C. G. Jung’s The Red Book: Liber Novus preserves a long exploration of his inner world through writing, dialogues, and paintings. For me, it is difficult to approach as a book that can simply be completed and reduced to clear answers. It asks to be approached repeatedly.
I place this note in November 2025 while allowing its surrounding time to remain visible: the intense dreams of summer and a change I later experienced during winter static apnea. This is a retrospective account of reading and experience, rather than a claim to have understood the whole book.
A Book I Could Approach Only a Little Each Day
I read The Red Book over a long period. It was extraordinarily intensive. I could read only a little each day; the following day I had to reread the previous passage before moving on.
Repetition did not always produce clarity. Some passages allowed deep reflection and resonance. Many other images remained only partly understood. I could not assign a definite meaning to every figure, and I do not want to pretend that the entire book became clear.
Gradually, I accepted that reading need not end in mastery. Some passages required time; some images remained beyond my understanding. Perhaps I read slowly because I could not let the next page immediately cover what had already touched me.
Understanding in Dreams Before Words
I read before sleep. Throughout the summer of 2025, my dreams were often very intensive. Their intensity came less from dramatic events than from a kind of recognition within the dream.
While dreaming, I could clearly recognize its images and what they represented to me. Yet that awareness did not gather into words or a stream of consciousness describable through one channel. It was clear without sentences, powerful without a ready form of expression.
After waking, I could remember and recount these dreams clearly. Recounting preserved scenes and sequences more readily than the simultaneous recognition within them. Language needed an order, while that awareness seemed to hold many relations at once.
I do not treat this feeling as an objective interpretation of dreams or claim a definite causal relation between reading and dreaming. What I can record is how close the images and the reading felt during that period, making me attentive to understanding that had not yet become language.
Some Experiences Became Pictures First
Certain dream scenes took shape as pictures before words. They became images I strongly wanted to express, rather than illustrations added after I had explained their meaning.
I recorded some in Sketches, in Into the Shadow, Become One. Drawing offered a way to preserve an experience before explanation simplified it. A line could hold approach and withdrawal together; a boundary could suggest both protection and constraint.
I wanted the images to have somewhere to remain. They were not standard translations of Jung’s symbols, nor proof that a dream had been resolved. They were traces of my encounter with those experiences. I left as much as I could express, without requiring it to become complete.
In Winter, Quiet Became Bearable
After this period, during static apnea in the winter of 2025, I suddenly began to feel at ease with an absence of continuous thought.
Previously, I needed an imagined scene—a burning candle, or a beautiful moment from my life—to help me concentrate or relax. Those pictures had supported me. The change was that I no longer always needed a picture to fill the quiet.
By this quiet I mean an absence of continuous thoughts, not a lapse of consciousness. I am describing an inner experience, not a technique for extending a breath-hold. Without a story unfolding in my mind, I could still remain with myself.
Fragments of thought and sensation could continue to appear. I felt less compelled to remove them or replace them with a more pleasant scene. Quiet began to feel capable of holding something.
At the Center of a Mandala
My reading of Jung helped me see something that brought happiness during those moments: the opportunity to encounter myself from different angles and attempt to integrate these different aspects.
They arrived as fragments of thought, memory, and sensation. Some were familiar; others were uncomfortable. They did not necessarily speak together or pull in the same direction. What I had once experienced as an interruption of concentration could also be encountered as part of myself.
Here, the mandala acquired a personal meaning. I imagined the sensations and thoughts arriving from different directions as a web, with myself at its center. This is my own image, rather than a strict definition of Jung’s concept. The center is not the psychoanalytic id; it names the place from which I felt able to notice, receive, and respond.
Being touched by different fragments was not necessarily bad. I tried to feel the pulls from all directions without immediately rejecting one of them. As different aspects became visible, the center seemed less easily carried away by a single thought.
Remaining still meant an inner steadiness. I could feel and be affected without treating every change as a rejection of my whole self. Integration did not mean that contradiction had disappeared. It meant that contradictions could be held together within me.
Limited Understanding, Experiences Worth Keeping
I still cannot say that I understood The Red Book. Many images remain unfamiliar. A later reading may bring something new; some may continue to feel distant.
I can nevertheless describe how it entered my life: it slowed my reading, accompanied a period in which dreams became drawings, and preceded moments of quiet I no longer needed immediately to cover with imagination.
I want to leave what I do not understand open. I do not need to explain every image or become a complete interpreter of Jung before recording my experience honestly.
I am still learning to stand at the center of that web—not because every direction has grown quiet, but because I am beginning to be quiet with them.