Transcription
It's 1743. A respected scientist, inventor, philosopher, and nobleman begins documenting his dreams. At first, they are strange but harmless. A deer in a garden. A disembodied voice calling his name from a faroff corridor. Moments where his body floats above the ground.
Then the dreams twist. Angels appear with burning eyes and golden mouths. Demons whisper riddles in unknown tongues. A stairway made of bones leads up into heaven. Or at least something that feels like it. And then a vision of Christ, but not the gentle, peaceful Christ of Sunday sermons, a radiant being of unimaginable force and judgment.
The man is Emanuel Swedenborg. And this is not fiction. This is a real journal. ink on paper night after night for two long years. Historians now call this time his spiritual crisis. But to Swedenborg, it was something else entirely. A calling, a rupture, a divine appointment.
What you're about to hear isn't just the descent of a man into mysticism. It's the dissection of the human soul written in its rawest form through dreams. And the deeper you go into this story, the more it begins to feel like something sacred, forbidden, something meant to be hidden. Because this journal was never meant to be read by you.
But someone did read it. Not only read it, he studied it, quoted it, revered it. Carl Young, the father of analytical psychology, the man who mapped out the collective unconscious, who introduced the world to the language of archetypes. He called Swedenborg a seer, a man whose experiences breached the boundary between dream and spiritual reality.
Jung once wrote, "Swedborg experienced the archetypal reality of the unconscious as actual encounters with angels and devils. His visions were real, not because they happened outside him, but because they revealed what was deepest within him."
In his dream journal, Swedenborg documented an inner war, not metaphorical, not poetic, real. To him, the human being was split. The natural man, rooted in desire and instinct, and the spiritual man, capable of communion with divine truth. These two selves clashed in his dreams night after night. Jung would later see this as a form of individuation, the process by which the self becomes whole through confrontation with its own unconscious. But for Swedenborg, it wasn't an idea. It was a lived experience, a descent into the psyche with no guarantee of return.
Let's begin where he began. In March of 1743, Swedenborg opened his journal. The first entries are cryptic. He writes of sleep paralysis, of his limbs becoming heavy and unresponsive. He dreams of endless rooms, of labyrinths beneath churches. In one entry, he writes, "I walked through a palace of mirrors. Every mirror showed a different man. None were me." A classic Yungian motif, the shattered identity, the fragmented ego, the mirroring of the self through archetypes.
One night, Swedenborg dreams that he is approached by a man cloaked in feathers, the man says, "Your soul does not yet belong to you." When Swedenborg asks, "Then to whom?" The man simply replies, "You'll know when the fire comes."
The fire would come. By 1744, the journal becomes darker. Dreams of violent storms, earthquakes beneath his feet, animals speaking in parables. He writes, "I lay upon a bed of serpents. They did not bite. They whispered the psalms. This isn't poetry. This is psychic dismemberment. It's initiation."
And Jung recognized it immediately. In a 1935 seminar, Jung told his students, "Swedborg's dreams are not hallucinations. They are myth in the making. The soul, when it is about to transform, often brings forth such symbolic suffering."
One particular dream shook Swedenborg to the core. "I was torn in two. My upper body floated toward a sun. My lower half sank into the sea. I felt no pain, only judgment." This theme, ascent and descent, would repeat again and again. Heaven above, hell below, and man stretched between them.
But it wasn't just his imagination at play. By this point, Swedenborg was also experiencing waking visions. He began hearing voices, feeling unseen presences. He reported a sensation of being watched by angels. One morning, he awoke with these words in his ear. "You will speak what others fear to know."
In April of 1745, everything changed. Swedenborg is in London. He's sitting alone in a tavern when the world begins to tremble. Not figuratively. The table shakes. The floor pulses. He rushes home, falls into bed, and dreams a dream he will never forget.
