ABSTRACT
When I was considering a topic for this first lecture at the 2011 Conference of the Moscow Association for Analytical Psychology on the theme of “The Mythological Unconscious,” it occurred to me that a dream of a Russian-American woman in New York might be of special interest to Jungians in Russia. It is a dream that she recounted to me not quite three years earlier. This is the dream:
My husband and I are in Moscow. He's in a car. I'm following him on foot. I'm supposed to go where he's going, but I don't. He turns left. I turn right. I walk down to the end of this path. I cross the road and enter a park. There I see a five-story Khrushchev-style apartment building. I see the bottom of the building. Then, suddenly, I see, coming out of the top of the building, a statue of horses drawing a chariot. Then, to the left, I see another statue of horses and other mythological creatures. The statues are marble, white, and massive. The scene blows my mind. Other people walking in the park stop and stare and talk in awe about how beautiful the statues are. No human could have put them there — they're so colossal, so “alive.” They're a blessing to all of us in this park, coming out of the top of this horrible, depressing Soviet building. The statues are ancient Greek, imaginative and inspirational — the opposite of socialist realism. I think that my husband will be angry that I'm late. I try to call him on my cell phone. The light's flashing red. My battery is low, so I can't call him. Then I see that it's 1:15. I think: “Oh, it's been only an hour, so it's OK.” I think that once I tell my husband what I saw, he'll understand. Then I wake up. I think: “No, he'd never understand.”
