The Young Jung? Where’s the Ying?

Yeah bullshit headline, especially if you don’t know Carl Jung. You don’t need to though.

You are fucked up. Your dreams try to help you. They whisper in your sleeping ears, spitting in them because you refuse to listen. Life would be easier if you would learn the dream makers language.

When I was in high school, sitting in music class, a friend told me about weed smoking. In lucid dreams. Both seemed great and he was disappointed that the experience matched exactly what he had imagined instead of surprising him. I was anti disappointed. As some people like their sunny side egg messy and flipped, I also glimpsed that dreams can be the doorway to our inner messy sunny side eggs.

As my friend spoke, the world around me turned sparkling. Do you know the anecdote of the fish that forgets he is immersed in water? Well in my case this is sparkling water now. Dry Music theory faded into the background as I glimpsed what might be possible in our dreams. Fun teenager stuff and profound sunny side stuff.

But how do we bridge this sparkling world with our waking lives when most of us forget they are living double lives minutes upon waking?

Commit: The 42-Day Marathon of Mind

Today marks Day 1 of a 42-day experiment—by accident matching the kilometers in a marathon, by choice matching the 21st June deadline of releasing the project I’m working on with a friend. The hypothesis? Transform how I work, create, and solve problems by forcing me to reflect and write about it. Accompanying my “professional” journey, my personal hypeman in the sprint to release.

The commitment is simple and hard: publish one blog post every day—ideally crappy and imperfect. Ideally talking about my subconscious talking to me. Ideally this becomes a secondary source, repetition of the prophecies that the dreammaker whispers and spits in my ear every night. This blog becomes my accountability partner, something I have been thirsting for like someone so thirsty they forgot that water exists.

I’m building a project with a friend. An app for people to voyage outside of their heads and find themselves through doing random shit. Intelligent random shit. Coaching but in fun and in AI. Pretty groundbreaking if your brain has become the dry bread it turns into when deprived of the juice of novelty. More about that idea in the next blog articles. Our basecamp is in the French countryside, I’m participating without formal training.

Hypothesis: By consistently harvesting dream insights and applying them through tiny experiments, I’ll develop a methodology that makes work more fluid and fun, and startup development more aligned with deeper wisdom.

Experiment: Creative Constraints as PACT

Today’s tiny experiment follows the PACT framework (Purposeful, Actionable, Continuous, Trackable):

Purposeful: Answer 10 catalytic questions to bypass perfectionism and connect subconscious insights to conscious challenges.

Actionable: Exactly 4 minutes per question—a hard constraint that forces raw expression.

Continuous: This becomes part of a daily practice, evolving with each iteration.

Trackable: Measure how many unexpected connections emerge that wouldn’t have appeared through conventional thinking.

The questions included prompts like: “What specific image from your mind mapping sparked the ‘Modern Jung’ possibility for you?” and “What specific fear about this 42-day journey keeps appearing in your thoughts?”

The results? Revelatory. When faced with the timer, my usual intellectualizing gave way—the dams broke and, as you can see, released a flood of more or less golden “soul puke” and “brain shit”—messy, authentic expressions that revealed connections I wouldn’t have made through conventional thinking.

Confront: Perfectionism and Purpose

Perfectionism has often blocked my creative expression. I fear that my rambling might not hold me accountable, that I’ll disappoint myself and others.

Why do I need this accountability? Because I believe in our project’s mission. It deserves seriousness and professionalism. Every artist needs discipline for when and how they sit in the sandbox where they invite play.

This 42-day blog marathon is comparable to the historical Greek marathon mission—bringing the fire, bringing the message, trying to be a little less blind, a little less squinting than I usually am.

Explore: The Positive Trojan Horse

We all know the legend of the Trojan Horse—a deceptive gift hiding soldiers who would destroy Troy from within. But what about a positive version of this story?

What if dreams are our friendly Trojan Horse? Not an invasion force with murderous intent, but a dream team that revolutionizes and seeds the inner city of our brain while we sleep?

No cold-blooded murder of hippocampus and frontal cortex, but rather meeting them in the smoky bars and buzzing atmosphere of the night, returning transformed without even noticing the change.

Alcohol disinhibits people. Truths reveal themselves when defenses drop. Our minds in dreams are completely truthful in ways almost unachievable during waking life—a trance of truth.

Test: The Lemon Face Tension

Recently, I experimented with biting into a lemon (or imagining it) and holding that “lemon face” as long as possible.

At first, the expression comes from bodily depth—uncontrollable instinct responding to sourness. But after about thirty seconds, maintaining the expression requires effort as the face naturally wants to relax.

This tension-and-release mirrors the relationship between our conscious and subconscious minds: the initial reaction is authentic but fleeting, while sustaining attention requires deliberate practice—exactly what this dream harvesting experiment aims to establish.

Embody: The Voice of This Journey

This blog will embody: unrestrained fantasy and soul puke. Call it work-life balance. It will lean into risky experiments, constantly stretching its own boundaries.

Like a baby ready to be born, stretching with kicking feet and punching fists against an already overstretched belly. But is it really a poor belly, or do we underestimate its ability and joy in being stretched?

I won’t restrict this blog by predetermining its path. We’ll see if it provides value to you who read it and to me who writes it. Or to me when I read it after writing it. Perhaps these 42 posts will capture a tiny or big success story of how this new world with its new tools allows us to build our own “applied university curriculum,” an experiment of the modern type of autodidactism.

Question: The Paths Ahead

What will unfold in the next 41 days? I don’t know yet. I’m stepping into this experiment with questions rather than answers, paths rather than destinations.

This blog is my telephone booth and time capsule. It’s raining outside and I’m on call with my future self. It’s a space to document space. It’s a failure if there is no space for failure.

Above all, it’s an invitation to wonder alongside me, to question the conventional wisdom about how we work, create, and become.

What would your life look like if you treated your subconscious as your most valuable collaborator rather than a mysterious stranger?

After Reading This…

You’ll never look at dreams the same way again—both the dreams spun by diligent, benevolent dreammakers who operate on an opposite rhythm to us (drinking their first coffee when we start snoring and snoring when we drink our first), and the waking dreams that guide our ambitions.

This blog offers an open exploration and alternative proposition: go through life fascinated and thrilled because everyone suddenly looks like a charming, relatable mess of dreams and fears.

It kills the anonymity of sitting on a train judging fellow passengers. It encourages empathy—and what I’ll call “impathy”—seeing everyone as a bundle of their dreams and hopes.

Assign: Tonight’s Subconscious Task

Before sleep tonight, I’ll plant this question: How can I make work more fun? How can I stimulate fascination—because fascination is fertilizer for the brain?

Brains are infinitely hungry creatures. Come along and join me in befriending these little monsters under our beds. If you prepare the right conditions, they grow wings.