In the dream, a radiant figure appears. It fills the room with blinding light. Swedenborg writes, "He said, I am God, the Lord, your creator. I have chosen you. You will write the spiritual truth of scripture, not the letter, but the life beneath it."
When he awoke, he was not the same. He never returned to science. He abandoned his work on mathematics, mechanics, anatomy. From that moment, his life was devoted to understanding the language of the spirit as revealed in dreams, symbols, and divine encounters.
Carl Young saw this not as madness, but as a pivotal moment in human psychology. He wrote, "Swedenborg's transformation was a psychic event of such magnitude that it split the man in two. What had been intellect became vision. What had been study became prophecy."
From this point onward, the journal becomes almost unreadable in parts. It's dense with religious symbolism, with cryptic warnings. He speaks of spirits guarding doorways, of heavenly scribes writing down the thoughts of men. And beneath all of it, a terror, the fear that what he saw was not only real, but inescapable.
He writes, "I saw a stairway built of light, and at each step stood a face I had forgotten. They all called my name, and I knew I had lied to each one." This is the dream Yung feared the most, because in it, Swedenborg confronts the shadow, the collection of all he repressed, denied, and abandoned. Jung later said, "Most people think the shadow is the evil in others, but the shadow is ourselves, stripped of our lies."
Swedenborg was not just recording visions. He was being emptied, transformed. His journal became a kind of spiritual crucifixion, ego dying, soul awakening. And the deeper you go into it, the more it feels eerily familiar, not in content, but in essence. Because who hasn't felt this pull, this war between reason and instinct, between who we are and who we could become if we faced what hides in us.
Young believed Swedenborg's journey was more than just mystical. He believed it was the future of psychology. And this is just the beginning.
But this descent wasn't just spiritual. It was anatomical. Swedenborg began to describe the interior structure of heaven and hell not as abstract places but as organically structured realms almost as if heaven were a living organism and the soul a migrating cell. He believed that just as the body had a heart and lungs so did the spirit world and each organ corresponded to different levels of consciousness. This was no metaphor to him. He began mapping them.
In his later works like heaven and hell and divine love and wisdom. Swedenborg writes that entire societies of spirits lived within the lungs of heaven exchanging spiritual breath just as oxygen flows in the physical body. The mind was not an isolated phenomenon. It was part of a divine ecology.
Carl Young later referred to this as a cosmic psychopysiology. Though he did not adopt Swedenborg's literal spiritual maps, he recognized in them a powerful psychological jung experiments leading to the red book. The parallels are haunting. Both men faced a breakdown. Both withdrew from public life. Both entered a symbolic realm filled with voices, visions, and beings that defied rational explanation. And both emerged transformed, armed with new language for the structure of the soul.
But Swedenborg's journey took an even darker turn. In 1745, shortly after the vision of Christ, Swedenborg reported what he called spiritual temptations. He claimed that spirits, some angelic, some demonic, would test him, not with pain, but with truth. One spirit told him, "Everything you believe is an illusion. Even your humility is pride." Another whispered, "The closer you come to light, the darker your shadow becomes."
Here we hear the unmistakable foreshadowing of Jung's most famous insight. The brighter the light, the darker the shadow. Swedenborg was confronting his moral contradictions, his unintegrated psyche, long before psychoanalysis gave it a name. These temptations, these spiritual confrontations would come to young centuries later in the form of Phileamon, Elijah, Salomi, and serpents speaking in riddles.
But here's where it gets deeper. In one harrowing entry, Swedenborg wrote, "I was taken down into the helds of my own thoughts. Each sin I ever denied was shown to me as a beast, and I was made to look each in the eye." This is not poetic drama. It is inner alchemy. He is doing what Young would later call shadow work, the intentional confrontation with the disowned aspects of oneself. Yet, Swedenborg had no psychology, no therapist's couch. He had only his dreams and his pen.
