These are some
terrific quotes that truly delve into the very heart of our dreamscape.
We
know that the wildest and most moving dramas are played not in the theatre but in the
hearts of ordinary men and women who pass by without exciting attention, and who betray to
the world nothing of the conflicts that rage within them except possibly by a nervous
breakdown. What is so difficult for the layman to grasp is the fact that in most cases the
patients themselves have no suspicion whatever of the internecine war raging in their
unconscious. If we remember that there are many people who understand nothing at all about
themselves, we shall be less surprised at the realization that there are also people who
are utterly unaware of their actual conflicts.
The
dream is a little hidden door in the innermost and most secret recesses of the soul,
opening into that cosmic night which was psyche long before there was any ego
consciousness, and which will remain psyche no matter how far our ego-consciousness
extends. For all ego-consciousness is isolated; because it separates and discriminates, it
knows only particulars, and it sees only those that can be related to the ego. Its essence
is limitation, even though it reach to the farthest nebulae among the stars. All
consciousness separates; but in dreams we put on the likeness of that more universal,
truer, more eternal man dwelling in the darkness of primordial night. There he is still
the whole, and the whole is in him, indistinguishable from nature and bare of all egohood.
It is from these all-uniting depths that the dream arises, be it never so childish,
grotesque, and immoral.
A dream, like every element in the psychic
structure, is a product of the total psyche. Hence we may expect to find in dreams
everything that has ever been of significance in the life of humanity. just as human life
is not limited to this or that fundamental instinct, but builds itself up from a
multiplicity of instincts, needs, desires, and physical and psychic conditions, etc., so
the dream cannot be explained by this or that element in it,'however beguilingly simple
such an explanation may appear to be. We can be certain that it is incorrect, because no
simple theory of instinct will ever be capable of grasping the human psyche, that mighty
and mysterious thing, nor, consequently, its exponent, the dream. In order to do anything
like justice to dreams, we need an interpretive equipment that must be laboriously fitted
together from all branches of the humane sciences.
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