Images · Light & dark

Dreams about darkness: Jung, traditions and semiotics

This is not a dream dictionary. Each perspective below names where it comes from; traditions are shown side by side, not merged into one meaning.

Start with yourself

What could you not see in the dark — and did it feel like something could see you?

Jung · Nigredo

Jung borrowed the alchemists’ word nigredo, “blackening”, for the dark first stage of a transformation — a time of confusion that comes before anything clarifies.

Does anything in your life feel unclear right now in a way that might be the beginning of something, not only the end?

C. G. Jung, “Psychology and Alchemy”, Collected Works 12

Traditions, side by side

Semiotics: how an image comes to mean

Following C. S. Peirce, an image can work as a sign in three ways:

• Icon — by resemblance
  Does the darkness look like one you have actually seen? Could it simply be a copy of a memory?
• Index — by connection
  Could the darkness point to an actual cause — a bodily sensation, a sound in the room, something that happened that day?
• Symbol — by convention
  Does the darkness mean what it means by convention — an idiom, a saying, a family phrase? Would it still mean that in another language or culture?

C. S. Peirce, Collected Papers 2.247–249 (icon, index, symbol)
C. G. Jung, Psychological Types (1921), “Definitions: Symbol” — a sign stands for something known, a symbol for something not yet fully known
Ellis (1911), ch. II, on verbal links between dream images

Exploration notes, not a diagnosis, a prediction, or evidence of real events.

Recorded dreams with darkness

• A spirit passed before my face Land of Uz · undated narrative
• The dark woman who led the sleepers away Kurukshetra (setting) · c. 4th c. BCE–4th c. CE (epic)
• The cave where Sleep lives Land of the Cimmerians (myth) · c. 8 CE (poem)
• The rudder was forced from him Rome, Italy · c. 59–68 CE
• Carried up out of a well Chang’an, China · c. 750
• Your fetters are loosed Northern borderlands (story) · c. 1070 (compiled)
• Would the fall never come to an end? Oxford, England · 1865 (novel)
• Evensong without light England · before 1911
• A basket of cold squirming snakes England · before 1911
• The child on my back grew heavy as stone Tokyo, Japan · 1908
• The white horse at dawn Tokyo, Japan · 1908
• I jumped into the sea and regretted it Tokyo, Japan · 1908
• A mother praying for a father who never returns Tokyo, Japan · 1908
• A samurai racing the temple clock to enlightenment Tokyo, Japan · 1908