The term ‘Dream Time’ occupies a charged intersection in the depth-psychology corpus, drawing together neurological, mythological, phenomenological, and metaphysical registers. At its most fundamental, the concept names the peculiar temporal structure of dream experience itself — the way dreaming seems to collapse linear succession into simultaneity, rendering past, present, and future coextensive within a single nocturnal event. Von Franz, drawing on Jungian foundations, pursues this most rigorously, arguing that the unconscious operates in something approaching a ‘block universe’ wherein temporal sequence dissolves and events are perceived as a simultaneous cluster. This resonates with the Jungian axiom, noted by Freud as well, that the unconscious ‘knows no time.’ Jung himself, in his seminars, maps dream time onto a cosmic vantage point — the soul seeing the river of life from above. A separate but related strand engages what Jung and von Franz call illud tempus, the primordial mythological time accessed in dreams, coma, and ecstasy — the ‘aljira’ of Aboriginal cosmology, in which time did not yet exist but always coexists alongside historical time. Hillman complicates this by insisting that dream time belongs to the underworld’s qualitative topology, not to chronological measure. The corpus thus presents dream time as simultaneously ontological claim, clinical datum, and mythological category.
This aljira is ‘the time in which time did not exist yet,’ but which is always there — alongside the time that has become time. But the world in which time does not yet exist is the world of the u
Jung identifies the Aboriginal concept of aljira as the paradigmatic depth-psychological analog for dream time — a primordial, atemporal dimension that coexists perpetually with historical time.
, Dream Interpretation Ancient and Modern: Notes from the Seminar Given in 1936-1941, 2014thesis
In most mythologies and primitive religious systems there is the representation of a primordial time or an illud tempus… an ‘other’ time beyond our actual time in which miraculous primordial mythological and symbolic events took place, or even still take place.
Von Franz establishes that cross-cultural mythology confirms the unconscious’s access to a primordial time dimension reachable only through exceptional states such as dreaming, coma, or ecstasy.
, Psyche and Matter, 2014thesis
The dream itself, which seems to occur in a nick of time, is in some ways nearly timeless, for we can often remember it as a cluster of simultaneous scenes which we have to sort out in their time sequence when telling or writing them down.
Von Franz argues that the experiential structure of dreaming is fundamentally simultaneous rather than sequential, reflecting the unconscious’s relative or absent relationship to clock-time.
, Psyche and Matter, 2014thesis
In such a dream we see human life as a stripe, as the river of time, and a person having such a dream is on a high standpoint, seeing the past, present, and future all at once.
Jung describes dreams in which time is spatialised — the dreamer occupies an elevated vantage point from which past, present, and future are simultaneously visible, subverting ordinary temporal succession.
, Dream Analysis: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1928-1930, 1984thesis
If, as Freud said, the underworld knows no time, then punctuality and retardation do not belong there. Yet, these are common experiences in dreams.
Hillman interrogates the paradox that although the underworld — and by extension the dream realm — is theoretically atemporal, temporal anxiety and retardation are among the most common phenomenological experiences within dreams.
, The Dream and the Underworld, 1979thesis
These time qualities refer to distinct psychic moments… They present moments of feeling consciousness, matutinal, post-meridional, toward evening and the close of day.
Hillman insists that times appearing in dreams are not clock-references but qualitative mythological persons — the Horae — expressing distinct psychic atmospheres and underworld regions.
, The Dream and the Underworld, 1979supporting
The ego is moving in time from the past to the future. The dream comes up toward it from the unconscious, like a wave containing a cluster of images.
Von Franz proposes a structural model in which the dream wave rising from the unconscious encompasses past, present, and future simultaneously, with the dreamer perceiving these strata sequentially only upon waking recall.
, Psyche and Matter, 2014supporting
The prophet within sees things in a way quite different from ego, that is his madness. His perspective blurs time so that the past seems closer to the present and the future not quite so full of surprises.
Moore, via Ficino, associates the soul’s prophetic and dream-like modes of consciousness with a blurring of temporal categories, linking dream time to the Neo-Platonic transcendence of linear sequence.
, The Planets Within: The Astrological Psychology of Marsilio Ficino, 1990supporting
There is a time element in the Self, so to speak, in its aspect of energy, emanations and motion, or: Because the Self moves it creates for us the experience of time.
Von Franz locates the generation of temporal experience within the dynamic aspect of the Self, suggesting that the peculiar time of dreaming mirrors the Self’s own mode of being.
, Psyche and Matter, 2014supporting
In modern dreams the clock or watch sometimes has the meaning of a reminder of our temporality. Sometime before death people dream, for instance, that their watch is broken beyond repair.
Von Franz reads clock-imagery in dreams as an archetypal symbol oscillating between the ego’s timebound existence and the Self’s transcendence of temporality, particularly intensified in dreams proximate to death.
, Psyche and Matter, 2014supporting
Simultaneity: An image is simultaneous. No part prece
Berry identifies simultaneity as an intrinsic formal property of dream images, implicitly aligning the ontology of the dream image with the atemporal structure of dream time.
, Echo’s Subtle Body: Contributions to an Archetypal Psychology, 1982supporting
The slide captured and framed time and movement. It kept everything alive but made everything stand still. It froze life. ‘Time moves on,’ she said, ‘and there’s no way I can stop it.’
Yalom’s clinical example uses a dream of frozen movement as a portal to existential confrontation with temporal finitude, illustrating how dream time can crystallise awareness of mortality.
, Existential Psychotherapy, 1980aside
A second archetypal image of time which we find represented in many myths and religious documents is that of a procession — and in dreams of modern people that
Von Franz catalogues archetypal images of time appearing in modern dreams — river, procession, wheel, clock — as expressions of the unconscious’s autonomous structuring of temporal experience.
, Psyche and Matter, 2014aside