The ticking timer of dreams
by Billy Cox
In 1958, three years before his death at 85, Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung addressed one of the great exasperations of his lifetime in Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth. By “myth,” he was referring to a sacred story that satisfies the deep inner needs of a community to rationalize a course of action, not to discredit them. Indeed, Jung had trouble ascribing the phenomena’s radar tracks to projections of the “collective unconscious,” and he conceded the probability of an external reality.
So many Al Qaeda colleagues were having dreams about planes crashing into buildings prior to 9/11, Osama Bin Laden feared his secret plans might be compromised
Evidence aside, Jung also wrote that UFOs represent “a symptom of a universally present psychic disposition” in the quest for wholeness or completion, especially when they manifest in dreams. And as he told Time magazine that same year, he was most fascinated by the cult-like Space Brothers movement in an age where American and Soviet nukes were fouling the atmosphere with radioactive fallout.
The Space Brothers, he said, “may be a spontaneous reaction of the subconscious to fear of the apparently insoluble political situation in the world that may lead at any moment to catastrophe. At such times eyes turn heavenwards in search of help, and miraculous forebodings of a threatening or consoling nature appear from on high.”
De Void couldn’t help but recall the power of archetypes as news of Osama Bin Laden’s death reverberated across the globe — and the way he laid it all out in the chilling videotape seized by U.S. troops shortly after the invasion of Afghanistan.
In it, a jubilant Bin Laden is holding court with his sycophants in Kandahar shortly after 9/11. Flush with sanctimonious pieties, OBL is discussing how the key to the hijackers’ success was sequestering and compartmentalizing information so that not even the agents themselves knew the full scope of the operation. Yet, as early as a year before the strikes, a colleague told OBL he dreamed of a soccer match against America in which the Arab team came dressed as pilots.
One of Bin Laden’s acolytes chimes in about a buddy who shared visions of a plane ramming a skyscraper before 9/11. Yet another added that he’d heard the same dream imagery from others. OBL himself apparently began to quietly freak before the attacks when a subordinate “came close and told me that he saw, in a dream, a tall building in America, and in the same dream he saw Mukhtar teaching them how to play karate.
“At that point,” Bin Laden declares, “I was worried that maybe the secret would be revealed if everyone starts seeing it in their dream. So I closed the subject.”
And so we close at least a small violent chapter of human history, having witnessed and endured a decade of upheaval, fear and chaos, maybe without fully understanding the primordial underpinnings of this experience. We may agree on an established set of facts. But what do we dream about now as a consequence? Will our subsequent actions reveal how many of us have shared that same dream? Or are we doomed, perhaps against our own willpower, to turn heavenwards in search of help from miraculous forebodings appearing from on high?
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