The Dream Book of Self-Knowledge
- seeing relatives and acquaintances who are dead in reality: one of the fascinating phenomena of the afterlife isn't just a memory, but an important message from the unconscious, which shares important information with the dreamer or settles unresolved emotional relationships or even indicates human existence in the continuous cycle of rebirth.
- corpses: a positive symbol that often ends one of the dreamer's dependencies (e.g. a dead monkey represents an overcome addiction to alcohol); a person has thus erased from his subconscious settled cases that are not definitively deferred.
- dead human bodies: they often border the dreamer's departure from the old world; they are usually one of the impulses for abandoning an old view, embedded ideas, and lead him to a new world (see Apocalypse archetype).
- corpses of people who were tortured: these psychopathological syndromes*83 are an emotional culmination of the third phase of the prenatal process – a phase in which the experience of pornographic scenes or masochistic and sadistic elements are typical; see the Basic Perinatal Matrix archetype.
- a dead prostitute: the dreamer has destroyed in his consciousness his instinctual assessment of women (women as sexual objects).
- a dead serf: deadening of lower parts of one's being, this image can often appear in the UFO – Initiation Ceremonies archetype.
- a decaying corpse, contemplating corpses or meditating about them: shows the dream the constant transformation of everything material and the impermanence of the world so that he finds the only reality, the only fixed point, the only invariable stability.
- a corpse at the end of a rope: a very positive dream that represents the end of sexual or emotional bonds that the dead person, if the dreamer knows him, embodied in life with his traits.
- personified evil often appears in images of the dead (see Shadow archetype).
- corpses coming to life: deadened tendencies are coming to life and will be much more dangerous for the dreamer.
- a view of corpses: should help the dreamer, through compassion (but not sorrow or fear), move toward indifference.
- the dead are often accompanied by visions of the future and past filled with painful emotions (see the Past and Future Visions archetype).
- a dead child: the violently interrupted process of unifying antitheses; this is usually a tragic fall from the emotional level back to the instinctual level; a serious crisis, one that can even last several months, can be announced in this way.
- a dead child revived: re-starting of the process of self-improvement and the unification of antitheses.
- dead people in the water: symbolize settled emotional matter or ended emotional relationships.
- corpses in the ice: an at least temporary ascension of the consciousness to the spiritual level inevitably brings death to instinctual and sometimes emotional personifications.
- a frozen corpse: the definitive culmination of the end of some instinctual inclinations and dependencies (the frozen person to whom traits forgiven by the dreamer are linked).
- seeing a corpse with a mask: the dreamer has got to the stage in which the contrived personality definitively collapses and the ego is no longer built so that he can finally finds his own individuality.
- playing that you're dead (usually when threatened): the subconscious desire for peace and tranquility; the desire to free oneself from fear and emotional pressures; sometimes this can be a subconscious memory of the birth process (see Basic Perinatal Matrix archetype).
- coins next to a human skeleton or a corpse: an important legacy of the past that relates to the dead; will have a beneficial impact on the dreamer's emotional and spiritual life.
- seeing yourself as a corpse: a very positive dream that prepares the dreamer for the future death of the ego; it has one more important dimension which is the splitting of the personality when one part linked to instinctual inclinations is definitively deadened; and the other, usually the spiritual part, observes the result of the deadening of instinctual dependencies; see Attentiveness archetype.
- cleaning away corpses: this grim picture expresses one of the largest positive shifts in the self-improvement process.
- of the kingdom of the dead: a visit to this realm is wholly inevitable for the successful self-improvement process (spiritual journey); the dreamer can identify with the stories of Heracles, Aeneas, Ulysses, the visionary traveler from the Divine Comedy (Dante) or with stories of other mythological figures that have the power to visit the mythical kingdom of the dead; it can help explain to the dreamer something unclear in his life, though it is in the interest of both sides that this contact not be prolonged (see Apocalypse archetype).
