interpretation at all times.

Lipstick
A woman in the seminar brought her lipstick along as a symbol of her main
blockage. Her conscious interpretation was that she always wanted to make
herself pretty for others but that, in doing so, she could at the same time hide
her wish to appeal to men. After some intensive work on the basis of this
lipstick, a completely different aspect was revealed to her consciousness.
The lipstick bore some initials that reminded her of her father. By twisting the
lipstick itself up and down, she associated it with a penis. Ultimately her
lipstick symbolized her unconscious wish to have some sexual attention from
her father. This was her real major blockage. Acknowledging this was both
shocking and liberating for her.

X-ray
A man in his thirties brought an X-ray picture of his skull as a symbol of his
main wish. His explanation was that he desired to grow to be an old man.
When he held his X-ray up, a small tremor went through the group because
every one thought they saw the skull of a dead man. It transpired that the
unconscious wish of this man was to die, to stand down and give up. He had
chosen his individual symbol extraordinarily well.

The examples show that both individual and collective symbols mark not only
our dreams but also our waking lives. There is no difference between the
symbols in our dreams and in our waking state. They are one and the same.
We constantly carry symbols around, generally without knowing it. Our rings,
necklaces, jewelry or amulets are often symbolic. They stand for a reality we
connect with, although we are unaware of it.

In my work in seminars I therefore encourage everyone physically to let go or

even to destroy their negative symbols (representing a blockage, a fear or a
negative wish etc.) Actually relinquishing or destroying a symbol is important
in order that the reality present in the symbol is removed from the person. The
fact is that the symbol is the carrier of that reality.
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It is not always the case, that a symbol can be interpreted quite as

unambiguously as in the examples above. Symbols are often equivocal and
often contradictory, so that they may have many meanings that exclude each
other.

Cell phone
A woman brought a cell phone to the seminar as a symbol of her main
blockage. At a conscious level it represented her wish to have some peace
and quiet and not to have to deal with the constant calls and needs of other
people. After a little work with the symbol, some quite different meanings were
brought to light in her consciousness. The cell phone symbolized her very
ambivalent attitude to her father. On the one hand she wanted to be cut off
from her father because he had wounded her deeply. On the other hand she
wanted to be in contact with him and yearned for his affection. The cell phone
represented both wishes: “Never call me again! You have hurt me, I hate you
and I never want to see you again.” And simultaneously: “Hurry up and call
me! I love you and let‟s patch it all up and please love me unconditionally.”
The cell phone revealed the ambivalence of her feelings towards her father.

1.2. Collective dreams and symbols - fairy tales

Fairy tales, such as those collected by the Grimm brothers, present a

multitude of collective symbols. Every one of these tales can be understood
and interpreted as a collective dream, presenting the same symbolic images.
Fairy tales give us marvellous insights into the basic problems of human
existence. They speak directly without deviation to our primeval sphere.
Expressed in collective symbols and images pertaining to everybody in that
culture, they are assimilated by the primeval sphere by everybody, be they
children or adults. When we read fairy tales to our children, we are imparting
information directly to their primeval sphere and teaching them about life and
surmounting its problems. Neither the child nor the adult can say, at a
conscious level , what the fairy tale is about but they both understand it at an
unconscious level. Fairy tales give us clues about important structural
elements of the primeval sphere, structures which are called the natural order
by Hellinger. This order might be for instance the requirement that wherever
children play a part, mother and father must also exist. In some fairy tales only
one parent is specifically mentioned, which means that the other parent is to
be found in a symbolic image.

Example: Little red riding hood and the wolf

This fairy tale tells a story of child abuse in the symbolic images of the
primeval sphere. It could just as easily be a dream by a woman or a child,
because it uses exactly the same kind of symbols and images as in a dream.
Little Red Riding Hood is alone with her mother, who sends her off through
the dark forest to her Grandmother although she knows that the wolf is
roaming the forest. The wolf is the father. As in the dream about the sleeping
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shepherd dogs (see above) the wolf symbolizes the male and paternal
energy. So the little girl goes, as her mother bids her to do, into the woods and
she does indeed meet the wolf (the father) who wants to eat (abuse) her. But
unexpectedly, the wolf in the fairy tale does not immediately attack his delicate
and tender prey, but he goes to the Grandmother and eats her up first. And
then he also eats up Little Red Riding Hood.
The red colour of the riding hood already gives a clue that the theme is a
sexual one. Just as in real life, the mother sends her own daughter into abuse,
of course not consciously, but unconsciously. Why does she do it? Because
she is following a pattern, which she has taken over from her own mother.
The wolf eats the Grandmother first. With this sequence, the fairy tale points
to an ancient, unconscious behaviour pattern: the Grandmother was the first
to be abused, presumably by her own father. We can therefore conclude that
Little Red Riding Hood‟s mother too was abused, because she now sends -
unconsciously- her own daughter to the wolf (the father). The therapy of
abused women has shown that this pattern is indeed often passed on in this
way. I have often come across this behaviour pattern in my own practice.

Example: Hansel and Gretel

This fairy tale tells the story of a mother‟s attempt sexually to abuse her own
son. The witch in the forest is the mother with ideas of sexual abuse. She
mutates from mother to step mother and finally to witch. She threatens the
boy sexually and demands repeatedly to see his finger to check whether he is
ripe enough to be roasted in a hot oven (vulva, vagina). Hansel tries to deflect
the danger by always proffering a too thin stick (penis), in order to show his
lecherous mother (witch) that he is not yet sexually mature and his penis is
too small and underdeveloped to be thrown into the hot oven.

I have come across many such Hansels in my practice, who have suffered
their mother‟s sexual advances and threats. One young man, for instance,
developed an allergy to certain foods, and in particular to fruit with any kind of
sexual connotation, which was quite extensive. In addition, he suffered from a
cat allergy.

Fairy tales are similar to dreams in that they use the same type of images and
symbols and they deal with significant problems needing solutions, just as
nightmares or “great” dreams do. We must assume that fairy tales will be told
as long as the issues they raise unconsciously continue to be relevant. As in
dreams, some only give a drastic description of a problem, while others offer
up solutions or some way out. Another similarity between dreams and fairy
tales is that they can also be subdivided into the dream categories that I have
delineated before. There are tales resembling nightmares (such as being
eaten up in Little Red Riding Hood, or Hansel and Gretel); other tales have a
spiritual character and are like spiritual dreams (such as The Crystal Ball) and
some are like “great” dreams (such as Mother Holle).
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The reality of symbols can be found at every level of life. Dreams are simply
an area where they have an overwhelming significance.

I would like to say in conclusion that symbols are the best representatives of
reality. Nothing is closer to the essence of reality than the symbol. In other
words: for us humans, reality can only be pictured symbolically.

2. Means of transport
Cars often appear in dreams. The original word “automobile”, with its Greek
connotation meaning “self-mover”, connects it symbolically with our self, or
our ego, so in a sense, a car is felt like an extension of our personality. It
helps us to move and gives us direction. Its symbolical value in our waking
state is thus very clear and strong. Many people, and especially in Germany,
identify themselves with their car and in particular its brand name. It is a status
symbol and a highly charged emotional object of identification. In our waking
life, it often represents our self-worth and the role we might wish to play in
society. Any harm to our car is felt like an attack on our own person.

