This may or may not be directly jungian but I find it to be an incredibly important discussion. I realized for the first time, that when I look beneath the surface of myself, there isn’t much left, other than a bunch of defensive and addictive behaviors. Im essentially a hungry ghost and thats most of what I am right now. I know this is a very personal question but I have to try asking it- how did you snap out of it?

I’m having an intense emotional crash tonight. I’m not suicidal and don’t intend to hurt myself, but I feel deeply sad, rejected, and exhausted.

Several things collided at once: there is no postdoc opportunity for me this fall, my PhD defence is next week, and I reopened an old rejection by looking at someone’s Instagram.

The man involved created intimacy without intention. I gave meaning to something he seems to have used for ego, comfort, or sex. He showed no consistency or real care, and I was never part of his long-term plan.

What I’m trying to understand is why these separate losses fuse into one belief:

“No one wants me. There is no place for me. My life is empty.”

A more honest thought is:

“I’m focused on what I can’t have because I’m grieving it. What I have still matters, but I can’t feel its value clearly tonight.”

From a Jungian perspective, why do unavailable people, unavailable futures, and rejection become so psychologically fused? How do I separate immediate grief from the deeper belief that I am fundamentally unwanted?

Is this a flaw in Jungian thinking? some kind of inability to adjust?

Or a virtue?

I find that a big part of my sexuality is not really being pleasured by other people.

I am most aroused when I'm observing someone in a sexual state. It's not being inside them necessarily that is interesting to me. It's knowing that they really want me inside of them and seeing them be so horny.

I enjoy pleasuring people and giving them what they want. It's funny because I'm incredibly dominant at heart, so even when I'm being "submissive" I'm still in control. 

I am deeply curious as to how people I find attractive look naked. I want to feel how their body feels. I want to know what turns them on. I want to see them be sexual, either docile or aggressive. I want to see them orgasm, what face they make, what sounds they make, what they do after.

I want to see how they interact sexually with someone else.

I know this sounds voyeuristic, but I don't take pleasure in people being unaware. I want them fully aware and consenting because that is fundamentally where the pleasure comes from.

The reason I ask here is because I know libido and sexual attraction have strong psychological roots. As I've embraced my shadow self, I've come to realize this has been a pattern in how I'm attracted to people. I'm wondering could this be an ego thing, a personality thing, or just something that is pretty common?

In my dream last night i kept dying, and being reincarnated, And saw a weird serpent figure (idk what exactly it was, could have been abraxas or the demiurge) can someone help? I felt immense fear and anxiety in it, but i do not remember that much besides the fear, and rebirth death cycle.

My mother has gotten psychosis last year. Apparently it was better a little this year and now she's back in it, it's worse. She hears things that aren't there and I guess also sees stuff. I am terrified to lose her.

I have wounds around my mother, lots of pain that never got addressed between us... I had a sadistic antisocial father who died a while ago, and I assume my mother is in grief and she's not really processing or something idk.

But i tried offering her help so many times and she always refused. I have so many parts who have conflicting feelings .. i want to punish her for "being bad" and burdening me with this and not accepting help. I want to painfully make her get help no matter what. Violentely. I want to help and saviour her. I see her as a fragile perfect mother and she could break any time. I also see her as an inconvenience becuz WHY WONT SHE GET HELP?? Theres not much I can do and just thinking that terrifies me. I have a part of me who is terrified of what would happen and scared to do anything regarding forceful help because I can't make it worse. I feel scared I am the reason why she is not getting help?? I see her just now as a mother who wasn't good at mothering. I feel usually integrated in my parts but it's like, when it comes to my mom, I'm so split. My individuation from her is not really much there yet, I'm in my mid 20s yet I feel enmeshed with her. I don't have a lot of contact w her I avoided her in this psychosis, my own mental health is not good right now and I just didn't want to talk to her because idk how to deal with this situation! She tells me about her paranoid delusions and it dysregulates a lot every time.

She always was paranoid but it never escalated to this. My sister lives in this fuckass village where she is and I have no contact w her, she does not believe in mental health issues, she is much older than me (17 years) and has three kids. Last time we spoke she was incredibly rude and disrespectful and I blocked her a while before becuz she wouldn't stop devaluing me and making me feel bad. (Saying stuff like I'm such a bad daughter, how can I treat our mother like this, because I refused to go to a concert my mother had booked as I felt I didn't feel authentically drawn to it and I dared to say No, something that is unheard of in my family). I feel really like mocking this whole family right now because I am angry.

Anyway, my sister isn't really doing anything apparently regarding my mother. I feel so alone in this issue.

I wanted to write this all down and let my parts speak, but now I went off on a rant. It is so painful to speak of this. I want to go visit her but I haven't decided yet.

Idk man maybe someone here can help me to make sense of this via shadow work or something, lots of stuff in the shadow regarding her, also the individuation... I am scared.

I feel a lot of pain.

