Eleven Thousand Years Early

I am at Göbekli Tepe - an archeological site in the southeast of Turkey. I walk along a boardwalk placed for tourists down into the excavation. Large T-shaped pillars stand up out of the earth with relief carvings of animals on them. Foxes, boars, a crane, a whole zoo carved eleven thousand years ago. I’ve seen these before - watched documentaries about them. But something feels… ominous.

And then, on one of the pillars, I see something that doesn’t belong. Not a vulture. Not a crane. Not anything that has any business in neolithic Turkey. The Mothman. The winged, red-eyed harbinger of disaster. A creature of 20th century American folklore carved into a stone older than civilization itself.

I know this is impossible. Even inside the dream I know it. So I go and find the archaeologist on duty, a woman who’s probably wearied by silly questions from tourists, and report what I’ve found. She scoffs. Mothman, she says, is a recent American folk-figure. Surely I’m mistaken. I can’t convince her to come see for herself. She’s already determined it’s impossible. And she’s the expert, of course. The stereotypical khaki pants and dusty clipboard confirm it. 

Then I woke up. I made coffee. I went to work and got about my day. But later that morning, scrolling through the headlines, I saw that an earthquake had struck southeastern Turkey. A severe one, with the epicenter not far from the archeological site.

Surprisingly - at least to me - my first reaction was not astonishment. It was an urge to explain it away. Not to deny it as the archaeologist in my dream did, but to rationalize it. Coincidence, perhaps? The mathematician in me reminded me that there’s a probability to everything, no matter how unlikely. Apophenia, maybe? The mind’s tendency to manufacture significance or meaning out of random occurrences. Aside from that, the best I could come up with was that maybe I was picking up news broadcast signals in my sleep. The impulse to rationalize is a necessary one that serves as we navigate the world. But it can also be a cage. The question to ask, I think, is not the obvious one: was it precognition? It’s rather, “what kind of reality does a dream like that reveal?”

I suspect many of us have been in this spot. Or at least, I’m astonished at how many people I’ve run across who relate similarly uncanny experiences. Carl Jung was. In 1916, in the midst of his “confrontation with the unconscious” which supplied the content of his Red Book, Carl Jung experienced what he described as a haunting. The doorbell rang with no one there. The air in the house went “heavy.” His children experienced nightmares. Out of those three nearly unbearable evenings came the Seven Sermons to the Dead. They were written in a voice that was not quite his own, speaking as the dead returning from Jerusalem, where they had not found what they sought. But the psychiatrist did not resort to a reductive psychiatric explanation. He allowed the dead to speak on their own terms. And by his own account, what they told him became an important part of the foundation upon which his entire psychology was built. In fact, it’s in the Seven Sermons that the concept and even the term for individuation first appears in Jung’s writing.

On one hand, Jung spent his professional career carefully managing his loyalty to the experience of the uncanny in the eyes of the public. As a young psychiatrist, he wrote a careful essay explaining belief in spirits as the projection of unconscious contents, for example. But he later returned to that essay and added his doubt: he was no longer sure the psychological explanation was sufficient to explain what he had witnessed1.

Much later in his life, he suffered a near fatal heart attack. Unconscious in hospital, he experienced a series of visions in which he found himself suspended in space, looking down on the earth from perhaps a thousand miles up. He described the blue of the planet and the curve of the continents years before the first astronauts would. He approached a temple and expected to learn the meaning of his existence, but was called back into his body. He refused to treat this as the misfiring of an oxygen-starved brain. Instead, he described it as more real than waking reality where past, present, and future became one2.

In his later years he turned to metaphysics to grapple with these and similar experiences. Working with Nobel prize-winning physicist Wolfgang Pauli, he developed the idea of the unus mundus - literally the “one world.” They proposed that psyche and matter are not two separate entities but two manifestations of a single underlying reality. And the evidence of that unity he called synchronicity, which is a meaningful coincidence. It’s two events bound together not because one caused the other, but because they share a meaning. To account for how a psychic state and an outer event could be joined by meaning across the wall separating mind from world, he proposed the psychoid archetype, a principle that is neither purely mental nor purely physical, but straddles the border between the two.