This is also true in dreams. A car generally shows us the condition of the ego,
as seen through the primeval sphere. Dreams about cars are revealing in
many ways. Some questions can help in interpretation: Whose car is it? If it is
your own, what does it look like? What condition is it in technically? Is it lovely
and comfortable to drive or is it an old banger about to fall apart? Who is
driving? If the dreamer is driving, he”is in the driving seat” and is in control of
his own life. If the driver is another person, it signifies that being in the driving
seat he is likely to be determining the life of the dreamer. If the dreamer is
sitting in some one else‟s car, it might be deduced that he is not living his own
life but living life through or for some one else. We often relinquish power over
our lives to others without realizing it consciously. The dream demonstrates
this with the image of some one else being the driver or the owner of the car.

The Mercedes with the missing star

A man dreamt that he was driving his wine red Mercedes on a visit to his
family from whom he had been separated for some time. He was winding his
way laboriously through narrow, congested streets when he suddenly realized
that his Mercedes had no star on its bonnet. This made the dreamer
absolutely furious, knowing very well that it could not be his car, because he
had a star on the bonnet. Convinced that he had been fobbed off with a false,
inferior type of car, he went back (to the garage?) in a fury to complain and to
demand that his own car be returned. When he arrived, he yelled and made a
great fuss until his own Mercedes with its star was returned to him.

The dreamer had not driven a Mercedes for many years in real life. But this
make of car symbolized its worth in the dream. It is a highly valued brand
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name that the dreamer identified himself with. The interpretation showed the
dreamer that he apparently felt inferior to his family ( the missing star) and that
his decision about his family was fraught with a deep need for security (wine
red colour). In the dream, he managed to regain his own value (Mercedes with
star) and to establish a positive attitude towards himself.

A bus is likely to symbolize a predestined way through life, because it is

public transport and generally follows a set time-table. It represents over-
regulation. It might also refer to the family or “clan”. When a bus appears in a
dream, it is useful if the dreamer can consciously examine the unconscious
collective patterns in his own family. Who else is sitting in that bus? Where is
it going to? In many families patterns blocking thought, emotions and actions
are passed on from generation to generation. A bus might well be the image
for this kind of family destiny.

A train symbolizes the fatefulness of our path through life. While a car is
driven by one individual and can go almost anywhere, a train is compelled to
travel on a track. In addition, trains travel according to a time-table, they do
not normally wait for us and they therefore represent the inexorable nature of
fate. Dreamers often miss the train, which generally means that they have
missed a fateful opportunity, such as a partnership, motherhood, fatherhood,
adulthood, a lucky strike, a decisive experience etc. Dreams about trains
mostly tell of accepting or missing important tasks in life or they herald the
next steps pertaining to our growing process in life. The saying “the train has
left the station” illustrates the fact that there is a time for each stage of
development which we can accept or refuse but we are not fully free to
choose. We have to comply with the train, not the train with us. In this way it is
a symbol for fatefulness and over-regulation.

The reversing train

A man dreamt about his childhood town. He was standing at the station at
night waiting for the train to take him to the town where he was born. He used
to take this trip nearly every week in his waking life as a child. The train
arrives but does not come to a complete halt, so he jumps on, which he does
easily. Standing in the train, he can see the tracks through a window in the
last wagon. He is looking in the direction that the train has come from. The
train suddenly moves backwards. The locomotive is not pulling the train in the
right direction but pushing it backwards. The dreamer reacts with panic and
confusion. Suddenly, there is the conductor with his red cap, standing in the
middle of the track facing the oncoming train and making warning gestures to
stop the train. But the train thunders along backwards, faster and faster - and
finally it runs over the man.

This dream was pointing out that the dreamer was concerning himself too
much with his past and that this direction was false and harmful. The
conductor with his red cap symbolized his inner guidance which he refused to
follow, as the dream showed.
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An underground train symbolizes our subconscious and our unconscious

path through life. A dream about the underground generally challenges us to
bring some light into our secret feelings. But it can also carry us into a
different dimension of our life. A man had a spiritual dream that began with an
underground train, which led him down into great depths to another dimension
where he saw images of a previous life.

Aeroplanes can show us different aspects. Flying can be the ultimate

surrender for some people. As a passenger, we have no influence on events
and are totally powerless. Flying also means leaving the space that is allotted
to us humans and relinquishing the safety of the earth. An aeroplane might
indicate a situation in our life where we have “taken off” and thus lost the
ground under our feet. It can also be telling us to let go and to have
confidence.Aeroplane crashes often show us that we are afraid of failing or
“crashing”. Such dreams invite us to look honestly at our present life situation
and especially to pay attention to our fears.

Positive aeroplane dreams can be telling us that we are about to raise

ourselves to another dimension. In other connotations, an aeroplane can also
be a penis symbol and have a sexual character, although this was almost
never the case in my practice. The most important aspect for interpretation is
the dreamer‟s view on flying and the atmosphere of the dream (fear or
happiness). One must of course pay attention to the point of the dream. Was
there a crash, an emergency landing or was it a wonderful flight to a place of
limitless freedom?

A ship and its connection to water means that the dream is dealing with an
encounter with the primeval sphere. Water, and in particular a large body of
water such as a sea or ocean, represents our primeval sphere, because all life
comes from water. A ship thus becomes a symbol for our present life or our
ego finding its way to the other shore. The ship is carried by the water just as
our ego is carried by the primeval sphere. Like the ship, we must not capsize
nor must we sink. Ships often symbolize the great journey of our life, possibly
the transition from one important phase to the next. In mythological imagery
death is the last shore on the other side that we steam towards across the sea
of life. Water both carries and menaces the ship. By taking the ship we leave
the land and the solidity of our consciousness and abandon ourselves to wind
and weather and the primeval power of the sea. In doing so, we learn to have
confidence in this great journey which is our life. A sinking ship points to the
danger of drowning in the primeval sphere. Sometimes there are huge waves
engulfing us, the sea rages - and it can be this way in our conscious life when
we are engulfed and we cannot keep our head above water, because we feel
inadequate to deal with a situation or a change in our life. A ship in a dream
symbolizes in the widest sense our relationship with our own unconscious
primeval sphere.
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A young man brought me a good example of a ship dream:

Failure to be taken along

It is a bright, sunny day. The dreamer is in a harbour with lots of ships of all
shapes and sizes. The crews are getting them ready for departure. The
dreamer would like to go along, knowing that it will be a big trip that he does
not want to miss. So he goes from one ship to the next asking to be taken
along. He is always refused. He is told time and again that the crew is
complete and no one else is needed. The dreamer is carrying a little, dark
green boat under his arm, a sort of toy or model boat. People laugh at him for
carrying a toy around. Then a very beautiful young woman turns up and the
dreamer is attracted to her. She tries to help him and takes the lead. She now
asks the boat crews to sign him on but in spite of her female charm and
beauty she fails. The ships are due to set sail soon.
Finally the dreamer builds his own ship with the help of the pretty woman.
When it is ready, the dreamer gets on it with his little green toy boat.

The interpretation showed the dreamer that, so far, he had always tried to get
on someone else‟s boat, in other words, he wanted to live his life through
others. He had not yet been able to build his own life and a stable ego (ship)
of his own. He clung to his toy boat in his dream. He wished to remain a child
and resisted growing up. This resistance is underlined by the green colour.
The beautiful woman is a dreamy wish fulfillment. The young man had no
female companion or wife in his waking state. The dream, however, made his
wish possible : the dream woman even takes on the task of asking for him to
be signed on. As far as the woman is concerned, it is sheer wish fulfillment; as
far as the situation with the ship is concerned, the dream points to reality:
nobody will take him along, so he must build his own boat and this means his
own ego and his own life.

