Children’s Dreams

Transcript

Welcome to Dream Auguries. Tonight, we’re going to spin a tale of artistic connections that may, at times, seem as disjointed as dream logic, but trust us, at the end, we've got a musical treat.

In the late 1930s, Carl Jung gave a series of lectures on Children’s Dreams. Significantly, these were not dreams as reported by children, but dreams from childhood remembered by adults. On the one hand they were undoubtedly significant dreams, powerful enough to have been remembered years later. But at the same time, these dreams were also influenced by the passage of time and vagaries of memory.

For example, how does a favorite book from our teens change when read later in life? And how does the recollection of a dream change?

Jung saw children as accessing content from our collective unconscious, something deep within our psyches, before our brains become muddled with more conscious content. In some ways, he saw them as clearer vessels and less filtered views into the collective unconscious.

Dreams were of such importance for Jung that he believed they could be premonitions of future events or catastrophes. He writes:

“This is the secret of dreams – that we do not dream but rather we are dreamt. We are the object of the dream, not its maker. The French say: “Faire un rêve.” (To make a dream.) This is wrong. The dream is dreamed to us. We are the objects. We simply find ourselves put into a situation. If a fatal destiny awaits us, we are already seized by what will lead us to this destiny in the dream, in the same way it will overcome us in reality.”

In 1981, the composer, David Maslanka, read an account of Carl Jung receiving a small book of twelve dreams from another psychiatrist. The book had been a Christmas present from the psychiatrist’s eight-year-old daughter and he was curious to hear what Jung thought.

Each dream began with words from an old fairy tale, such as “Once upon a time….” as if the girl was relating a fairy tale to her father. 

Maslanka took five of the twelve dreams as motifs and inspirations for the five movements of his composition: A Child’s Garden of Dreams. The First Movement begins: “There is a desert on the moon where the dreamer sinks so deeply into the ground that she reaches hell.” 

The image from the Fourth Movement is: “A drop of water is seen as it appears when looked at through a microscope. The girl sees that the drop if full of tree branches. This portrays the origin of the world.”

On YouTube, we found a recording of this beautiful Fourth Movement from A Child’s Garden of Dreams, one to which a certain MrFauno81 has assembled a series of dreamlike images. We've included a link to that video in the Notes section and hope you enjoy..

Forgive us for a recapitulation (and perhaps a little redundancy) but these connections bear repeating:

The meditation written by Carl Jung and the music composed by David Maslanka that you are listening to are the result of dreams an eight-year-old girl in Geneva, Switzerland shared with her father in 1936.

We re-mention this because, this is a tale of not only the power of dreams, but of the act of sharing those dreams.

Dream Auguries is a weekly reflection series for insomniacs, lucid dreamers, oracles and soothsayers, magicians and conjurors of all kinds. It's bonus content for the film, Dreaming Grand Avenue, now streaming on cable, written and directed by Hugh Schulze. Our theme music was composed and performed by Tony Scott-Green and sound design by Kevin O'Rourke.