Digesting Jung: Food for the Journey - Inner City Books

The Heroic Journey 71
dream that could not also be found in a myth, legend or fairy tale.
This is one of the best-kept secrets of psychological development:
others have been through the same tortuous trials. And many have
survived.
A sword-fight in a dream may reflect the cut-and-thrust of an encounter
with your boss, your lover, your mother; the thorn hedge
surrounding a sleeping beauty is a prickly animus who keeps you at
bay; the ravishing pixie who lures you to bed may be a false bride,
a femme fatale; the secretary guarding the photocopier is a witch in
high heels; an outworn conscious attitude is a sickly old king; an
absent queen reflects lack of feeling; a quarrelsome royal couple is
a conflict between masculine and feminine, ego and anima/animus,
you and your mate; nightmares of burglars breaking in suggest
shadow sides of oneself demanding recognition; and on and on.
Like the Dummling or youngest brother in many fairy tales, it is
appropriate to be naive about the unconscious and what it holds.
This actually works in one’s favor, since accomplishing some of the
tasks required of us is only possible if we suspend a rational way of
looking at things. The Dummling represents an aspect of the individual
psyche that has not been coerced by collective pressures. We
all had it at first, and still do, buried under the accretions of daily
life: a virgin innocence unhobbled by hard knocks; fresh, spontaneous
and not yet fixed in rigid patterns; a time when the border between
fantasy and reality was permeable. That openness to the unknown
is an important element in the struggle to discover our own
individual truth.
The treasure “hard to attain” is variously symbolized in myth and
fairy tale as a ring or golden egg, white feather, coat of many colors,
fountain of youth, elixir of life, and so on. Psychologically
these all come to the same thing: oneself—the acceptance of one’s
true feelings and talents, one’s uniqueness. This pursuit, by many
other names, is a time-honored tradition. It differs greatly in detail,
but the pattern is well known.
Symbolically, the heroic journey is a round, as illustrated in the