Descending in Dreams

In the text "Whatever is rejected from the self, appears in the world as an event," I mention towards the end that I started to have dreams of being forced to the ground, which was followed by a slip and fall accident that literally forced me to the ground. Furthermore, I told that I worked with the symbol while I was bedridden, whereupon the dream image ceased. I have not had such dreams since.

The question arose: What did the dream symbol "descending (to the ground)" refer to? I understood that detail would arouse curiosity, but for reasons of space I waited the question before clarifying, because it requires its own text.

The dream images "high up" and "low down" are a pair of opposites. The famous Chinese symbol taijitu is a good illustration of the dualistic psyche according to Jung's model. Light and sky belong to the masculine and active yang, while darkness and earth belong to the feminine and passive yin. Our culture overvalues ​​the masculine principle ​​and consequently devalues ​​the feminine principle. We look positively on the active, expanding, bright, warm, strong and ascending; but we look negatively on the passive, constricting, dark, cold, humble, and descending.

This cultural value is integrated into our identity as part of natural adaptation to the environment from childhood. Being active and outgoing and aspiring is heroic and enviable, while being compliant and resting is associated with weakness and defeat. This is of course particularly prominent in competitive areas such as sports and business, but is also found in school and play and entertainment; competition and to at least figuratively succeed permeates pretty much all of our activities and to a large extent our own attitude.

Clarity, enlightenment and insight, resulting from facts, logic and reasoning are also cultural ideals. From architecture with houses scraping against the sky to the individual pursuit of success (in some form), yang characterizes our world and psychology.

Yang is valuable, of course; especially at a young age when one needs to establishing oneself in the world, it is generally a necessity. The problem is the one-sidedness, especially if it persists over decades of our lifetime, because yin is basically nowhere to be found in our culture or even individual life; even though the feminine principle is not only as valuable as yang but also a significant part of our inner lives.

This one-sided yang attitude is sometimes symbolized in our dreams by "high up" themes. We can be on a tall structure and feel dizzy, cling to a roof, fear falling to the ground; climb, take the elevator up or even hover or fly. Edward Edinger says:

"In fact, for contemporary [dreamers], elements of ascent, heights, and flying almost always indicate a need for descent." (Anatomy of the Psyche, p. 142.)

I have had my fair share of these kinds of dreams, where we leave the ground or yin below and find ourselves in a precarious situation. But before my accident, I began to dream that I was forced to the ground, which is a rarer, more literal image. But the high-up-low-down theme is nonetheless a common dream symbol, as Jung points out:

"[Both rational and irrational people are] just as much detached from the soil, as it were. That is in accord with all that I have found in practical analysis; in every case, without exception, it must be a descent because it is typical of the Western mind that it moves into a conscious world." (Visions, p. 601.)

During these seminars, Jung often returns to yin and yang and in this context could just as easily say "yang" as "the conscious world". (Yang is the conscious, while yin is the unconscious, as principles.) What he highlights is precisely our culture's and the individual's focus on masculine values ​​- a one-sidedness that the unconscious will not tolerate in the long run. While young, as I said, it probably is a positive orientation, but eventually it has to be balanced. Therefore, it is typical that sooner or later there will be a backlash that first makes itself felt in our dreams.

If we return to the taijitu symbol as a picture of our psyche as a whole, we see that it strives for balance between opposites, and to some extent they mix together (the union of opposites, which is so central to Jung's work). The unconscious compensates the conscious attitude to achieve equilibrium; like the body, the psyche is a self-regulating system. Because the dreams are forced by our one-sidedness to adopt an opposite, compensatory attitude, they are often experienced as unpleasant. They show something we want to avoid in our egocentric ambition.