And he didn't stop at private introspection. No, he began to describe how every person, regardless of belief, was undergoing this same spiritual anatomy in silence. He believed the Bible was not just a historical text. It was a mirror of the soul. And every character, every story was happening inside you. Adam, your innocence. Eve, your intuition. Cain and Abel, the war between your ego and your conscience, the flood, your emotional overwhelm, the exodus, your spiritual awakening.
But here's where Young again picks up the torch. In psychology and religion, Young writes, Swedenborg was perhaps the first to claim that sacred scripture had psychic dimensions, internal meanings mapped onto the human soul. And though theologians scoffed, this insight remains the foundation of symbolic psychology.
And still it gets stranger. Swedenborg claimed that he could, while awake, leave his body and travel the spiritual realms. He would sit silently, eyes open, yet perceive himself walking the halls of heaven or descending into lower spheres. He would encounter spirits who mirrored people he knew and learned that every thought leaves a spiritual residue and every feeling has form in the next world.
Was he hallucinating or documenting another layer of consciousness? Jung remained undecided. He was cautious, never fully endorsing Swedenborg's claims of spiritual travel, but he never dismissed them either. He said this, "If Swedenborg is mad, then the madness contains a grammar we have not yet understood."
Because here's the terrifying truth. What if your dreams are not metaphor at all? What if that whisper at 3:00 a.m., that recurring figure you can't name, that room you always revisit in sleep, what if those are actual places in the psyche? Or worse, what if they're real? That was Swedenborg's claim that the dream world is not just an echo chamber of memory, but a parallel domain with its own laws, its own beings, and its own unfolding destiny.
And if you read his journal long enough, something strange begins to happen. The imagery, you start dreaming it. The voices, you start hearing them in your own thoughts. The staircase to heaven, the library of burning books, the rose that speaks. This is why Young warned that Swedenborg's journal is not passive reading. It is initiation.
And it's one Young himself underwent, though he did so cautiously. In memories, Dreams, Reflections, Young describes a vision remarkably similar to Swedenborg's split soul experience. He writes of being suspended between a glowing city above and a dark cavern below. Both called to him. Both offered wisdom. He later realized this was not a choice between good and evil, but between comfort and transformation because spiritual growth is always painful.
Swedenborg's journal confirms this. In a final passage written shortly before his death, he records a dream of silence. "There was no voice, no vision, just space. And in that space I heard the shape of my soul." And here even Jung admitted Swedenborg showed us that the soul speaks not in words but in symbols that dissolve the ego.
And so the descent ends or maybe it doesn't. Because for those who read his journal, the descent may just be beginning. But what if the reason this journal still haunts us isn't just its content, but the implication that anyone who truly reads it will begin to descend, too.
Eugene Taylor, a respected Yungian historian and scholar of mysticism, once said of Swedenborg's work, "He did not write from speculation, but from initiation. He lived what others only theorized." Jung himself respected this deeply. He believed that Swedenborg's journal couldn't be dismissed as religious fantasy, nor labeled pathological hallucination. Rather, it existed in a rare middle ground, the direct confrontation with the numminous, that which is wholly other, terrifying yet magnetic to the soul. Jung once said, "The numinous is the real therapy." And Swedenborg had been struck by it, not once, but continuously.
As the journal unfolds, it becomes increasingly clear that Swedenborg was encountering what we might now call archetypal forces. Not abstract metaphors, but living presences that held power over the soul. The angel with the flaming sword, the weeping tree, the serpent that whispers comfort while wrapping tighter around your throat. These weren't mere dream fragments. They were initiators. And according to Yung, once you encounter an archetype consciously, you're no longer the same.
In fact, Jung argued that most neurosis stems from refusing to heed the call of the inner symbols, to walk away from the angel, to ignore the shadow, to dismiss the voice in the garden. But Swedenborg didn't walk away. He listened. And as he listened, his inner world exploded into a cosmic theater of symbols and judgments.