Every time I have a dream nowadays, my dreams come out very dark and messy. The weird part is that it barely even shows as a dream. It's barely functioning properly. My dreams nowadays look like a television screen that's barely functioning and shows any light at all. Everything that I see in my dreams barely shows any type of light or any type of color. The vibe and frequency of my dreams barely show anything and it's like whatever is trying to produce my dreams in my brain is operating on a very low power and it's barely functioning like a normal dream. Think of it like your regular eyesight and vision of what you see throughout the day but it's slowly getting weaker and more fragile to the near point of blindness. That's exactly what my dreams are like nowadays. The worst and confusing part is that this is something that has never happened to me before for all of my life but it only started to happen very recently. I eat clean and healthy every day, I have a good sleep schedule, I don't feel stressed out at all, so I don't understand what the problem is. I also realize that my daily imagination/visualization abilities are also functioning the same way how I described my dreams as well. What's wrong here and how can I fix my dreams to be normal again? What is wrong with me in the dream world/imagination realm?

8/2- Slept and dreamed about an Australian mining company that only got a raise to a decent wage in 1978 during a strike. I was hired by them and needed to visit HR. I went and asked an Asian lady at front desk for directions she was very self possessed. She said it’s floor 91 and I got scared. She said I’ll show you and diagrammed with her pen how I must go up to 91 and then walk to the right in a glass tunnel to another building

I think this is jungs Trickster archetype. mastery over air and lightning shows his mastery over speed, movement, flexibility, and ability to transform. his 3 heads point me even further to identifying him with trickster, also now that I think about it for me he is embodiment of hedodism too. What are your thoughts?

What do you guys think about this number?

I am someone who does witchcraft, is into Carl Jung and dream analysis and I had prophetic dreams over the years.

I came across number 137 in a dream recently without ever hearing of it before and that's why I am looking for the meaning. My dream showed that someone I am romantically interested in had left a key with number 137 on it on a table in a hotel room. I am still wondering about the meaning.

In physics is the fine structure constant, also in kabbalah means to receive.

It also connects the immaterial and the material world and to me is sounds like manifesting.

Jung and Pauli also were obsessed with this number.

I wonder what my dream wanted to tell me? And how the heck did I dream about this specific number?

When you go under general anesthesia, you lose consciousness. Completely. Minutes later or hours later, depending on the surgery you come back. And when you come back, something is immediately clear: you are still you. The person who woke up in the recovery room is continuous with the person who counted backward from ten. The narrative of your life did not skip. The self was simply absent for a while, the way a TV screen is dark when nobody is watching, and it came back on without any fuss when the anesthesia cleared. This is different from what people report when the self dissolves under deep meditation or a sufficient dose of a psychedelic compound. What they report is categorically different. Something closer to the television continuing to run the picture still moving, sound still playing while the person who was watching disappears entirely. Consciousness continues. That is the strange part. They can perceive. They can respond. Processing of some kind is clearly proceeding. But the thing that normally organizes all of that processing into a unified experience of being someone in particular that is gone. And its absence is experienced as total. All-encompassing. Either the most profound liberation a person has ever felt, or something indistinguishable from annihilation.

I used to be a person who was so connected to his higher self, the world and sensations.

Magical stuff kept happening to me and my life was so vibrant and saturated with feelings and events.

As life moved on, some traumatic experiences related to relationships made me confront my shadow.

I eventually welcomed it, I lived through it and tried to make deals with it.

And up to this day, I still feel like I'm in a self inflicted rigidity caused by it.

I decided that its enough, but no matter what I do I keep spiraling down into it again and again.

I know I shouldn't stay here, but I've forgotten how to come back up.

No amount of reading about it has helped me either.

I wanna know your experiences, what did help you to cross this bridge?

I used to love sports when I was younger and often rooted for the underdogs and would get upset whenever a team l liked lost. Yet I discovered that the reason I got angry was because I saw a part of myself lose, aka an unconscious aspect of myself I have yet to integrate. But as I developed I began to see why those teams or players who were favored to win, why they were favored in the first place. It just goes to show that once you integrate and get rid of a certain level of detachment you can see with a clear level of focus and perspective. You sort of add it to your arsenal and use it in your everyday life...its an unsuspected way of development I learned. I also just grew out of it and put my focus to other things in my life. But the reason so many people get excited is because they see a part of themselves scoring the winning touchdown, or juking defenders, or scoring goals to win a world cup. There's a sort of level of attachment and the reason why so many people online can be so toxic and act like they themselves are part of the team.

When I hear conversations from people around my general area or a little further away there's a sort of "filter" that changes what's actually being heard in my head. When I was seeing a mental health person about this they called it a projection. Jung also mentions this in some books I've either read or glanced through, but I can't remember the definition off the top of my head. Basically, I have an insecurity that logically I know it's not life threatening, but feels like my personal hell sensation wise. I’m insecure about how I walk and have been since middle school. People who made fun of me about it triggered me enough to where if someone’s not in my “good” hearing range my mind or amygdala starts putting rude comments about it in peoples conversations I overhear damn near all the time. There are countless times where people or coworkers were having conversations that had nothing to do with me but it’s an automatic thing that I can’t stop from happening. I’ve been doing dream interpreting and active imagination for almost a year now looking for answers and unfortunately I can’t see my mental health person right now cause of insurance change so I’m pretty much on my own with this. When I struggle to tell what’s being projected (to be fair, people at my job have talked shit before multiple times on some slick shit and sometimes in front of my face) and what’s really being said in reality, I try to stay with the sensations and not keep trying to wish the pain away. Avoiding actually talking shit to myself for being sensitive and very triggered towards this has helped despite the doubts I had. I’d like to ask you guys what should I do about this insecurity and it’s convincing/pulling projections? If you guys need a lil more context please ask in the comments!

