We are all searching for a deeper understanding of our life and destiny. Hoping to find the meaning of the choices we make, and the decisions we are too afraid to make, we mistakenly rely on our subjective, and very personal understanding of these issues. Perhaps it is once again time to follow in the footsteps of the mystics and sages who taught us to look to God, to the heavens, and always to the dream for a wisdom that far exceeds what we can consciously understand.
In turning to the symbols in our dreams, the path for this profound understanding about our life is still present. It was this understanding of the spiritual and objective nature of dream images that moved Jung and von Franz to dedicate their lives to understanding the language of Psyche. Here we enter the domain of “Psychic Representation”, where these eternal messages about life, love, career, aging and death, are expressed through the richness of universal, archetypal images.
Jung was asked why Psyche speaks in a spiritual and not a secular language, and does not ask us to just turn right or left, or to engage or disengage from a particular initiative, to which he suggested our soul speaks and understands this iconographic, symbolic language and this is what truly touches our heart and soul.
These sages and dreamers also spoke in this ancient tongue, informing us about the natural rhythms of Psyche and soul through these eternal and sacred images. In present times, however, humanity has preferred its own conscious and subjective interpretations of dream images rather than recognizing the dreams’ innate, archetypal significance.
Much of our misguided understanding of dreams and life emerges from this highly complexed and mis-aligned relationship to an archetype. It is not the language of daily life but this language of Psyche that we need to understand if we hope to change a fated, protracted, and at times a tragic life into a meaningful life where we are aligned to Psyche.
Jung understood that the greatest problems and transgressions occur when we sanctify such mis-alignments to the Self and is why he continually warned against the danger of being possessed by archetypal energies. He and von Franz pleaded for humanity to understand as much as possible about the nature and contents of the Objective Psyche and its images, so as to step away from the all-consuming power of archetypal possessions and fall prey to those contents erupting from the dark unconscious, resulting in individual and collective tragedies.
Dreams can lead us to embrace the sacred and at such moments we are brought to our knees by the experience of the sacred. It is this profound presence of Psyche and its symbolic expression in our dreams that will be the focus of this three-day Winter Dream Conference. We will take an in-depth look at the workings, and meaning of complexes in dreams and their relationship to the innate, archetypal meaning of dream images.
Dr. Magda Di Renzo, a highly acclaimed Jungian Analyst and Jungian Child Analyst from Rome (Itali), will be giving our Keynote address, speaking on the meaning of children’s dreams. We hope that you will join us for this unique event.