I'll bet you didn't know that silver is used in the production of high-tech missiles. Or maybe you did, but do you know how much?
I was horrified when I learned that lots of silver goes into the construction of high-tech missiles, to the tune of 500 ounces in one Tomahawk missile (of which there are about 4,000 in the US arsenal alone). That adds up to 62 tons of silver that are destined to explode somewhere. (That doesn't count Tomahawk missiles that are exported. Japan just ordered 400.)
Here is something else worthy of your attention. There is gold in dreams. What am I saying!
I am speaking metaphorically of course. Jung's psychology is based on his deep dive into the study of alchemy which provided the blueprint for his whole theory of individuation. What he discovered was, the alchemists of old were projecting the process of individuation onto the sublimation of matter from the prima materia (think, shadow), to its spiritual refinement into the gold of the Self.
When you work with your dreams archetypally, inevitably alchemical symbols show up, because you are a modern alchemist, transforming the dross of the shadow into the gold of centered consciousness.
What prompted this little essay is something I read in my own memoir that I distilled from Jung, "within the symbol is the reality of what the symbol represents". This "reality" of the symbol is a psychic reality, but if anyone doubts the reality of what the psyche manifests for us in nightly dreams, just consider that when you don't recall your dreams or ignore or neglect your dream-life, the dream gets projected onto your waking reality. I would like to repeat that:
When you don't recall your dreams or ignore or neglect your dream-life, the dream gets projected onto your waking reality. So, if you aren't paying attention to your dreams, your reality saturated by the feeling-tone of your dreams anyway.
I just thought it was amusing and ironic that we are (I was) completely unaware of how silver is being extracted from the Earth at an alarming rate just to make missiles for war and future wars, and, by the same token, most of us are also unaware that our dreams are full of psychic gold that vanishes back into the unconscious every time we sleep and do not recall our dreams, as if our slumbering psyches were a blank slate.
This is not a good situation, but is profoundly dysfunctional and dystopian. We seem to have a knack for making ourselves poor, both literally and psychically, by ignoring the insane rapacity of the unchecked military and well-intended largess of the creative psyche. .
(Article changed on Jul 26, 2025 at 11:30 AM EDT)
