BLAKE & DREAMS 1

British Museum

Illustrations to Young's Night Thoughts

Copy of image in British Museum

“The dream is the small hidden door in the deepest and most intimate sanctum of the soul, which opens to that primeval cosmic night that was soul long before there was conscious ego and will be soul far beyond what a conscious ego could ever reach.” Carl Jung

The quote is from "The Meaning of Psychology for Modern Man" (1933) an essay by Carl Jung that was published in 1933 as the second part of his series “On Psychology.”

Pictured is the threefold materialized body - moving from the feet to the head we see:

Horses - body - energies -  Tharmas

Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Plate 4, (E 34) 

"2. Energy is the only life and is from the Body and Reason is
the bound or outward circumference of Energy.
3 Energy is Eternal Delight

Hunter -  loins - passions - (daughter of) Urizen

Ahania, Plate 2, (E 84)

"6: But the strong arm that sent it, remember'd
The sounding beam; laughing it tore through
That beaten mass: keeping its direction
The cold loins of Urizen dividing.

7: Dire shriek'd his invisible Lust                           
Deep groan'd Urizen! stretching his awful hand
Ahania (so name his parted soul)
He siez'd on his mountains of jealousy.
He groand anguishd & called her Sin,

Woman - heart - emotions - Luvah 

Four Zoas, Night VII ,Page 84, (E 359)
"This thou well rememberest listen I will tell
What thou forgettest. They in us & we in them alternate Livd  
Drinking the joys of Universal Manhood. One dread morn
Listen O vision of Delight One dread morn of goary blood
The manhood was divided for the gentle passions making way   
Thro the infinite labyrinths of the heart & thro the nostrils issuing
In odorous stupefaction stood before the Eyes of Man   
A female bright."
Owl - head - mind - Urthona

Jerusalem, Plate 82, (E 240)

"then they saw the Furna[c]es opend, & in tears
Began to give their souls away in the Furna[c]es of affliction.
Los saw & was comforted at his Furnaces uttering thus his voice. 

I know I am Urthona keeper of the Gates of Heaven,
And that I can at will expatiate in the Gardens of bliss;
But pangs of love draw me down to my loins which are
Become a fountain of veiny pipes: O Albion! my brother!
Plate 83
Corruptibility appears upon thy limbs, and never more  
Can I arise and leave thy side, but labour here incessant
Till thy awaking! yet alas I shall forget Eternity!"  

We are accustomed to thinking of the material outer world as having some independent existence. This is the exterior world mediated through consciousness. But the world of dreams is an internal world coming to us from the unconscious which exists within our psyches exclusively. The images which came to Blake existed first in his mind. He brought them from his unconscious and expressed them in symbolic language when they reached his conscious mind. 

We may recieve material which resides in our unconscious through dreaming but often it never reaches our consciousness. Blake had the uncanny ability to bring into the light material which primarily resides in the collective unconscious which we know primarily through archetypes. Blake's poetry and visual images can become an avenue through which we become acquainted with material which is hidden from us in our own unconscious minds. If we believe, as Blake did, that the world of thought is the real world, we have a key to that interior world through studying Blake.

Vision of Last Judgment, (E 565)

"Mental Things are alone Real what is Calld Corporeal Nobody Knows
of its Dwelling Place <it> is in Fallacy & its Existence an
Imposture  Where is the Existence Out of Mind or Thought Where is

it but in the Mind of a Fool."