3. Animals

Animals often figure in dreams. They take on a whole variety of functions in

our human lives. Generally speaking, they symbolize our animalistic side, our
untamed, natural, aggressive, instinctual or primordial aspects: strength,
power, aggression, originality, naturalness and that part of our personality
which has not been touched by culture or civilization. Animals also
complement us. The Indians have “power” animals who accompany them like
guardians. We Europeans keep pets - and we choose them because they
represent something within ourselves that we would like to be or have. In our
waking life we often delegate our feelings to our pets and live our “animalistic”
impulses through them. In this way they become an extension of ourselves.

A dream about an animal normally shows up a part of ourselves that we do

not wish to see nor accept in our waking life. It is important to ask: What kind
of animal is it? What aspects connect the dreamer with this animal? Is the
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animal benign or threatening and disagreeable? Has the animal played a part
in the life of the dreamer? Does the animal‟s name remind the dreamer of
something specific, for instance a term of endearment ( bunny or teddy bear)
or an insult (“you pig!”)? The dreamer might even be reminded of a person. As
always, his own ideas and connections are decisive for interpreting the dream.
Language is full of references to animals, such as “under dog”, “horsing
around”, or “playing cat and mouse”, and these associations help a lot and are
very important.

Dogs and wolves represent the male urges, not only in the sexual sense.
They symbolize the original strength and power of the conscious energy of
men. The wolf in most fairy tales is a big, bad wolf, frightening and ferocious.
He steals, threatens, kills and gobbles up his victim. In our culture we might
take this as a symbol for a sexually threatening father figure, such as in Little
Red Riding Hood or the tale of the “three little piggies.” However, positive
dreams about dogs are very frequent, and not surprisingly men dream them. I
have often been told about sleeping dogs or dogs waking up, generally
meaning that the grasping, instinctual energy of the male was sleeping and
wanted to wake up. The saying “let sleeping dogs lie” does not apply to
dreams, on the contrary, the dream is saying: wake your dog! Arouse your
maleness!

Women and girls are more likely to perceive a dog as rather menacing.
Nightmares about dogs or wolves often refer to real abuse or other problems
connected with the father or the male partner. If children are terrified of dogs,
there is often an aggressive or authoritarian father or other male figure in the
background who frightens the child. That fear is then projected on to the
symbol “dog”.

Cats symbolize female strength, power and energy. They represent the
original woman, the primordial energy of the female. If the dream is nasty or
frightening, this means that the dreamer has some kind of problem with
femininity. The problem may involve some female person or refer to the
dreamer‟s own femininity. A cat allergy symbolizes exactly the same thing in
affecting the body. The psychological cause of cat allergies always indicates a
problem with the female gender.

The snake is a primordial animal and therefore represents primordial

energies. We normally find snakes frightening and menacing. Like all ancient
and original things, the snake is ambivalent, both positive and negative,
fascinating and revolting. A poisonous snake can kill, but the same poison is
also used to save lives. Think of the pharmacists‟ symbol that depicts a snake
or two snakes and a stick. In the Bible, the snake is the great seducer in
paradise, convincing Eve to bite the apple of knowledge although God had
forbidden it. The acquisition of extensive and deep knowledge is thus
associated with the snake, an age-old knowledge that we are often afraid of
because it lacks logical clarity. The snake symbolizes knowledge and hence
power. A dream about a snake shows us that we have encountered a very
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deep and original layer of cognition that needs to be dealt with carefully. The
conscious mind is right to be suspicious of the snake knowledge, because a
snake always implies an ambivalent, unitary, primeval knowledge that cannot
be decoded into a rational whole. In mythology, the snake is a cunning
creature possessing special knowledge, and the conscious mind lacks the
tools to oppose it.

A snake might also crop up in a dream about sex and be a penis symbol. This
aspect is inherent in the symbolic significance of the snake. In the Bible,
Adam and Eve only become aware of their nakedness and develop a feeling
of shame after the seduction by the snake.
Calling a person a snake implies something about temptation, cunning and
seduction. A snake lures us away from the confines of morality because the
snake itself operates and lives “beyond good and bad.” Being beyond
morality and yet having a hidden connection with morality must make the
conscious mind feel threatened.

The lion is regal and noble. People look upon him as the king of the jungle
and the desert.The lion represents strength, power, pride, courage, dignity
and freedom. At the same time, he is an expression of ferocity and
aggression: he bites and kills.Although lions belong to the family of great cats,
they symbolize the primordial energy of the male.

The horse, again, may portray a sexual urge and the word “riding” is
sometimes used to mean the sexual act. The horse symbolizes the need,
particularly of women, to give a positive aspect to their own sexuality.
Although it is a large animal, it prefers flight to fight and is sensitive and
refined. Young girls are often attracted horse riding and dealing with horses
helps the girls subconsciously to channel and defuse their awakening
sexuality. Both physically and in the dream world, the horse is able to channel
mainly female sexuality and thus to relieve the woman or girl. Male sexual
energy is not diverted, so teen age boys are not relieved by dealing with
horses. A horse allergy is an indication of a problem with one‟s own sexuality,
especially in the case of women.

Birds may symbolize subconscious or unconscious thoughts. In mythology,

they are often messengers from “another world”, a world of thoughts, spirits
and ghosts. Dark swarms of birds may be a warning of our own dark and
negative thoughts. Witches in fairy tales often take on the guise of black
ravens or cats(femininity). These large dark birds symbolize a dark spiritual
force or death, but here too, a sexual connotation cannot be excluded.

The eagle is a rapacious animal and, as such, it is a symbol both of spirituality

and power. In legends all over the world, it appears as a symbol of spirituality.
Flying higher than any other bird, it gets closer to God than any other being.
Thus it becomes a bridge between the human world and the divine world.
Traditional Red Indians still give offerings of tobacco and sing songs when
they espy an eagle because they believe it is watching over them or bringing
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them a message from the world of spirits. The eagle represents an overview,
transparency, clarity, wide open spaces and freedom, but at the same time, it
has connotations with being obstinate, grasping, decisive and, ultimately, with
killing.

The eagle is depicted in many flags and crests all over the world, representing
might, wisdom, nobility, majesty and great leadership.

Insects often relate to our nervous system. Even in our waking state,
mosquitos, flies and wasps get on our nerves. Dreams about insects may alert
us to an inner disquiet, negative machinations or a sense of being driven.
Such a dream may also challenge us to clear up whatever is presently getting
on our nerves or is biting us.

Spiders often appear in dreams. So far in my experience all the dreamers

were disgusted by them. Spiders, like snakes, are primordial creatures that
repulse us humans. They live in dark, secret places and erupt from the tiniest
cracks. Thus they symbolize those aspects of the primeval sphere that we find
revolting or dangerous. The spider itself does not represent a specific aspect
that we can define, unlike in the case of the horse, dog or cat. We have to
look for something that is trying, spider-like, to insinuate itself into the
conscious mind from the primeval sphere. Normally this is something very old
that we have repressed for a very long time. There are many old wives‟ tales
about spiders, mostly that they are poisonous, but some are positive, showing
us again that there is ambivalence in interpretation. For instance, a spider on
one‟s clothes is a sign of good luck or that money is coming, and the very
small spider is called a money spider. Spiders only spin their webs where
there is life.

The rat represents repressed aspects of the primordial sphere that are
“rotting”. If rats appear in our dreams, there is some old rubbish lying within
our personality, a secret rubbish heap that is permeating into the dreamer‟s
conscious mind although the dreamer does not want to see it and has
suppressed it. The rat is often connected to some sexual phantasies which we
would call dirty in our waking life and regard as perverse or unnatural. The rat
calls for a value judgement, meaning that there are aspects of the primeval
sphere that the dreamer considers “dirty” or “filthy”. The same meaning may
be attributed to cockroaches and other vermin.

