Death is one of the greatest mysteries of human existence, the inevitable fate that unites us all. Whenever man is confronted with something mysterious and unknown such as the origin of the world, death, the afterlife, etc., the unconscious produces symbolic representations. Thus, in all religions a doctrine of the afterlife is handed down as a myth (a perennially recurring pattern that symbolises a fundamental concern of the human condition). Life after death is a mythologem, a universal idea or myth motif that belongs to the structural elements of the psyche, which is essentially real, and on which all religions
are ultimately based on. Psychologically, we would say we are dealing with an archetype or primordial image, an inherited pattern of behaviour of humanity. Religion, myths, fairy tales, fantasies and dreams, are indispensable for understanding what the unconscious, that is to say, our instinctive world, says about the fact of the proximity of death. While elaborate mythological material necessarily goes through a layer of cultural material, which may obfuscate the original unconscious material; dreams, on the other hand, are spontaneous, unprejudiced expressions of the unconscious, and as such, a dream may be our most “objective” criterion by which to judge
the true nature of death. In Jungian psychology it is known that dreams cannot be manipulated (except in rare cases of lucid dreamers), as they are in a way the voice of nature in us. Dreams are not invented by human beings, they just “happen”. They are not superfluous and only tell us what we need to know, and are not there to satisfy our intellectual curiosity. Dreams are the purest products of the unconscious. Instead of doing dream theories as each different psychological school does, Carl Jung got the idea of amplification, that is to say, using mythological, historical,
and cultural parallels, in order to “amplify” or “turn up the volume” of the dream material, to understand it clearer. So, if there is a bird, one would ask, “what symbolic role does the bird play in the fantasies, religions, myths, etc., throughout all humanity? Much of the literature on the subject of death deals with the development of the personality in the face of death, describing primarily those processes of consciousness which are externally observable and can be articulated. Events which take place in the depths of the unconscious, however, are seldom talked about. So, what do dreams tell
us about death? This question led Jungian analyst Marie-Louise von Franz to write her groundbreaking book On Dreams and Death, where she explores what the unconscious tells us about death and if there is indeed life after death. After the first publication of this book, she and her colleague initiated a research project (“The Alchemy of Death”) on the question of post-mortal existence, having collected about 2,500 dreams. In all of these dreams, not a single one points to a final end, but rather always to a great change or transformation. From her work with older patients, von Franz came
to recognise how the dreams of older people produce these insights, she writes: “It is in fact true, as Jung has emphasised, that the unconscious psyche pays very little attention to the abrupt end of bodily life and behaves as if the psychic life of the individual, that is, the individuation process, will simple continue… The unconscious “believes” quite obviously in a life after death.” Dreams show us that death is not an end, but a transition into another kind of existence. Death is indeed the end of our bodily existence, however—most of us are so strongly identified with our
body and are therefore inclined to think that when the body is dead, everything is finished. “The greatest difficulty we have in imagining our own life after death… may well be accounted for by the fact that while still living we identify almost completely with the body.” In Hinduism the goal is to detach oneself from the Ahamkara (ego or everyday self) and “know that one is the Atman” (true self or essence that transcends one’s physical body). It is the veil of Maya which conceals the true character of spiritual reality, creating the cosmic illusion that our body and
the phenomenal world is real. To transcend this, one must understand that the Atman is identical to Brahman or ultimate reality. American psychiatrist Raymond Moody coined the term near-death-experience or NDE in his 1975 book Life after Life, where he identifies a common set of experiences of those who come back from death, including seeing one’s own body lying dead on the bed while one hovers above or besides it, an overwhelming feeling of peace and well-being, freedom from pain, floating or drifting through darkness or a tunnel, encountering beings of light, having a rapid succession of visual images of
one’s past, a feeling of finally being “back home”, or being in a realm “more real than reality itself”, among others. Since then, much more scientific research has been done on NDEs, which seem to confirm that consciousness is non-local, that is to say, consciousness somehow continues even after being declared “clinically dead”, suggesting that the brain is not the generator of consciousness but merely acts as a receiver. In many NDEs, the subject has had distinct feelings of reluctance to return to everyday reality. Patients report hearing a voice say, “You must go back.” There appears to be a
further threshold from which apparently there would be no return. Such was the case of Jung who experienced an NDE in 1944 after a heart attack, which ended with his doctor telling him that he had to return to earth. Upon which his vision ceased. He felt profoundly disappointed and reality seemed to have been artificially built up. He thought, “Now I must return to the box system again.” Our brain seems to tune down the intensity of the psyche until it becomes bound to lower frequencies which confines the individual once again to the realities of spacetime. That is
why, when Jung returned after his visions, he felt imprisoned in that “intolerable grey world with its box system which is only a segment of existence.” The body, which had been “irrealised”, as Jung puts it, can once again be felt. It seems that from all this, one could say that all material phenomena, including our body, lie below a definite threshold of energy-intensity. The unconscious, however, is not bound to matter and spacetime and therefore there is no reason that it should be affected by death. During the day, Jung felt depressed. In the night, however, he had profound
visions, of which he writes: “It is impossible to convey the beauty and intensity of emotion during those visions… We shy away from the word “eternal”, but I can describe the experience only as the ecstasy of a non-temporal state in which present, past, and future are one. Everything that happens in time had been brought together into a concrete whole… The only thing that feeling could grasp would be a sum, an iridescent whole, containing all at once expectation of a beginning, surprise at what is now happening, and satisfaction or disappointment with the result of what has happened.
