There were no images, no voices, only awareness, an awareness that correction was underway, correcting all the damage that had been done by the world’s leaders in recent time. It was clear that this correction was not being carried out by persons, but by some implacable force. I did not have the impression that this dream was conveying this awareness in any personal sense. The dream startled me awake—a rare event. The experience was stunning, the impact leaving me breathing hard, disoriented.

The next night, the dream repeated, only this time with an insistence that the correction would be complete.

The sense that this was some personal “wish fulfillment” dream was ludicrous on the face of it and most every orientation I came up with toward the dream felt much the same way. All minor potatoes in relation to the intensity and breadth of the dream experience.

Finally, I felt that what I was being made aware of was a vast enantiodromia now underway. This felt as close as I was going to get to an “understanding” of the dream, though even this seemed paltry in relation to the experience itself.

To understand the meaning of enantiodromia, one needs to understand the meaning of dominant.

On a personal level, Jung used the term dominant primarily in relation to the psychological functions. If, for example, the thinking function was dominant in consciousness, then its opposite would be dominant in the unconscious. Over time, as the personality is urged onward in development, the conscious function resists this, seeking only further development of the dominant function. However, what happens is that the dominant function in the unconscious grows more powerful and eventually breaks through and overwhelms the conscious dominant. This is an example of enantiodromia, where the thinking function gives way to its opposite. This forces a struggle between these dominants to achieve a necessary balance and greater wholeness that is the hallmark of the process of individuation. Anything less subjects the personality to breakdown, reversals, illness, debilitating neuroses, addiction, or worse.

When applied to groups, culture, nations and large-scale processes, Jung used dominant to refer to the “spirit” of the time. Ordinarily, there are multiple spirits of the time, keeping the aggregate in some state of uneasy balance. However, periodically in history, a particular “spirit” will become dominant. This is marked by extremity of one sort or another, that goes way beyond the usual and normal. Extremity is psychologically dangerous because it unleashes unconscious processes in vast numbers of people that fuel further extremity. This is a cycle that builds up to explosive potentials that usually are catastrophic. History is the story of such catastrophes.

The trigger for enantiodromia cannot be predicted, but it always relates to extremity increasing to some point. The dream indicates that a process of correction, complete correction, is underway. The fact that such a process was not the result of persons, but some impersonal force, points to the potential for an archetypal shift, a change on dominants, is underway. If so, I want to be on the lookout for evidence of this. Such evidence will be the subject of my next post.