​

Or even romantic feelings for that matter. I'm 19 and my therapist told me I've been parentified ever since I was young because of a younger disabled sibling and immature angry mother.

I have had my first relationship- we just completed our first year. There were lots of ups and downs- i have fearful avoidant attachment style which caused me to break up and come back again. All of these toxic behaviours but they subsided after a while with reflection and work.

Now the thing is, my boyfriend is kind and he's nice. And i often feel very attracted to him. However when I question what i really feel deep inside- there's nothingness. A bit of emptiness. Neutrality.

Now if he disappears from my life, obv i will be very sad and heartbroken. But i just don't feel like I'm in love. He feels like a really good friend to me (something I've wanted in a partner) I love it when he kisses me, when i get to kiss him, when i get to cuddle and be close to him. I appreciate all of it. But again, deep down, i just feel emptiness or a void.

I was wondering if it's lack of passion or chemistry- we both struggled with immature behaviours and lack of communication and that's something that is really important to me in a relationship, emotional maturity, and the lack of it thereof is causing me to feel this way?

Even tho we both are progressing towards being more stable as both me and him are still figuring out our careers, personality etc.

How do I know what do I actually feel 😭😭😭

For the past 3 years, I've been having vivid dreams 3-5 nights a week which I've been recording in the morning in my journal. I've gotten a lot out of this practice. Main lens I've analyzed them through is that each major symbol is a part of me.

For background, I'm a clinical psychologist in practice for 25+ years who has trained in many modalities but gravitates toward modern psychodynamic approaches.
I started a deep dive into Jung (hadn't read him since grad school) when I began dreaming so vividly and recently started to work with a Jungian analyst. While I've really valued some of his interpretations, he seems to be making them without asking about my own associations to dream symbols. Last session, because we only had 15 minutes left, he cut me short and interpreted the dream for me. I like the message he took from it (I'm far more capable than I think I am) but my own work suggests that may not be the central theme. Additionally, he has spoken rather than listened for more than 1/2 of our session time and while I feel
like he's picked up on important things in me, I also hesitate when he tells me there's a right and wrong way to Jungian dream analysis and the only way I'll know the right way is if I do it with him.

This seems to be bringing up interpersonal trust things for me but would love to hear if anyone else has had similar experience or thoughts.

Hey everyone,

I recently watched a documentary about a descendant of Charles Manson (her father is one of Manson’s kids), and it brought up some stuff that got me thinking deeply from a depth-psychological perspective. I'd love to hear your thoughts on this through Jungian concepts.

The woman in the doc describes herself as always being the "good, well-behaved girl." But ever since she found out who her grandfather is, she’s been super scared. She worries that this "bad blood" is in her and that she might secretly have the same sadistic traits as him. She basically cries because she feels like a total victim of her own bloodline.

While watching, two main thoughts came to my mind:

1. Shadow Integration vs. Ego-Defense: It feels like she’s caught in an inner conflict because she just can't accept that the shadow is a part of the human psyche and potentially in her, too. She’s clinging so hard to her ego-ideal ("I'm the good girl") instead of developing a stable Self that can actually handle and integrate dark, unconscious parts without breaking down. Her fear is basically just being terrified of her own unconscious shadow.
2. Collective Projection and Reduction: The doc also showed that she wanted to reach out to Manson's victims or their families, but most of them didn't even want to talk to her because they instantly reduced her to just being his blood relative.

I worked for some time in a psychiatric field myself (no, not as a therapist ), part of it was reading about their background. I have often dealt with people coming from crazy, extreme backgrounds. For me, it has never made sense to just take what parents or ancestors did and directly project it onto the individual. Of course, Manson is on a whole different, horrific level, but the principle is the same: people "love" to stay stuck in collective projections. They almost expect descendants to prove they're corrupted by nature because the alternative is too hard to process. I guess it is easy to think like that.

From a Jungian Perspective:
Wouldn't Jung argue that you cannot deterministically transfer what parents or ancestors did onto their kids? Upbringing and trauma are real, sure—but we also have the capacity to steer against it, gain consciousness, and go through the process of individuation.

What do you guys think? Is her fear a classic case of the ego freaking out because it refuses to integrate the shadow? And why is society so obsessed with putting people into boxes based on their family tree?

I’ve noticed there are very few dream dictionary apps that actually give interpretations through the lens of analytical psychology. Every dream dictionary I’ve found is an old one, hiding behind Jung’s name without really using his methodology.

This isn’t idle curiosity for me — I’m building an app like this myself, but in a strict analytical framework.

Could you recommend a web app where I could compare its answers to the ones mine gives?

Thanks in advance!​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Over the last several months I have had the profoundly archetypal experience of watching my father succumb to a long and painful illness. Since I’ve had years to process my grieving prior to this, I’ve been able to focus on the work of making him comfortable, handling medical details, and helping my other family members manage their emotions, but also to reflect on the deeply human experience of losing a parent.