One is interwoven into an indescribable whole and yet observes it with complete objectivity.” In many accounts of NDEs the survivor’s everyday ego is confronted with a “voice” or with an “inner friend”, who would be interpreted as a personification of what Jung calls the Self (the total personality). In some instances, the ego also seems to merge partially with this image of the Self. Moody cites the case of a man in a deep coma who met with a being of light. A hand, reaching out to him, invited him to come along so that he himself floated aloft
and then moved with the light being in the hospital room. The man says, “Now, immediately, when I had joined him and had become a spirit myself, in a way we had been fused into one. We were two separate ones, too, of course. Yet he had full control of everything that was going on as far as I was concerned.” An intimate association between ego and Self is described here but not a complete merging of the two. In another report the everyday ego is so greatly altered that it closely resembles the Self: “My new ego was no
longer the old familiar ego, but rather a sublimate of it, as it were, even if it did seem to me somehow familiar, like something I had always known but which had been deeply buried under a superstructure of fears, hopes, wishes, and desires. This ego had nothing to do with the ego of this world. It was a spirit, absolute, unchangeable, indivisible, indestructible. Although absolutely unique, as individual as a fingerprint, it was at the same time part of an infinite, well-ordered whole.” The two aspects, ego and Self, are almost completely united here, but the ego remains part
of a large whole; it is not the whole itself. Another of Moody’s patients had a heart attack and described seeing himself as a little sphere on the inside of a round ball. It is just this relation between ego and Self which Jungian psychology attempts to establish in every person during his or her lifetime, through the process of individuation (the journey towards wholeness). For if the ego identifies with the Self, then it suffers an inflation. If it goes too far from the Self, then life seems meaningless. A small number of the 2,500 dreams compiled by von
Franz, are death dreams, which are not just dreams surrounding the archetype of death, but dreams of people who subsequently died. Therefore, they are of a precognitive nature, as they can anticipate the death of someone. These are the types of dreams the book deals with. In death dreams, the end of physical life is represented in a symbolic way, but almost always accompanied by manifestations that allude to the continuation of the person’s life. A psychologist should not begin by telling a patient facing death, “You have to believe in an afterlife”, but rather simply emphasise the individual’s dream
and what the dream means for him or her. It is up to the patient to believe in it or not. The voice of nature or instinct which is the dream helps one to die in peace and in harmony with oneself, living right into one’s death. This is a great advantage, since one does not continue to fight with oneself, one is no stranger to oneself. That is why, generally speaking, interpreting the dreams of those who are moving towards death gives them great consolation and calms them down. A sceptic might insist that dreams are merely wish fulfillments,
against which the following can be said: it is not at all consistent with general experience that dreams only reflect unconscious wishes. On the contrary, they most often depict a completely objective psychic “natural event”, uninfluenced by the wishes of the ego. In cases where the dreamer has illusions about the approaching death or is not aware of its proximity, dreams arise that show it with total brutality and without compassion. It is as if the unconscious wants to convey an urgent message to rid oneself of all self-deception. Such is the case of a woman who had cancer and
dreamt that her wrist watch was damaged. She brought it to the watchmaker, who told her that it was beyond repair. Two days later, she dreamt that her favourite tree fell down the ground. It was all too clear for her what the dreams meant. It was a terrible shock for her but she had accepted her fate. After this realisation, however, she continued to dream normally and lived for many more years. Thus, we must make an important distinction. Having dreams about death does not necessarily mean that death is imminent. There are death dreams that indicate one’s death,
and dreams about death that occur to people in order to have them face death, and can be interpreted more as a memento mori (meditation on one’s mortality). Whether that person would get a salutary shock and continue to live, or if it actually means that one will die, that one is never quite sure of until the end has come. Von Franz points out, however, that there is sometimes a kind of uncanny feeling that a certain dream forebodes death, but that is more of a parapsychological feeling, scientifically one couldn’t give any reasons why one dream means actual
death and another means only the problem of death. Sometimes, one gets a gruesome shiver when people tell one a dream about death, as if one’s nervous sympathetic system would say “Watch out, this really means death!" One of von Franz’s old colleagues had a very severe illness and had a dream that said, “You can go on living if you want.” He made a great effort and he recovered. We are free to choose. Other times the dream says, “it is your destiny to die.” There is destiny and freedom at the same time. One of the functions of
