Recycling

I was pondering "dreams" and life-goals again (you´ve got to do something with your time, right?), and wondered whether, in the end, our dreams are all essentially the same.
Made up of the same stuff.

I started to think of a little something called "the collective unconscious". My university advisor (and English professor) was a bit of a Jung-freak and managed to incorporate Jungian psychology into all of his lectures on Shakespeare, Spenser, and Milton. These were my favorite classes, due in part to this, I think. My professor explored connections between the texts and analytical psychology (some very obscure). I´ve long since forgotten some of those connections, the clues in the literature that pointed to traces of Jungian psychology. But they were fascinating, because they made sense out of it all, and they made the literature resonate with me.

Jung´s concept of the collective unconscious states, basically, that a large part of our thoughts and experiences are universal. In other words, our thoughts, dreams, feelings, and experiences are inextricably linked to those of other humans....regardless of our situation & geography & age. Most of our ideals, then, are timeless. I could be dreaming of the same thing as a woman in the Middle Ages, or a child in Africa. Our environment & personal experience only affect the details, not the essence.

Anyway, this is precisely why my aspirations have been shaped, in large part, by others (more directly, by the expression of others, or art). The images that come to my mind when I consider my dreams & goals are images reflected in movies, novels, or song-lyrics. And vice versa.
"There is nothing new under the sun". Remember? That is exactly what Jung was talking about.

I thought I´d give you a recap of some of my recurrent life-dreams, to illustrate the point more clearly:
*I envision a cozy bookstore with wooden beams across the ceiling and myself in the middle of it, serving coffee to the fascinating readers....... (the "You´ve Got Mail"-idea)
*I see myself, briefcase in hand, doing literature research in the stuffy basement of an old university.. or sitting in an office (with a huge wood-framed window) in the English department, contributing to journals for literary criticism. With a bunch of other enthusiastic academics (academic enthusiasts?) around, of course... (think "Possession", the film with Gwyneth Paltrow)
*I imagine having no "job" at all (basically what I´m doing now, but in a more romantic setting): just raising my daughters (and 2 or 3 more kids :-) why stop at 2 in an ideal world?), frolicking in the green hills, racing to the lighthouse, baking cookies in our industrial oven in a massive kitchen with an ocean-view. (à la "Anne of Green Gables,"maybe).

That is the best I can think of. And, honestly, don´t you think of similar things? I don´t know how many of my friends have shared a similar coffee/tea/book-store idea. Obviously, we´ve customized these collective ideas, but they originated in the same place.

I guess I´ll talk for myself, but I do think Jung had a point. My thoughts are nothing but a patchwork of the best feel-good movies and novels. With a few slight adaptations. Little House on the Prairie meets Dead Poets Society. Something like that. Usually, this frustrates me. It bothers me to be so unoriginal. To have such Blah-aspirations. But then I remember that what seems unoriginal and abstract (the common denominator in my dreams: I might describe it as a sense of "coziness" or something fluffy like that :-) ) is just a reflection of a greater/universal/collective dream. I am not saying that Napoleon ( to name someone ) shared my dream of serving coffee and conversing with a bunch of fellow idealists. But there is a reason why Hollywood feeds us the same formula (for romance, for action, for adventure) in all its productions. Books do the same. And songs.

Sometimes, I just think in song-lyrics. Whatever I might be experiencing, all that comes to my mind to express it is something written/expressed by someone else. While writing this, for instance, I sing, "But you can´t be in love like the movies..... ´cos in the movies, they´re not in love at all!" (from a song by the Avett Brothers, one of the local bands from our life in NC) It seems so pathetic, but, on the other hand, it´s just human. It´s a manifestation of the collective unconscious. It makes art work. It makes Hollywood a lot of money. It´s a form of recycling.

Good grief! I dwell on the same two or three things... it´s all kids and marriage and dreams in my world. Any suggestions for a change of topic??

I´ve added some Ari-quotations to that earlier post (before I forget them).