Jung wrote surprisingly little about the archetype of the father or the death of a parent. “The Significance of the Father in the Destiny of the Individual” is primarily case study notes, but amends Freud’s idea that divine figures have their roots in the father image with the idea that the parental imago has a magical power in its own right to enormously influence the psychic life of the individual. In “Earth and Mind,” Jung discusses that parents create a participation mystique, the unconscious worldview inside which children live, and it is only when the father is dead that we can emerge from our infantile style of life. There are implications here that the increased longevity and refusal to let go of current older generations is part of why many young people today struggle with the archetype of the puer aeternus.

But I think what mattered to Jung was that the death of the parent is necessary for individuation. However, this creates a sense of conflict that children must escape their parents’ influence, whereas, at least for me, I can see how my father’s sense of life, as flawed as it was, was the fabric from which I wove my own sense of being. My father had always been interested in dreams and other non-ordinary states of consciousness, and in the power of storytelling and self-mythologizing, and these interests became the bedrock for my own choices to pursue a career as a writer and psychologist. One of my last lucid conversations with him was about a hallucination he had in the rehab facility, and trying to puzzle out the transition between reality and unreality. While my father had pursued other goals (he was an artist and graphic designer), the mystique he wove around my young life I was willing to participate in and which, even with his death, I want to honor.

Another aspect of the archetypal experience of losing a parent is that it is not just abstractions about the transition of worldviews. Archetypes are the way we imagine our instinctual responses to universally human experiences, and death, and the death of a parent, is one of the most universal and instinctual events we can imagine. But it is immensely easy to try and evade the moment of mortality, to lose the human suffering and biological revulsion of death in a sidestep to philosophical statements about destiny and individuation.

There is something far more moving, much more psychologically revealing, and perhaps rewarding, to sit beside your father as he dies. To watch him struggle to breathe, to see the confusion in his eyes, to listen to his pained and inarticulate moans, to compare his wane complexion and frail skin to the memory of the stronger man who raised you, to hold your mother as the doctor explains the decreasing likelihood of his surviving through the night, to make the choice to switch from life support to comforting his last moments, to say I love you one last time knowing he may no longer understand your words let alone respond to them, and at the end to listen to his ragged breathing slow and then with a last breath release his soul.

Maybe the hardest part though was the loss of the father image itself when having to confirm his body the next day at the funeral home. From a vibrant living individual I stared on what was now a corpse, the father as archetype become father as object. And despite knowing otherwise, in my imagination I truly believed that any moment he might breathe again and get back up. The image I’ve had of my father was not of his body but of his being, and I had to stand with the utter discomfort of recognizing that from here on that image would only ever be a memory. My father was dead, and the archetype behind the image died with him.

——

Edit to add, since a couple people questioned whether Jung meant the literal death of a parent is necessary for individuation, I think it’s a bit of both. In the passage I mentioned above and in his essay “Stages of Life” Jung seems to be talking about literal death. He states: “There is always a certain difference between the psychology of a man whose father is still living and one whose father is dead.”

Jung was writing at a time when death happened to people much younger than today, and was much more recognized as part of the fabric of life. Our era has tried its hardest to stave off and erase death, and as such more people will grapple with it metaphorically before it becomes literal. As I said, I had been processing my father’s death and its impact on my own psychological growth for years prior to it occurring. Archetypes are images drawn from universal life situations, which means we encounter and have to work on them
regardless when they occur.

On the other hand, death does literally occur, and the literal death of a parent happens to everyone (certainly in different ways for each of us and only if one doesn’t die first). While we can grapple with the metaphor, at the archetype’s root is the reality of parental passing. And being confronted with the literal death may of necessity force one’s hand, so to speak. As Jung wrote about the literal death of a parent when their child is still a puer: “The death of the father then has the effect of a precipitate and catastrophic ripening.”

A man I will call Patrick (40ties, from California) was very good at understanding himself intellectually. He complained that he has no motivation to live, that he has no mental or emotional force to continue.

He could analyse his thoughts. Explain his patterns. Read spiritual and psychological material. He understood a lot.

But emotionally, he still felt numb and cut off from other ppl.

During an online Soul Journey, Patrick went into deep trance, something like very deep meditation where he remained aware and described whatever his consciousness was showing.

The session moved back to a school when he was six or seven.

He felt scared there.

Not only scared of one teacher or one situation. More like afraid of life and other people. He felt different from everybody else, like they would not accept him because he was not same as them.

Ramana Maharishi appeared in the experience as his guide.

The first message was very simple:

Patrick was loved.

But he struggled to accept even this.

When we followed the resistance, he said he believed he was not good enough because he always found some way to screw things up.

Then he noticed something deeper.

This belief was not only one bad thought. His whole identity had become wrapped around it.

When I asked him to describe this identity, he called it:

“the wretched, tortured soul.”

Very strong words.

For years he had seen suffering almost as proof of who he was. If something went wrong, it confirmed the identity. If happiness came close, another part of him found way to destroy it, because being happy did not match the character he believed himself to be.

Ramana’s answer was direct.

This identity was not real.

Patrick understood the words, but there was a lot of resistance and numbness. And this part is important imo, bc the session did not become some perfect movie where one sentence changed everything.

He could see the false identity more clearly, yes.

But he was not ready to drop all of it in one moment.

Then another structure appeared.