“Filthy dirty stuff” is attempting to surface from the primeval sphere into the
consciousness. Rats and cockroaches are regarded with the same
abhorrence in waking life. Here, there is no difference in interpretation. So, if
you have cockroaches or rats in your house, ask yourself the same questions
as in dream interpretation.
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4. Plants, fruit and food

The tree is the essence of life. Hence, we talk of “the tree of life” and we
present our personal origins in the form of a “family tree”. We bring a green
tree into our house at Christmas, because it represents life in the midst of a
grey and cold time of year. The tree of knowledge from which Adam and Eve
had been forbidden to eat, appears in the first few pages of the Bible. So the
tree is undoubtedly one of the very ancient and comprehensive symbols of life
itself.

Fruit have a sexual meaning as a rule. Nuts in particular symbolize the testes
and hence the male principle and its sexual associations. Apples and
oranges and all other fruit of a similar shape indicate female breasts and also
have a sexual meaning.Other fruit such as cucumbers, carrots, asparagus
and of course bananas, are penis symbols.

Strawberries and cherries generally also have a sexual meaning. Their red
colour stands for the alluring, fruity sensuality of the female. These fruits are
often used as adornments in paintings or other pictures representing female
sexuality.

Again, I must stress however, that the individual associations of the dreamer
must override any general interpretation.

Milk symbolizes our relationship to our mother or to our maternal feelings.

Milk is the very first food we have in our life and normally it comes from our
own mother. Milk allergies may indicate a problem with one‟s mother or with
one‟s own maternal instincts.

Bread is a basic food and is associated with the “bread of life”. There are
many phrases involving bread, such as “bread and butter” meaning one‟s
livelihood or to “know which side one‟s bread is buttered”. Dreams about
bread throw up questions: whose bread am I eating? Do I feel replete? Am I
hungry? Is the bread good and fresh or is it a dried up piece?

A young man in my practice dreamt that he woke up in his Grandmother‟s

house and found a dried up piece of bread under the bed. During
interpretation it turned out that this man had been abandoned by his birth
mother and had never known her. He had lived with his grandmother for
several years during which she gave him his only “maternal” affection in the
widest sense of the word. This was the significance of the bread.
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5. Numbers
In dealing with dreams I always check the individual meaning of the number.
Some dream numbers refer to biographical details such as the number of
children or family members, birth or death dates, people‟s age or similar data.

One (1)
“One” symbolizes original unity and therefore God and divinity. It implies
uniqueness, the starting point, the origin and also completeness. But at the
same time, it represents the opposite, everything that is undeveloped, alone
or turned in upon itself. It combines the starting point with the end point, so
that it is both an expression for perfection as well as for the void or non-
existence. Quantitatively, it is the smallest number, hence almost negligible .
Qualitatively, it stands for the birth of all things, for plenitude and entirety. On
the human level, the number one stands for the rational consciousness of the
ego.

Two (2)
Two means duality. It represents separation, splitting, alienation and the
process of acquiring consciousness. The number one - the original unity- falls
into identical parts within it. Unity is hence transformed into duality -- .
RELATIONSHIP. Two elements are needed to make relationships not only
possible but necessary. The number two implies a split into one side and its
counterpart and ties them in a relationship (good - bad; bright - dark; hot -
cold; day - night; man - woman; Ying - Yang...). In this way it points to the first
elemental order. The two is the first even number. On the human level it
symbolises our earthly body as well as the relationship between you and me.
It separates us and pulls us together. A suckling baby still feels at one with his
mother while he has no distinct consciousness (language and thought
process) as yet. This elemental unity breaks down once the child becomes
contrary (the “difficult twos”!) The child finds himself distanced from his mother
by this conflict and must painfully realize that he and his mother are are not
one, but two distinct beings: I and you. The split between the two is a
necessary precondition for individuality and identity. Two different, individual
beings are required in order to relate to each other.

Three (3)
Three symbolises a dynamic, tense unity. It is the dynamic, creative principle.
In human life, the 2, representing relationships (man and woman), becomes a
3 ( the child and the start of a family). In this sense the number three is a
higher entity that has actually produced something new but it has also created
an area of conflict. This tension is innovative, but people should never live or
work in groups of three, because there will always be two against one. This is
not due to any animosity but to a basic dynamic of life and of the number
three. The Christian Church made God three in the Trinity ( Father, Son and
Holy Ghost) and ever since there have been endless theological arguments
over this question. The Church split apart in 1054 into the Western or Roman
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Catholic Church and the Eastern or Orthodox Church. As a dynamic principle

full of conflict, the 3 is powerful, productive and creative, but it lacks tranquillity
and peace, as all tripartite relationships show us. Its symbolic properties are
power, dynamism, creativity and tension. At the human level it represents the
mental centre.

Four (4)
Four symbolises unity and completeness at the earthly human level. With its
double polarity (2 x 2), it establishes stability and completeness, it gives order
and achieves a kind of initial totality. Our lives are ruled by the inclusiveness
of the number four. Four points on the compass make up the globe; four
seasons form a year; four elements constitute the world (earth, water, fire,
air). The 4 introduces a new geometric dimension, the body. Prior to that
everything was only surface (3). Hence, 4 also represents the unity and
completeness of the bodily/earthly world. Whenever a 4 appears in our
dreams as a symbol, it always has a positive meaning, because it is whole
and complete. At the human level, it represents the soul.

Five (5)
The number five stands for sensuality: five fingers, five senses, five toes on
each foot. At the human level, the five also represents the ego and
encapsulates excessive sensuality which is lust. Sensuality, neediness, lust,
desire, acquisitiveness, egoism are all traits associated with the 5. It also
represents the “in”-dividual, in other words the indivisible part of us that
nevertheless consists of a multiplicity (3 and 2). It is uneven, unruly, unclear
and full of conflict. If a person dreams of the number five, he should ask
himself what his present true needs are, and what he is lacking most.

Six (6)
Six stands for union and life. The geometrical figure of the David star with its
overlapping triangles is symbolical for the 6. Its union with the dynamically
tense double three creates a new, stable harmony. It is the elemental image
of sexual energy (six and sex have the same linguistic root) Whereas the 3
tends to have negative or at least disputatious associations, the six is made
up of 3 times the 2 and is therefore generally structured positively. The 6 is an
expression of the vital force of life. While the sensuality of the 5 remains
enclosed in the ego, the 6 symbolises an opening into a sort of higher realm
and a stable harmony. The David star, the symbol of Judaism, shows us a
geometrical figure where there is union between heaven and earth, God (the
triangle pointing downwards) and man (the triangle pointing upwards). In
many cultures, the number six was accordingly regarded as the expression of
a higher order and harmony. Plato considered Eros to be the driving force that
gave philosophers their powers of insight. The 6 is vital, sensual and earthy
(sex), but at the same time it strives to reach higher things. It represents a
very elemental order of urges and of vitality, and thus also represents the
primeval sphere.
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Seven (7)
Seven represents secrecy and holy transcendence. It even surpasses the
higher structure of the 6. It is the primordial image of that which is
incomprehensible, it is the divine secret, which we as mortals will never be
able to perceive nor understand. The 7 is the number of spirituality, it evokes
the transition into other hidden worlds, dimensions and incomprehensible
realities. The 7 signifies incalculable, irrational, labyrinthine realms and hence
it is associated with holiness. It cannot be drawn geometrically. No image of
the God of Judaism is possible! He created the world in 7 days, so we still
have seven days in a week. If the 7 appears symbolically in a dream, it makes
us aware of the realms of spirituality and it connects us to other realities.

