DREAM DICTIONARY

 First Years-C.G.Jung-Memories-Dreams-Reflections-2

Lord Jesus was comforting, a nice, benevolent gentleman like Herr Wegenstein up at the castle, rich, powerful, respectes, and mindful of little children at night. Why he should be winged like a bird was a conundrum that did not worry me any further. Far more significant and thought-provoking was the fact that little children were compared to chicks which Lord Jesus evidently "took" reluctantly, like  bitter medicine. This was difficult to understand. But I understood at once, that Satan liked chicks and had to be prevented from eating them. So, although Lord Jesus did not like the taste, he ate them anyway, so that Satan would not get them. As far as that went, my argument was comforting. But now I was hearing that Lord Jesus "took" other people to himself as well, and that this "taking" was the same as putting them in a hole in the ground.

This sinister analogy had unfortunate consequences. I began to distrust Lord Jesus. He lost the aspect of a big, comforting, benevolent bird and became associated with the gloomy black men in frock coats, top hats, and shiny black boots who busied themselves with the black box. These rumin ations of mine led to my first conscious trauma. One hot summer day I was sitting alone , as usual, on the road in front of the house, playing in the sand. The road led past the house uphill, then disappeared in the wood on the hilltop. So from the house you could see a stretch of the road. Looking up, I saw a figure in a strangely broad hat and a long black garment coming down from the wood. It looked like a man wearing women's clothes. Slowly, the figure drew nearer, and I could now see that it was really a man wearing a kind of black robe that reached to his feet.

At about the same time- I could not say with absolute certainty whether it preceded this experience or not- I had the earliest dream I was in this meadow. Suddenly I discovered a dark, rectangular, stone-lined hole in the ground. I had never seen it before. I ran forward curiously and peered down into it. Then I saw a stone stairway leading down . Hesitantly and fearfully, I descended. At the bottom was a doorway, with a round arch, closed off by a green curtain. It was a big, heavy curtain of worked stuff like brocade, and it looked very sumptuous. Curious to see what might be hidden behind, I pushed it aside. 

I saw before me in the dim light a rectangular chamber about thirty feet long. The cieling was arched and of hewed stone. The floor was laid with flag stones , and in the center a red carpet ran from the entrance to a low platform. On this platform stood a won derfully rich golden throne. I am not certain, but perhaps a red cushion lay on the seat. It was a magnificent throne, a real King's throne in a fairy tale. Something was standing on it which I thought at first  was a tree trunk twelve to fifteen feet high and about one and a half to two feet thick. It was a huge thing, reaching almost to the ceiling. But it was of a curious composition: it was made of skin  and naked flesh, and on top there was something like a rounded head with no face  and no hair. On the very top of the head was a single eye, gazing motionlessly upward.

It was fairly light in the room, although there were no windows and no apparent source of light. Above the head, however, was an aura of brightness. The thing did not move, yet I had the feeling that it might at any moment crawl off the throne like a worm and creep towards me. I was paralyzed with terror . At that moment I heard from outside and above me my mother's voice. She called out, "Yes, just look at him. That is the man-eater!" That intensified my terror still more, and I awoke sweating and scared to death. For many nights afterward I was afraid to go to sleep, because I feared I might have another dream like that.

This dream haunted me for years. Only much later did I realize tht what I had sen was a phallus. I could never make out whether my mother meant, "That is the man-eater," or, "That is the mean-eater,"In the first case she would have meant that not Lord Jesus or the Jesuit was the devourer of little children , but the phallus; in the second case that the "man-eater" in general was symbolized by the phallus, so that the dark Lord Jesus, the Jesuit, and the phallus were identical.

The abstract significance of the phallus is shown by the fact that it was enthroned by itself, "ithyphallically" ("upright"). The hole in the meadow probably represented a grave. The grave itself was an underground temple whose green curtain symbolized the meadow, in other words the mystery of Earth with her covering of green vegetation. The carpet was blood-red.What ab out the vault? Perhaps I had already been to the Munot,the citadel of Shaffhause? This is not likely, since no one would take a three-year-old child up there. So it cannot be a memory-trace. Equally, I do not know where the anatomically correct phallus can have come from. The interpretation of the orificium urethrae as an eye, with the source of light apparently above it, points to the etymology of the word phallus (shining, bright).

At all events, the phallus of this dream seems to be a sub-terranean God "not to be named," and such it remained throughout my youth, reappearing whenever anyone spoke too emphatically about Lord Jesus. Lord Jesus never became quite real for me, never quite acceptable, never quite loveable, for again and again I would think of his underground counterpart, a frightful revelation which had been accorded me without my seeking it.