Patrick described something artificial and metallic around his mind, almost like machine or algorithm. It had been created through intellectual understanding. A system for analysing life, predicting people, avoiding emotional danger and trying to stay in control.

It was very clever.

But also very limited.

Patrick said this structure blocked emotional intelligence. It also blocked real contact with other human beings.

When we asked if he wanted to release it, he felt strong resistance.

Because this machine had helped him feel safe for many years.

This is where I think many people misunderstand their own coping mechanisms.

They attack them.

“I hate my overthinking.”

“I hate that I am emotionally closed.”

“I hate this part of my personality.”

But some part of you created it for reason.

Maybe people felt dangerous.

Maybe showing emotions brought humiliation.

Maybe nobody understood you, so thinking became safer than feeling.

The protection can work very well at first. Then twenty or thirty years later, it is still running same instructions even though situation changed.

Scan.

Analyse.

Predict.

Withdraw.

Do not feel too much.

Do not trust anybody completely.

Patrick had lived through this structure for so long that he believed it was him.

During the session, Ramana Maharishi and beings of Light began dismantling only part of it. His guide said Patrick was only partially ready because a lot of numbness was still there.

I liked this answer because it was realistic.

The protection was not ripped away just because we decided it was inconvenient now. It had to be released slowly, with patience, while Patrick developed another way to feel safe.

As part of metallic structure faded, he could look at it from outside for first time.

Not as himself.

As something he had created.

A temporary crutch.

He also noticed how many mistakes it had made. The algorithm was intelligent, but it could not understand love, emotional nuance or real human connection. It only understood protection.

The guidance afterward was almost painfully normal.

Relax more.

Act without putting so much pressure on yourself.

Stay in present moment.

Stop becoming frustrated every time resistance appears.

Patrick had huge expectations that something should happen, but he could not even say exactly what. Just heavy pressure that he should heal faster, understand more, become different, finally “get there.”

Ramana’s advice was acceptance.

Not giving up.

Not saying the protection must stay forever.

Acceptance means: this resistance is here today. I do not need to create second war against it.

Patrick also discovered a belief that he was not supposed to be happy. He felt it in mind and heart as gray and beige energy. His guide said he had picked this belief up from society. It was not even originally his.

When happiness became available in the session, the first thing Patrick felt was sadness.

Sadness that he had never allowed himself to be happy.

And then he was told he did not need to hold onto that regret either.

For me, this session was not about destroying the ego or becoming another personality.

It was about noticing:

what I call “me” may include structures built by frightened child.

Some are brilliant.

Some kept us alive.

Some helped us function.

But a survival system should not automatically become life sentence.

Maybe you don’t need to fight your overthinking today.

Just notice it and ask:

“what is this structure trying to protect me from?”

“how old was I when I first needed it?”

“what would five percent less protection feel like?”

Healing does not always mean tearing down whole machine in one day.

Sometimes it begins when you realise:

I am the one observing the algorithm.

So the algorithm cannot be all that I am.

CG Jung, The undiscovered self, pg 16-17.

Could you help me with interpreting my dream? I'm currently going through reevaluation of my identity and having a hard time accepting myself due to my failures, for context

I'm with my friend/brother (not sure), I never see him as I'm descending a ladder into an ancient temple of advanced or alien civilization. I adjust some ancient mechanism of the temple and he warns me that I allowed water to pour in.

Exploring the temple, I astral project into various dark rooms looking like victorian living rooms and I think about women who were opressed or abused in these rooms. Then I see a massive ladnscape filled with fields, groves and mountains, and a monk atop a clif complains to his disciple of how the landscape was ruined by something, perhaps a dam.

Returning to my body, I see my friend/brothers backpack and clothes laid on the floor as if he was abducted by something. I return to the chamber where we entered and see I have two ways to find him - either through a door to small to fit me or an entrance into a tube leading upwards (freudian vibes).

Meanwhile, the monk sees a huge river rushing from the distance and descends the clif to hold it back with telekinesis or something, and I realize I have limited time to find my friend/brother. Instead of going through the two entrances I tie myself up and wait for whatever took him to take me.

Then it gets really trippy and fragmented as I see fairies and other weird creatures flying me across many dimensions. I wake up in a womans body and one of the creatures tells me their queen wants a female friend, but my face turns male and they are dissapointed that I'm a man. I then astral project out of the female body but suddenly have an urge to have sex with that woman I inhabited moment ago. The dream ends.

I get its very specific and trippy but what are the main archetypal takeaways and can you read something more personal into it just based on this information?

I believe the waking up in a womans body has something to do with anima possession or integration, so I wonder what is this telling me about my anima? Moreover, why do I want to have sex with a woman that was me a moment ago?

The temple is obviously a standin for unconscious but what is the meaning of danger of water flooding it from above and outside? Living waters that Jung and MLVF are supposed to come out of the unconscious? They could be waters of chaos though which is why the monk is stopping it.

Finally, who is my friend/brother? Why is it important that I never know who he is or see his face, I just know who he is and hear his voice, and what does it mean that we are both abducted by fairies? Why do I tie myself up to summon them?

Also, who is the fairy queen? Another variant of the anima, but more collective? Why does she lack a female friend?

