Last Night

I woke up fairly early this morning with a question on my mind: what was I trying to tell myself?

The issue was a fleeting image of writing this post today. The idea was that a symbol was trying to make itself clear to me in my dream, but I couldn’t fix my attention on it sufficiently clear enough to understand what it was.

It was not the first time that such a situation has occurred to me. In fact, most nights I dream ‘something’ which I then have to grab back to consciousness in the morning. But this one has eluded me, and that might be the point entirely.

Ampersand

Take this word for example. We don’t think about it in everyday language, but we use it all the time. The image (above) is a perfect reminder of how a word becomes a symbol.

When it shows up in a sentence, we say “and” without a second thought. And yet it is a shortcut for the Latin word “et”. Most people, these days, do not study Latin, so the ‘reason’ is lost to them.

It’s the same with symbolic language in general.

Collective Unconscious

Carl Jung suggested that there is a store of knowledge that is available to everyone. He felt that they were ancient archetypes: images that contain within them the information that can be interpreted by sincere seekers of truth. He saw dreams as our access point to this information.

In modern times, we hearken back to these images via “Fairy Tales”, so it must be asked why these stories have such a hold on our imaginations. “Once Upon a Time” takes us immediately back to the childhood wonder of hearing these stories for the first time. The retelling of these stories on the TV has been quite revealing for the first six seasons of the show, especially our need for a “Saviour” to rescue us from the ‘curse’ of amnesia of our true origins.

However, the seventh season has been a huge disappointment, because we lost the “kick-ass” female character: Emma Swann. Some things work, others don’t. Just sayin’.

Conclusion

We have another way of accessing the collective unconscious: Tarot cards. When a reading is done, the cards pick up the individual’s thought processes and the reader then interprets the cards for that person. It’s an interesting process, for sure.

What I’m trying to say is that we have a vast amount of knowledge at our fingertips: all we have to do is ask and it will be given to us. Just be careful what you ask for.