Dreams are the guiding words of the soul. Why should I henceforth

When Carl Jung wrote, “Dreams are the guiding words of the soul. Why should I henceforth not love my dreams and not make their riddling images into objects of my daily consideration?” he was not speaking of idle fantasies or fleeting night visions. He was speaking of the mystery of the inner world, of that vast and secret realm that lies beneath waking reason. For Jung, dreams were not illusions to be dismissed, but messages from the depths of the psyche, where the eternal and the personal meet. In those strange and shimmering images that rise from the night, he saw the handwriting of the soul itself — a sacred alphabet through which the unconscious speaks to the conscious mind.

In this quote, Jung calls upon us to love our dreams — to cherish them not as foolish fictions, but as revelations. The ancients understood this truth long before modern science gave it new names. The Greeks believed that dreams were sent by the gods, that Morpheus, the son of Sleep, shaped them to carry wisdom from Olympus to mortal minds. The Egyptians wrote them on papyrus and sought their meaning in temples. The Hebrews saw in them the whisper of prophecy. Jung, standing at the bridge between myth and modernity, revived that sacred view: that the soul does not speak in the language of logic, but in the symbols of dreams, where truth is veiled in story and emotion.

He himself lived by this teaching. When Jung broke away from Freud and entered the dark forest of his own psyche, he began to record his dreams in what he called The Red Book. In those pages he met figures that both terrified and enlightened him — ancient sages, serpent gods, wise old men, and radiant women. They were not mere hallucinations, but living metaphors of his inner transformation. Through these visions, Jung came to see that to understand one’s dreams is to understand the hidden currents of one’s being, and that only by listening to them can one walk the path toward wholeness.

In one of his dreams, Jung saw himself descending into the earth, deeper and deeper, until he reached a chamber of skulls. There he understood that he was journeying into the collective unconscious — the ancestral memory of humanity. From that vision came his greatest insight: that the soul of each person is rooted in the same eternal soil, and that our dreams connect us not only to ourselves, but to all who came before. Thus, to love one’s dreams is to love the voice of the human spirit that speaks through them.

But how do we, in our restless and practical age, heed this wisdom? Jung warns that to ignore dreams is to silence the very voice that seeks to guide us. The modern world teaches us to value the outer life — our work, our achievements, our possessions — but neglects the inner. Yet within each dream, however strange, lies a truth meant only for the dreamer: a fear that must be faced, a desire that must be understood, or a destiny that calls softly from the shadows. When we make our dreams “objects of daily consideration,” as Jung said, we bridge the distance between what we do and who we are.

Consider the story of Dmitri Mendeleev, the Russian chemist who dreamed the periodic table. After long nights of work, exhausted, he fell asleep — and in his sleep, the elements arranged themselves before him in perfect order. He awoke, wrote it down, and history was changed. The dream that spoke to him was not magic, but the voice of his own deep intuition — the soul’s guidance taking form. So too it is with us: what we ignore in waking thought, our dreams often reveal with perfect clarity.

Therefore, let this be your lesson, child of light: do not flee from the riddles of your dreams. Write them down upon waking; meditate upon their meaning. The image that troubles you may hold the key to your healing. The vision that inspires you may be the seed of your calling. Remember always that the soul speaks in symbols, and that dreams are its chosen tongue. To love your dreams is to love yourself — not the surface self that acts and speaks, but the eternal self that watches, remembers, and guides.

For the night is not an enemy of truth, but its mirror. The dream is not madness, but message. And the one who dares to listen — who seeks wisdom not only from the stars above but from the stars within — shall walk the path of the ancients: the path of those who know that life’s deepest truths are not learned from the world, but revealed in the quiet chambers of the soul.