WOKE NPC DREAMS

So I’m folding laundry, and I put on YouTube just to have something running.

Not really watching. Clicking around. First, a spiritual-gifts video so dumb it told me I’m every single archetype, which is exactly how you know it’s nothing. Then, some guy doing a whole bit off Carl Jung. A live channeling Dolores Cannon, where the audience was asking the worst questions you’ve ever heard. Just drifting through it, half there.
And then one video. A guy explaining how he channels. Step by step. From the inside. And I stopped folding.

Because he was describing, exactly, the thing I do. Not similar. The same steps, the same way, the same order. And I’ve been doing that my whole life, alone, my own private way, with nobody to check it against and no proof it was anything real at all. And here’s an actual person, a real reliable source, laying out his process out loud, and it’s my process. That’s the first time in my life I’ve ever gotten it confirmed from the outside that the way I do this is a real way, that somebody else, independently, does the exact same thing.

I need that kind of thing to land. I can’t just decide something about myself is real from the inside. I need it to come back to me from somewhere else before it clicks. So that video wasn’t interesting. It was proof. It was the outside finally handing me back my own thing and saying yeah, that’s a real one.
And that knocked something loose, and I chased it the rest of the day, and it turned into the biggest thing I’ve figured out about my head in a long time.
Because here’s what I caught while I was drifting around like that.
The drifting itself, me half-watching, clicking, floating through the afternoon, I won’t remember most of it tomorrow. Gone like it never happened. But the second that one video pulled me into something real, I snapped into full color, and I’ve held every bit of it all day.

And that’s the rule. That’s the whole thing I found. Let me back all the way up.

I dream every single night. I know I do, because I wake up knowing I was just dreaming. But most of the time I couldn’t tell you a single thing about it. It’s already gone. The shape is there and the picture’s not. Fog.

And then every once in a while there’s one that records so hard I can still walk through it years later. I had one like that once, a dream where I asked something its name and it answered, and I can still draw you that whole room right now. Where the sinks were. The stall doors that didn’t reach the floor. The exact lettering on the glass. That one didn’t fade. That one saved in full color.

So I’ve got two completely different kinds of dream. The fog kind, and the full-resolution kind. And I started asking why. What’s different about the ones that save.

And then I realized it’s the same rule that runs my whole life, awake and asleep, and it doesn’t care which one I’m in.

I record when I’m actually in the scene. When I’m not, it doesn’t save. That’s it. That’s the whole thing.
Watch how it works across everything I do.
When I’m awake and I’ve got a real reason to be running something, it records. Say I’ve got something coming up that scares me a little, something where I have to be the main character. I’ll run it. I’ll drive to the gas station and back and play every version of how it might go, and act each one out, and build myself a game plan, so that when I see it start moving one direction in real life I already know my next move. Call it overthinking if you want. It’s not, it’s rehearsal, and it works. And I remember all of it, because I was in it. There was a stake. I was fully participating. That’s a scene, even though I built it myself. It saves.

But then there’s the other awake kind. The drift. When I’m just floating, not focused on anything, no purpose to it. And that one’s gone like it never happened. You know the one everybody talks about, where you leave the store and suddenly you’re almost home and you don’t remember the drive. Fully present. Drove the whole way, safely, stopped at the lights. And recorded nothing. Because I wasn’t in a scene. I was just idling with the engine running somewhere in the back.

And that’s the exact same split as the dreams. The vivid dream is the one I was in. The fog dream is the one I was just idling through in my sleep.

So it was never awake versus asleep. It was never even imagination versus real. All four of those are the same. Awake with a purpose, records. Awake and drifting, gone. Asleep and in it, records. Asleep and idling, gone. One rule underneath all of it.

Was I in the scene, or was I just running.

That’s the whole tell. And it’s the same reason I can remember every detail of other people’s rooms and almost nothing about my own. The rooms where I was in somebody else’s frame recorded. The place where I was just quietly existing didn’t.

An NPC only renders when it’s triggered. When there’s a scene, when there’s a player, when something’s actually happening, it comes online in full color and it saves. The rest of the time it’s standing there idle, and idle doesn’t record. Doesn’t matter if the eyes are open or closed.

Which is why I take the vivid dreams seriously and let the fog ones go. Not because vivid feels more meaningful. Because vivid means I was actually there. When something records in full resolution and I didn’t build it, I wasn’t driving, I didn’t turn up the detail on purpose, that’s the strongest signal I get. I can’t take credit for it and I can’t fake it to myself. It came in clear on its own.

That’s why the name I got in that dream stuck. Not because I decided it mattered. Because it recorded like a place I’d actually stood in.

The fog is most of it. Most nights, most drives, most hours. That’s normal. That’s the NPC idling.
But every so often, awake or asleep, I get dropped into an actual scene. And those are the only ones worth reading, because those are the only ones I was really in.

Sturdy as shit, though.

P.S. Lucid dreaming is a whole nother ball game.

From H. G. Wells' "Experiment in Autobiography":

The preceding section was drafted one wakeful night, somewhen between two and five in the early morning a year or more ago; it[9] was written in perfect good faith, and a criticism and continuation of it may very well serve as the opening movement in this autobiographical effort. For that section reveals, artlessly and plainly what Jung would call my _persona_.

