THE DREAM

I was with an unknown, brown-skinned man, a savage, in a lonely, rocky mountain landscape. It was before dawn. The eastern sky was already bright, and the stars fading. Then I heard Siegfried's horn sounding over the mountains and I knew that we had to kill him. We were armed with rifles and lay in wait for him on a narrow path over the rocks.

Then Siegfried appeared high up on the crest of the mountain in the first ray of the rising sun. On a chariot made of the bones of the dead he drove at furious speed down the precipitous slope. When he turned a corner, we shot at him, and he plunged down, struck dead.

Filled with disgust and remorse for having destroyed something so great and beautiful, I turned to flee, impelled by the fear that the murder might be discovered. But a tremendous downfall of rain began, and I knew that it would wipe out all traces of the deed. I had escaped the danger of discovery; life could go on, but an unbearable feeling of guilt remained.

AFTER

When I awoke from the dream, I turned it over in my mind, but was unable to understand it. I tried therefore to fall asleep again, but a voice within me said, "You must understand the dream, and must do so at once!" The inner urgency mounted until the terrible moment came when the voice said, "If you do not understand the dream, you must shoot yourself!" In the drawer of my night table lay a loaded revolver, and I became frightened.

Then I began pondering once again, and suddenly the meaning of the dream dawned on me. "Why, that is the problem that is being played out in the world." Siegfried, I thought, represents what the Germans want to achieve, heroically to impose their will, have their own way. "Where there is a will there is a way!" I had wanted to do the same. But now that was no longer possible. The dream showed that the attitude embodied by Siegfried, the hero, no longer suited me. Therefore it had to be killed.

After the deed I felt an overpowering compassion, as though I myself had been shot: a sign of my secret identity with Siegfried, as well as of the grief a man feels when he is forced to sacrifice his ideal and his conscious attitudes. This identity and my heroic idealism had to be abandoned, for there are higher things than the ego's will, and to these one must bow.

EDITOR'S NOTE

What I find startling here is that Jung interprets the dream symbolically, not as a warning of coming war--the slaughter of millions seduced by heroism in an age of the modern rifle, tank, and poison gas. Yet Jung had already been warned explicitly war was coming--see Jung's Premonitions of World War I. In Siegfried too, the signs are there:

• The modern rifles Jung and his ally are armed with. These are equally out of place in Siegfried's mythic time and in peaceful 1913. One year later, they were everywhere--massacring Siegfrieds who hadn't understood that technology changes war.
• Jung's brown-skinned ally (who he says in a further note took the initiative in firing on Siegfried) isn't from Teutonic myth. He was in the news. In America, tiny bands of Indians with rifles had held back much larger white armies for a generation. Independence movements seethed in Europe's vast colonies, especially India. Japan had recently whipped Russia, the first nonwhites to defeat a European power.
• A chariot made of the bones of the dead isn't one of Siegfried's mythic attributes either. Yet Jung ignores this grisly and telling image in his illustration AND his analysis! To me, that's the real Shadow in this dream, one he--and all Europe--won't look at. Yet it characterizes the next thirty years all too well.

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