Exploring Jung’s revolutionary idea of dreams as compensation

One of the physiological marvels of our species, which we share with animals, is a process called homeostasis. The word means “steady state” and refers to how our bodies adjust to internal and external changes to maintain a dynamic equilibrium of our systems. According to the Britannica Encyclopedia, homeostasis is “any self-regulatory process by which biological systems tend to maintain stability while adjusting to conditions that are optimal for survival.”

To adjust to external temperatures or to fight an infection, our bodies shiver to raise our internal temperature or sweat to lower it. When we ingest sugar, our pancreas secretes insulin to help us balance glucose in our blood. Our blood vessels contract or expand to direct blood flow as needed. None of these functions are under our conscious control any more than sneezing or itching.

One of the great Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung’s most significant concepts was that our psyche seeks this same kind of balance between our consciousness and the unconscious and that our brain uses dreams as the psyche’s self-regulatory system. He proposed that one of the functions of dreams is to compensate for our conscious thoughts, attitudes, and beliefs by providing a different point of view through dream imagery.

Based on his work as a psychiatrist at the Burghöizli Hospital in Zurich, and analytic sessions with his private clients, he concluded that by presenting repressed and archaic archetypal material from the unconscious, dreams offered a remedy to the one-sidedness of ego-consciousness. This led to his concept of dreams as compensation.

In The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, Jung wrote:

The unconscious content contrasts strikingly with the conscious material, particularly when the conscious attitude tends too exclusively in a direction that would threaten the vital needs of the individual. The more one-sided his conscious attitude is, and the further it deviates from the optimum, the greater becomes the possibility that vivid dreams with a strongly contrasting but purposive content will appear as an expression of the self-regulation of the psyche^.1

Consider this simple example of the compensatory function of dreams and how it might benefit the dreamer: a client carries a low opinion of herself and struggles with depression. During this period, she dreams of a grammar-school teacher from her past who praised her creativity and determination. This memory has been excluded from her conscious mind but returns in dreams to remind the dreamer of her forgotten potential buried under the depression. After working with these dreams in therapeutic sessions, she finds new energy to enroll in painting classes and reunites with her creative energies.

In his wonderfully engaging new book The Four Pillars of Jungian Psychoanalysis, the distinguished Jungian analyst, Dr. Murray Stein, includes a chapter on dreams that clarifies Jung’s notion of dreams as compensation. He writes:

The unconscious is another realm with a life of its own, and often it runs quite contrary to what is going on in the world of consciousness. When a person is sleeping, another type of thinking is taking place that is different from waking thought. Dreams can give us important information about what is going on within ourselves and about possible developments for the future. But beyond that, and more important for the outcome of analysis, is that dreams build the way to psychological wholeness.²

Working with dreams and using dream interpretation to decode their symbolic content can lead to the transcendence of repressed material and the renewal of the self. As Dr. Stein suggests, we might ask ourselves, “Why this dream at this time?” What the unconscious brings forward, he further suggests, depends on the present state of one’s consciousness. Viewing a dream as compensatory medicine, we then might ask ourselves: what wound or trauma is the unconscious aiming to heal?

Several months ago, during a difficult time of personal questioning, I had a dream in which a salamander became a healing talisman I was to wear around my neck. When I awoke, the oppressive feelings that had been haunting me were gone. Salamanders are not creatures I commonly encounter in my daily life, nor do I think about them, and yet a numinous and magical salamander appeared in my dream. The dream, in turn, changed my relationship with my feelings. Later, when I looked up the symbolic meaning of salamander, I was amazed to discover salamanders have long been associated with totems of transformation.

The nature and function of dreams continue to provoke spiritual, scientific, and psychological debate. However, in honoring their symbolic meaning and potentially healing function, we resource the hidden treasures in our depths that can alter our relationship to our inner world and restore us to a more balanced life.

What images, symbols, or dream-stories are knocking on the door of your consciousness?

References

¹Jung, Carl. The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, Collected Works, Volume 8, p 346. Princeton University Press. 1970

²Stein, Murray. The Four Pillars of Jungian Psychoanalysis, Chiron Press. 2022

You may also be interested in my other recent blog posts about dreams

“Dream Incubation: Solving Problems in Your Sleep”

“Dream Disturbances: The Healing Function of Bad Dreams”

This post appeared in a slightly different form on Dale’s blog on Psychology Today. You can find all of Dale’s blog posts for Psychology Today at 

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Archetypes abound in fairy tales, dreams, and nightmares. What do they mean for you?

“Granny is ill,” says the mother in the fairytale “Little Red Riding Hood,” handing her daughter a basket of food for the ailing old woman. Wearing her red cloak, the little girl skips off on the path through the woods to granny’s house.

Along the way, Red Riding Hood meets a wolf. He tricks her into telling him her destination, then races off to grandmother’s and gobbles up the old woman. When Red Riding Hood arrives, the wolf is in granny’s bed wearing her nightclothes. Peeking out from beneath the covers, granny looks odd! We know the fearsome litany. What big arms you have, Grandmother! What big teeth you have! Even young listeners at this point get prickles up their spine and understand that Little Red Riding Hood must flee. But Red Riding Hood disregards the signs of danger and is soon devoured by the wolf.

In her ground-breaking book, Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Women Archetype, Clarissa Pinkola Estés discusses naïve women as prey and the common fairy tale motif of the animal groom. According to Pinkola Estés, the animal groom in a tale is “a malevolent thing disguised as a benevolent thing,”¹ a shadow aspect of our psyche. This type of character, wolf or human, represents an inner predator. Unrecognized, this predator can destroy us, but recognized and confronted, it can lead to an awakening of the strong Self that faces down self-destructive tendencies.

