Symptom, or a Truth Within Us?
Is a dream simply a symptom of what is happening to us, or can it reveal something we have not yet consciously understood? Jung's answer begins by refusing the choice.
Part 1 ended with a question. The alchemists' sparks, Paracelsus's light of nature and Ezekiel's eyes all say that something in the dark of us sees.
But a doctor looking at the same dream, the same hunch or the same preoccupation may call it a symptom.
Which is it: the nature of our symptoms, or a truth within us?
The question is far older than Jung, and he answers it by refusing it. To understand why that is not a dodge, we need the quarrel first.
Two answers, two thousand years old
Nearly everyone who has written about dreams has given one of two answers, and the two have been arguing since antiquity.
The same two answers have also been given about madness, which is why the histories of dreams and madness repeatedly cross.
The first answer: the body is talking
Greek doctors in the Hippocratic tradition read dreams almost as we might read a temperature chart.
A dream of rivers might suggest too much moisture in the body, while a dream of fire might indicate excess heat.
The same medical tradition famously argued that epilepsy, despite being called the "sacred disease", was no more divine than any other illness and had a natural cause.
Aristotle gave dreams a mechanism that still sounds surprisingly modern. During waking life the senses drown out faint movements within us. In sleep those small motions become magnified.
Galen even wrote a short treatise on diagnosis from dreams.
On this view, a dream is a sign. The question is simply what it is a sign of.
The second answer: something in you sees
Plato had already spoken of a "divine madness" that could be a gift rather than a disease.
Synesius, writing around AD 405, described the imagination as a mirror through which the soul can glimpse things.
His practical recommendation remains familiar today: keep a "night-book" alongside the diary of waking life and write dreams down.
Macrobius divided dreams into five kinds. He discarded two as products of worry, indigestion or the threshold of sleep. The other three, he argued, could carry truth.
When the two answers meet
The Middle Ages characteristically refused to choose.
Thomas Aquinas held that a dream might come from inside - the body or the day's thoughts - or from outside.
He also considered it legitimate to use a dream arising from a bodily cause to anticipate what the body might do next.
Nicholas of Autrecourt, one of the most sceptical thinkers of the fourteenth century, put the limit precisely.
In a dream, images present themselves to me. The appearing is certain. The truth of what appears is not.
That distinction will become one of the practical rules of the article.
The Renaissance then gave the same double answer to madness.
Erasmus and Shakespeare let the fool speak truths nobody sober could say. At roughly the same time, Johannes Weyer argued that women confessing to witchcraft were melancholic and that some of their supposed crimes had been dreamed - a medical interpretation that saved lives.
The dream as truth and the dream as symptom could therefore both be humane positions.
Girolamo Cardano simply refused to separate them, filling books with his own dreams and combining medicine with interpretation.
Paracelsus belongs here too. He was a doctor. His "light of nature" was first of all something the physician learns to read in the plant, the disease and the patient.
For Paracelsus a disease has a nature and a course of its own. The physician's task is to read it rather than merely shout it down.
When he says the same light "builds shapes in sleep", he is not moving from medicine into an unrelated mysticism. Dream and symptom are read with the same eye.
Jung's answer: the light is in the symptom
Read section 6 again with this history in mind and Jung's position becomes clearer.
The alchemists found their sparks at the bottom of the vessel, in the darkest and least promising part of the work.
Translated psychologically: the light is in the material.
It is in the symptom, in the thing you keep returning to and perhaps in the preoccupation you would rather not mention.
It is not necessarily found in your best ideas about yourself.
So the dream of the kitchen without a door is a symptom, exactly as the doctor says.
And the symptom is also where something in the dreamer is looking.
"Symptom" and "truth within" are not necessarily two kinds of experience. They may be the same spark named from different directions.
Nebuchadnezzar's tree was both. The hunch about the job may be both.
Ignatius was not wrong to be suspicious of his visionary visitor either.
Jung's little lights may know things, but they do not come with a guarantee that what they know is good for us.
What to do with a small light
This is perhaps the most practical stretch of the argument, and its rules were worked out long before Jung.
Start in the material - what is actually troubling you - rather than where you would prefer the insight to be.
Mark the spot. Write down the dream or hunch. Return in daylight and do the ordinary work of examining it.
Do not identify with it. Seeing a flash of insight does not make the person who saw it illuminated.
Folk tales across Europe describe buried treasure revealing itself as a small flame hovering over the ground.
The rule is remarkably consistent: mark the place, return in daylight and dig.
The flame is not the treasure. It is only the sign.
Stories also agree about how the treasure is lost: someone chases the light, grabs at it or tells everyone too soon.
Nicholas of Autrecourt's philosophical rule says much the same thing: the appearing is certain; the meaning is not yet.
Going further
Before Jung
The medieval name for a light in us that we did not ourselves light was synderesis, the "spark of conscience".
Jerome saw a spark that could survive even in Cain after the murder. Later theologians developed the idea into an inborn orientation towards the good - something passion might cloud but not extinguish.
The shape resembles Jung's model: a light in us that does not belong to the conscious "I".
The difference matters. Their spark is one and points towards the good. Jung's lights are many, and they do not necessarily point anywhere morally reliable.
After Jung
James Hillman took the alchemists' image in another direction.
Jung's little lights are still described in relation to the daylight of the ego: dimmer, partial, approximate.
Hillman argued that darkness might have its own mode of seeing rather than being merely a weaker form of daylight.
In his writing on the alchemical black sun, grief and depression are not simply darkness waiting to be lit from outside.
Robert Burton had already offered a memorable version of the same paradox when he began The Anatomy of Melancholy by explaining that he wrote about melancholy partly to keep his own melancholy at bay.
Two questions to leave open
Think of a dream that seemed to know something before you did - about a job, a friendship or a decision you were still pretending was open.
Now imagine a doctor calling that dream a symptom of a bad month.
Were they wrong? Or were they describing the same thing from the other side?
And what would change in how you treated the bad month if you thought so?
Think of an idea or a hunch that died because you talked about it too soon or grabbed at it. What would "mark the spot and come back in daylight" have looked like?
Paragraphs 397-399, where Jung replaces the wall between conscious and unconscious with one field at dusk - and meets an ant that was born with the film already loaded.
Further listening and reading
Peter Adamson's History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps includes episodes on Paracelsus, Cardano, Renaissance magic and astrology.
Roy Porter's Madness: A Brief History is also a concise and accessible introduction to the history of madness explored here.
Sources
Hippocratic Regimen IV; On the Sacred Disease; Aristotle, On Divination in Sleep; Galen, On Diagnosis from Dreams; Plato, Phaedrus; Synesius, On Dreams; Macrobius, Commentary on the Dream of Scipio; Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae; Nicholas of Autrecourt; Roy Porter, Madness: A Brief History; Cardano; Jung, CW 8, paragraphs 388-396; Jerome; James Hillman, Alchemical Psychology; and Peter Adamson, History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
Reading Jung together
The purpose of this series is not to make Jung easier by removing the difficult parts, but to slow the text down enough to see where its questions lead.