Jung begins his discussion of dreams with a discussion of the difference between signs and symbols. Signs denote objects to which they are attached. Symbols, on the other hand, imply something that is hidden from the consciousness. The balance of this essay discusses separation of the conscious and subconscious with an interesting discussion of the “bush soul.” The bush soul is an anthropological term related to totemic cults among primitives. Jung discusses the fact that the human consciousness develops slowly, at great pains, and we cannot be sure that it came into existence until the advent of the written word. Jung was addressing the hubris of the scientists of his time who didn’t believe there was an unconscious, while today we may think of his view that only the written word could prove consciousness as hubris. He describes it as, “The undeniable common inheritance of mankind.” Much of the discussion is devoted to debunking what he describes as “misoneism,” a fear of the new and the unknown. This fear is invoked often in discussions of the unconscious. Jung claims this is so, because the human consciousness is, “A very recent acquisition of nature… It is frail, menaced by specific dangers, and easily injured.”

Jung references Chartres Cathedral and the imagery of the four Evangelists with the Lion as Mark, the Ox, Luke, and the eagle, John as numbering among commonly misunderstood symbols. For instance, an Indian traveler thought that Europeans worshipped animal, when in fact the animal symbology was inherited from the Egyptian practice. He discusses the ink blot test devised by the Swiss Psychiatrist, Hermann Rorschach, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the sexual imagery of medieval deer hunting art [essentially the pornography of medieval Europe], the fact that the key in a lock is not necessarily a sexual symbol, and finishes with a description of the anima and animus, the male and female psychological element embedded in the opposite gender, “the deplorable condition of the woman within.”