According to Carl Jung, "the collective unconscious is a universal datum, that is, every human being is endowed with this psychic archetype layer since his/her birth. One cannot acquire these strata by education or other conscious effort because it is innate.
Carl Jung extended Freud's theory of the unconscious. While he agreed that each of us has conflicts and associations relevant to our own history, he felt that the unconscious goes further. He also believed that there are some cultural references, known as archetypes, that are so familiar to us in our culture, that we all share common associations to them. They form a collective unconscious.
The unconscious mind is divided in personal and collective distinctions. The personal part contains someone's individual experiences, while the collective part has general content existent in all human beings. The collective part is represented in dreams by the archetypes, which are symbols that appear in everyone’s dreams.
It was a big deal when I came across the ideas of Jung. And not just the idea of the Collective Unconscious but the way he viewed the unconscious mind as well. Freud saw it as the subconscious. As a repository for all the things we've forgotten and basically a creation of the conscious mind. But Jung turned that around. He saw the unconscious as something rich and deep, something even greater than our conscious mind. Something that was uniquely apart of ourselves; that we could explore and use to realize our potentials. The ideas are too intense, that the unconsciousness is automatically working on behalf of the conscious mind, but we are ignoring the facts before us that we can change and evolve to higher selves within this life time and not excuse it to the next life time. The notion of the unconscious mind that is the unrevealed information that we collect without knowledge, interpretation, translation of information given collectively to our mind that is