Carl Jung stole my idea (okay, so it was copyright-free in the collective unconscious!)

Shortly before his death, Jung informed his assistant of his "last dream." He dreamed of a huge block of cut stone in a landscape, a symbol of wholeness and, he declared, a promise for the future.
Jung, too, had been hit by the Stone.

-- Churton, Tobias. 2005. Gnostic Philosophy: From Ancient Persia to Modern Times. Rochester, Vermont: Inner Traditions. Page 370.

For many years (I don't know how long), I have had a picture in my head; just one of those visual ideas that I couldn't find a story to put in. This mental picture is of a stone -- six-sided, rough-hewn and bumpy on its faces instead of smooth -- sitting alone in the middle of a big empty space. It is not really a spontaneously appearing image, and sometimes when I imagine it, my imagination makes it look different. When I was a kid into Native Americans, I used to consciously project a little Native American "circle of life" symbol -- a circle with four quarters, one each in white, black, yellow and red -- onto the broadest face. I don't know i f I always thought of it being the same size and exact shape, but I seem to picture it (and remember picturing it) as slightly taller than it is wide, with two broad sides at right angles to two narrower sides.

I do not remember having considered it any kind of vision of anything external, but the fact that it just was a sort of random visual idea that wasn't connected to anything -- and that I do not remember the circumstances under which I first thought of it -- always made it feel kind of mysterious.

Now, of course, I've read the excerpt above, and I will now continue to wonder whether I actually did think of it independently, and even if I thought of it before reading that paragraph. I do not recall ever having recorded this visualization before, either in writing or in my bad drawing skills. Therefore I have no evidence of having come up with this mental picture independently of psychologist Carl Jung. Do I even need to mention that because Jung was the guy who wrote about the collective unconscious of shared symbols, the coincidence is even more spooky? Of all the people to share a symbolic thought with -- the irony.

I don't think I'm going to make anything big and mystical out of this vision shared between ol' Jung and me, though -- when I was a young, gullible kid, I got burned by that kind of magical thinking. Whether it does actually signify anything, I know that thinking of it that way can mess you up in the head if you read too much into it. Maybe it is really something mystical, but Brad Warner and other have said that you can't get caught up in a particular mystical experience any more than you can any other experience -- getting caught up in it is anti-mystical.

I'm reminded of the story my friend tells about how he was saved in the Christian sense after he saw his name written in the clouds. Hey, maybe there are such coindences. Maybe there aren't. Maybe God wrote my friend's name in the clouds, and maybe I tapped into the collective unconscious and have been carrying around Jung's last dream in my head. Maybe not. Supernatural activity or otherwise, the important thing is to try to be a good person and to just keep going along one's spiritual/religious path.