Museum

Memory; family and cultural heritage; the living past within us.

Often it is a search into ones past, and the clues left in us, in an attempt to form a clear understanding of ourselves in the present, our identity. It can also be your view of ideas, for inspiration and beauty.

Carl Jung says, “Just as the human body represents a whole museum of organs, each with a long evolutionary history behind it, so we should expect to find that the mind is organized in a similar way. It can no more be a product without history than is the body in which it exists. By “history” I do not mean the fact that the mind builds itself up by conscious reference to the past through language and other cultural traditions. I am referring to the biological, prehistoric, and unconscious development of the mind in archaic man, whose psyche was still close to that of the animal”.

A dream in Jung’s book Man and His Symbols mentions a hall in the attic of a museum, which looks partly like a ship’s cabin painted black. Jung says the black colour indicates darkness, night, a turning inward. The cabin, then the museum through cabin is associated with a ship. The suggestion is that when the mainland of our conscious mind is flooded by unconsciousness and barbarous images, shown by the museum-ship, it suggests carrying those who enter it beyond the rational mind and link the dreamer, not with the dead remains of the past, but with alive and meaningful realisations of his past. See The Conjuring Trick

 Example: I am staying somewhere where there are some old papers of my father’s. I am waiting for a chance to take a look at them without raising my brothers’ suspicions. I am hoping the papers will lead me/leave me something valuable. My mother is there too and as I am there on a visit she will hardly leave me alone. She wants to be with me constantly. I feel frustrated in not having a chance to look at or search for my father’s papers – a birth certificate? I can see a picture of a document with several people engraved at the top – two on the left and three on the right with the title of the document in the middle at the top. I am hoping to be able to copy the document and hope that it will give me a chance to inherit something. I am looking for some very, very old papers. I am thinking of looking up the same kind of paper in a library or museum and making up (forging) an original copy of these papers.

Example: Had another “travelling in London” dream. This time I was with my youngest son and a group of people. I assumed we were all going to the same place – something my son would be interested in, perhaps a museum or exhibition. The group I followed on the Underground got off. I followed them, and a woman like Edith (motherly middle-aged type) told me they were all going home, not my destination. I then realised I had lost my son.

In exploring this dream he said – I realise it is about following unconscious habits – the Underground. I follow other people’s opinions and already built in habits. What answer is there in the unconscious? If we had an answer, it would already be part of our unconscious. As we do not have an answer we must find it not in the past – the museum – but in future, in the formless, in my potential. We must leap into the unknown and bring back the new to etch into my body. The loss of my son is the loss of a vulnerable and loved part of me.

Useful Questions and Hints:

What events were surrounding the mention of the museum?

Did I find any thing that drew my attention?

Was I searching for something?

See Using Your Intuition; Links to Archetypes and Acting on your dream