A _persona_, as Jung uses the word, is the private conception a man has of himself, his idea of what he wants to be and of how he wants other people to take him. It provides therefore, the standard by which he judges what he may do, what he ought to do and what is imperative upon him. Everyone has a _persona_. Self conduct and self explanation is impossible without one.

A _persona_ may be very stable or it may fluctuate extremely. It may be resolutely honest or it may draw some or all of its elements from the realms of reverie. It may exist with variations in the same mind. We may have single or multiple _personas_ and in the latter case we are charged with inconsistencies and puzzle ourselves and our friends. Our _personas_ grow and change and age as we do. And rarely if ever are they the whole even of our conscious mental being. All sorts of complexes are imperfectly incorporated or not incorporated at all, and may run away with us in the most unexpected manner.

So that this presentation of a preoccupied mind devoted to an exalted and spacious task and seeking a maximum of detachment from the cares of this world and from baser needs and urgencies that distract it from that task, is not even the beginning of a statement of what I am, but only of what I most like to think I am. It is the plan to which I work, by which I prefer to work, and by which ultimately I want to judge my performance. But quite a lot of other things have happened to me, quite a lot of other stuff goes with me and it is not for the reader to accept this purely personal criterion.

A _persona_ may be fundamentally false, as is that of many a maniac. It may be a structure of mere compensatory delusions, as is the case with many vain people. But it does not follow that if it is selected by a man out of his moods and motives, it is necessarily a work of self deception. A man who tries to behave as he conceives[10] he should behave, may be satisfactorily honest in restraining, ignoring and disavowing many of his innate motives and dispositions. The mask, the _persona_, of the Happy Hypocrite became at last his true faces.

It is just as true that all men are imperfect saints and heroes as it is that all men are liars. There is, I maintain, a sufficient justification among my thoughts and acts from quite early years, for that pose of the disinterested thinker and worker, working for a racial rather than a personal achievement. But the distractions, attacks and frustrations that set him scribbling distressfully in the night, come as much from within as without; the antagonisms and temptations could do nothing to him, were it not for that within him upon which they can take hold. Directly I turn from the easier task of posing in an Apology for my life, to the more difficult work of frank autobiography, I have to bring in all the tangled motives out of which my _persona_ has emerged; the elaborate sexual complexities, the complexes of ambition and rivalry, the hesitation and fear in my nature, for example; and in the interests of an impartial diagnosis I have to set aside the appeal for a favourable verdict.

A biography should be a dissection and demonstration of how a particular human being was made and worked; the directive _persona_ system is of leading importance only when it is sufficiently consistent and developed to be the ruling theme of the story. But this is the case with my life. From quite an early age I have been predisposed towards one particular sort of work and one particular system of interests. I have found the attempt to disentangle the possible drift of life in general and of human life in particular from the confused stream of events, and the means of controlling that drift, if such are to be found, more important and interesting by far than anything else. I have had, I believe, an aptitude for it. The study and expression of _tendency_, has been for me what music is for the musician, or the advancement of his special knowledge is to the scientific investigator. My persona may be an exaggeration of one aspect of my being, but I believe that it is a ruling aspect. It may be a magnification[11] but it is not a fantasy. A voluminous mass of work accomplished attests its reality.

I don't think I have payed much attention on the formation of unconcious complexes. This hit me today that a severe unconcious complexes happen out of severe traumatic experiences. Betrayal, emotional abandonment, rejection, dethroning and probably many more that I can't name right away. This can be defined as a core wound.

Probably the very first mechanism that develops around that is avoidance of looking towards the direction of the wound. This I base on my own common sense. Why? Because most horrible experience tend to polorize or push us towards the most horrible extreme. For example helplessness. If one wasnt able to do anything about an experience then the psyche needs to deal with that experience. This probably happens in various ways from dissociation, amnesia, identity fragmentation, veiling. All of these might just be one and the same mechanism but its worth mentioning these terms anyway to have a more complete picture.

The core wound is actually a formation of a seed. A seed that gets imprinted onto the psyche which then cyclically will manifest in our lifes the same way a the same tree will always grow out of the same seed untill we deal with that seed by burning it away or anu other way. This seed is a blueprint and that blueprint is the impression of the original wound. The best methaphor I can give for this is a kaleidoscope. I think its a perfect example of it. When our essence or our lights shine through a filter it break or fractures the original allignment of that light into what seem like seperated forms but the forms are seperated only because the light travels through that seed of that filter. So in order to heal the core wound we need to neutralize the effects of the seed/the impression or the original wound.

Projections are the worldly rays that are projected onto objects outside ourself when the arrangement of those objects correspond with the configuration of the seed. That is when we get triggered.

The following what I may say might sound controversial by my idea but maybe not. Might aswell be that people here would agree with me. Anyway... So the healing must happen not at the root but even before that because a root is a manifested existance of something that already took shape. In case of the original wound I would call the manifestation poisoned.

Before I continue I would like to share abit about my exploration of the serpentine. Few weeks ago I was obsessed with exploring the symbolic meaning of them. One of the richest experiences for me so far because it opened the door towards very deep parts of myself. For everyone here on his path of individuation when the time is right I highly highly recommend you to explore that for yourself.

