Dreams Now and Then: Paintings of Jacob’s Dream
[[[ Before the scientific “revolution,” dreams were had a significant role in healing and in religion. One of the dreams of Joseph was a major inspiration for many artists of the Renaissance:
Jacob left Beersheba and set out for Harran. When he reached a certain place, he stopped for the night because the sun had set. Taking one of the stones there, he put it under his head and lay down to sleep. He had a dream in which he saw a stairway resting on the earth, with its top reaching to heaven, and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it.” (Genesis 28:10)
In the current scientific and rational paradigm we are cultured in, dreams of the night are disregarded, neglected, ignored. I find this neglect of the reality and importance of the unconscious to be extremely short-sighted, disturbing and dangerous;it is as if there is a black hole in the present day consciousness.
I was forewarned of heart problems by a dream of a red-four cylinder engine [i.e. an analogical image of the heart] that was smoking and leaking oil; my physician and I both ignored the dream, resulting in a long journey of heart procedures and a heart attack. When I tell cardiologists about this diagnostic dream, they almost inevitably roll their eyes and discount anything else I have to say.
Eighty years ago, Jung diagnosed an organic spinal cord condition in the patient of a physician who told him the dream — yet this source of critical information that dreams provide is routinely and almost always. Why is that? ]]]
It is only in modem times that the dream, that fleeting and insignificant product of our minds, has met with such profound disdain.
C.G. Jung, Two Essays in Analytical Psychology
Jung: Dreams as Cornerstones
Of the dream it can indeed be said that “ the stone which the builders rejected has become the head stone of the comer.” It is only in modem times that the dream, that
fleeting and insignificant product of our minds, has met with such profound disdain. In earlier times it was esteemed as the herald of destiny, a warning and a consolation, the
messenger of the gods. Now we employ it as the herald of the unconscious. It reveals to us the secrets that are hidden from consciousness, and the thoroughness with which it does this is amazing.
From the analytic study of the dream it was found that the dream, as it appears to us, is only a facade which conceals the real interior of the house. But if, observing certain
technical mles, we let the dreamer talk about the details of his dream, it soon becomes manifest that his associations tend in a particular direction and revolve around particular themes.
These appear to be of personal significance, and point to a meaning which could never have been guessed to lie behind the dream. Yet through a careful comparison,
their relation to the dream facade can be shown to be both extremely exact and detailed…
The dream is apparently occupied with extremely silly details. The general impression it produces upon us is consequently absurd, or it is on the surface so unintelligible
as to leave us thoroughly perplexed. Hence we have always to overcome a certain resistance before we can seriously set about disentangling the intricate web. But when at last we penetrate to its real meaning, we find ourselves deep in the dreamer’s secrets and discover with astonishment that an apparently quite senseless dream is in the highest degree significant, and that it speaks only of extraordinarily impor-tant and serious things of the mind. This discovery compels more respect for the so-called superstition of dream interpretation, to which the rationalistic temper of our age has
hitherto given short shrift….