dreams is a preparation for some approaching phase or threshold in life. Death is such a threshold, for which the unconscious wants to prepare us. While people of all ages can dream of death, they are more frequent in the second half of life. This is because during midlife, when most people have reached the top of their external life, physically, biologically, and sociologically, the psyche starts a natural preparation process towards death, in order to attain inner maturation. This shows that death is not just something that happens at the end of our life, it’s an opus magnum, a
great work, and the effort that we make, the conscious realisation is completely essential. We can thus say that, since midlife, we are starting to live towards this eternalisation. In some cases, death dreams can appear at a young age. In Man and His Symbols, Jung writes about a case in which he was approached by a psychiatrist who had received a booklet of a series of twelve dreams as a Christmas present by his ten-year-old daughter, written when she was eight. They were some of the weirdest series of dreams Jung had seen, nine of which centred on the
archetypal themes of destruction and restoration. The girl had dreams one would expect in an aging person who is approaching death. Indeed, they were confirmed to be death dreams, as one year later, she died on Christmas of an infectious disease. There are also cases in which someone dreams about the death of some other person, usually one that is close to him or her. A colleague of Jung’s was suffering from a deadly gangrenous fever. A former patient of his, who had no knowledge of the nature of his doctor’s illness, dreamt that the doctor died in a great
fire. At that time the doctor had just entered a hospital and the disease was only beginning. Three weeks later, he died. Just before Jung’s death, his friend Laurens van der Post, who was on a voyage from Africa to Europe, had a dream of Jung waving and calling out, “I’ll be seeing you.” On that very day, nature joined the event and lightning struck Jung’s favourite tree in the garden. “This spectacle of old age would be unendurable did we not know that our psyche reaches into a region held captive neither by change in time nor by limitation
of place. In that form of being our birth is a death and our death a birth. The scales of the whole hang balanced.” It is very important for the unconscious that we accept our mortality, for one has the chance to experience in death the “birth” of one’s soul-substance, the Self, the great work which is the completion of one’s inner wholeness. The realisation of the Self means a restoration of one’s relation to God. In the most vital moment of self-realisation, God unites, as it were, with us. This would mean that through the realisation of the Self,
we assist at the same time in God’s incarnation, God’s completeness. Self-knowledge is a reunion of the soul with God. The state of wholeness is inseparable from the experience of God. Individuation—the process of psychic and spiritual growth—is actually a preparation for death, the most essential transformation of our whole being. It is as if it were the goal and sole purpose of our life, and all that is important to the unconscious. As such, individuation is much more important than death itself. This may explain why people who have the feeling that they have completed their life’s task do
not fear death. For they have done their best to attain wholeness. In the final stage of individuation, we finally become our uniqueness or essence, and also, paradoxically, one with all other souls. The symbols that manifest in death dreams are images that also appear during the individuation process. It is as if this process manifests itself abruptly before death, if it had not been consciously experienced up to that moment. Von Franz noted that it sometimes happened that in dreams actual dead people came to visit the still-living person. This special category of dreams is known as “metapsychic” or
otherworldly dreams, which usually have an intense emotional impact on the dreamer and are characterised furthermore by a unique, indescribable feeling—a touch of eternity. In metapsychic dreams, the dead person is interpreted on the objective level. Therefore, some dreams deal really with the dead, and others with their subjective image that is within the personal unconscious. This distinction is very subtle, and one treads on uncertain ground. In psychotherapy one generally attributes these dreams to a mother complex or a father complex, and rarely take into account the “objective dead”. These objective dreams are more frequent in the first weeks
or months after the event of death, though they can appear years later too. Six weeks after Jung’s father had died, he appeared to him in a dream saying that he made a good recovery and was now coming home. Two days later, the dream was repeated. This was an unforgettable experience that forced Jung to think for the first time about life after death. Jung had several dreams of his late wife. In one of them, she was continuing to work on the grail legend, which she had left unfinished when she died. Jung also reports that it is
told in dreams that the dead were eager to learn from the newcomers from Earth what they brought over to them as if they had no direct information of what was happening on Earth. Von Franz also experienced metapsychic dreams. Three weeks after the death of her father, she dreamt that her father visited her and she asked him, how he was doing and if he was happy. He replied that he was happy and studying at the music academy. Then he went into the guest-room instead of his former bedroom. For he said, “now I am only a guest.”