Do not talk to strangers. Do not stray from the path. Do not open the door to strangers while we are gone. (The seven dwarves to Snow White.) Here are my keys, but never unlock that closet door. (Bluebeard’s Castle.) Fairytales pulsate with warnings. Trickster spirits—embodied by greedy witches, calculating wizards, and charming wolves—appear without fail. Trickster spirits pop into our lives as well, mercurial figures that enchant, bewitch, attract. The role of the animal groom or other destructive figures in fairy tales is to wake us up to our need to not be easily deceived or to fall into a clever trap, and to our sense of agency.

Fairy tales transport us to a timeless space in which we inhabit the domain of eternal situations—abandonment, displacement, poverty, orphanhood, war, childbirth—and meet archetypal figures, basic human types like the good daughter, the jealous sibling, the feckless father, or wise old woman that have existed across time and cultures. In dreams we may also meet archetypal figures in the shape of robbers, wicked queens, authoritative kings, kindly animals or trees, and dream figures also serve an alerting function: to awaken us to our personal unconscious, to very real situations mirrored in our psychic lives. The dream clown (archetypal figure) has the face of our first boyfriend (from personal memory) who reminds us of our current boyfriend and the uneasiness he inspires (a present situation that needs attending to). The great dream theorist and depth psychologist, Carl Jung, wrote: “The dream shows the inner truth and reality of the patient as it really is: not as I conjecture it to be, and not as he would like it to be, but as it is. “²

In dreams as in fairy tales, disturbing or brutal images capture our attention. That is their purpose, to rouse us from our habitual ways of seeing and knowing, to alarm us enough so that we sit bolt upright in bed and ask: What is going on in my life?

Jung believed that healing images lie within. Dreams, he assessed, are “small hidden doors in the deepest and most intimate sanctum of the soul.”³ When we study our dreams, we discover the personal motifs, patterns, and themes that actively, though unconsciously, govern our lives. They are our own private fairy tales in vivid color calling to us from within. Revisiting fairy tales, especially ones we are drawn to, can shed light on our own complexes, and provide insight into the images that appear in our dreams. Do we identify with the abused Cinderella taunted by her female kin and find ourselves dreaming of a waif in rags? Are we self-sacrificing? Waiting to be transformed by a godmother? Are we the youngest son competing for our father’s attention? The tales that attract us may give us a whiff of our psyches and appear in some variation in our dreams.

If the haunting images in fairy tales stalk our sleep, and nightmares awaken us, heart thumping, the mood can sometimes carry over into the next day. Neuroscience research on nightmares and other night terrors has enlarged our understanding of what is going on in the brain. For example, researchers have found that in post-traumatic nightmares, a type of nightmare in which a real traumatic event is relived, the amygdala, the structure deep within the brain associated with fear, is overly sensitive. In other types of nightmares, researchers speculate on a neurological fear circuit involving the amygdala, the hippocampus, and the prefrontal cortex.⁴ Knowing the anatomical mechanism of nightmares aids clinicians in creating specific therapies to help clients work with disturbing dreams, such as rewriting or reframing a frightening dream and meditating on a positive ending.⁵

Let me invite you back into your dreams. If you have tried keeping a journal of dreams and stopped, begin again. If you are exploring dreamwork for the first time, consider this moment a pivotal time to turn within. Whatever you record in your dream journal has value—entire dreams in all their specificity, snippets of dreams, single images or words, associations, doodles, drawing, graphic comics—whatever comes, welcome it.

Record the feeling associated with the dream, both in the dream and upon awakening. If certain feelings and moods continue throughout the day, note them too.

Another way to work with dreams is to make a list of the characters in the dream including non-animate objects like a train, a suitcase, the landscape, rainclouds. Notice where there are conflicting needs and desires between the characters. The train may tell you it’s on a strict timetable. You can ask yourself: Where in my life am I on a strict timetable? How do I feel about this? Notice which characters answer readily and which are hesitant to speak or remain silent. Do these exercises several times over a week and notice what changes in the responses.

Regard whatever comes to you as the vastness of your innate wisdom asking to be heard.

 

Notes

¹  Pinkola Estés, Clarissa, Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Women Archetype

² Jung, C. G., “The Practical Use of Dream Analysis”, Collected Works, 16: The Practice of Psychotherapy.

³ Jung, C. G., The Meaning of Psychology for Modern Man,” Collected Works,10: Civilization in Transition

⁴ Nielsen, Tore, “The Stress Acceleration Hypothesis of Nightmares,” Frontiers of Neurology, June 1, 2017.

⁵ Tousignant, O. H., Glass, D. J., Suvak, M. K., & Fireman, G. D, “Nightmares and nondisturbed dreams impact daily change in negative emotion,” APA PsycNet 2022

This post appeared in a slightly different form on Dale’s blog on Psychology Today. You can find all of Dale’s blog posts for Psychology Today at 

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In 1932, a new radio show called The Shadow, adapted from a popular pulp fiction magazine, premiered on the nation’s airwaves. Its narrator, Frank Readick, had the perfect menacing voice to embody the show’s protagonist. Lamont Cranston, a rich man-about-town by day, morphed into the indefatigable and invisible crime-buster, The Shadow, when summoned to uproot evil. The show’s signature line was: “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows!” A sinister, knowing laugh followed. Audiences were mesmerized. In later episodes, the young Orson Welles voiced The Shadow.

In the thirties, the economic and emotional effects of the Great Depression still lingered in the public’s mind. Awareness of the spread of fascism in Europe and its threat to democracy captured headlines. The country was ripe for entertainment that provided a character endowed with superhuman powers and knowledge of enemy-defeating esoteric practices. In our own troubled times, media icons, cult stars, and a handful of political figures attract similar projections. Wishful thinking, a collective sense of doom, nostalgia for a previous (and non-existent) innocent era, and a rejection of the hardships of change have elevated certain leaders to savior status.

in Jungian terms, the “shadow” refers to those aspects of ourselves we reject. They remain hidden from our conscious mind but often appear in dreams as fearful or hated figures. Whenever we have a strong hostile reaction to a person or to an idea, or feel overly self-righteous, we can be sure the shadow is at hand, showing us something about ourselves we do not wish to see. That’s because the shadow presents a threat to our ego ideal, the good personality with which we identify.