Eight (8)
Eight symbolises the height of perfection. While the 4 stood for unity and
perfection of the earthly world, the 8 (as a total of 2 x 4), represents unity and
perfection of not only the earthly world but also of the spiritual and divine
world. The 8 signifies the ultimate perfection and hence the divine
consciousness. It means clarity, transparency, purity; it symbolises the cosmic
dimension of God‟s plan. In mysticism, the step from 7 to 8 signifies man‟s
deliverance, his redemption and the end of his cycle of reincarnations, leading
therefore to the highest knowledge of the divine. Most Christian baptismal
fonts have eight sides and Buddhism teaches the eight paths to redemption.
The figure of eight turned on its side is the sign for infinity. At the level of our
human personality the 8 indicates the divine within us.

Nine (9)
Nine means something new (new and nine have the same linguistic root). It is
the new number “one” after the perfection of the 8. It symbolises the end of all
time (the eight lying on its side is infinity but it is still trapped in time and the
“eternal return of the same “). Nine also means the beginning of a totally
different reality beyond time and earthliness. Thus, the nine my be taken as
the symbol for eternity, as opposed to infinity of the number 8. The nine
combines ultimate completion with new beginnings, similarly to the 1 but at a
supreme level. After the 9, there are only composite numbers.

Other numbers can, of course, also have symbolic significance, such as

twelve ( twelve tribes of Israel, twelve apostles, twelve months in the year...)
but they acquire their significance only through combination.

6. The elements
The four elements often play a part in dreams because they make up the
bodily world in which we live. I shall outline some very generalised meanings
of the elements, but as always in the interpretation of dreams, the individual
must take precedence over generality.
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Water
Water symbolises the realms of the primeval sphere. It indicates the power of
nature and of the unconscious. The greater the body of water, the stronger
and deeper the power of the primeval sphere. For humans, water is elemental
nature from which life has sprung. The human embryo is encircled and grows
in amniotic fluid. Water therefore symbolises the most powerful, ancient and
deep source of our being on earth. It is the deep primordial power of life. We
encounter this primordial power when we dream of large expanses of water
and we often feel ambivalent about this. It is both helpful and dangerous,
beautiful and menacing, life giving and life destroying.

A dream about the sea is full of significance. Such an unspecific, extensive

image puts us into a larger picture of our life. The sea either indicates our
“journey through life” from one shore (birth) to the other (death), but it might
also point to the natural might of our primeval qualities. The dreamer will
generally be in a ship or boat if the dream refers to his great passage through
life. If, however, he is on land and has to battle with tidal waves or similar
surges, the sea is more likely to symbolise the natural might of the primeval
state. Whenever the sea appears in dreams, we are dealing with life itself in
its widest sense and usually the dream points to a far-reaching coherence.

Rivers
A river carries the water of life. If we dream about floating down a river or a
stream, we are flowing or streaming along, which is following our destiny. The
question is: Is the river trip agreeable or disagreeable, calm or stormy? Is it a
torrent with dangerous cataracts and whirlpools? If so, then we are having a
difficult phase in our life.

Folk tales and myths often use the image of a river and its ferryman to take
people from one bank to the other. Such images have a spiritual dimension. If
the river appears to be a frontier, a break or an obstacle that needs to be
overcome, it symbolises a significant change. Such dreams might be showing
us the way to a transition into another spiritual world. “Crossing the Jordan”
can be a circumlocution for dying. A dream about crossing a river can be
about one‟s own death or that of a friend or relative, or it might also be an
encounter with another spiritual dimension, such as a meeting with the
deceased or with spirits (33).

A stream appearing in a dream may also indicate a step from one stage in life
to the next, such as moving from childhood to adulthood. Dreams about rivers
are in my experience always very significant, like all dreams about water.

Earth
The earth does not have the elemental power and might of water. Dreams
about the earth are generally positive unless they are about being buried.
“Mother earth” carries and sustains us and hence is the essential maternal
principle. Sayings such as “down to earth” or “to earth” a cable or “earthiness”
imply something straightforward and safe. It is a tranquil element and he who
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feels connected to it knows where he stands. It is our home, our sanctuary

and gives us a feeling of belonging. People who are close to the element
earth often reject change because they seek continuity, regularity and solidity.

However, problems arise if we feel threatened in our earth dream, if for

instance there is an earthquake, or we become buried alive or if we need to
descend underground. Such a descent brings us into contact with our own
depths, possibly with our roots in a primordial or a historical sense.The earth
element also shows us that we are transitory and mortal. We throw a handful
of earth onto the coffin at funerals and the priest tells us that we have come
from dust and return to dust. Too much earth can be heavy and hinder us
from making necessary changes. Too little earth can stop us from putting
down roots and we wander about without finding a place in our life. Here
again, the context of the dream is of prime importance.

Air
Air is both a spiritual element (spiritus in Latin = wind, breeze, breath) as well
as an important life symbol. God gave his creatures the breath of life in the
Bible. When breathing stops, a person used to be considered dead. The lungs
are the organ that symbolises our body‟s relationship to life. If the lungs are
attacked in a dream, it means that the dreamer has a problem at the moment
with accepting life and making himself comfortable in it. Dreams about air
itself, as an element, almost always have a spiritual character in my
experience. An air dream may however indicate problems, if we disappear
into thin air or “evaporate”. Such dreams may be expressing our wish to leave
this life and to take refuge in a spiritual world. Air dreams also comprise
dreams about flying, birds or other creatures of the air. If an adult dreams
about flying (not as a solution of a conflict but as an agreeable experience) I
believe he is having a spiritual dream that is putting him into his own spiritual
or astral body (see the comments on astral trips above).

Air is not however our natural space. Therefore a dream about air should
prompt the following questions: Is the dreamer possibly soaring too steeply up
into the air, influenced intellectually, spiritually or maybe through love? Or
does the dreamer need more space to breathe, more breadth and freedom?
(Incidentally, this is the psychological cause of asthma).

Fire
Dreaming about fire is often associated with negative images and sensations.
We are threatened if our house or other objects are on fire. Fire dreams
generally mean that something in us has caught fire. This element also
belongs to the spiritual world, which is why people often dream about the attic
catching fire (rationality, control, brain/head work...) This kind of dream would
indicate negativity or maybe even spiritual confusion. Fire is mostly also
connected to our mental centre. If fire threatens to engulf us, it means that
there is trouble at the subconscious level: beliefs, fears, confusing and
menacing thoughts assail us. These are our non- conscious thought
processes that cause a fire in our personality to break out.
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Fire can also be positive: we talk about being “fired up” if we become
enthusiastic about an idea, a thought or a project. Perhaps this kind of fire is
lacking in the dreamer. In interpreting a dream we should pay particular
attention to the mood of the dream as well as to the picture it describes. Does
the fire die down, does it burn us or warm us? Is it the tamed kind of fire in an
oven or fire place, or is it a flaming conflagration that engulfs us?