Von Franz then thought she had forgotten to put out the electric stove and that there was a danger of fire. At that moment she woke up, feeling terribly hot and sweating. Jung interpreted this dream on the objective level, that is, as a dream concerning her real father. He loved music but never had time to perfect this gift; apparently he was then catching up with something he had neglected in this life—as a form of compensation. In Jung’s dreams, however, the dead person continues to work on what they couldn’t finish. Jung said that the end motif of
feeling terribly hot is caused by being in touch with the “coldness” of the world of ghosts, which produces a strong physical counterreaction as a defense against the chill of death. This “coldness” may be accounted for by the fact that apparitions take energy away from the living in order to make themselves visible. It is reported that witnesses who touched phantoms received a kind of electrical vibration. At any rate, it is emphasised that the world of the living and the world of the dead should not come too close to each other, for they are somehow dangerous for
each other. Metapsychic dreams seem to indicate that what we take with us into the Beyond is whatever substance of the Self we have extracted from the unconscious and integrated in our whole being. It would mean that the more we become conscious of the Self during our lifetime, the less we might have to go through it upon death, and who knows, perhaps even after death. The attainment of maximum consciousness and psychic wholeness while still in this world seems to be an essential condition for the coming life in the Beyond. We will now turn to some cases
of death dreams and explore their archetypal motifs. A 52-year-old man had to go to the hospital for an operation of bladder cancer. He was uncertain and worried about the outcome. He dreamt that an ambulance came to take him to the hospital (in reality he was still well enough to be able to go by taxi). The driver got out of the ambulance, and with a cynical grin, opened the backdoor, and there lay a white coffin. The man woke up with a terrible shock. In fact, he did not leave the hospital alive, but died there after several
weeks of great suffering. However, as soon as he accepted the bitter fact that the operation would not help, he began to have dreams about life after death. He dreamt that he was going through a forest in winter. It was cold and misty. He shivered. From a distance he could hear the noise of a chainsaw and from time to time, the thundering crash of a big tree falling to the ground. Suddenly, the scene changed, and it was summertime. The sun shone through the leaves, making a speckled design of light in the green moss on the ground.
The dreamer’s father (who, in reality, had died long before) walked toward him and said, “Look, here is forest again. Don’t pay any attention to what happens further down there” (he meant the fall of the trees in the lower forest). The cutting down of trees probably alludes to the brutal operation that the dreamer was going to have, and which did not save his life. The same dream, however, continues on a “higher level” where there is life once again. In that place the dead continue to live. The dead father advises his son not to worry about what
is happening “down there”. The unconscious wants to detach the dreamer psychically from the physical terminal event. It is not by chance that the unconscious chose the image of a forest when it tried to describe the destruction of the mortal body. Vegetation is a form of life that directly grows out and feeds on organic and inorganic matter. This is an image that the unconscious often uses about death, as if to say, the disappearance of the person in death is not total. There is something that remains “underground”, and from there life returns. Plants disappear during autumn and
then grow back from the roots in the spring again. A man in his forties visited von Franz for a single consultation. He had received a terminal medical diagnosis and could not accept it. The night after he received his diagnosis, he dreamt the following: “He saw a green, half-high, not-yet-ripe wheatfield. A herd of cattle had broken into the field and trampled down and destroyed everything in it. Then a voice from above called out: Everything seems to be destroyed, but from the roots under the earth the wheat will grow again.” In this dream von Franz saw a
hint that life somehow continues after death, but the dreamer did not want to accept this interpretation. He was an atheist materialist and did not believe in an afterlife. Shortly afterward he died without having become reconciled with his fate. This dream reminds us of John 12:24: “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” Death is often represented as an old man with a sickle or scythe, the instrument of the harvest god Saturn, who reaps the corn and
man is like the wheat he cuts down. The Egyptian god Osiris, with whom every person became identical to after death, was simply called “wheat”. The grain which is put in the ground is the dead Osiris, and the grain which has germinated is the Osiris who has once again renewed his life. The Egyptian paradise is the Field of Reeds, a fertile land where wheat and barley grow much higher than in our world. Egyptians would put wheat grains and flower bulbs inside the mummy bandages or in a container near the dead body and pour water over them.