We play out the tension between our ego ideal (I am a smart, respectable, dutiful, kind father, daughter, wife, son) and the reality of our more complex wholeness, which includes split-off aspects of the Self, in our personal relationships but also on the broader stage among religious or ethnic groups and among nations.

J. Edgar Hoover, the first Director of the FBI who served under eight presidents, offers an example of someone in conflict with his shadow. A notorious homophobe, he was instrumental in persuading Present Dwight Eisenhower to ban gays from all government jobs. For decades, Hoover engaged in illegal wire-tapping and spying activities against his enemies and kept extensive dossiers on their sexual and private lives. His rationale was that he was upholding the values and laws of this country. After his death, several of his biographers found evidence that Hoover was himself a man of secrets and lived a closeted gay life.

No one likes to feel vulnerable, humiliated, or ashamed. No one wants to show their neediness, but all humans share the same instincts and emotions. If we can bring compassion to the disowned parts in our own psyche, we have a better chance of extending compassion to others who are needy, hurt, vulnerable.

The aspects we deny in ourselves are not always negative. Some psychotherapists refer to a “golden shadow,” disowned unconscious energies that fuel and are necessary for a vital life. A young man may cut off his creativity as a dancer to conform to some societal or family norm. A young woman may fear being too brainy or too assertive to fit stereotypes reinforced by her upbringing. Our personal shadows are shaped by individual experiences but also by the society and family in which we live.

When shadow material is guiding our thoughts and actions, we’re inclined to see the other who carries our projections as all bad. What we cut off in ourselves we see outside of us and respond by attacking those traits in others with displaced aggression. In some instances, this leads to scapegoating, a process in which we attribute all the “badness” to another person or persons who are persecuted and exiled from the dominant group. When we own our split-off parts, we no longer need to project them onto others.

I’ve written before about Jung’s concept of the shadow (“How Facing Our Shadow Can Release Us from Scapegoating”), and it’s a topic worthy of further exploration. Jung’s contention was that through the inner work of recognizing and owning our shadow and integrating it as part of one’s totality we can hope to balance our personal nature and prevent the repressed aspects from spilling out into the world. This is one of the ethical dilemmas of our time, a global era that is ripe with fear, hatred, and blame.

What we don’t realize is that the battle between opposites is within us. Locked away in our unconscious mind are unacceptable drives, fantasies, and beliefs that appear in dreams as dangerous invading forces—thugs and vigilantes, the figure of an arrogant neighbor, a Nazi soldier, or the ex-partner we demonize and disdain. In biblical stories, fairy tales, and literature we can easily identify the polarized parts: Cain and Abel, God and the Devil, wicked stepmothers and innocent stepdaughters, derelict fathers and victimized children. Iago in Shakespeare’s Othello and Lady Macbeth are two of the most fascinating evil characters in literature. With our more aware social conscience, we might question why the great bard made Othello a person of color and a scheming woman the engine of tragedy in Macbeth. Jung suggests that our task is to peer within, to acknowledge the shifty, malevolent, or frightened parts and make them our allies.

As a novelist, I pay a lot of attention to the shadow aspects of my characters, what they don’t know about themselves but which the reader will learn by reading the book. I am each character’s psychoanalyst, digging deeper into their psyches to reveal the driving forces and the points of conflict in their being. In early drafts, I think I know what’s going on in their internal lives, but just as in analysis, it takes time and great patience for a character to reveal herself to me. Sometimes I’m saddened by what I learn. Sometimes I have a great “Aha” feeling when the contradictions in their actions and words cohere and make sense.

When we say writing novels is not for the faint of heart, we mean that as writers, we are deeply invested in the world we’ve created. We expend vast amounts of time and energy in the act of creation. We want our characters to evolve and grow wise. But since art follows life, and life can’t be counted on for producing happy endings, so neither can we guarantee fulfillment for our characters. In The Conditions of Love, for instance, part of me wanted troubled, self-centered Mern to reappear reformed later in her daughter’s life, but Mern wouldn’t have it. Instead, resilient Eunice had to grow independent and find love on her own.

How can you recognize your shadow? Notice when you have a spontaneous and disproportionate response to a person, an idea, or a group. Take some time to entangle what has agitated you. What characteristics do you find most problematic in the other? Where might they live in you?

This post appeared in a slightly different form on Dale’s blog on Psychology Today. You can find all of Dale’s blog posts for Psychology Today at 

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One of Carl Jung’s most haunting statements: What we do not make conscious appears to us as Fate. We may sometimes call an outside event like an illness or an accident “fate.” Jung’s great insight, however, was to recognize that what “happens to us” is intimately connected to what is going on inside and that only by turning inward and exploring the hidden aspects of ourselves, our shadow parts, might we gain a deeper knowledge of who we are and attain a sense of agency about our destiny.

When I asked renowned psychoanalyst and Jungian scholar Murray Stein what he’d like to discuss together here, he didn’t hesitate: “Anger.” Anger is one of the emotions that often remains unconscious, in our shadow, as Jung might say. But in today’s world, unprocessed and unrecognized anger, and its destructive buddy, violence, is rocking the foundational supports of individuals and nations.

How are we to process this powerful force, personally and as a species? I can think of no better person to illuminate how inextricably connected the inner and outer worlds of anger are than my dear friend and mentor, Murray Stein. Murray’s perspective comes from his scholarly investigations of Jung and from his past role as president of The International Association for Analytic Psychology as well as being a clinician and teaching analyst in Zurich with an international following. I’m delighted to introduce you to his work. This will be the first in a series of two interviews with Dr. Stein.

