“Sorry, Doc, you lost me,” Theta said. “What’s this collective unconscious?”
The psychiatrist hooked his spectacles over his ears again. “Think of it as a symbolic library that has always existed, which houses all our personal and our ancestral experiences and memories, shared knowledge that each individual seems to understand on an innate level, like an inheritance. Religion. Myths. Fairy tales. All of it gains its power from the collective unconscious. And dreams are like a library card, if you will, that provides access to this great archive of shared symbols, memories, and experiences.”
“Can it hurt you, though? If you get hurt inside a dream, you wake up. But what about if you’re living inside that dream, like my friend Henry? Could something bad happen to him or to Ling?”
“An interesting question. Have you ever heard of the shadow self?”
Evie and Theta shook their heads.
“It’s a dark side, isn’t it? Like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, if I’m not mistaken,” Mabel said, and she took some satisfaction in knowing this.
“Yes. That is so.” Dr. Jung blew out puffs of spicy tobacco. “Every one of us has a conscious self. This is the face that we present to the world every day. But there is another self, which remains hidden even from our own minds. It contains our most primitive emotions and all that we cannot abide in ourselves, all that we repress. This is the shadow.”
The psychiatrist relit his pipe. At the strike of the match, Theta’s hands began to prickle.
“Is this shadow self evil?” Evie asked, and for a moment, her mind flashed on John Hobbes and his terrible secret room.
“It depends on how fiercely one guards against the shadow self and to what lengths he would go to protect himself from that knowledge. Such a person doesn’t even know he is doing evil. Think again of your Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The goodly Dr. Jekyll is, one might say, possessed by his shadow self, Mr. Hyde, who does unspeakable things. Dr. Jekyll projects—that is, assigns—his intolerable qualities onto the split self, Mr. Hyde. That is an extreme example, of course, but it does occur. That is the shadow’s greatest power over us—that we do not see it. Once we are conscious of our shadow, we can become enlightened.”
“I think my pal Henry has a shadow side—”
“Everyone has a shadow side,” Dr. Jung corrected gently.
“How do we get him to stop and wake up?”
“The only way to correct the shadow is to become conscious of it. To accept it and to integrate it into the whole person. Perhaps your friend will find this solution on his own by exploring his dreams, for our dreams wish to wake us to some deeper meaning. All that is hidden eventually reveals itself, no matter how fervently we fight to keep it locked away.”
Theta thought about her dreams, of the snow and the horses, the burning village. And Roy. Always Roy. How hard she worked to keep her past in the past, where it couldn’t harm her. But now the head doctor was saying she couldn’t keep a lid on it forever. The uncomfortable itching in her palms had progressed to a burning sensation.
“Are you feeling well, Miss Knight?” Dr. Jung said, his brow furrowed. “You seem anxious.”
“It’s, um, awfully stuffy in here is all.”
“Actually, it’s a bit chilly,” Mabel said.
“I-I just need some air. We’ve already taken up too much of your time, Doctor. Thanks. You’ve been swell.”
Panicked, Theta sprang from her seat. As she did, a book fell from a shelf behind the psychiatrist, knocking over a candle. The flame lit a section of Dr. Jung’s coat sleeve, but the psychiatrist snuffed it out before it could truly catch.