Jung: On the Darkness
When I went to East Africa, I went to a small tribe in Mount Elgon and I asked the medicine-man about dreams.
He said, “I know what you mean; my father still had dreams.” I said, “You have no dreams?”
And then he wept and answered, “No, I have no dreams any more.”
I asked, “Why?”
He answered, “Since the British came into the country.”
“Now, how is that?”
He said, “The District Commissioner knows when there shall be war; he knows when there are diseases; he knows where we must live—he does not allow us to move.”
The political guidance is now represented by the D.C., by the superior intelligence of the white man; therefore, why should they need dreams?
Dreams were the original guidance of man in the great darkness.
Read that book of Rasmussen’s about the Polar Eskimos.
There he describes how a medicine-man became the leader of his tribe on account of a vision.
When a man is in the wilderness, the darkness brings the dreams—somnia a Deo missa—that guide him.
It has always been so.
I have not been led by any kind of wisdom; I have been led by dreams, like any primitive.
I am ashamed to say so, but I am as primitive as any Negro, because I do not know!
When you are in the darkness you take the next thing, and that is a dream.
And you can be sure that the dream is your nearest friend; the dream is the friend of those who are not guided any more by the traditional truth and in consequence are isolated.
Collected Works 18
The Symbolic Life
Paragraph 674
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