Yin represents the earth, the passive, unclear, docile; eros as opposed to logos; moonlight as opposed to sunlight. In our dreams, animals crawling on the ground such as snakes and toads may represent yin, as it has remained undeveloped and primitive in the darkness of the unconscious; along with other images of earthiness, such as plants. Unreasonable ascents and falls from great heights, lying helpless on the ground, and so on, illustrate the necessity of compensating the upward striving, the masculine, with earthiness, the feminine.

If we live our lives far too one-sidedly or in other ways that go against our inner nature, the unconscious strives to make us aware of what we push away; not only with unpleasant dreams that leaves us shaken, but in the worst case also with accidents or symptoms that force us to bed. It is as if the unconscious wants to give us a chance to stop and contemplate "the other". But usually it doesn't help. I have many times seen middle-aged colleagues who enjoy their jobs and work really hard, but then experience burnout or unexpected physical symptoms that force them out of work.

Of course, I cannot determine why this happened to anybody, here I am only speculating, but what I do know is that without exception they have striven to "come back" as soon as possible. After their absence, everyone has returned to being who and what he was before. This is seen as a victory and rewarded by those around them; everyone – including the one who was away – is happy that he hasn't changed a bit; that everything is as if nothing had happened.

Of course, recovery is positive, but if one turn the perspective and look at the pattern from the perspective of yin, instead of yang, it becomes missed opportunity that everything is as before. He got his chance to descend to "the soil," but only bounced on the surface while probably distracting himself with screens during sick leave, only to "rise" again, and continue with the one-sided masculine pursuits as if nothing had happened. Without reflection, as I said since childhood, we fulfill the expectations of the environment, and become this "environment" ourselves with the same expectations of others.

One is reminded of the fairy tale motif where the hero meets a toad who is in fact an enchanted princess. If, in this repulsive guise, she is accepted by the hero, the curse ends and they live happily ever after. But this demands that the hero climbs down from his horse, kneels, bend down and kiss the crawling animal. In reality, he likely just flinches and rides on, glad that it was so easy to leave the little monster behind - unaware that he missed the treasure of his life.

There is a story where a man asks why people no longer believe in God, and is told that no one can stoop that low anymore. According to Jung, the truth comes from below, it springs forth from the earth. (Aion, p. 132.) The collective justice, the law comes from heaven, but the individual truth grows out of the earth, Edinger clarifies. (The Aion Lectures.)

These motifs lead us to another yin quality belonging to the ground, namely humility, compliance – the Daoist concept of wu wei. In our masculine yang ambitions, we leave the ground and all the useless things that seem to belong to it, which with the above can be symbolized by the sick bed, to get back into the saddle to face "new challenges." In my native language, "humble" is "ödmjuk", which etymologically means "that which is easily made soft", which of course brings to mind compliance. The English word "humble" comes from the Latin humilis, which means "on the ground". One who develops humility becomes grounded and docile, manifesting yin or feminine qualities.

A few years ago I had a dream where I was sitting on the ground while many people came to me, one by one from different directions, wanting to borrow and read my texts because they felt they were valuable. I was a little taken aback by this dream, because it went against a pattern I'd noticed in my dreams. But now I think that the situation of me sitting on the ground opened up this unexpected energy; my humility opened to it.

In another dream not long after, I did the opposite. It started with me standing on a beach with many other people. Two groups of people were going to the other side of a ridge that divided the beach in two. For me it was obvious to go straight ahead, over the mountain. But a man my age told me, with an apologetic smile, that his group goes around. My path, which represented the attitude and habits of the ego, ended with me clinging to a rock, afraid to fall. The other man represented wu wei, the compliance; like water and thus according to taoist philosophy, they went around the obsctacle.

So the symbol of "descending (to the ground)" represents the feminine quality rejected in our culture - the down-to-earth, humble, docile, but also the true - which tries to get us to let it into our lives.

I had a big dream before all this was revealed to me. It started in Manhattan with all its skyscrapers, and ended on a peninsula where I met an old Asian man with a wistful smile, and a abhorrent toad at his feet. At the time I didn't understand what it meant.