Archetypal Dreams of Our Time

The lectures and articles presented here were written over a period of some twenty years. They form a part of my painstaking attempt to connect the problems facing humanity today with the pictorial, intuitive wisdom of the inner world of the psyche. My purpose is to illustrate in as comprehensive and plausible a manner as possible the significance of the inner world in dealing with collective issues. [...] The hypothesis I formulated in 1977 in the course of working on my Ph.D. thesis at the ETH in Zurich has been confirmed many times over: dreams that deal with some transpersonal problem contain essential information that would contribute to our better understanding of such collective problems. But, [...] these inner images, after having been given our meticulous attention and cautious interpretation, must then be incorporated into our everyday reality. Only when the hints from the symbolic world of dreams become linked with the clarity of consciousness do they turn into the water that bestows life. In view of the enormous problems of our time, we can no longer afford to lose these treasures by continuing to think and behave in a purely extraverted manner.