Hi!

Have a question regarding a DG I have, a vampire. I have read quite much about the meaning of cerain characters in dreams, character of God, hero, shadow, soul.
Basically things which mean practically the same thing to all people in different parts of the world.
This is one example of what these pioneers of psychology said of such a character.



Freud and Jung, the major thinkers of our time, have based their work on the book from Stocker which was published in 1897. Count Dracula posed many threats to Victorian social, moral and political values: he changes virtuous women into beasts with ravenous sexual appetites; he is a foreigner who invades England and threatens English book and superiority; he is the embodiment of evil that can only be destroyed by reasserting the beliefs of traditional Christianity in an increasingly skeptical and secular age; he represents the fear of regression, a reversal of evolution, a return to our more primal animal state.

Let us examine how the main school have analysed the emergence of the vampire as a central figure of human societies.



According to psychoanalysis and the Freudian school, any dreams about vampires or other forms of the undead, are a metaphor for the fascination and fear mankind has with the concepts of death and the dead

"All human experiences of morbid dread signify the presence of repressed sexual and aggressive wishes, and in vampirism we see these repressed wishes becoming plainly visible."

The first thing a Freudian will usually comment on in regards to a vampire story is how they are a metaphor for infantile and perverse sexuality.

For Freudian scholars, Dracula, is a combination of all the traditional myths of the vampire merged with what they consider to be the epitome of Freud's Oedipal complex concept. A Freudian will look at the sexuality combined with brutality of the feeding off of the living's blood and say it is suggestive a child's interpretation of watching his parents copulate for the first time.

Other topics of importance are how death coexists with the longing for immortality, showing man's love-hate relationship with both concepts, how greed, sadism, and aggression are intermingled with desire and a compulsion to possess and express said desire, and the consistent use of metaphor for virginity, innocence, and vulnerability and the overlapping of images of guilt.



For Jungians, the fact that the Vampire developed in nearly every culture in the world at the same time without contact amongst developing humans is both proof of the vampire as the archetype ("an inherited pattern of thought or symbolic imagery derived from the past collective experience"), but also proof of Jung's concept on the Unconscious Collective.

The concept of vampires and vampirism indicated that vampires are not mere stories or explanations created by personal experience or folk tales, but are in fact a species-wide psychological structure that all humans share in primitive thought

The Jungian interpretation of the vampire assumes that all humans have a vampire inside of them. What this means is that Jungian believe vampires are an intuitive concept to the human psyche. Something we understand in some way, shape or form, from the moment we exist into this world. Vampires reflect significant issues universal to all human life.

For Jung himself, the vampire was the representation of a psychological aspect he called, "the shadow." The Shadow is made of aspects of one's self that the conscious mind and ego were unable to recognize. The shadow was primarily negative concepts, such as repressed thoughts and desires, out anti-social impulses, morally questionable judgment, childlike fantasies, and other traits we normally feel shame for expressing or thinking.

Jung himself describes this shadow self as:

"The Shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real."

Jung interpreted the vampire as an unconscious complex that had the ability to taken over the conscious mind by means of "enchanting" the psyche or akin to what we might label a spell.

The vampire became a key fixture in society according to Jungians, because it became a mental scapegoat of sorts. It allowed humanity to project the negative aspects of ourselves onto something we could both openly revile and admire without actually acting out the desires and impulses ourselves. The vampire acts in the way humanity wishes it could, but can not due to social restraints.

Jung also added that there are other traits the vampire possesses, such as auto-erotic, and narcissistic traits, as well as a personality that is predatory, anti-social, and parasitic.

These people waren't lucid dreamers(as far as history knows, as far as I know)
What if you choose this character for a dream guide, or it chooses you, for example, does it actually mean anything?
Though I also know that Jung was certain that it does not matter what the character means to the world, but what it means to you.
Is this the context you should be looking at?


Thank you for taking your time and reading this