Jungian Archetypes

According to Wikipedia (or shall I say, according to Carl Jung) archetypes are "innate universal psychic dispositions that form the substrate from which the basic themes of human life emerge". I also found on the interweb that Jung found that his experiences had the tendency to form themselves into persons, such as the wise old man and his companion, a little girl. Over the course of a number of dreams, the wise old man evolved into a spiritual guru and the little girl became "anima", the feminine soul who served as his main form of communication with the deeper aspects of his unconscious.

"A leathery brown dwarf would show up guarding the entrance to the unconscious. He was "the shadow," a primitive companion for Jung's ego. Jung dreamt that he and the dwarf killed a beautiful blond youth, whom he called Siegfried. For Jung, this represented a warning about the dangers of the worship of glory and heroism which would soon cause so much sorrow all over Europe -- and a warning about the dangers of some of his own tendencies towards hero-worship, of Sigmund Freud!"

Jung dreamt of the dead quite a bit as well, and felt it was a way to represent the unconscious itself- not Freud's version of the unconscious, but a new collective unconscious of humanity that could contain all the dead and not just our personal ghosts.