Listen to our call for dreams:
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Jung’s psychology has long been understood as an attempt to revivify the Christian tradition and its symbolic universe through the language and methods of depth psychology. In my paper at this year´s IAAP Congress in Zürich, I explored the ways Jung both failed and succeeded in his ambitious undertaking. To dream the Christian myth onward is, admittedly, a grandiose endeavouer, even for Jung.
In his late essays, he no longer strains toward a full revisioning of Christian doctrine but turns instead toward a more intimate injunction: that each of us must meditate again on the inner Christian mystery, repentance, metanoia, orientation toward the divine, and the possibility that individual transformation might ripple outward into collective renewal.
At the final evening of the IAAP conference, after the gala dinner dissolved into a dancefloor of Jungians shedding their personas, I bumped into fellow analyst Cécile Buckenmeyer. We had never met, but she recognized me from the podcast and approached me with warmth and enthusiasm. What began as a brief exchange next to a crowded dancefloor continued over the last few months, and gradually, after pregnant pauses, took shape as the seed for this project.
A simple but potent question emerged between us: What would it mean to dream the myth onward, literally?
The idea we arrived at is simple, almost obvious once spoken aloud. We are launching a collective dream experiment and new podcast series devoted to the dreams that Jung called “the common property of mankind” (CW 10 §33). Those archetypal dreams that can feel larger than our individual psyche, and at times seem to speak not only to us but through us.
Part of the inspiration for this project comes from Charlotte Beradt’s extraordinary book The Third Reich of Dreams. In the 1930s (1933-1939), as totalitarianism tightened its grip on everyday life in Germany, Beradt quietly collected the dreams of ordinary Germans. What emerged was a parallel record of the era, an underground psychological archive revealing how political terror seeped into the inner world long before it was recognized consciously.
Her work showed that dreams are much more than private fantasies. They can also work as early-warning systems and register shifts in the collective psyche long before history names them. Beradt’s project stands as a reminder with both a warning and a possibility: if dreams can record a society’s descent, perhaps they can also help us sense the possibility of renewal, or the yearning for it.
This project is not about repeating Beradt’s work, but about honoring its insight:
that dreaming can work as a form of resistance, a way of staying human, permeable, and responsive to der Zeitgeist. That dreams can become the earliest archive of an era, the place where anxieties, distortions, and longings surface before they are spoken aloud.
If this is true, then gathering dreams today is not only a psychological gesture but a civic one. A quiet act of remembering that our inner lives matter, and that the imagination, the unconquered part of us, can still resist, reveal, and renew.
We are inviting you to share these dreams of yours, anonymously, with us. Each episode will focus on one submitted dream. We will read it, explore it, and allow it to resonate within a wider symbolic and cultural frame. Perhaps, over time we´ll see the forming a living archive of collective dreams: a map not of political events, but of the deeper emotional, spiritual, and archetypal currents shaping this moment, and our future.
If a dream has stayed with you, unsettled you, moved you, or felt “too big” to keep to yourself, it may belong here. If you hear one of the dreams we share in the podcast and feel some resonance, feel free to respond with a dream.
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