If they germinated, it was taken as a sign of a completed resurrection. It is a widely spread archetypal concept that the dead, like vegetation, come back to life. Vegetation represents the psychic mystery of death and resurrection. For this reason, the image of vegetation appears repeatedly in the dreams of terminally ill people. Flowers, too, are a widespread archetypal image for life after death, or for the eternal within us. The mandala structure of the flower points to the Self. Buddha “the enlightened one” not only sits on a lotus, but also in a lotus position. A patient and
friend of von Franz had the following vision during active imagination before she died: “The mystery of the flower is within me. I am it and it is me. It has entered me and has been transformed into a human being… I am this radiant flower, from which a spring has burst forth… Am I this? From now on, when I go to the flower, I know that I go into myself… I look at the flower. As I meditate on it, I am transformed into a flower, fully rooted, radiantly eternal. Thus I take the shape of eternity. This
makes me quite whole… As flower, as centre, no one can harm me. I am protected in this way. For the greater part of the time I will have to return to human form, but again and again it will be possible for me to become the flower. I am happy about this, for until recently I did not know it was possible. I only knew the flower as an object. Now I know that I can also be it.” Our rich offerings of flowers and wreaths of flowers at a burial not only symbolise our feelings of sympathy but
also, unconsciously, a “resurrection magic”, a symbol for the return of the departed to a new life. Another motif that appears in death dreams is fire as the regeneration of the dead. Fire is often seen as a destructive element, but it is also purifying. The fire which either “punishes” (hell) or purges (purgatory) was, for a long time, not precisely differentiated. Origin of Alexandria (who died in 253 AD) was an early advocate of the purgatory idea. Hell, for Origen, is only a temporal place of limited punishment; he rejects the idea of eternal damnation. But purgatory serves as
a catharsis. Only for those who cannot be taught is purgatory a punishment. In the Egyptian underworld, one has to pass through a lake of fire which can destroy or save one. In one of the funerary spells of the so-called Coffin Texts (dating back to 2100 BC), it is written: “I am the shapeless one in midst of the fire, I enter the flames and come out of the flames, the shining flames do not sting me, they do not burn me.” Fire burns away everything which is superfluous and untruthful, so that when one has gone through the
fire, only that which is eternal remains. The Apostle Paul refers to Christ as the eternal foundation upon which each one builds his work: “Now if anyone builds on the foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, stubble—each man’s work will become manifest; for the Day will disclose it, because it will be revealed with fire, and the fire will test what sort of work each one has done… Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s spirit dwells in you?” The man mentioned earlier where the dream informed him that life would continue in
the upper forest, now became more peacefully prepared for death, but he could not rid himself of a certain bitterness that he must die so relatively young, for there were many more things he still wanted to do in this life. Then he had a dream: “He saw a wood which was green, not yet autumnal. A fire was raging, which destroyed it completely. It was a terrible sight. Afterwards, he was walking through the burned-up area. Everything was turned into black coal and ashes, but in the midst lay a big round boulder of red stone. It showed no
trace of the fire, and the dreamer thought: That one the fire has not touched or even blackened!” The fire destroys all vegetation, but when it is over something indestructible remains. This is the lapis philosophorum (philosophers’ stone) of the alchemists, a symbol of the Self. Many alchemical texts explicitly state that the stone is able to withstand fire. From the very beginning of alchemy, the making of the lapis was linked with the idea of death. The prima materia or basic material necessary to create the stone must go through the stage of the nigredo or blackening, which is
related to the alchemical operations of mortification and putrefaction seen in the decomposition of bodies, and in nature, where nutrients are recycled back to the earth. After this comes the second stage, the albedo or whitening, which purifies the soul. And finally, the third stage, the rubedo or reddening, where the opposites of sun and moon are united and where the lapis is created, putting an end to the Great Work. The man had to die by a catastrophe, but his innermost core, the red stone, would remain untouched. Thus, the lapis is a symbol of that form of the
dreamer’s existence which will continue to exist after death. The philosophers’ stone was conceived as the immortal body of the dead, which is associated with the mummification process of the ancient Egyptians, who would bathe the corpse in natron, a naturally occurring salt. The roots of the word natron come from the Egyptian word ntr, meaning “god”. Thus, the corpse was literally bathed in God liquid in order to become deified and eternalised. Jung’s last dream he was able to communicate before his death also involved an alchemical symbol of wholeness: “He saw a great round stone in a high
place, a barren square, and on it were engraved the words: “And this shall be a sign unto you of Wholeness and Oneness.” Then he saw many vessels to the right in an open square and a quadrangle of trees whose roots reached around the earth and enveloped him and among the roots golden threads were glittering.” The motif of the stone also appears in the death experience of a man killed in the war. In a state of unconsciousness, from which he awakened only briefly, he saw his mother and father, then wandered with them in the mountains through