7. The house
Like a car or a ship, a house symbolises the totality of our personality. Having
several floors, it represents the multi-layered aspect of our personality very
well. The roof and loft represent the ego-conscious: reflection, thinking,
rational acts. The cellar symbolises our own primeval character and our
unconscious zone. In dreams about houses, it is interesting to establish who
the people are who inhabit them. Long forgotten people often suddenly
appear. It is also important to note whom the house belongs to, or whose
house appears in the dream. If it is not our own house, one might infer that we
do not live within ourselves. A dream often returns us to our parents‟ house,
showing us that our primeval character has not moved out from there or would
like to move back in. Another important clue is how the house is arranged or
furnished. Is it tidy, is it clearly laid out, is it full of rubbish, chaotic or dirty?
The house shows us what it looks like at present within ourselves. A dream
house often also gives us some indication of time via its owners or
inhabitants: our parents‟ house (=childhood or youth), our parents-in-laws‟
house, grandfather‟s house etc. This aspect is important because it may be
linked to the problem evoked by the dream.

8. People
People appear in most dreams. They are often long forgotten school friends,
old contacts or partners who play no part anymore in our conscious daily life.
Our primeval sphere has however stored them up and then uses them
according to the dream‟s message. I have therefore made it my rule always to
investigate these figures both as subjects and as objects. These figures are
almost never in the dream exclusively as themselves. Practically always
(except possibly in some spiritual dreams), these people are an expression of
one‟s own self. In relating the interpretation to the subject, we find a key to the
meaning of the figure, in other words, the figure shows us a side of ourselves
that we perceived particularly clearly in that other person. People then remind
us of a specific time, an attitude, an action etc.

8.1. The substitute

People who appear in our dreams are mostly substitutes for ourselves. They
represent us or a part of us from a special angle. In my experience, these
people are generally old school-mates, old friends or acquaintances from a
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long time back, or maybe brothers and sisters. Interpreting the dream at the
level of the subject is particularly indicated if the figures in the dream seem to
come from very far off, either time-wise or from the extreme outer circle of the
dreamer‟s acquaintanceships. Frequently, these people have not impinged on
the dreamer‟s waking life for an extremely long time. It is precisely because of
their remoteness and neutrality that the primeval sphere picks them out as
substitutes for our own selves. It is therefore not immediately obvious that the
figures are us. They generally symbolise a facet or a central core in our
personality. It is therefore extremely important to listen and concentrate hard
on this aspect when we try to understand a dream.

A person in his fifties had the following dream:

The ship launching

I have just finished installing a new sauna. It is located in a most beautifully
renovated old ship lying in dry dock. The ship is now ready. I am about to sail
in it with Gabriel, a good friend of mine. I am about to do the official ship
launching So I go to the dock and let one of those wide, rounded bottles
containing Franconian wine drop, but the string attached to the bottle is too
short, so that it does not shatter against the ship. I try again while the ship
slowly slides away. I simply cannot make it work. Gabriel is very annoyed. I
run after the ship, still trying to give it its baptism. I then find myself in the dry
dock, which looks like a narrow street with rails. I keep running after the ship,
but suddenly between the rails in this narrow street, there is a white stone
monument of Pope John Paul II. I am tempted to break the bottle on this
monument because it feels like a kind of compromise solution instead of
smashing it against the ship. Gabriel encourages me to do this. But I hesitate
because I think it would be disrespectful.

The interpretation revealed the following: The sauna is the place where the
dreamer likes to withdraw to be totally himself and at one with himself. The
ship in the dry dock is his personality. In recent years, he had been doing a lot
of work on himself and had renovated “the old ship” most beautifully. The
dreamer is catholic and leads a normal, conventional life. Gabriel is a friend
who is audacious, unconventional, he rides a motorbike, he loves adventure,
he is successful and gives everyone a good time. Gabriel is a substitute for
the dreamer and symbolises a part of him, that would like to be, and live, like
Gabriel. By working on his personality, the dreamer had been mobilizing his
own bolder traits. His own “wild man” is depicted in the dream by his friend
Gabriel. The wine bottle from Franconia points to his father who still lives
there. The dreamer is asking his father for his blessing for his newly worked
out personality. This is the meaning of the dream. The launching or baptism of
the ship is the blessing (baptism) by the father (wine from Franconia) for the
new, wild, bold ego (renovated ship/Gabriel). Gabriel is annoyed because the
dreamer fails. The ship (=new ego) leaves the dock without the father‟s
blessing. The monument of the Pope is again a catholic father figure, a
sovereign father and leader. Gabriel spurs the dreamer on to smash the bottle
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against the statue of the Pope, but the conventional side of the dreamer feels
that this would be sacrilegious.

8.2 Supreme leaders

Supreme leaders appear in a few, but significant dreams: a medicine man or

shaman, a holy old woman, an old man with white hair and a beard. These
supreme leaders, or as C.G.Jung would say archetypal figures, are given to
us by our higher self.They are not only psychological symbols emanating from
the primeval sphere, but they also always connect or combine with our higher
self, in other words with the divine guidance of our life. Supreme leadership
figures confer wisdom and life knowledge on us.These beings are leaders in
the truest sense of the word, they guide us spiritually and actively through life.
Fairy tales evoke these supreme leaders, such as Mother Holle who is a kind
of elemental mother and moral guide.

Such figures occur mostly in great dreams. Supreme leaders are sent to us in
our dreams when great developments or upheavals need to be
accommodated, such as moving from youth to adulthood, preparing to
become a mother or father, undertaking life-long commitments, facing a mid-
life crisis, coming to terms with suffering, dying and ultimately death. Even
death, the Grim Reaper depicted with a scythe, is a supreme leader. An
encounter with one of these great spiritual leaders in a dream sometimes
brings about a real initiation or an opening up process. Their appearance
means that the dreamer is in contact with fate and the deepest dimensions of
life. Our highest self speaks to us through these supreme leaders. It points out
duties, challenges and necessities and at the same time, through these
figures, it gives us the strength and determination to face up to our
obligations. An encounter with supreme leaders in a dream is uplifting and
almost holy in terms of the mood of the dream.

8.3. Lesser leaders: people in authority

Not all leaders in dreams emanate from the self, many are in fact presented to
us by the primeval sphere. These might be a train conductor, a policeman, an
officer, a pilot, the prime minister or president, a king, emperor or other people
in authority. They represent either our own or a generally accepted natural
value system. When they appear, they are normally admonishing us. They
symbolise the basic order against which we should not offend. If their authority
turns up in a dream, one should ask whether and how the dreamer might have
neglected or transgressed against an important rule. Figures in authority
provide a warning system which we should heed. Mostly, there are grounds
for correcting certain conscious actions or attitudes when a person in authority
intervenes. This is equally the case in our conscious life where they only play
a role if our conduct is out of order. In Freud‟s language a person in authority
represents the super-ego. If we offend against the deep-seated standards and
values inculcated into us by our parents, they pop up in our dreams. They
appear additionally if we contravene against the natural order. People in
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authority are a kind of warning signal triggered by the primeval sphere. They
look after our safety, even in dreams. That is why it is rewarding to determine
what their message is.

8.4. Murderers and burglars

These dark figures in dreams are fearsome and mean danger and menace. In
the dream image, the threat comes from outside but the threat may also lie
within the dreamer. A murderer can have various meanings.

A woman who had a strict moral upbringing as a good Christian and whose
mental centre was imbued with these tenets, suffered a series of dreams
about murder over a number of years. She had interiorized her father as a
judgmental and punishing force who threatened her in the night. Her desire
and her behaviour towards sex did not conform with the value judgment of her
father, so he appeared in the dreams as a “murderous” threat. Her
unconscious fear about her guilt and the consequent punishment created a
dream-murderer for her.

