Unconscious Hints

Now and then, I pick Jung’s autobiography, Memories, Dreams and Reflections, and just read from random pages. Even though I’ve read the book several times, I usually find some nugget that I don’t recall reading before. One powerful story that he recounts took place during WWII, when he was returning home from Bollingen, Switzerland. He was on a train, had a book with him, but couldn’t read. “…for the moment the train started to move, I was overpowered by the image of someone drowning.”

During the entire journey, Jung couldn’t get rid of the feeling. “It struck me as uncanny, and I thought, ‘What has happened? Can there have been an accident?'” The feeling was apparently exacerbated by a memory of an accident that had occurred while he was in the military service.

He got off the train at  Erlenbach and walked home, still troubled. His second daughter’s family was living with the Jungs then and as he walked into the garden, her kids were all there, upset. “They told me that Adrian, then the youngest of the boys, had fallen into the water at the boathouse. It is quite deep there, and since he could not really swim, he had almost drowned. This had taken place at exactly the time I had been assailed by that memory on the train.”

This story appears in the chapter on life after death, which has numerous examples of synchronicities like this that Jung experienced.  As he wrote, “The unconscious helps by communicating things to us, or making figurative allusions. It has other ways, too, of informing us of things which by all logic we could not possibly know. Consider synchronistic phenomena, premonitions, and dreams that come true. The unconscious had given me a hint. Why should it not be able to inform us of other things also?”