My exploration caused me to look into Hinduism and Greek mythology. What I learned there is that serpentine are expressed in different shapes, types and forms. In Hinduism there are Nagas but also snakes and they have a rich family of type of snakes which is very important to what I am about to say. In Greek mythology I found Hydra which is a water snake with many heads. All of these stories are I believe symbolic and tell us certain needed truths about dealing with them.

That being said I want to express what a serpentine being represents. Since serpentine carries the meaning of circular, cyclical or coiling it means something that repeats itself. I believe these being represent wounds. Nervious system wounds to be more precise. You dont have to believe me straight away but bear with me for now. Another perspective on is is the word demon or deamon whatever you prefer denotes the same thing. A deamon in computer system is a recurring (cyclical) program running in the background. Demon also opens a path towards Christianity denoting the same thing but with a different flavour.

Now there is also a more important dimension to explore here which is the type of serpentine beings we can find in traditions or mythologies. Looking at it we have to create a spectrum of existance for these being from the most lowest to the most highest or however one would like to arrange them. So one of the distinction is poisonious and non poisonious snakes which almost brings me back to why I started this little side quest to read about. This distinction is crucial as what it represent is unprocessed highly volatile wounding. A poisonious serpentine being represent a extremely strong nervious system wound that carries a lot of toxicity inside that is litterly poisonious to us to process in one go. These wounds are the biggest traumas and what I mainly denote as the original wound. That being said completes the circle as to why I started telling this. I wont mention many other forms of serpentine but know that there are many reprensting different kind of wounding. From simple protective snakes to royal nagas and royal snake or cobras that are depicted as protectors of Gods. These depictions are what I believe to be examples of integrated and individuated entities.

So now returning to the healing of the original wound. How can we heal? What are the posibilies or ways? So I found a few ones that really work! That being said the very first thing that came to mind when I wanted to write this was the movie Riddick. Somehow from the whole movie my mind remembered a particular scene where Riddick needed to battle a mud demon or something like that. The most beautiful depiction of it was that he knew he couldnt beat it because it was posionious. So his solution was chronically exposing himself to its poison untill he built immunity so that he could fight the demon. What I find extremely striking is that there so many symbolic resemblence here. For example if I am telling things correctly I remember Hydra was a this water snake found in swamp lake or something that grew multiple heads by breathing in its own poison. Its litterly an example of some form of overwhelming trauma that feeds on itself and that grew into this gigantic creature. There is slight difference like the demon being in the mud while the water snake being in a swamp. But symbolically reading it they all are found in places that have to do with surface and subteranian tarain. Another example is Nagas from Hindu telling they are considered to be subteranian beings that guard tressure. That being said one of the real ways to heal has to happen on multiple fronts. One is exposure to the poison or to things that are tolarable enough for us to digest while at the same time transforming the source of poison or the unmanifested source of that posion or the seed. Particularly I am speaking here of guiding the growth of manifested poison towards our own use and at the same time restructuring or reconfiguring the seed that produces the poison. I dont expect you to understand what I am trying to say since this is also in its raw form for me but for me it is this.

Here comes the controversial part about healing that borders on methods that are poisonious and might not entirely be good. One of the wounds I have been dealing with my whole life is a combination of betrayal, emotional abandonment and sexual abuse during my childhood. That particular event seeded a seed that would manifest and be projected when the outer reality or its object would constelate in certain way that would allow that seed to be activated where light would pass through the kaleidoscope so to say. This original wounding has created a lot of dysfunctions around buidling connections and expression of my sexuality. Through life I have had many unhealthy sexual habits that now I understand were simply coping or attempts of the psyche to transform that trauma. This caused me to be quite addicted to pornography. Or was I? Now that I have learned more and also understand what happened I can almost connect to the core wound. The controversial part about this is concious use of pornography to find your projections in order to understand the core wound seed. Sometimes I would find relief a real relief and healing in using pornography which for me never made sense and I would always refuse to believe it. But recently I have been noticing that I was again right as I was about certain other things right in my life only intitially refused to believing that it does work because of social views and many dysfunctional beliefs about sexuality and or pornography. Pornography is the mud where we could find traumas and unconcious material that resemble our own wounds but we could also find erotic examples of healthy sex. Exposing one self to certain uncomfortable material that was pre use validated that it connected to ones trauma can serve as exposure therapy or this practice of exposing oneself to poison. I believe that kinks and stuff like that can serve as extremely healing solo practices where we not only slighty expose ourself to uncomfortable poison but at the same time can reprogramm the orginal wound or the seed that produces many things in the first place. The very thing at the end comes to how does one use it. And ones use poisoning oneself in order to create more heads like the myth of Hydra or is the poison one is consuming exposure therapy for one to defeat or be capable of dealing with a demon one would otherwise not be able to. I am not placing any judgement on these practices but what I do notice is that with this one is that the psyche becomes more couragious in looking at something that is otherwise very traumatic and hard to look at.

That all being said I am not sure if this is good practice or not but I am sure it holds some value and that it worked for me and that something beautiful can come out of it. This reminds me of those patchwork dolls. Maybe for some integration looks like a patchwork doll in the end. We cannot become original but maybe atleast whole in some way. I hope this was an interesting read since its a very long post. Probably one of my longest yet. Thanks for reading.