Archetypal images are common to dreams; are these images widely different in dreams that are reported from cultures that are strongly divergent from each other (e.g. Japan and the U.S.?) Or alternately, are the just the same type of images,but expressed in slightly different ways?
I wouldn't call Japan divergent from the US, rather convergent since WWII. They generally take whatever we do - say cars - do it better and then eventually out-compete us at everything. That's their way. The only thing we've got on them is NASCAR and cheap, piss beer. As for dream archetypes, I imagine it has a lot to do with upbringing. Christian vs Islamic would definitely have different archetypes.
Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces argued that our myths are pretty much similar all over the world, all using the same basic archetypes. He suggested that the similarities outweighed the differences, more or less because we're all human. Would not the same be true for dreams?
That's a good point. Storytelling has always been a part of our species, in virtually every culture. It's interesting how relevant a Native American story can be to just about anyone. Then you can read a Chinese story and it's basically the same type of values, similar use of metaphor and so on. For some reason, though, wet dreams have always eluded me. WHY?!! It's always coitus interuptus for me...suddenly my Father-in-law walks in or something. My dreams suck.
Dreams are essentially conjurings of the subconscious, our psyche attempting to sort out something we are too afraid to deal with consciously and directly. I imagine people everywhere have similar issues, therefore similar archetypes would present themselves. One for me is inability to run. I sometimes figure out I'm dreaming because I am being chased by the bad guys and just can't seem to run worth a damn. So I realize it's a dream and I take off, just start flying around and forget about the whole mess down below. Lucid dreaming rocks.
Why don't you use the rocks and drop them on your father in law - you might get to complete one of your dreams without interruption?
I have a better idea: conjure the ample bosom and tight buttocks of a wonderful woman to fly with me, and we can make love on our journey through the Solar System.
Archetypes by definition occur in nearly all societies in nearly all eras. They are instinctive images that are pre-programmed into our unconscious. Of course there's plenty of room for them to be dressed up in the details of each specific culture, but the archetypal motif is always there. Campbell was the most famous popularizer of Jung, and one of the keys that Jung used for identifying archetypes was their common occurrence in dreams. Archetypes are instincts, and with most instincts it's not too hard to understand why we have them. We instinctively run from animals that have both eyes in the front of their heads like wolves, but not those whose eyes are on the sides of their heads like horses, because the former are the predators. But the instincts that we classify as archetypes are difficult to understand. It's as though they're survival traits left over from an era whose dangers would be completely incomprehensible to us... yet we would run from them, as it were. On the other hand they could simply be mutated synapses that were passed down through a genetic bottleneck like Mitochondrial Eve, and it's just our luck that we've got them even though they're useless--or worse. For example, religions are collections of archetypes. The subconscious is part of the old Freudian model. Jung just talks about the conscious and unconscious minds. Archetypes are part of what he calls the collective unconscious, something we all share that helps form us into communities.
