A seventeen year old girl dreams:
I was coming home at night.
Everything is as quiet as death.
The door into the living room is half open, and I see my mother hanging from the chandelier, swinging to and fro in the cold wind that blows in through the at night.
I get up and discover that a frightened horse is tearing through the rooms.
At last it finds the door into the hall, and jumps through the hall window from the fourth floor into the street below.
I was terrified when I saw it lying there, all mangled.
(Dreams, C.G. Jung, pages 106 – 109 )
Jung comments:
The gruesome character of the dreams is alone sufficient to make one pause. All the same other people have anxiety dreams now and then. We most therefore look more closely into the meaning of the two main symbols, “mother” and “horse”. They must be equivalents, for they both do the same thing, they commit suicide. “Mother” is an archetype and refers to the place of origin, to nature, to that which passively creates…. It also means the unconscious, our natural and instinctive life… The word “mother” which sounds so familiar, apparently points to the best-known, the individual mother, to “my mother.” But the mother-symbol points to a darker background which eludes conceptual form…
If we apply our findings to the dream, its interpretation will be, “The unconscious life is destroying itself.”
It is evident that “horse” is an equivalent of “mother,” with a slight shift of meaning. The mother stands for life at its origin, the horse for the merely animal life of the body. If we apply this meaning to the text of our dream, its interpretation will be, “The animal life is destroying itself.”
Both dreams point to a grave organic disease with a fatal outcome. This prognosis was soon confirmed.
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