a blossoming landscape: “I found a large stone and turned it over; it was weightless. On the back of it there was a large number of the most beautiful mountain crystals. They were arranged together to form something resembling a cathedral. I felt happy about it.” The image of the fruit is another motif that appears in death dreams. At the end of life there remains a fruit that will be preserved for eternity. A dying eighty-year-old man dreamt, “A sick old plum tree unexpectedly bears a lot of fruit on one of its branches. At the edge of one
bough there are even two golden plums. Full of joy, I show this miracle to my daughter and to my son.” The Gnostic philosopher Simon Magus taught that the universe consists of fire of which one half creates the visible world, the other remains invisible. He compares this to the tree of life, whose visible part are the leaves, branches, trunk, etc., which will be destroyed by fire in the end. But the fruit of the tree which is an image of God in the human soul, survives after death, and is stored in a “heavenly barn”. Hinduism and Buddhism
teaches that our experiences and actions are transformed into “grain” which represents the “fruit of our deeds” (karma). In the Book of Matthew it is written, “by their fruits you shall know them.” If any man shall eat of the fruit, he shall live without hunger. This is similar to the water that grants one eternal life described by Christ. Psychologically, the fruit is the result of our efforts towards conscious realisation, which seems capable of continuing to have effects after death. Thus, a man who had suffered a great deal in his professional life dreamt that a voice told
him, “Your work and your life, which you have endured consciously, have redeemed hundreds in your generation and will have an illuminating influence upon hundreds of generations to come.” According to this dream, there exists an invisible compensation. Suffering and pain which are consciously lived seem to have their own rewards—their fruit—but often only in the Beyond, as is indeed emphasised in Christianity. Thus, consciously lived suffering has a redeeming effect on the past and on the future of humanity, an effect which is exerted invisibly from the Beyond or the collective unconscious. This fruit is often described as the
gold fruit, the philosophers’ stone, the diamond body, etc., symbolic of a unique quintessence—the goal and completion of existence. This is a remarkable take on suffering, for there is nothing worse than meaningless suffering. Von Franz was once consulted by a woman who had a schizophrenic episode and was in an awful state, she told von Franz: “What is the meaning of my life? I am ruined. Even the medication isn’t helping me anymore. What meaning can you give to my life.” Von Franz replied: “You are suffering for God.” And she fully understood and she said, “Thank you, now
I can live.” It is the meaning of life that keeps us alive against even very unfavourable conditions. If one continues to suffer and consciously accepts this suffering, and understands that one is doing something for the eternal in oneself, then one has made a conscious realisation that is essential. And then, when one dies, there will be a fruit. Perhaps this is what the Book of Job points to. When the Second World War broke out, and von Franz was living in a civil defense shelter, she had to think about the possibility of immediate death. However, she wasn’t
afraid to die, but rather afraid of not finishing her work. At that moment, she saw very clearly that it is to accomplish one’s task that is important, not so much one’s personal life. The feeling that she would not die before she finished her task remained with her until she reached old age. In her 70s, she finished most of her work and was at peace with dying. She died at the age of 83. Jungian analyst Edward Edinger reports the following death dream from a patient: “I have been set a task nearly too difficult for me. A
log of hard and heavy wood lies covered in the forest. I must uncover it, saw or hew from it a circular piece, and then carve through the piece a design. The result is to be preserved at all cost, as representing something no longer recurring and in danger of being lost. At the same time, a tape recording is to be made describing in detail what it is, what it represents, its whole meaning. At the end, the thing itself and the tape are to be given to the public library.” This unique quintessence is to be stored in
a collective library as a kind of “spirit treasury’, which resembles Simon Magus’ idea of a “heavenly barn” into which the “fruit” is brought. A colleague of Von Franz, once analysed a 29-year-old woman who was terminally ill. The cancer spread into the brain and she became unconscious. Her analyst continued visiting her and sat silently by her side. One day, she suddenly opened her eyes and was fully conscious and told the analyst that she had dreamt of standing beside the hospital bed and the sun was shining into the room, she was feeling extremely well, as she had
never felt for years. The doctor came in and said, “Yes, you are cured, you can put your clothes on and leave the hospital.” Then she looked back at her bed and she saw herself lying with closed eyes, dead. One day later, she died. Here death is represented as a cure. This dream reminds one of Socrates’ enigmatic last words, “Crito, we owe a cock to Asclepius. Pay it and do not neglect it.” Socrates invokes the only god known to revive the dead, thanking him for healing him of the sickness of life by the cure of death.
The dream of the young woman conveys a similar point of view, as if it was saying that she would now at last be well and alive again. But it also tells her, unmistakenly, that her body would also be dead. The image of a dark tunnel also belongs among those archetypal motifs which anticipate the course of death. In NDEs many describe their experience as one of being in a very happy state, but quite often some of them had first to go through something resembling a dark tunnel before they could arrive at a new state of existence.
