Lucid Dreaming by Paul Levy
LUCID DREAMING
By Paul Levy
In the late eighties I was the book service manager at the C. G. Jung Foundation in New York. I would oftentimes meet some of the major Jungian analysts in the world. One day, one of the most famed Jungians of England was in the bookstore. Taking advantage of one of the perks of the job, which was to get the chance to pick the brains of the leading Jungian thinkers, I began dialoguing with him about a major interest of mine, lucid dreaming. Lucid dreaming is when we recognize we are dreaming and continue the dream with this recognition. A few years before this conversation I had begun having profoundly significant lucid dreams which had exponentially catapulted my own process of healing and awakening. I was really curious what a traditional Jungian elder would say about the cutting-edge phenomena of lucid dreaming.
Much to my dismay and disappointment, this highly esteemed Jungian author pooh-poohed the practice of lucid dreaming, saying it was just hypnagogic imagery, emphatically stating his opinion that it was not a good thing for the conscious ego to interfere with the unconscious. For a traditional Jungian the unconscious was the font of wisdom, and we shouldn’t try to direct or control it. From the Jungian point of view, we should learn from, dialogue with and get into relationship with the unconscious. Dreams speak in the language of symbols, which from the Jungian point of view compensate an overly one-sided attitude of consciousness. In essence, to a Jungian, dreams are a self-balancing mechanism of the psyche which serve to integrate the conscious and the unconscious. Who can disagree or argue with any of this?
This particular Jungian scholar was of the opinion, however, that it was a mistake to intervene in the dream with the conscious ego, as to do so would be getting in the way of a deeper process of guidance that needed to be kept pure. I have since learned that he wasn’t speaking for Jung, though he thought he was, as Jung himself was much more turned on to the dreamlike nature of experience.
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