Dale Kushner: What is the difference between anger, rage, and aggression? Is it important we understand the difference?

Murray Stein: Anger has many degrees of heat. Rage is the highest. It is red hot, burning, emotion in uncontrollable flames. Aggression is action sometimes taken as the result of anger, or rage, and sometimes not. Aggression can be quite cold-blooded and calculating as we see in the strategic moves of chess players and politicians. Anger and rage disrupt clear thinking and so are not much in evidence if aggression is carried out for strategic purposes. Of course, anger might be behind the strategic moves of aggression as a fundamental motivation for acts of calculated aggression, like the raging dictator ordering his rational military to go to all-out war.

DK: Are you now encountering more dreams about anger in your practice and among your students?

MS: The short answer is “yes.” We know that anger is one of the basic emotions and is always with us as a species. However, it seems to be an exceptionally predominant emotion throughout the world nowadays. It’s as though the entire human population has become choleric, edgy, quick to anger. This hot emotion rises fast and furious in families, boils up in social and professional circles, infects political arguments, and rages on the roads and highways. And yes, anger even erupts among Jungian students in the classroom over issues like wearing the mask or not. We live in a world where splitting energy is rampant everywhere. It feeds on divisions and fuels hatred of the perceived “other.” Dreams sometimes reflect the emotionality of the awake mind, and sometimes not.

DK: Are similar images or themes appearing?

MS: A related theme is vulnerability and victimization. This comes up frequently in dreams. Dreamers find themselves in dangerous situations and have to make decisions that could prove life-threatening or life-saving. I haven’t made a statistical study of the frequency, but my guess would be that dreams of vulnerability – to oneself, to a child or loved one – have increased during the Pandemic.

DK: How do these more recent dreams of anger differ from anger dreams you saw earlier in your practice?

MS: Maybe I’m just more sensitive to the issue of anger now, but these more recent dreams of anger do seem exceptionally intense. I personally had a dream recently in which I became angrier than I can remember ever being. A brief summary of the dream: a man carelessly ignited a fire that nearly destroyed the building I was in and then nonchalantly refused to take responsibility for his action. I flew into a rage at him. It was his lack of accepting responsibility for the fire that made me so angry, more than the fact of the fire itself. When I woke up from this dream, it took me some time to cool down. I immediately associated the irresponsible individual with a notorious politician who will go unnamed.

DK: How is anger manifesting in your patients’ lives? Would you say it is related to the current collective global turbulence?

MS: I hear accounts regularly of anger flare-ups in their lives. Sometimes it is at home – for example, a mother of a young child who can’t go to school and is overwhelmed by her responsibilities toward her child, her work, her husband. Anger flares quickly and without much immediate cause in this circumstance. It’s simmering constantly in the background and flares up at the slightest provocation. This is not her usual pattern.  Another instance is a father who becomes furious with his grown daughter because she voted for the other political party and he now refuses to speak to her. Sometimes it is in the online work situation – short tempers flare because of distance and poor communications among the members of a team. I get the feeling that Ares, the angry god of war, is taking over as the dominant archetypal energy of the times. Everyone seems ready to go to war at a moment’s notice and often with the thrill and pleasure associated with the war-monger god.

DK: Does anger seem more prevalent in this decade than previous ones you’ve practiced in?

MS: Yes. More precisely, in the last five years, since the manifestation of political divisions between left and right have sharpened worldwide, and also the economic disparities between the ultra-rich and the rest have become intolerable, and then also since the Pandemic has generated its dynamics of tension and anger. The patients I see are subject to all of these collective stresses, and we have to deal with them in the sessions of psychotherapy while also of course dealing with their particular issues from their personal life histories. The collective tensions come into dreams and personal relationships. We are all embedded in the collective and cannot avoid the emotions that collective issues generate in the people around us.

DK: What are the consequences of personal and collective anger?

MS: As I said above, the consequences are both destructive and creative. James Hillman, who was an astrological Ares, once said that he could not write if he was not angry. Anger motivated him to create. In other cases, anger results in rubble and ruin, of individuals and civilizations. The splitting energy that we see rampant in the world today might be the harbinger of a new civilization in the making beyond the angry present, or it might be nothing more than a signal that the present systems of organizing human society are broken beyond repair.

DK: What guidance might you suggest to populations overwhelmed by righteous anger?

MS: Righteous anger is still anger, and it can become so powerful and convincing that one could speak of possession. Jung defined psychosis as a state of possession by archetypal energies. In this condition, you say and do things that are not balanced. Fueled by righteous anger, they can lead to committing acts as unjust as the injustices you are protesting against in your righteousness. My suggestion would be to hold on to your thinking and feeling functions, that is, to your capacity to think rationally and to follow the guidance of your best values. If you lose contact with these functions, you are in trouble and in danger of possession. The expression of this usually leads to backlash and retribution, so not to a good result if you think about it. However, righteous anger must be expressed or it will turn to bitterness and hatred. It’s a question of how to express this type of anger. The form is important. My suggestion is to express the anger but not to let the anger per se take control of your actions.

DK: What would be a positive way to mitigate collective anger?

MS: Leadership! The anger must be heard, and there must be a response from collective leadership that gives hope of remediation. Then action. Words are not enough.

DK: Are there other extreme emotions being expressed more often in this decade (in America)? Positive or negative.

MS: It’s hard to say. Maybe despair. This has been a time of what I’ve called umbra mundi, the shadowed world, as though we’ve been living in a longtime eclipse of the sun and moon. It’s a dark time, and in this global mood, the dominant emotions have been anger and despair, in my experience. At the same time, there are moments of hope and vision and determination to make things different. I think we are emerging into an era of activism when the vast majority of conscious individuals will put their energies into remedial efforts to restore human values and repair the global environment.

