“The dream is a little hidden door in the innermost and most secret recesses of the soul,” Jung wrote (CW 10, para. 304). It is the opening line of ARAS’s latest Archetype in Focus, the monthly feature in which the Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism takes a single symbol and follows it through images and cultures. This month’s is the Dream, and it comes with some news attached. ARAS has launched a Patreon page, and the long-awaited archive of every Archetype in Focus post is now available there.
For those who haven’t come across it, Patreon takes its name from “patron”, someone who supports an artist or cause. It is a membership platform where people can support the organisations that move them, and in return receive bonuses, exclusive content, early access and other perks. This is where ARAS plans to offer the extras it has been holding back. The archive of Archetype in Focus posts is the headline, as ARAS says followers have been asking for it for a long time. There are also research packets compiled during the writing of The Book of Symbols. These cover more than 220 symbols, each gathering the relevant research from around 40 resources in the ARAS library into a single file. ARAS suggests that if there is a symbol you have wanted to explore more deeply, the research may already be done for you! Other benefits include exclusive art prints from the archive, mailed to your physical mailbox every quarter, and ARAS merchandise made with artisans. There are also meet-ups, art prompts and access to the ARAS Lecture Vault of earlier lectures. To become a patron go to Patreon.com/arasarchive and choose Membership Options. There are six levels, starting from $3 a month.
The Dream feature itself ranges from Hellenistic dream incubation in temples, to Native American dream quests and the Aboriginal Australian Dreaming. It ends with the waking dream as aspiration, taking Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a dream” as a public summons. The images come from the ARAS archive, including a sixteenth-century Indian painting of Queen Trisala dreaming, and the 3800 to 3600 BCE “Sleeping Lady” sculpture from Malta.
If you are new to ARAS, or would like to find your way around it, the best starting point is A Guide to ARAS, a free online book at aras.org/guide, written for analysts, candidates, artists, scholars, students and anyone who loves symbolic images. You can see our breakdown of The Guide here. Its launch event, published on YouTube at the end of 2025, brings together four of its contributors. Thomas Singer, president of the ARAS board, introduces the archive and its origins in the Eranos seminars of the 1930s. Patricia Llosa, who wrote the guide’s introduction, speaks about the spirit of ARAS and its founder, Olga Froebe-Kapteyn. Bruce Parent draws on his essay on circumambulation, and Betty Sue Flowers on mythopoesis and the hero’s journey