When obliged to return to life by medical treatment, some of these patients report that they had to come back through the same passage by which they departed. The dark passage is represented in dreams as a journey to the West, to the place of the setting sun. According to von Franz, the image of the journey in dreams is the most frequent occurring symbol of impending death. We find the motif of the journey most extensively in the Egyptian mythology, where the souls complete their journey with the sun god Ra in his solar barque. The journey to the
Beyond follows the path of the sun, beginning with a descent into the underworld, and leads to the East, where the deceased return to life. The directional burial orientation of numerous ancient and still existing cultures also points to this idea, that the resurrection is at the same time something like a new sunrise. Psychologically, the sun is a symbol of the source of awareness. The longing for light is the longing for consciousness. The meaning of light also lies behind the widespread customs of lighting candles (in antiquity, torches) and letting them burn in mortuary rooms, tombs and graves.
This is a form of analogy magic, through which new life and an awakening to new consciousness is granted to the deceased. Death is described in dreams sometimes not as a tunnel passage but as a heavy dark spot which spreads out and hangs over the dreamer, or as a cloud which completely obliterates all view of the outer world. In the last dream of the woman who saw the flower in her active imagination, she had a black spot in her eye. This black spot was death, which “darkens” the eyes, and puts an end forever to all sight
of the outer world. The spirit of discouragement is related to the fact that the ego still looks too much toward the outside, at the visible world, and does not yet sufficiently see the “reality of the soul.” A young woman, before dying unexpectedly during a surgical operation, dreamt that she saw a black bird in the depths of the lake, it was dead and she felt great sympathy and wanted to dive in to save it. Her husband told her not to do it, for it is right this way. Then she saw that the eye of the bird
was a diamond that shone brightly. The initial darkness in the Beyond is a state of profound depression and a feeling of complete meaninglessness. This spirit of discouragement appears in many people facing death. It may serve to detach the consciousness of the dying person from the outer world, which is experienced as meaningless, futile, and unreal. This gloomy image reminds one of some of the experiences reported by Moody, in which his witnesses are said to have spent some time in a kind of “in-between” region or limbo where shadowy spirits of the dead wander about mindlessly. He writes:
“What you would think of as their head was bent downward; they had sad, depressed looks; they seemed to shuffle… They looked washed out, dull, grey. And they seemed to be forever shuffling and moving around, not knowing where they were going, not knowing who to follow, or what to look for… They seemed to be… very bewildered; not knowing who they are or what they are.” Another type of dreams that occur when approaching death is being visited by a stranger or burglar, that is, by someone unfamiliar which unexpectedly enters one’s life. A businessman in his mid-fifties had
the following first dream during analysis: “He awakens in the middle of the night in bed, in a dark room halfway under the earth. A bright gleam of light streams in through the window. Suddenly he sees a stranger in the room, someone who fills him with such an inhuman, terrible fear that he awakens, bathed in sweat.” A year later, he was about to die from cancer of the spinal cord. A similar dream is reported from a man who died soon thereafter: “I come home and close the apartment door. As I enter, I have the feeling that
something is there… I look into my room and see an old man over sixty whom I have observed occasionally on the tram; he looks like death. He has come into the house as a burglar. Horrified, I run out of the house but I cannot lock the door from the outside so I knock at the neighbour’s door and call for help. But there is no one to be seen there and no one opens the door for me. I am all alone. I go back to my apartment where the sinister man is still in my room.” Death
also appears as a wolf or dog in dreams. In Egyptian mythology, Anubis is the canine-headed god of the underworld, and among the Aztecs, Xolotl is a dog-headed god of fire, lightning, death, and misfortune, and also a psychopomp. In Greek Mythology, the three-headed hound Cerberus guards the gates of Hades. The night Jung’s mother died, an event of which he was not yet aware, he dreamt: “I was in a dense, gloomy forest… It was a heroic, primeval landscape. Suddenly I heard a piercing whistle… My knees shook. Then there were crashings in the underbrush, and a gigantic wolfhound
with a fearful, gaping maw burst forth… It tore past me, and I suddenly knew: the Wild Huntsman had commanded it to carry away a human soul… The next morning I received the news of my mother’s passing.” Von Franz states that the terror-filled uncanny aspect of the “other” appears especially when the dreamer has yet no relation to death or does not expect it. It is actually God who brings death to man and the less familiar one is with this dark side of the divine, the more negative one’s experience of it will be. But the great religions
have always known that death and life are a part of the same divine mystery which lies behind our physical existence. The threshold is a typical motif in death dreams. An old woman dreamt the following: “She sees a candle lit on the window sill of the hospital room and finds that the candle suddenly goes out. Fear and anxiety ensue as the darkness envelops her. Suddenly, the candle lights on the other side of the window and she awakens.” The dream here contains an element of momentary fear and anxiety when the light is extinguished. Then, the candle dematerialises