A murderer may also be an image for own‟s self and indicate that we are
killing something in us, possibly through ignorance or fear. A memory of an
earlier life may also be a possibility. If in an earlier life, a murder was
committed upon us, such dreams may occur. In this case, the dream would
normally be a recurring dream where the murder is repeated again and again.

Burglars may indicate that repressed thoughts, wishes and urges are
“breaking in”. They are shadowy figures evoking a side of us that we are not
aware of and eluding our consciousness. A burglar is a stranger, a negative
unknown presence, mostly in our own self. If, in addition, the burglar steals
something, this shows a fear of loss. Then it is important to determine what
exactly is stolen from the dreamer. Sometimes we may experience
unconsciously that other people are intruders, such as parents, partners or
even offspring. The house symbolises our entire personality. If an intruder is
trying to break in, we should first ask what part of our self has been shut out
and is now trying to re-enter the house in this dark and covert fashion. Or we
should ask who is close to us who might be “intruding” on our personality or
ego. This could be someone who exerts pressure on us or has, or is trying to
have, power over us.

8.5 Spiritual figures

Everybody has one or several spiritual leaders; they are spiritual beings who
accompany us and support us from the spiritual world. These beings can
appear in dreams. They are not a product of our primeval sphere, they are not
symbols or anything similar but real beings in their own right. As a rule, we
cannot discern their face. Sometimes they have a message for us, which is
why Christianity calls them angels (angelos in Greek means messenger). The
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presence of spiritual leaders is almost always an uplifting sensation for the

dreamer. Other spiritual beings come from the dark side of the spiritual world
and can frighten us, threaten us or endanger us. Such beings can take on
endless shapes, from typical devilish heads to imps and monsters. Again,
these beings and figures are not a product of our personality, but they come
into us from outside through the spirit. Their shape is generally not human. In
these cases it is advisable to pray loudly and to beg God for light and
protection. We can do this even in our dreams. Prayer always works and it is
the best ever protection against the dark side.

9. Colours and their symbolical meaning

I do not claim to the cover the subject entirely, but I would like to present a few
important aspects and meanings of colours. I am talking here about the
unconscious meaning of colours in the context of the primeval sphere.
Colours can have other meanings in other contexts, for instance spiritually.
Here, and everywhere in dream interpretation, the significance imputed to the
dream by the individual takes precedence over these generalities to which I
am limiting myself here. Symbols are the same in our waking life as in our
dreams so the following meanings also apply to our waking life.

Black
Black symbolises death, mourning and sadness. It also expresses our desire
to keep our distance. These feelings are closely linked. In the past people
wore black to show that they were in mourning, that they had lost a close
relative and needed time to grieve, and they also expected to be given space
to do so. Black is the dark side of spirituality. That is why we speak of “black
magic” when people deal with occult forces.The devil is often portrayed as
black and sooty.

Blue
Blue symbolises depth, distance and coolness. The endless sky is blue,
likewise the deep sea. Blue is thus a colour denoting that which is
fundamental and existential. It is the colour of mysticism, philosophy and
spirituality and of the deepest discoveries of the mind. It means insight,
perception of reality and in-depth knowledge. At the same time, blue is as cold
as the sky or the sea. The “coldness” of blue corresponds to the intellect.
Whenever blue appears in a dream this implies keen spiritual insight but not
warm feelings.

Green
Green is the colour of dominance, power and order. In dreams, green may
also mean that we fight change, we stubbornly refuse to compromise and are
self-opinionated. It stands for our need for rules, methodology, leadership and
assessment. Nature is green - it is the greatest power on earth that we can
experience. In many countries, the army is clad in green and so is the police
in Germany. When green appears in a dream, it may be a command to heed
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our inner order or it may point to our resistance to change, such as in the
example of the dreamer with his little green boat. (see under “ship”)

Wine red
Dark red colours symbolise our need for security in the widest sense.
Whenever this colour plays a role in dreams or in our waking life, it is a
question of safety. Older people have an increased need for security and it
transpires that an above average number of senior citizens drive dark red
cars. The down-side about this need for security is the concomitant fear of
change resulting in hanging on for far too long to old habits and life styles.
Many people become stuck in a rut and are sometimes also obdurate in the
pursuit of their security.

Purple
Purple is a step up from wine red and symbolises an increased need for
security. In a psychological interpretation, purple means an excessive and
often problematical need to be cosseted. It generally indicates strong
unconscious fears of loss. In spiritual dreams purple may also represent the
intellectual world.

Brown
Brown is the colour of earth and indicates our need to be rooted in the soil and
to have continuity in our existence. It stands for a kind of heaviness and
solidity. At the same time, it is a warm colour; it can express an aptitude to
persevere but also to stagnate. In our waking life too, brown points to a
connection with the element earth.

Yellow
All warm colours represent our wish for harmony in our relationships. Yellow
and all pastel shades are relationship colours. Human warmth, affection,
nearness, communication, sharing and exchanges are all expressed by
yellow. A warm yellow represents our wish to love and be loved, indeed, all
pastel hues mean this.

Bright red and blood red

These are colours of sexuality, vitality and aggression. The colour of blood is
the colour of life itself, of vivacity and vitality. Blood pulsates though our body
and keeps it alive. It is spilt in fighting when aggression takes over. Sexuality
and aggression hang together like twins and their togetherness gives them the
same red colour. A “red light district” indicates sex for sale. If we get angry, we
“see red”.

White
White is not actually a colour but it does often appear in dreams. It symbolises
purity, innocence and virginity. A “white lie” is an innocent lie. A bride wears
a white gown to show she is a virgin. (This was the original meaning, at least).
In a dream we should however also ask ourselves whether white is supposed
to dissimulate or white-wash something: a guilty secret, a blemish, some
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skeleton in the cupboard? Spiritually white also stands for a kind of rapture or
ecstasy. There is a white light which is not of this world. Sometimes, when
dead people appear, they are bathed in a white light or they wear white
clothes. This shows us that they come from another world. A white person in a
dream may also indicate neutrality. The neutrality of the colour creates a kind
of distance.

10. The human body

In many dreams, single parts of the human body play an important role,
mostly in a problematical way, in that we dream of incapacity or sickness.
Every body part and every organ has its own symbolical meaning within the
primeval sphere. There is again no difference between their significance in a
dream or in our waking life. If an organ is actually diseased, its symbolical
significance is the same as if we had dreamt it. In this sense I think that the
following list can be taken as a tool in understanding one‟s own actual
ailments. For further study on this subject, I refer to the books by Ruediger
Dahlke and Louise Hay quoted in the bibliography.

10.1. The body in its entirety

The whole left side of the body represents our emotional or feminine side in
general terms.
The whole right side of the body represents our rational or masculine side in
general terms.

Apart from the different meanings of single body parts, the entire body, seen
from bottom to top, is a kind of time-track subdivided into 7-year rhythms.

The foot up to the ankle symbolises our first year in life, our arrival in the world
or in our family etc.

The legs from the foot to the knee represent the first 7 years of our life, with
the left side being our relationship with our mother and the right side with our
father.

The part from the knee to the hip and genitals represents the life span from
the age of 7 to 14. The rump denotes the age of fourteen onwards, when a
child becomes his own person. The genitals are here and they begin to play a
central part during puberty.

The body from the genitals to the neck symbolises the age from 14 to 21. We
“wander through” the trunk and torso in discovering our self and our
personality.
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The next development phase from 21 to 28 is symbolised by our upper arms

up to the elbow. During this time, we focus on relationships, marriage and
family (left side) as well as further education, work and profession (right side).

