The Dream Book of Self-Knowledge
- it is not in the unconscious a positive symbol; although a deep interest in artistic objects, coins or postage stamps leads a person to emotional experiences and is the key to the spiritual level, a collector of artistic objects takes for himself and those around him the chance to ascend to the emotional level of experience or focuses on the material value of works and stores wealth in his collections.
- he is so fascinated and blinded by amassing and administering his collection that he doesn't even realize how powerfully he is bound to the material world, and therefore the collector symbolizes one of the hardest dependencies to get rid of.
- of paintings and sculptures of saints: if the paintings or sculptures are revered by the dreamer as a symbol of divine reality then this is a deep mystical act, but if such images are merely an object of a collector's interest, then the dreamer is reduced to mere "profiteering in the temple," which Jesus Christ*60 once sharply rejected as a heinous act.