and materialises again on the other side of the window, as if it had crossed a threshold of solid glass, suggesting that life would indeed continue in the Beyond. The woman did not know why but felt at complete peace, four hours later, she died. Von Franz compares this threshold to the event horizon in astrophysics, an invisible boundary surrounding a black hole, nothing inside this can be observed from the outside, because nothing inside that surface, even light, can escape beyond it. Thus, everything which happens within the event horizon becomes unobservable. This natural phenomenon can be used as
a simile for the threshold between life and death. The dead go over into another form of existence which we cannot perceive any longer, even though they might still be present in reality just as before, they are in the event horizon, and are no longer observable. Although some people get, from to time, amazing glimpses of it. The image of light appears more often than any other image in death dreams and NDEs. It has been described as unusually bright and yet does not hurt one’s eyes, or as a beautiful colour unknown to us. When Jung had his
profound visions after his NDE, his nurse told him, “It was as if you were surrounded by a bright glow.” That was a phenomenon she had sometimes observed in the dying, she added. This presence of luminosity is like the indication of a light that exists somewhere else. Light has always been the symbol of conscious realisation. That is why, when we understand something, “it dawns on us”, we are illuminated, and we see clearly. The alchemist Gerhard Dorn describes such light as a window into eternity, a window which opens itself for the adept as a result of his
dedication to his opus. A man who was considered to have been clinically dead for twenty-three minutes experienced the following: “I was moving very quickly toward a bright shining net which vibrated with a remarkable cold energy at the intersecting points of its radiant strands. The net was like a lattice which I did not want to break through. For a brief moment my forward moment seemed to slow down, but then I was in the lattice. As I came in touch with it, the light flickering increased to such an intensity that it consumed and, at the same time,
transformed me. I felt no pain. The feeling was neither agreeable nor disagreeable, but it filled me completely. From then on everything was different—this can be described only very incompletely. The whole thing was like a transformer, an energy-transformer, which transported me into a formlessness beyond time and space. I was not in another place—for spatial dimensions had been abolished—but rather in another state of being.” At a certain threshold in the increase of frequency, the psychic functions which produce our perception of time and space seem to cease functioning. Jung never got tired of stressing the fact that a
certain part of the psyche is not bound to the space-time category. On this subject he writes: “[I]n the deeper layers of the psyche which we call the unconscious there are things that cast doubt on the indispensable categories of our conscious world, namely time and space. The existence of telepathy in time and space is still denied only by positive ignoramuses. It is clear that timeless and spaceless perceptions are possible only because the perceiving psyche is similarly constituted. Timelessness and spacelessness must therefore be somehow inherent in its nature, and this in itself permits us to doubt the
exclusive temporality of the soul… It is sufficiently clear that timelessness and spacelessness can never be grasped through the medium of our intelligence, so we must rest content with the borderline concept. Nevertheless we know that a door exists to a quite different order of things from the one we encounter in our empirical world of consciousness.” In his book, The Mystery of Death: Awakening to Eternal Life, the Christian theologian Ladislaus Boros presents a final decision hypothesis, according to which, each human being, at the moment of death, has to pronounce one’s final decision: to be in favour or
against God. What is decided here subsists before eternity, since now the act becomes being, the decision becomes state, and time becomes eternity. Thus, one either rejects God’s divine love (hell) or accepts it (heaven). In other words, death is a kind of judgment day, but it is we who pass judgment on ourselves. On the contrary, according to alchemical symbolism, opposites are reconciled at the last moment and remain united. All of the dreams of people who are facing death indicate that the unconscious prepares consciousness not for a definite end but for a profound transformation and for a
kind of continuation of the life process which, however, is unimaginable to everyday consciousness. Von Franz’s work answers only a few questions; it raises anew many old ones and suggests many new ones. Does survival after death continue for only a limited period of time or longer? What is meant by a timeless existence? How do the dead relate to each other? Are there any traces of the reincarnation hypothesis? Etc, etc. With the death dreams she has been able to collect, von Franz concludes that they point to something of our individuality remaining after death. Thus, our sense of
individual identity that we have acquired during our lives seems to continue after death. Though we don’t know if it’s going to continue for long. But that is one of the essential questions. What we know for sure is that the physical body is destroyed. And we also know that it seems likely that the “everyday me or ego” that is concerned with relatively trivial matters and the occupation with external facts disappears in death. But there is an “essential or purified me” that seems to be preserved, something eternal, and that is identical to the Self. Conscious realisation is
the great mystery of human life, and the meaning of life. We are here on this earth to become aware, to attain a higher level of consciousness through the experience of suffering and duality. And what seems to be preserved, is all our great conscious realisations that have illuminated us, and will continue to live on after our disappearance, for the common good of the human species. It seems that there is an indivisibility of the psychophysical universe, and, in this sense, every small step that we make towards awareness has a completely universal effect. If someone solves his or
her problem completely inwardly and invisibly, there is a change in the universe. And that is our task.
