During the Christmas of 1918 I was much occupied with Orphism, and in particular with the Orphic fragment in Malalas, where the Primordial Light is described as the "trinitarian Metis, Phanes, Ericepaeus." I consistently read Ericapaeus instead of Ericepaeus, as in the text. (Actually both readings occur.) This misreading became fixed as a paramnesia, and later I always remembered the name as Ericapaeus and only discovered thirty years afterward that Malalas's text has Ericepaeus.

Just at this time one of my patients, whom I had not seen for a month and who knew nothing of my studies, had a dream in which an unknown man handed her a piece of paper, and on it was written a "Latin" hymn to a god called Ericipaeus.

The dreamer was able to write this hymn down upon waking, The language it was written in was a peculiar mixture of Latin, French, and ltalian. The lady had an elementary knowledge of Latin, knew a bit more Italian, and spoke French fluently. The name "Ericipaeus" was completely unknown to her, which is not surprising as she had no knowledge of the classics. Our two towns were about fifty miles apart, and there had been no communication between us for a month.

Oddly enough, the variant of the name affected the very same vowel which I too had misread (a instead of e), but her unconscious misread it another way (i instead of e). I can only suppose that she unconsciously "read" not my mistake but the text in which the Latin transliteration "Ericepaeus" occurs, and was evidently put off her stroke by my misreading.

SOURCE: Synchronicity by Carl Jung (2011 ed.) p.27-28.

EDITOR'S NOTE

Jung also compares this dream-error to a more famous one--dream writer J.W. Dunne's 1902 dream of the eruption in Martinique, which Dunne concluded wasn't clairvoyant and about the actual eruption, but predictive and about his reading the headline reporting the disaster. He dreamed 4000 died; it was really about 40,000, but when the paper arrived, he misread the headline by one zero. Dunne's point was that many "clairvoyant" dreams might be either subliminal or psychic, but based not on distant events, but on things we experience firsthand--namely, news of those events--potentially inaccurate, and sometimes just misread. Jung calls this "the reading mistake."

I think Jung's implying that his patient, asleep, learned from Jung's unconscious both the word and that he misspelled it (but if it knew, why didn't Jung's unconscious point it out to him?)--so she clairvoyantly consulted the text, but, rattled to learn her therapist could make an error, SHE made an error similar to his.

Maybe. It's certainly not random. Not that alphabet soup!

I'll propose another possibility. That patient might be offering a helpful correction, whether to get attention or just out of friendship. In the languages she knew, Latin, French or Italian, Ericipaeus, her spelling, and Ericepaeus, the spelling in the manuscript, would be pronounced almost the same, with a soft C; Jung's Ericapaeus, with a hard C, would not. (Though in the original Greek that C was surely a K and all three variants would sound hard.) So phonetically her spelling corrects his error. But Jung didn't take her odd spelling as a prompt to check the name, and went on misspelling it for decades.

Oh well! Misspelling Ericacecicocupaeus is almost inevitable. Typing this out, I've botched it half a dozen ways. Almost as bad as Rhamphorhynchus!

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