The period between the ages of 28 to 35 is symbolised by the part between

the elbow and the hands. It is the time of life for creating, instigating and
seizing opportunities. It is a time to make decisions, to be enterprising and to
give and take.

The next phase between 35 and 42 is symbolised by the neck. We are now at
the apex of our life in terms of our strength, energy and enthusiasm for action.
This is a time to understand and recognize our own needs and demands and,
in particular, to express them and fulfill them.

The life span from 42 to 49 is symbolised in the body by the face from the chin
to the crown. It is a time of true self knowledge.

From the 49th year onwards the natural order of life starts with its spiritual
knowledge, which is symbolised by the crown of the head.

10.2. Single parts of the body and their meaning

The feet stand for our presence, our standing in life. The soles of our feet
relate to how well we hold on to life. Feet and legs also indicate our ability to
make progress.
The left foot also represents our mother and our early relationship with her,
while our right foot refers to our father and our early relationship with him.

The knees symbolise our capacity to give in. Dreams about knees or knee
problems in our waking life show us that, at some point, we are stubborn and
refuse to give in. The ego shows its reaction in the knees. Unconscious
feelings of being humiliated by others manifest themselves in the knees. We
speak about “bringing someone to his knees”, meaning to vanquish him. “On
your knees!” commands a gesture of humiliation.

The thighs represent the period from 7 to 14 years of age, the left side being
our relationship with our mother, the right with our father.

The genitals are self-explanatory: sexuality, vitality, desire, adulthood.

The bladder symbolises letting go, especially of relationships. If people suffer

from bladder problems they are cross or irritated, mostly with a partner or
substitute partner (father, mother).

The kidneys symbolise relationships, with the two kidneys facing each other
as you and I. A dream about a diseased kidney indicates that we feel hurt,
neglected and unloved in a very close relationship (partner, parents, children).
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The intestines stand for relinquishing whatever is old. It may be a case of

letting people and relationships go or giving up material things like a house,
property or other things. If we cannot let go, we become constipated. If we are
afraid to let go, we will have diarrhea. (“Being shit scared”).

The stomach stands for digesting current experiences and developments.

The liver and gall bladder represent suppressed aggression, fury and
annoyance. “The gall of bitterness” means the bitterest grief or extreme
affliction. To feel “liverish” means to feel peevish or glum.

The pancreas stands for the sweetness in our life.

The spleen means an attack or possession by negative spirits and forces.

The heart is our emotional centre. It refers to the totality of our emotions and
especially to love and joy.

Blood is the free flowing joy of life.

The lungs represent the actual principle of life: giving and taking. You live as
long as you breathe. A lung disease in a dream or in our waking life indicates
a problem with living. When the lungs are damaged, our vital nerves are under
attack. We often do not want to continue to be here and subconsciously
entertain ideas of dying.

The throat symbolises our ability to express our own needs and especially to
define what troubles us and what our aims are. “To have words stuck in one‟s
throat” or “to have a lump in one‟s throat” is to be unable to utter them
because of reluctance, nervousness or emotion. When the throat falls ill, it
means that we cannot express what bothers us, and that we have to swallow
our aggression and emotions.

The eyes stand for everything that we see and that we do not wish to see.
Our left eye looks at our emotional state while the right eye perceives our
rational and conscious decisions.

The teeth stand for resolutions. If we have problems with our teeth in a dream
or in our waking life, it means that we are troubled subconsciously by an
imminent problem needing a resolution.

Ears mean hearing. Our ears become unwell if we do not want to hear
something. This can come from outside, such as information from other
people (inflammation of the middle ear, deafness) or from inside, from our
own inner voice (tinnitus).

The elbows represent changes of direction in life.

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These are just a few, very general interpretations of a selected number of

parts of the body or organs. But the basic principle always applies: The
individual always takes precedence over the general.

In conclusion
Dear reader

You have now taken on board a lot of information about the knowledge of
dreams
Some of it is doubtless new to you, and you probably found some of it
incredible or strange.
If you get involved with your dreams, you will enlarge your view of the world.
You will open a door to other dimensions. If you continue to work on your
dreams, you might soon be able to write your own book filled with your many
varying dreams.

The aim of this book is to encourage you to have faith in your own dreams. A
first reading may overwhelm you, and you may think it is too much for you to
cope with the complexity of your dreams. Remember the phrase: ”practice
makes perfect”! I would therefore like to ask you to keep practising with
confidence. Always remember that your dream is there for you, it is speaking
very personally and individually to you. You are capable of hearing its
message, to interpret it and to integrate it into your life as a gift of great
richness. I believe you can do it.

My wish to you now, is that your dreams are a helpful and good companion
through your life, because dream interpretation is self-knowledge and hence
an aid in life.
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Footnotes
22. C. G. Jung Psychological Types. 647 f
23. Der Mensch und seine Symbole 56
24. Op. cit. 32
25. Op. cit. 29
26. Op. cit. 53
27. I would like to point to our age-old knowledge and quote the words of
Jesus of Nazareth: “He who wishes to preserve his life shall lose it but he
who loses his life for me shall find it.” Luke 16, 25. Or ... “a grain of wheat
remains a solitary grain unless it falls into the ground and dies; but if it dies
it bears a rich harvest.”
John 12, 24
28. R.A. Moody: Leben vor dem Leben 1999 (Life before living)
29 Martin Heidegger: Sein und Zeit ( Being and Time) 1927
30. See also the books by Louise L. Hay and Ruediger Dahlke
31. So god created man in his own image, in the image of God created he
him male and female created he them. Genesis 2. 27
32. The Indian book on the interpretation of dreams, - Sun Bear - see
Bibliography
33 See examples under item 8.1.1
 113

Bibliography

Aeppli , Ernst : Der Traum und seine Deutung 1960

Dahlke, Ruediger: Krankheit als Sprache der Seele. Be-Deutung und Chance
der Krankheitsbilder. 1999

The Holy Bible

Freud , Sigmund: The interpretation of Dreams. 9th edition 1950

Freud, Sigmund: Essays I, Selection 1890-1914 hg. D. Simon 1988

Freud, Sigmund: Essays II, Selection 1915-1919, hg. D. Simon 1988

Freud, Sigmund: Essays II Selection III 1920-1937 hg. D. Simon 1988

Hark, Helmut: Traueme als Ratgeber. Deutungshilfen fuer die Praxis, 1983

Hay, L.Louise: Gesundheit der Koerper und Seele. 1994

Heidegger, Martin: Sein und Zeit (Being and Time) 1927

Hellinger, Bert/Gabriele ten Hoevel: Anerkennen, was ist. Gespraeche ueber

Verstrickung und Loesung. 1996
Jung, Carl Gustav: Die Beziehungen der Psychotherapie zur Seelsorge 1932

Jung, Carl, Gustav: Psychologische Typen. 1921

Jung, Carl, Gustav: Die Psychologie der Uebertragung 1946

Jung, Carl, Gustav: Archetypen. 1990 hg. Von Lorenz Jung

Jung, Carl, Gusta: Der Mensch und seine Symbole. 1981

Jung, Carl, Gustav: Psychologische Betrachtungen. Ausgewaehlt und hg. von

J. Jacobi

Moody, Raymond A. : Leben vor dem Leben. 1999

Schneider Norbert, Juergen: Die Kunst des Teilens. Zeit, Rhythmus und Zahl.
1991

Sun Bear/Wabun Wind Shawnodese: Das Medizinrad-Traumbuch. Der

indianische Weg der Traumdeutung. 1995