The Dream-Creating Ghost

The dream describes the immature ego’s initial encounter with the Self, an experience that challenges the dreamer and raises several questions. The dreamer is a man in his early twenties.

The dreamer is sitting on the floor of a boat cabin, accompanied by two friends who are sleeping. One of them is M, an old friend; the other remains unknown. The cabin is quite small, and the luggage makes it cramped. The interior is decorated in shades of red.

He has his two dream journals with him—those notebooks in which he writes down his dreams. There is something magical about them.

The dreamer is distressed. He has the feeling that a malevolent force, a ghost, is after him. He has nine Chinese amulets on the floor, which protect against evil. He arranges them symmetrically. It strikes him that the number nine is unfortunate, as it is Odin’s number and thus associated with sorcery. He tries different combinations before settling on the number five. The amulets he removes disappear.

The dreamer has come into contact with the Ghost. At first, it was intriguing, but now the Ghost has begun to take over. The Ghost claims that it is he who creates the dreamer’s dreams. It is he who writes them down in the notebooks through the dreamer.  

The dreamer does not accept this. Now, he uses his amulets to protect himself from the Ghost’s influence. The atmosphere is unsettling, but eventually, he falls asleep and dreams that he turns off from a country road and walks into a forest. He sees the Ghost in a clearing.

The Ghost appears to be dressed in a skeleton costume—a black, tight-fitting suit with a printed white skeleton. The dreamer is not afraid. They talk about dreams and the dream journals. The dreamer insists that it is he—at least his unconscious—that creates the dreams. The Ghost says that it is he who creates them, but that the dreamer believes that he himself is the one doing it since the Ghost makes them play out in his head.  

By the Ghost’s side stands a simple stone altar. The two notebooks lie there. This particular place is illuminated by a sunbeam shining through the tree canopy.  

The Ghost seems gleeful. The dreamer feels deeply uneasy. It starts to rain on the notebooks. Then, the Ghost hands them to the dreamer, who becomes very upset and rips off the wet covers. His impulse was to tear them apart completely, but he restrains himself.

The Ghost says that he has already written down the most recent dream. If the dreamer reads it now, he will see the same dream written in his notebooks when he wakes up. The dreamer reads what is written—a short, hastily recorded dream in his own handwriting. 

The dreamer says he does not believe him and walks back towards the road with the books in hand.

When he wakes up, he takes out his books and sees that the most recent dream is indeed written there, just as the Ghost had said.

One could say that the dreamer is at the beginning of his Jungian journey. Not only does he study Jungian psychology in his spare time, but he has also started working at a Jungian center. Inspired by the literature, he began writing down his dreams a few months ago; has just filled the first journal, and has started writing in the second.  

The opening of the dream takes place in a cabin on a ferry, representing this journey. We see that it is cramped with a lot of luggage. The dreamer is not forcibly confined here, but the small room, with bunk beds and barely any other furniture, along with the somewhat claustrophobic situation, resembles a prison cell. Daryl Sharp writes that “the prison is a well-known symbol to the analyst of resistance to the individuation process.” (Konsten att överleva, p. 82 [The Survival Papers].) This type of imagery, where the dreamer is cornered and fears being overwhelmed in some way, sometimes appears when the Self is approaching. That is precisely what this dream is about.

That his travel companions are asleep illustrates that the dreamer does not have access to certain mental faculties that would be useful. M represents an inner authority connected to individual spirituality, according to the dreamer’s associations. When he is unconscious, the dreamer feels exposed.

The dream journals are the most central aspect of the dream. They appear in every scene. These notebooks, which the dreamer uses to record his dreams, represent the connection between the ego and the Self; they are the very link between them. This is why they have something "magical" about them in the cabin. They are the portal between the ordinary world, where the conscious ego reigns, and the Dreamtime, where the Self rules. However, the meeting has given rise to a conflict—who, then, is the subject? The dream ego insists that it is he who is the subject, because the realization that the Self is the subject and the ego merely its tool, so to speak, is too early for the young man to accept. He must protect himself from this realization.

Since the dream ego fears the "Ghost," he perceives it not only as dangerous but also as evil. This is how we tend to react—if someone is our enemy, it must be because they are "evil," leading to projection. In dreams, what we fear appears as something dangerous—a monster chasing us, a venomous snake in the bedroom, a terrifying burglar, and so on. They reflect our attitude toward it, not its true nature, and they transform as the ego accepts the content.

Thus, the dream ego tries to build protection around himself with his Chinese symbols. (Images evoking Asia, especially China, have a positive value in his dreams.) Initially, there are nine of them. The dreamer associates the number nine with necessity, sorcery, and Odin, due to his studies of rune numerology. These associations are relevant in the situation because the Self expresses necessity, and the dreamer experiences this unwanted contact with the unconscious as a kind of sorcery; furthermore, Odin, as “The Highest,” can symbolize the Self. The dream ego realizes that the number nine is unfortunate because it expresses precisely what he wants to protect himself against.

