What if your dreams were mostly about your cognitive functions? Another angle of interpretation.
Jungian commentator Thomas Willard wrote The Star in Man: C. G. Jung and Marie-Louise von Franz on the Alchemical Philosophy of Gerard Dorn.¹ He reports a dream from Carl Jung.
In 1926, when he was 51, Jung had a frightening dream. He dreamed that he was on a battlefield in the Italian Piedmont with bombshells bursting all around him. He was looking for a means of escape when a horse-drawn wagon pulled up and the driver told him to get in. They drove through an increasingly beautiful landscape until they reached a Renaissance villa. Just as the dreamer began to feel safe, the gates slammed shut and the driver shouted, “Now we are caught in the seventeenth century” (Jung, 1961, p. 203). Jung awoke with a start, feeling condemned to spend years in the past, but hoping one day to return to his own time.
Willard links this dream to Jung's future interest in alchemy as if the dream were precognitive. I have a different approach which is based on common sense: people often dream about the state of their cognitive functions.
As Herbert Silberer (1882-1923) wrote, the dream is mostly autosymbolic and describes the state of the dreamer. In Jung's dream, we see the two prominent symbols of leaving the war and being trapped in the seventeeth century. The coming out of the war should be linked to the depression he endured from 1912 for most of the First World War period. After his break with Freud, Jung felt in a depressive state that lingered many years. He tried to analyze his childhood memories but with no avail. He then started to play with peebles, constructing small houses in order to reach his feelings. It is out of despair that he resorted to active imagination, the interaction with imaginative personalizations of feelings.
Jung was an INTJ. His dominant cognitive function was introverted Intuition ane his auxiliary function was extraverted Thinking. We discern those two functions on all pages of his written work. When the analytic or thinking processes did not produce any sufficient results to alleviate his illness, he turned to his tertiary introverted Feeling function. Playing with peebles and active imagination are directly concerned here. He performed active imaginations for many years, thus developing his tertiary cognitive function.
In 1915, he decided to write down his imaginative experiences in what would eventually become The Red Book. Now, this task is nothing but a painstaking work of his inferior extraverted Sensation cognitive function. That leads us to the observation that in a few years, from 1913 to 1917, Jung, knowingly or not, had been developing his two undifferentiated cognitive functions, an achievement above normality.
Did Jung continued to use his four cognitive functions after 1917? His 1926 dream says he did not. The autosymbolic interpretation of being stuck into the 17th century leads to the observation that he stopped using his new cognitive functions and returned to his dominant and auxiliary ones. The dream, if it had been interpreted correctly, said: Carl, you are going backwards, in the wrong direction. You need to continue to use your new cognitive functions.
The dream is clear. When he exited war (depression), he found himself in a beautiful landscape and a Renaissance villa (the new form of conciousness). The word Renaissance is important here as it means rebirth. But when Jung began to feel safe (no more pressure to heal himself), the doors of perception closed and he felt into his old habits, the old cognitive functions depicted by the 17th century. This dream is not about the precognition of his alchemical studies but his actual state of consciousness in 1926.
The hypothesis of a precognitive dream should be considered in the very last resort when all other possibilities have been evaluated. Jung's dream primarily has an autosymbolic quality. When one interprets dreams with logic instead of magic, he or she finds that dreams are very often concerned with consciousness. The psyche seeks to bring to consciousness the wisdom that has been lost in matter: the undifferentiated cognitive functions. In other words, the mind knows it is incomplete because it misses two functions of orientation of consciousness. One function of judgment and one function of perception. Although dreams also show the problems of the shadow, it must be considered that the state of consciousness is the other principal preoccupation.
It is important to underscore that Jung did not invent the four cognitive functions. He renamed the four temperaments of the Greek and the four elements of astrology to which he added the quality of introversion and extraversion. He needed a system composed of two pairs of opposites which they both are. As such, dreams about cognitive functions are not a new thing or a 20th century development. They have been around for a long time, as long as humans have given up two of their cognitive functions. That probably occurred with the agricultural revolution when food availability and security of the settlement lifted the need to be totally conscious.
When deciphering your dreams, consider that they often speak about your cognitive functions. You will learn a lot about yourself.
For more on that, see
Carl Jung's Transcendent Function
¹Thomas Willard (2021) The Star in Man: C. G. Jung and Marie-Louise von Franz on the Alchemical Philosophy of Gerard Dorn, Psychological Perspectives, 64:1, 9-36,