The illustrations in this book are done in a mythic mode, rather than the realistic World-Machine style. Most of them are mandalas, an art form that requires no drawing skill, since most of the shapes are made with compass and straight edge, and the representational elements can be done in Amerindian style, which is mythically potent, simplified, but not abstract. Other elements are traced.
The dreams are from 12 by the 10 year old daughter of a psychiatrist, who in turn gave them to Jung for interpretation. Several (not illustrated here) are precognitive and initiatory for the little girl's approaching death. The others are of universal significance, dealing with all the main themes of the 20th Century, and of this book. Dream 1 deals with quaternity, a basic symbol of differentiated wholeness. The four horned serpent was found in alchemical manuscripts, is a reference to dragon current, and has to do the GOLDEN FLOWER self-transformation.
Dream 2 has the same theme as Alan Watts' THE TWO HANDS OF GOD, the necessity of seeing good and evil as polar opposites and thus parts of the total pattern of the Great Way. Dream 4 is a symbolic form of the cryptozoic memories of biological evolution, a psychic process. Dream 5 is a universal symbol of the great differentiation which produced mind. Dream 7 is a symbol of psychic initiation, which requires a willingness to accept a death of the present ego, and rebirth.
Dream 8 and dream 9 are so remarkable, I quote them exactly: "The scene is in America, where many people are rolling on an ant heap, attacked by the ants. The dreamer, in a panic, falls into a river." This shows that the dehumanizing processes of the World-Machine will reach their extreme in America, where the people will all become ant-like, i.e., rigid, mechanical, conformist, crowded, thing-like. The dreamer (the little girl) escapes this fate by rejoining the river, the stream of consciousness as it leaves this existence and reappears elsewhere. Dream 9: "There is a desert on the moon where the dreamer sinks so deeply into the ground that she reaches hell." One meaning of this is that the purely technological feat of putting people on the moon (and similarly pointless military-technological feats) has deprived America of crucial energies which should have been directed towards critical problems---resulting in the hell of corruption and insoluble problems we are now entering.
Dream 12 may be a symbol of the effects on our world-view of a swarm of gnats (sophists, petty scientists, technocrats) which has obscured all the beautiful and higher spiritual elements in life, often symbolized by a star. The one star left to her is her own higher center which sends her dreams preparing her for death.
The Secret of the Bath Badgerd is an old Iranian fairy tale, and fairy tales and another rich source of universal mythic truth. Badgerd 1 is another symbol of initiation. Again we have a kind of death. Everything gone dark, and he is drowned in water, a universal symbol of the mind-stuff. Badgerd 2 is a symbol of the petrification which follows from parrot-like mimesis, with the desert that results. Badgerd 3 shows the necessity sometimes of completely submitting oneself to the higher inner self (by shooting blindly) and the resulting rejuvenation which results. The dreams and the fairy tale come from C. G. Jung's MAN AND HIS SYMBOLS, pp. 70, 216.