Instead, he reduces the number to five. It is unclear what symmetrical pattern he arranges the amulets in, but it would not be surprising if they formed a pentagram, which has been used throughout history as a demon-repelling protective symbol, commonly found in magical rituals. Then, he is able to sleep.

In the dream, he dreams. The Jungian analysts Whitmont and Perera aptly state that “a dream, dreamed in a dream, refers to a hidden, but vitally crucial issue, one with archetypal existential meaning.” (Dreams: A Portal to the Source, p. 100.) The dreamer leaves everyday reality and enters Dreamtime; just as, in his dream-within-a-dream, he leaves the road and walks into the forest, into the collective unconscious—where he meets the Ghost.

That this entity is called precisely the Ghost is significant. Firstly, it expresses the fact that we are dealing with an “autonomous activity” (a complex/archetype) from “the other side” (the unconscious); but in addition, ghosts represent what remains of previous lives, the spirits of ancestors—innate structures in our psychology that can be constellated and appear in our dreams as ghosts. (Visions, p. 1266.) This is thus an archetypal image; we could call it the archetype of the shaman. It is not only appropriate because a theme of the dream is the ability to move between worlds, but it is also quite explicit considering the Ghost’s appearance as a skeleton. Mircea Eliade writes regarding initiation rites:

“The master assumes the form of a skeleton. [...] It is interesting to note that the initiator’s master, magically changing himself into a skeleton, reduces the apprentice’s stature to that of a newborn infant; both these feats symbolize the abolition of profane time and the restoration of mystical time, the Australian ‘Dream Time’.” (Shamanism, p. 132.)

“The human skeleton in a manner represents the archetype of the shaman ...” (Shamanism, p. 160.)

This connection between the shaman and the skeleton as archetypal images was entirely unknown to the dreamer.

The dream ego is, as we have seen, something of a shaman, using his dream journals to travel between worlds, and his perceived antagonist is obviously one as well. While the Self may initially be experienced as something very foreign and therefore frightening, the ego and the Self are inherently connected. The ego may be—probably is—completely unaware of the Self, but it is, so to speak, born from it. That is why similarities exist between the more enlightened ego and the Self; they share certain qualities. One could say that the hero archetype, for example, is linked to both the ego and the Self as symbols. The latter is the autonomous driving force, while the former is the one who carries out the deeds. In this dream, both the ego and the Self are the shaman. But the ego is uncomprehending and immature and cannot accept this duality or the inferiority that the relationship implies. For a young man struggling to find his place in the external world, this is not a major problem—but the dream does not suggest that it would be, either. It merely describes a fact that the dreamer may choose to acknowledge or not.

The dream journals lie on an altar, illuminated by a sunbeam. The dream thereby shows that they hold real value for the inner world, that the dreamer’s relatively new habit of writing down all his dreams is a worthwhile endeavor. They rest on the altar beneath the sun as if they were sacred books. Then it also begins to rain on the books, which in this way are purified, perhaps fertilized, in preparation for their transition into the external world.

But there is, indeed, a conflict. The dreamer continues to insist that it is he who creates the dreams, that it is his personal psychology that generates them, while the Ghost repeats that the dreamer has nothing to do with it—it is the Self that creates the dreams that the ego experiences and records. This is so upsetting to the immature dream ego that he is about to tear his books apart. He would rather destroy something valuable than accept his subordinate position. Incidentally, he merely tears off the covers. Then he stops himself. The pages with the recorded dreams are not torn apart but lose their protection. They are now both purified and naked.

The Ghost, in conclusion, tells him that he has already written down the next dream and suggests that the dreamer read it now, so he can verify it when he wakes up in the cabin. The dreamer does so and confirms the fact—it is the Ghost, or the Self, that "writes" the dreams. The ego, in this regard, is merely a tool in its hands.

“The experience of the Self is always a defeat for the ego.” (Mysterium Coniunctionis, par. 778.)

The dream appears grim for our young dreamer. However, the reason for this is that the starting point for our contemplation has been his subjective experience, as opposed to the objective standpoint of the dream. James Hillman is said to have remarked that everything in a dream is as it should be—with the exception of the dream ego. If we lift ourselves from the subjective experience and consider the dream objectively, a more uplifting dynamic emerges.

The dream books lie on an altar, in a sunbeam and then rain. The altar represents the center and the connection with the divine. What is placed on an altar is an offering from the one side to the other. According to the dream, the dream books hold the highest value, and the Self hands them to the dreamer as a holy gift. The dreamer does not understand this, due to his anxiety and his supposed defeat, but his dreams are in fact a precious and sacred gift from his inner center.