At one point in the journal, he writes, "I stood before a tribunal, not of men, but of virtues. Patience, mercy, honesty, and love judged my life. Each wore my face." This is the dream logic of individuation. The process, Jung said, leads to the full integration of the psyche. But it's terrifying because it demands self-confrontation at a mythic level. Swedenborg wasn't just witnessing the drama of his own unconscious. He was becoming every character in it. The savior, the sinner, the judge, the beast.
And this, Young believed, was the future of psychology. A return to the symbolic, the sacred, the mythic. A psychology that did not reduce dreams to childhood fixations or chemical surges, but recognized them as the soul's theater. This is why Jung kept returning to Swedenborg even as many of his peers dismissed him. Because Swedenborg didn't just analyze dreams. He became the dreamer who never woke up.
And in a culture obsessed with control, Swidenborg offered a warning. The self who believes he is awake may still be dreaming. The true awakening begins only when you die to the dream of who you thought you were.
What do you make of a man who calmly writes that God walked into his room, handed him a task, and told him the world's meaning was hidden in riddles? What do you make of a man who accepts it? That's what terrified Yung the most. That Swedenborg didn't resist. He surrendered. He let go of science, fame, and the security of rationalism to plunge into the unknown. And when he emerged, he claimed not only to understand heaven and hell, but to have been assigned their interpreter.
That boldness, that certainty, that spiritual madness cloaked in reason, it compelled Jung because it mirrored something within himself. In the red book, Jung would write, "The soul demands your madness, not your sanity. It demands your surrender, not your control."
Swedenborg had surrendered, but not to chaos, to a higher order. One he insisted lay behind all appearances, one that split scripture into two levels, dreams into two dimensions and the self into two people, the natural and the spiritual. He wrote, "The natural man reads the word and sees history. The spiritual man reads the same and hears prophecy."
This is exactly how Jung later described alchemy, a text that decoded properly speaks to the transformation of the self. Jung's notion of an antiodroia, the idea that everything turns into its opposite foreshadowed in Swedenborg's journal decades when he described how divine light casts the deepest shadows, how love without truth becomes cruelty, how even angels when misunderstood become tyrants.
But Carl Young could have never predicted how deeply this journal would echo through his own life. During his darkest periods, particularly after his break with Freud, Jung kept returning to Swedenborg's idea of dual vision. That behind every mundane event is a symbolic event. That there is no such thing as coincidence, only symbols you're not yet awake enough to interpret. It was this lens that led to exploring coincidences of hidden order. And while Jung popularized the term, many of its roots are found in Swedenborg's accounts.
In one entry, Swedenborg writes, "The spirit world does not speak in time, but in meaning. All things are arranged not by cause and effect, but by correspondence." That word correspondence was Swedenborg's way of describing how spiritual truths are reflected in physical forms. To him, nothing was random. The shape of a tree, the sound of a bell, the timing of a storm, all were symbolic messengers. And Jung would later write, "What we call fate is the meeting of the outer world with the inner necessity, a synchronicity." In other words, when your soul is ready, the world responds. Just as Swedenborg's descent began when he could no longer deny the inner summons, so too does the modern seeker begin to descend when meaning starts to crack through the illusion of chance.
And yet, for all his insight, Swedenborg remained haunted. He'd never returned to his previous life. His later dreams were filled with ever stranger images. Cities made of glass, children with the faces of old men, oceans made of light that burn instead of drown. He never tried to explain them away because he understood something most modern minds reject. That the point of the dream is not to explain but to transform. To burn away the literal so only the symbolic remains. To face the tribunal of your own virtues. to die before you die so you might live after you live.
Swedenborg didn't try to bring his readers comfort. He didn't try to convince them of a doctrine or build a new religion. What he offered was something much more dangerous, an invitation not to believe what he wrote, but to enter it. Because to truly read his journal, not skim it, not intellectualize it, but to let it work on you, is to begin your own descent. to peer into the mirror where your reflection disappears to hear the voices you've spent your whole life trying to silence.
