One study of dreams concluded that if we live to eighty years old, six years of our life will have been spent dreaming—not sleeping, which is a far higher percentage. Six years dreaming! Apparently, dreams are tied to our nature and its effort to process, metabolize, correct, and heal the fissures that lie within each of us.

A dream is a theater in which the dreamer is himself the scene, the player, the prompter, the producer, the author, the public, and the critic. —C. G. Jung

The anima/animus usually appears in films, fiction, dreams—and waking life—as a compelling, opposite-sex other: what I am not. It can manifest in an idealized way, such as Helen of Troy or Superman, or in its dark aspect, in figures such as Medea and Dracula. Whereas shadow is largely related to personal experience, the anima/animus is infused with

This inner world is just as real, perhaps even more than the tangible world, because our presence, our choices, our being in that outer arena is governed by the psyche’s agenda, not the ego’s. Our dreams are not here to comfort us or make life easy. That is why so many of us pay so little attention to them. Rather, they ask of us attentiveness,

Having studied myths, symbols, and religious material, Jung posited a collective unconscious, a deep layer of psychic experience common to humankind. This concept is unique to Jungian psychology. The repository of prototypical, instinctual human experience over millennia, the collective unconscious is a wellspring of inherent, universal patterns

the “I” in the dream is usually the least trustworthy part. Often at night our dream ego—the “I” in the dream—is confronted by figures that frighten, denigrate, or frustrate. Upon awakening, we tend to side with our dream ego and assume that the figures that have crossed us in the dream are mistaken or threatening. Usually, however, the new

Both dreams and symptoms are examples of the transcendent function at work.

Some dreams direct us to the hidden source of a current difficulty. They may reference elements from earlier life to show how past attitudes may be maladaptive in the present.

Then you will find what supports you when nothing supports you. Then you will be comforted by, rather than threatened by, the idea that something within you knows you better than you know yourself. Then your ego consciousness will be reframed, enlarged, and deepened.