This post appeared in a slightly different form on Dale’s blog on Psychology Today. You can find all of Dale’s blog posts for Psychology Today at 

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A Conversation with Jungian Analyst Kenneth James (Part Two)

This post continues my conversation with esteemed Jungian analyst Kenneth James. In Part One, we focused on how Jungian analysis is different from conventional therapies and other analytic traditions.

The COVID pandemic is reshaping life as we have known it on the planet. For many, the absolutes we have counted on to sustain us during times of crisis have already disappeared. That we have lost all sources of income, that our hospitals are understaffed and inadequately supplied, that we may die alone without a beloved near are the unthinkable realities we must now face. During the long weeks ahead, fear, loneliness, and despair will be uninvited visitors. As our sense of catastrophe deepens, so will our feelings of isolation. How can we cope? One way is to turn inward and pursue a relationship to our inner world. In this second conversation, Dr. Kenneth James will discuss the importance of dreams and how making the unconscious conscious is a giant step toward becoming self-enlightened.

Kenneth James is a Jungian analyst in private practice in Chicago. He holds a Ph.D. in Communicative Sciences and Disorders from Northwestern University, and a Diploma in Analytical Psychology from the C.G. Jung Institute of Chicago. Dr. James holds the rank of professor emeritus after a 33-year career as a university professor and now devotes his time as founder and director of The Soulwork Center in downtown Chicago where he practices as a Jungian analyst.

Dale Kushner: Most contemporary models of psychological counseling do not value the examination of dreams. Why do Jungians place so much value on dreamwork?

Kenneth James: The dream is considered the purest expression of unconscious dynamics, both personal and collective. Jungian work is not strictly speaking ego-based. We rely on disclosures from the unconscious to guide us in analysis and more importantly, in life outside of analysis. There are many ways that the unconscious seeks to communicate with the ego. These ways include daydreams and reverie, projection, displacement, somatization (the production of medical symptoms with no apparent organic cause), parapraxis (the so-called “Freudian” slip) and synchronicity. Dreams we have while we are asleep are highly esteemed because the ego is not involved in the generation of dreams (while we are asleep, the ego is absent). By examining dreams, the analyst and the analysand are guided to explore critical areas of the analysand’s life that may lead to unsuspected breakthroughs in self-understanding and growth of consciousness.

D.K.: In your experience, how does working consciously with dreams benefit an individual?

K.J.: Dreams point both the dreamer and the analyst toward issues and concerns that are in need of exploration and understanding. These may not be considered important by the ego, but when considered calmly and openly, dreams can awaken awareness of connections that can help the dreamer resolve problems, alleviate suffering, and calm conflicts. I often refer to dreams as the “MRIs” of the psyche. They show what the ego can’t see. A skilled analyst can use the dream to help the analysand explore areas that may not be brought up in any other way. Dreams circumvent the dominance that the ego wishes to claim for itself, and help facilitate both individuation (see Part One for our discussion of individuation) and its close companion, the relativization of the ego to the unconscious.

D.K.: Is there a positive side to nightmares or so-called bad dreams?

K.J.: Although uncomfortable for the dreamer, nightmares can serve as “stat” directives for the analysand and analyst, calling us to deal with something right away, now. Nightmares can be thought of as dreams that will no longer be ignored. Nightmares often motivate people to question what is going on at deeper levels of human personhood, and as such can be valuable in bringing the ego to the place it needs to be for psychological health. No matter how hard we try, we cannot take into account all of the exigencies of human life. The ego is always thwarted when faced with phenomena that can be referred to as luck, fate, and hazard. Each of these is an event that happens without regard for causality, intention, planning, or personal volition. We go along in life, making our way and formulating decisions, and if all goes smoothly, things seem like they are under our control. This is a pernicious egoic illusion, or perhaps delusion. Experiences of luck (who knew that would happen?), fate (I had no choice, I was destined to undergo that event) or hazard (an event that seems to come out of nowhere, usually suddenly, with significant consequences for the individual) show the ego that, despite its good-faith efforts to plan and provide for all contingencies, life has more to offer than any ego could dream possible. The nightmare supports this, bringing the ego to the place where it can experience fear, and possibly terror. This capacity for utter terror, which would be avoided at all costs by the ego, serves to shake up the complacency of even the most resistant person, if the nightmare can be respected for its gifts, and not explained away as “nothing but a dream.”

D.K.: Can you give some examples of how dreams contribute to the development of the individual?

K.J.: Dreams can help individuals approach events in their lives more slowly and reflectively than one might do habitually. Because dreams can shine new light on situations and relationships that the ego thinks it already understands, an individual who can become more open to dream symbolism will find new and different perspectives by which to consider aspects of their experience. Dreams are viewed as works of art produced by the unconscious, and as such, can be explored again and again throughout one’s life. Jungians rarely simply “interpret” a dream and then abandon it as having been understood. Dreams never cease to be sources for deeper and deeper insight. A dream image, whether a person, place, or event, can serve as a seed for what Jung referred to as “active imagination.” Active imagination is sometimes referred to as “dreaming the dream forward.” In active imagination, the individual gets into a relaxed state and focuses on a particular element in the dream.

For example, one analysand had a puzzling dream about being in Grand Central Station, a place familiar to him because he was born and raised in New York City. He wondered why he should dream of what was to him a very mundane setting. I suggested he do an active imagination on Grand Central Station, relaxing his body and then focusing his mind on the place, letting himself move through it as though exploring it in waking life. His visions began in an ordinary way, and he went through areas of the station he remembered from waking life. But then he turned a corner in the imagined station and found a doorway down to the sub-sub-basement, where he witnessed rats carrying on their lives unbeknownst to the people bustling to meet their trains or greet their loved ones. He then was taken, in the active imagination, to the top of the station, where he saw a large statue. He didn’t know what it was. When we discussed his active imagination, I suggested that he investigate what statue might be on the top of Grand Central Station. He did, and discovered it was a statue of Mercury, or Hermes in the Greek mythological form. I explained that Hermes/Mercury was the messenger of the gods, entrusted with carrying messages from humanity to the Olympian realm, and returning with divine message for mortals. He then said, “so Mercury is what helps us do this analytic thing!” I agreed. I believe that one of the functions of this dream of Grand Central Station for this analysand was to help him accept the reality and the autonomy of the psyche. He also was able to see that the rats might represent things going on “really deep inside me” that he either ignored or judged to be disgusting. Because of his valuing of the dream, he came to see that even the disgusting parts need to be witnessed, understood, and respected.