This latter Jung is the one that the clinical tradition tends to struggle with, and perhaps even shy away from. It emphasizes the respectable doctor but hides the seer. And I wonder what we lose in trying to make things too tidy. It occurs to me that the scoffing archaeologist in my dream is attempting to do exactly that.

There is a different way to stand in relation to dream, and Robert Moss has written extensively about it. In Dreamgates he treats dreaming not as something that happens to us while we are “switched off,” but as something we do. It’s a place we travel to, a reality we can re-enter while awake to tend to unfinished business. To Moss, a dream may be re-entered as a conscious exercise to explore the inner landscape. Though he is not strictly Jungian, his technique of “active imagination” is very similar to Jung’s.

The philosopher Henry Corbin called it the mundus imaginalis - the imaginal as an authentic reality. A place to be entered through the experience of active imagination.

I see three ways that the reality of dreamscapes is typically addressed. First, and perhaps most commonly, the dream can be held as a real experience, but of psychic reality. Perhaps using the images and experiences of waking life, but to display the inner workings of one’s psyche. The mundane objects and events of our day repurposed as symbols for what lies in our psyche. But a solid wall separates them.

Second, there is Jung’s psychoid archetypal concept that psyche and matter share a root and the wall between inner and outer is not where common sense puts it - or at least not so impermeable as it seems. And third there is the plainer kind of realism that Moss describes. The dream as a literal journey, during which you go somewhere and see something that occurred. And that somewhere and something are not limited to the dreamer’s interiority.

Perhaps there is a fourth category though. Peter Kingsley’s work In the Dark Places of Wisdom explores the prophetic descent. In that tradition, dreamers and seekers descended into incubation chambers and dark caves to receive knowledge from the dead. The dream was not regarded as “real” because it successfully predicted anything particular about the waking world, or because it delivered an effective solution to the seeker’s “real life” dilemma. It was regarded as real because it was the ground of the physical one. The place from which it emerges. In that light, Jung’s synchronicity is not something requiring an explanation, but a natural - and expected - consequence. It maintains a logic of its own. Mothman is a harbinger - a figure whose entire nature is to appear before a catastrophe and announce it. My dream did not show me the ground shaking directly. It showed me an omen. The dream sent a catastrophe harbinger into a context which provided the most fertile ground for it. For Göbekli Tepe is itself associated by researchers with ancient catastrophic events. The archetype is independent of the calendar. Only the archaeologist cared about the dates.

I do not believe I read tomorrow’s newspaper in my sleep. Or that I picked it up from the airwaves. Rather, I believe I stood, for a few moments, in the presence of something real - a reality that does not answer to archeological chronologies or folkloric anachronisms. I think I stood in timeless ground where Mothman, Göbekli Tepe, catastrophe, and, frankly me, constituted the soil. The place from which they emerged before we constructed the walls of time and space which apparently separate them. In short, the Unus Mundus. That probably makes me a poor Jungian in the strictest sense. But I think Jungian in the strictest sense was a cage built after the fact, and I don’t think it was built by Jung.

The archaeologist was right, of course. Mothman is a recent American folk-figure. He doesn’t belong on old-world neolithic stones. What my dream archaeologist didn’t understand is that the distance between USA and Turkey, and the time between neolithic and 21st century is an artifact itself of the waking world. I suspect that we live too much within that artifact today. And I think Jung was subtly inviting us to explore the deeper ground beneath it all.

Andrew Lavin is an ICF-credentialed Jungian depth coach and the founder of Chiron's Cave, a depth coaching practice focused on individuation, shadow work, and the recovery of soul. He brings more than two decades of executive leadership experience to his work with clients navigating the deeper questions of identity, vocation, and meaning.