And this is where Carl Young's warning becomes prophetic. Jung wrote in psychology and religion, "To confront a man with his own shadow is to show him his own light, but he will turn away. He will prefer to remain in the dark, for the light is terrifying to behold." Swedenborg stared into that light, and it tore him apart. But it also revealed something else. A kind of divine geometry beneath madness, a structure to the dream world that mirrored the structure of the soul, a correspondence between inner chaos and cosmic order.
This is the very idea that underpins Jung's map of the psyche, the ego, the shadow, thema, animus, and the self. Archetypes that govern not just our dreams, but our behaviors, relationships, and destiny. And Swedenborg in his own symbolic language had documented each one centuries earlier in his terrifying dreams. He even wrote of what he called the grand man, a being composed of all the angels of heaven, each corresponding to a specific part of the divine body. He believed humanity too was part of this divine organism and that our souls were not individual entities but limbs in a cosmic being. Jung would later echo this idea when he said, "The self is not just you. It is the whole of mankind in miniature."
This wasn't just mysticism. It was psychology. It was the blueprint for how symbols shape the mind and why ignoring them leads to spiritual collapse. But Carl Young could have never guessed the magnitude of spiritual fire Swedenborg was walking through, nor how much it would mirror his own future experiences with madness, visions, and his infamous descent during the red book years.
You see, Jung too had dreams of angels, of gods and serpents, of diving into a cave and discovering a bound ancient prophet. At one point, he dreamt of a sea of blood covering Europe. This was before World War I. Another time he saw a city consumed by fire and above it a voice whispered, "This is what happens when men ignore the soul."
And perhaps that is the deepest link between these two men. Swedenborg walked into the abyss willingly. Young fell into it unwillingly, but came to accept it. Both emerged with maps that were not safe, but necessary. Maps that speak to something that rational psychology has lost. The idea that the soul is not a metaphor, that it has shape, depth, dimension, and that it suffers when ignored.
Swedenborg didn't write his journal to entertain. He wrote it as a record of a death, a crucifixion of the rational man, and a resurrection into something the modern world no longer recognizes, a soul awakened by the unbearable presence of the divine. This is why Jung even decades later said Swedenborg's visions couldn't be dismissed because they showed what happened when the unconscious was not a theory but a storm and what happens when that storm comes to speak your name. It's why he warned that those who seek meaning must be prepared to lose everything they thought they were because he said the symbols that bring salvation also bring terror. They must destroy before they can rebuild.
Swedenborg's journal destroys the reader. Not literally, but spiritually. It destroys the illusion that dreams are harmless, that visions are mere fantasy, that we can navigate life without ever answering to the tribunal of our own neglected truths. And it replaces that illusion with something much heavier, a weight, a responsibility, the responsibility to descend.
Because if you've ever had a dream that shook you, that showed you something too strange to forget or too painful to accept, then you've already begun. You are already in the garden with weeping roses, already hearing the lion's voice, already being asked to burn the books of your old identity. You just haven't finished the descent yet. Most never do. But those who do change. They become interpreters, translators of the symbolic world into the language of this one. And that's the legacy Swedenborg left behind. Not just a journal, but a doorway. One that Carl Young himself stepped through. One that now sits in front of you.
So the only question left is this. Will you read what was never meant for you? Will you listen to the voice that calls out from the burning mirror? Will you face the lion, the tribunal, the garden of screaming flowers? or will you close the book, label it madness, and return to your sleep?"
Swedenborg warned us what would happen if we turned away. The soul will still seek truth, but if denied, it will seek it in shadows. And Jung echoed that fate when he said, "If you do not make the unconscious conscious, it will rule your life, and you will call it fate."
So, if you've made it this far, if the words have stirred something ancient in you, then maybe it's time. Time to lose the dream of safety. Time to answer the call that Swedenborg could not ignore. Time to begin your own descent into the terrifying journal. Into the forgotten dream, into the soul itself.