Up: [[Dreams]] Related: [[Spirituality]] Created: 2023-01-14 Updated: 2025-09-11 Course: Jung's Notion of the Self - Lionel Corbett for Phoenix Friends of Jung [[The Self]] may be represented in our dreams by religious symbols and figures. However, those symbols and figures can look radically different from the God-images we are used to seeing in our religions. As Jung said, *You can’t Christianize the unconscious.* Jungian Lionel Corbett gave a few examples of dream images that he sees as representative of the Self. They included: an extraordinary child, often glowing with piercing eyes; a much larger than normal lion (I’m remembering Aslan in C.S. Lewis’s *Chronicles of Narnia*); awe-inspiring natural phenomenon such as a powerful storm or wind, or enormous mountains with a golden glow; or, for Lionel himself, a UFO coming closer and closer to him that was covered in eyes with light pouring out of them. The question is, how to know that these are actually images of the Divine? ### Jung’s Criteria for Images of the Self 1. The image must be **numinous**. This is a Greek word for *divine nod* so it’s referring to a moment that feels sacred, touching a very deep part of you that cannot be expressed. A numinous experience can be awesome and inspiring, or it can be dark and frightening. Either way, it is mysterious and intensely moving. 2. [[There are No Opposites in the Self]] so the image is one of wholeness and completion. It unites the opposites. Lionel Corbett gave a few examples: a snake with wings; a figure that is both young and old or male and female; a rose that is both white and red; a lion and lamb together. ### Where are the images coming from? We don’t know. Maybe it’s the unconscious that is producing them. Or *maybe there is a divinity beyond the psyche that is using the unconscious as a vehicle for transmitting the image*. (Corbett) We can’t ever know because we can’t get out of our psyche to look at it. But whatever the source, psyche keeps producing the images, in dreams, visions, or through any other form, so that we will always have a sense of the sacred.