Figure-8 Uroboros
In On Dreams and Death, von Franz reports a dream she had several years after her father’s death, in which the number 8 played a prominent role:
I was with my sister and we both wanted to take Tram No. 8 at a certain place in Zurich, to go to the center of town. We leaped onto the tram and discovered too late that it was going in the opposite direction. I said to my sister, “If one of us had done this it would be just a mistake, but since both of us have done it, then there must be a meaning in it. Let’s watch out for what it may lead to.” …. At the next tram stop we got off and there a taxi drove up near us and out of it—came my father! I knew it was his ghost. When I started to greet him he made a sign not to come too near to him and then walked away to the house where he had lived. I called after him, “We don’t live there any more.” But he shook his head and murmured, “That doesn’t matter to me now.”[1]
Von Franz identifies “Tram No. 8” as a key element of the dream: “In number symbolism, eight represents timelessness and eternity….In alchemy eight is the number of completion.”[2] And it is clear that the retrograde movement described in the dream (the tram was “going in the opposite direction”) involves a passage into the realm of the dead. Here a dream of my own comes to mind.
NOTES
[1] Von Franz 1987, p. 148. [Boston & London: Shambhala.]
[2] Ibid.