Island

The island is a self set apart. Greek myth gives us Circe’s island, Calypso’s, Ithaca at the end of Odysseus’s long return. Celtic tradition fills the western sea with blessed islands of the dead or the living otherworld. Jung treated island-dreams as images of a psychic territory the dreamer has kept separate — a refuge, or an exile. The feeling tone matters: is the island solitude welcome, or is it loneliness? Is it a place you can leave, or are you stranded? A dream of reaching an island often marks the achievement of a hard-won separateness; a dream of escaping one, a readiness to rejoin larger waters.