Please watch for Part Three of my conversation with Dr. Kenneth James. This series is an invitation to turn toward your deepest internal resources. How we respond as individuals to the overwhelming emotions generated by this global crisis will affect not only our own lives and those in our circle, but the entire planet. When we know ourselves, when we can name and face our fears, we are in a stronger position to act with clarity and brave hearts. We also recognize we are joined to others in our suffering. As Buddhist teacher Tara Brach says, “What if compassion could go viral? What if love could?”

This post appeared in a slightly different form on Dale’s blog on Psychology Today. You can find all of Dale’s blog posts for Psychology Today at 

 

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In September of 1913, Carl Jung, the great pioneer of depth psychology, was on a train in his homeland of Switzerland when he experienced a waking vision. Gazing out the window at the countryside, he saw Europe inundated by a devastating flood. The vision shocked and disturbed him. Two weeks later, on the same journey, the vision reoccurred. This time an inner voice told him: “Look at it well; it is wholly real and it will be so. You cannot doubt it.”

Years later, in his memoir Memories, Dreams and Reflections, he recalls the event and his concern that he was having a psychotic break.

“I was suddenly seized by an overpowering vision: I saw a monstrous flood covering all the northern and low-lying lands between the North Sea and the Alps. When it came up to Switzerland I saw that the mountains grew higher and higher to protect our country. I realized that a frightful catastrophe was in progress. I saw the mighty yellow waves, the floating rubble of civilization, and the drowned bodies of uncounted thousands. Then the whole sea turned to blood.”

The following spring of 1914, he had three catastrophic dreams in which he saw Europe was deluged by ice, the vegetation was gone, and the land deserted by humans. Despite his awareness that the situation in Europe was “darkening,” he interpreted these dreams personally and feared he was going mad. However, by August of that year, his dreams and visions were affirmed: World War I had broken out.

Some fifty years earlier, President Abraham Lincoln had a prophetic dream. Three days before he was assassinated, Lincoln conveyed his dream to his wife and a group of friends. Ward Hill Lamon, an attending companion, recorded the conversation.

“About ten days ago I retired very late. I had been up waiting for important dispatches from the front. I could not have been long in bed when I fell into a slumber, for I was weary. I soon began to dream. There seemed to be a death-like stillness about me. Think I heard subdued sobs, as if a number of people were weeping. I thought I left my bed and wandered downstairs. There the silence was broken by the same pitiful sobbing, but the mourners were invisible. I went from room to room; no living person was in sight, but the same mournful sounds of distress met me as I passed along. It was light in all the rooms; every object was familiar to me; but where were all the people who were grieving as if their hearts would break? I was puzzled and alarmed. What could be the meaning of all this? Determined to find the cause of a state of things so mysterious and so shocking, I kept on until I arrived at the East Room, which I entered. There I met with a sickening surprise. Before me was a catafalque, on which rested a corpse wrapped in funeral vestments. Around it were stationed soldiers who were acting as guards; and there was a throng of people, some gazing mournfully upon the corpse, whose face was covered, others weeping pitifully. ‘Who is dead in the White House?’ I demanded of one of the soldiers. ‘The President,’ was his answer; ‘he was killed by an assassin.’ Then came a loud burst of grief from the crowd, which woke me from my dream. I slept no more that night; and although it was only a dream, I have been strangely annoyed by it ever since.” (Recollections of Abraham Lincoln, 1847-1865 by Ward Hill Lamon, published 1911.)

Two weeks later, on April 14, 1865, Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth. As in his dream, his casket was put on view in the East Room of the White House and guarded by soldiers.

These are two chilling examples of dreams that occurred during periods of collective crisis which accurately predicted historical turning points. Do prophetic dreams occur more often during turbulent times? How does the dreamer know if a dream is to be interpreted personally and symbolically, or as a warning for others and the world at large?

I asked these questions to Dr. Murray Stein, a renowned author and Jungian analyst at the International School for Analytic Psychology in Zurich, Switzerland. Dr. Stein replied that he had no statistics on whether people have predictive dreams more frequently in times of crisis than at other times. In his experience, one can’t know if a dream is precognitive until after the event. After 9/11, he told me, people reported precognitive dreams that foretold the disaster. He said people also reported that dreams foretold the financial crisis of 2008, which he called, “a black swan event.” According to Investopedia:

A black swan is an unpredictable event that is beyond what is normally expected of a situation and has potentially severe consequences. Black swan events are characterized by their extreme rarity, their severe impact, and the practice of explaining widespread failure to predict them as simple folly in hindsight.

The recent outbreak of the coronavirus might be considered a black swan event, and perhaps we will soon hear about people who have had prophetic dreams of its manifestation.

While there is no simple answer or proven method to discern whether a dream should be interpreted personally or more broadly, we can go about exploring its contents with both aspects in mind. For example, if I have a dream in which I am a child who has been put into a cage. I might ask: What aspect of me feels “caged” right now? Noting that I am a child in the dream, I might further inquire: Is there something from my childhood that is still confining and constricting me? I might try to estimate the age of the child in the dream and reflect back to when I was that age and try to remember if something significant happened then. Maybe my parents had begun to think about divorce at that time and I felt caged by their emotions. I might then inquire if there is something similar going on in my life right now, not necessarily a divorce, but an imminent disruption or the loss of a treasured relationship. When we go back into a dream to amplify it, each question generates other questions that can lead to deeply buried insights. (For a more complete explanation of Jung’s use of amplification as a technique, please see Michael Vannoy Adams’ description on JungNewYork.

