Books: The Dark & Light of Dreams

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Flying Saucers. His fancies led him everywhere. He went to Uganda to study the noble savages and swing their rhinoceros whips. He went to New Mexico, and while listening to the words of a Taos Indian chief, began for the first time to wonder about the morality of the Crusades. Everywhere he went he detected a "faint note of foolishness" clinging to his European clothes. To Jung, that was proof enough that Western man had "plunged down a cataract of progress," drawing him away from the unfinished business of the Middle Ages, the last age when man nakedly confronted the issues of good, evil and his God before he was distracted by material progress. But perhaps the feeling of foolishness was nothing more than the stirrings of the sexual embarrassment that Freudians think drove him away from his science in the first place.

His notion of man as the dreamer of age-old dreams led him into a mystic world. His life was plagued by occult phenomena (poltergeists threw his books about; blinding pain awakened him at the instant a patient was committing suicide), and his dreams even came to include flying saucers. In the morning he would ponder: perhaps the flying saucer is a magic lantern, and I—I am only the picture it projects.

All his life he felt most at home in the 16th century, and to recapture a time unscarred by "the deceptive sweetenings of existence," he built a round stone tower at Bollingen on Lake Zurich, where he comforted himself in total anachronism. Eager in his old age to chip into stone the thoughts that had escaped him on paper, he surrounded his tower with totems and painstakingly carved stone tablets, and over his door he carved his final confession of faith: "Called or Not Called, God Is Present." Tourists taking their holiday on the lake often saw him, as their boats passed by, dozing and dreaming in his field of stone totems.