Ego and Self
From what creative inner source do your dreams come? Obviously not from your conscious Ego, which is often in conflict with other figures in the dream. When given a chance, these others speak a different truth. The perspective shown is larger and wiser than that of the Ego, and thoroughly aware of what is going on internally. In some dreams, you actually know that you are in two places, both acting and observing yourself. Liz had such a dream:
Dream report: Eagle Over the Moors
“I was aware that I was a woman in times long gone. I was dressed in a long skirt and a woollen tartan plaid, which I wrapped around my head and across my body. I held the plaid close to me, guarding myself from the damp and cold of the mist swirling across the moors I walked upon. My steps were slow. There was no definable path……To my left was an outcrop of rock and a dominant cliff-face, its craggy and brooding façade soaring skywards. An eagle soared amongst the peaks, rising and swooping majestically between them, then down, down, to the valley floor. I could feel the air rush past my wings. With speed and strength I circled over the woman. I cared for her – I urged her to carry on.”
This dream offers Liz a picture of her current stage of life as a lonely journey through a bleak and foggy landscape, perhaps echoing the experience of her ancestors; but to her surprise she finds that even in the wilderness there is another being that offers companionship. The effect was to give her a sense that she was not alone in her life, that she was in touch with a “higher self” that gave her more courage. Thus we have here a symbolic image of the two Centres in the psyche, the conscious Ego and the inner Self.
Jungians say that dreams come from the deep Self at the centre of the total psyche, both conscious and unconscious, which seeks to maintain your psychological balance (Hall, 1983). If you practise meditation, you may be seeking to get in touch with this source of inner wisdom. Some people call it the inner spirit, or the spark of God within you. In his first book, Eric Berne wrote briefly about “the fourth force of personality… the soul,” and Physis, the life force which constantly seeks growth and healing (Berne, 1947/ 68, p.98). Later, Muriel James and Louis Savary gave us the concept of the Inner Core, the universal Self (1977, p.33). They diagrammed it as a cylinder of energy moving freely through the centre of the ego states, with access to the whole personality.
Whatever you choose to name it, there is a deep creative intelligence within all of us which continually produces purposeful dream-stories on the inner stage of the mind.