But what if I dream that I am a child that has been put into a cage, and a few days later I discover that children of immigrants are actually being held in cages in detention centers? My dream, while personally relevant, would carry a collective, or more public meaning as well. This collective meaning of the dream attests to the interconnectedness of our species, to our capacity for empathy (we see a horror on the news and we feel it enter us) and to the common values we share about the quality of human life.

If we had lived during the early part of the last century, or in an indigenous culture, or in ancient Mesopotamia, we might examine our dreams for deep wisdom and as augurs for the future. These days we are more likely to look to neuroscience to understand of our dreams. Neurobiology tells us that sleep is a complex neural activity of the brain that stays busy activating and deactivating complicated neuro-systems while we doze, including consolidating memories, regulating mood, restoring immune function and many other important utilitarian tasks. But neuroscience tells us nothing about the meaning of dreams or why our dreaming life has carried significance for humans since we first walked the planet.

About thirty thousand years ago, toward the end of the Paleolithic Era, our hunter-gather forebears descended into the subterranean darkness of caves to enact rituals of trance and dreaming. Recently, archaeologists and ethnographers have speculated that the artifacts found in the caves of southern Europe— bone flutes, whistles, and types of drums—and the now-famous discovery of cave wall paintings indicate that ancient shamans may have used these caves for ceremonial dream retreats (See in particular the work of David Lewis-Williams). We can speculate that the depictions of bison and large and small game along with scenes of hunting painted on the walls may reflect shamanic dream content. Perhaps the shaman ascended from his retreat having had visions about the abundance and location of prey, which would be crucial information for the clan.

Later human societies continued to transcribe their dreams. The oldest written dream recorded is in the Sumerian epic poem of Gilgamesh (2100 BCE). Not unlike King Nebuchadnezzar’s frightening dream in the Book of Daniel, Gilgamesh, the king of the Sumerian city Uruk, has violent nightmares about death, which shake him to the core, and send him on his quest for immortality. But Gilgamesh cannot interpret his own dreams, and like many of the dreamers in the Old Testament, is in need of an interpreter. How telling that from ancient times, the one who receives the dream and the one who knows its significance are different people.

In some contemporary cultures, dreams are thought to be a way of receiving messages from the spirit world. A holy man or medicine woman, an elder or shaman is the receiver of the prophetic dream, which is given for the benefit of all and linked to the survival of the tribe or people. Black Elk, the holy medicine man of the Lakota Sioux, stated this when he said a dream is worthless unless it is shared with the tribe.

How can we relate to the dreams that pursue us? Are they simply the result of complex neurological activity and without real meaning, just as we know the moon is no enchanted sphere but a mere rock in space? What might we miss if we cast our lot with a viewpoint based wholly on the material world? Is it possible to consider the two worlds as being equally meaningful, the world of science and — to borrow the phrase John Keats used to characterize adventurers on the threshold of a new frontier — the world of “wild surmise”? Can we think of ourselves as vessels open to receiving wisdom through non-ordinary means? Can we be our own shamans?

This post appeared in a slightly different form on Dale’s blog on Psychology Today. You can find all of Dale’s blog posts for Psychology Today at 

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One definition of what separates us from other species is our ability to construct narratives from our random thoughts, memories, and imaginings. We are a species of storytellers. How and why we construct stories remains a mystery, one being explored by biologists, anthropologists, psychologists, neuroscientists, and researchers in semiotics and linguistics. One common thread in the research is that stories help us make sense of our lives.

Brian Boyd, author of On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction, suggests that we are hard-wired to tell stories. Boyd argues that art, in general, and fiction, in particular, have evolved from cognitive play and serve an evolutionary survival function. Our oldest stories, our myths and fairy tales — the story about the hunter and the stealthy lion, or the one about the fox and his invisible cape — may have determined whether our primordial ancestors lived or died. Over time, these stories have become embedded in the warp and woof of our culture, and while the danger of a humanly cunning lion may no longer fit our lifestyle, we get the point. Viewed literally, lions can maim us; taken symbolically, understanding and honoring the ways of an intelligent and powerful predator might help us navigate certain obstacles in our lives.

I’ve recently written several blogs about fairy tales. Fairy tales present simple stories that are still relevant as guides to the archetypal patterns in our unconscious minds. They are also teaching stories and cautionary tales that speak to the mythopoeic in our psyches, that aspect of our minds that think in metaphor and symbol. Like our ancestors who lived closer to nature, and like the cosmologies of many indigenous peoples, we, too, have the capacity to experience a tree as a spirit helper or a demon or a bewitched prince. While the earliest folk tales emerged from peoples who possessed a less sophisticated notion of the world, their repertoire of emotions and the stories they wove around them were not dissimilar to our own. Greed, loneliness, jealousy, sorrow — these continue to be our human burden. Cinderella, Bluebeard, Sleeping Beauty are our contemporaries, their journeys to selfhood or self-destruction familiar to our modern souls.

One way to more fully experience the wisdom of fairy tales is to write your own. Through objectifying the contents of our unconscious by drawing, sculpting, writing, dancing, we find the healing symbols within. The Red Book is a record of Carl Jung’s own plunge into an almost psychotic state after his break with Sigmund Freud in 1913. Characters from his unconscious welled up in his conscious mind. Methodically, with terror and fortitude, he recorded his dialogues with these characters as if they were flesh and blood and Jung even painted images that illustrated his experiences with them. Jung sometimes feared during this period that he was toppling into a psychotic state, but by working consciously with these figures, he found he was able to hear their wisdom “from the other side.” These encounters later lead to his theory of Active Imagination, which he somewhat describes in this advice to an analysand about working with her dreams.

