Some Dreamers Bring Collective Dreams to a Whole Group
I want to mention one more type of dream that isn’t compatible with the life-as-school metaphor: collective dreams.
This fascinating dream phenomenon demonstrates the underlying connectedness of people involved in a common endeavor. I’ll tell you a dramatic example.
This is the sixteenth post in a series on dreams. In Part 9 of the series, I told you about the metaphor that can serve as a guidepost for interpreting many dreams.
https://dreamtherapyminneapolis.com/dream-series-part-9-life-as-school/
But since then, I’ve been telling you about the exceptions: objective (literal) dreams, prospective dreams, prodromal dreams, relationship dreams, and now collective dreams.
Starting next week, we’ll go deep-sea diving in the unconscious.
I’ll go more in-depth about symbolic dreams—also called subjective dreams. These are the kind where the life-as-school metaphor tends to help. I’ll go into the workings of symbols, complexes, archetypes. We’ll look at how they interact with mythology, folklore and fairy tales. I’ll tell you how to identify a personal myth in your dreams.
For now, let’s not miss out on the big drama of collective dreams.
As always, please note that this post is solely educational and not a form of treatment.
Have you ever been in a group where people shared their dreams
and one group member had some dreams for the whole group?
I was in a dream group like that.
It was always the same woman who brought the collective dreams. The group leader didn’t. But the leader knew how to identify these dreams.
Often, collective dreams simply bring helpful information in a symbolic language. Sometimes, they can be anticipatory of events.
One example is the series of visions and dreams Carl Jung reported having just prior to the outbreak of World War I. While traveling alone in October 1913, he first had two visions of disaster, with a huge flood from the North Sea to the Alps awash with corpses and rubble, then turning to blood.
At the end of the second version, an inner voice said, “Look at it well; it is wholly real and it will be so. You cannot doubt it.” (Jung, 1989).
When asked at a professional meeting for his opinion about world affairs, he said he doesn’t have any opinions about that but only has been seeing rivers of blood. He later wrote that war didn’t even occcur to him.
If this means anything, it means that I am hopelessly off. I had the feeling that I was in an over-compensated psychosis, and from this feeling I was not released until August 1st, 1914. ―
Then in spring and early summer of 1914, he had a dream that recurred three times.
. . . in the middle of summer an Arctic cold wave descended and froze the land to ice.
I saw, for example, the whole of Lorraine and its canals frozen and the entire region totally deserted by human beings.
All living green things were killed by frost.
This dream came in April and May, and for the last time in June, 1914.
In the third dream frightful cold had again descended from out of the cosmos.
This dream, however, had an unexpected end. There stood a leaf-bearing tree, but without fruit (my tree of life, I thought), whose leaves had been transformed by the effects of the frost into sweet grapes full of healing juices.
I plucked the grapes and gave them to a large, waiting crowd . . .
In Jungian dreamwork, the tendency to take dreams literally without deeper consideration is a rookie mistake. It can also be an egotistical error, since it’s usually more difficult to look for the meaning in oneself than attribute it to the environment. It’s a good rule-of-thumb to exercise restraint and caution about seeing dreams from a collective standpoint.
Jung employed this reserve and humble self-examination in considering the series of visions and dreams. Perhaps, in this case, it could have been harder to see the visions and dreams as collective because of what they disclosed.
In my experience, collective dreams are rare. Many people don’t tend to have them at all.
When I was in the dream group I mentioned earlier, it was only one woman who brought such dreams, and that was infrequent. And they weren’t dreams about disaster!
They commented on the dynamics of the group and the topics we were exploring.
The collective dreams provided a perspective that deepened group members’ work together, and also affirmed the living presence of the deeper psyche collaborating with us.
From these descriptions, perhaps you see that collective dreams can simply be enhancing a group’s process, but they are sometimes bold warnings of impending large-scale events. A danger exists when someone interprets subjective dreams as if they are speaking about world events or community matters.
If a person wants to feel important, or if someone is overly susceptible to being swept up in the tides of the unconscious (like in fantasies of doom or feelings of knowing the future), he or she could wander toward psychosis by thinking that a subjective dream was a collective dream. Using restraint and seeking guidance can help.
Yet, overall, it’s interesting that dreams care about the health and well-being of groups, including when that group is all of humankind.
References
Jung, C.G. (Author), Sonu Shamdasani (Editor, Translator) (2012). The Red Book: A Reader’s Edition. W.W. Norton & Company.
Jung, C.G. (Author), Aniella Jaffé (Editor) (1989). Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Vintage Books.