“I should advise you to put it all down as beautifully as you can — in some beautifully bound book,” Jung instructed. “It will seem as if you were making the visions banal — but then you need to do that — then you are freed from the power of them. . . . Think of it in your imagination and try to paint it. Then when these things are in some precious book you can go to the book & turn over the pages & for you it will be your church — your cathedral — the silent places of your spirit where you will find renewal. If anyone tells you that it is morbid or neurotic and you listen to them — then you will lose your soul — for in that book is your soul.”

To begin, what is your favorite fairy tale? Most of us have a tale that has lingered since childhood, one that strikes a strong resonance in us. Rediscover the story that seems to be “yours” and reread it. That you choose one fairy tale over another is significant. Part of your inquiry is to ask yourself why. Does this tale say something about your life? Is your own myth about rejection or abandonment? Do you feel victimized and left in the ashes like Cinderella? Or pressured to be the hero and save your family from poverty like Jack in “Jack in the Beanstalk?” After you read your chosen fairy tale, ask yourself these questions:

1. What is my reaction?
2. What does this stir up in me?
3. Have I lived something similar?
4. What are the symbols in the story and what are my associations to them?

You might want to write your answers in a journal you set apart for this work. The magic of fairy tales is that they transport us into an enchanted realm that is itself “set apart” from ordinary life. By recording your responses to your fairy tale, you honor the creative storyteller in you. In attempting to become conscious of the story, you make sense of yourself.

The second part of this exercise is to rewrite your favorite tale using the story you chose as a jumping off point. The goal here is to get “inside” the story and write it from inside out. “The good writer,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson, “seems to be writing about himself, but has his eye always on that thread of the universe which runs through himself and all things.” This exercise isn’t about crafting a story that will make you a famous writer, it’s about discovering the richness, subtlety, and astonishing wisdoms of your inner life.

The guidelines for writing your new fairy tale are simple:

1. Create a new setting for the story you chose. The writer Eudora Welty, who grew up in and wrote about the Deep South, reminds us that “feelings are bound up with place.” Instead of beginning with “Once upon a time” or “Long ago,” set your story somewhere specific. NYC, 2017. St. Petersburg under Tsar Nicholas. Setting is locale, period, weather, time of day. It includes sense perceptions —smells, tastes, sounds. What about a fairy tale set in a Wisconsin barn or a bar in New Orleans?
2. Choose a character from your favorite tale and tell the story from his or her point of view. Empathy is the ability to put oneself in another person’s shoes. What would we learn if we heard the story of Rumpelstiltskin from Rumpelstiltskin’s point of view? Set your wild imagination free. What if Cinderella’s stepsister confesses she didn’t want to marry the prince, she only wanted to wear his splendid uniform!

In creating this new story you will surprise yourself. The process is one of discovery. Pay attention to what you dream during this process. With inner and outer vision, discover what animals appear to you. What song plays on the breeze? Don’t overthink, strive or fret. There are no rules. Whatever reveals itself wants your attention.

This post appeared in a slightly different form on Dale’s blog on Psychology Today. You can find all of Dale’s blog posts for Psychology Today at

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Sometimes a book we’ve had for years falls off the shelf at just the right moment. I read James Hillman’s book, A Terrible Love of War, in 2004 when it was first published as a response to 9/11. In this, his 28th book, Hillman sought to examine the archetypal roots of our “madness for battle,” the “myths, philosophy, and theology of war’s deepest mind.” He was moved to write it because of what he found missing in other books about war. He rejected, for instance, Susan Sontag’s concluding assertion in Regarding the Pain of Others:

“We can’t imagine how dreadful, how terrifying war is and how normal it becomes. Can’t understand. Can’t imagine. That’s what every soldier, every journalist and aid worker and independent observer who has put in time under fire and had the luck to elude the death that struck down others nearby stubbornly feels. And they are right.”

“She is wrong,” Hillman counters, “If we want war’s horror to be abated so that life may go on, it is necessary to understand and imagine.”

In an interview years after he was secretary of defense, Robert McNamara stated that the catastrophe of the war in Vietnam over which he presided pointed to “a failure of imagination.” Years later, comparing our unpreparedness for the attack on Pearl Harbor with that on the Twin Towers, National Security Agency director Michael Hayden famously said, “perhaps it was more a failure of imagination this time than last.”

For both men, a failure of imagination implies a failure to apprehend a reality that is present but hidden or incomprehensible, which is to say, that we do not apprehend we cannot comprehend. In order to understand and respond to something, we must first be able to see it.

Muriel Rukeyser came to a similar conclusion in 1949. In The Life of Poetry, she writes: “We are a people tending toward democracy at the level of hope; on another level, the economy of the nation, the empire of business within the republic, both include in their basic premise the concept of perpetual warfare. It is the history of the idea of war that is beneath our other histories…But around and under and above it…is the history of possibility.”

It is this sense of hidden possibility, of renewed inspiration that now urgently calls for my attention. A failure of imagination implies a failure of empathy, our ability to stand in another’s shoes. Empathy and imagination seem to many the weak sisters of rigorous rational thinking, and yet, might they be an avenue to creative change? This strikes me as critical for us now as individuals and as a society. Can a Clinton voter imagine the anxieties of a Trump voter? Can a Trump voter imagine the fears of a Muslim?

We live at a time of enormous turmoil and transition, a time when re-apprehending and re-comprehending how we view the world is crucial, and re-examining the governing modes of how we make meaning timely.

Einstein said we cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them. He also said the true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination. We often forget that each of us has our own ready source of imagination in our production of dreams. Each of us possesses a variety of marvelous, fantastic, even weird images and scenarios remembered from our nightly vision. Here, in our own production studios, we might discover creative insights that have the potential for personal and cultural transformation.

Listen to Einstein describe a dream he had as a teen:

“I was sledding with my friends at night. I started to slide down the hill but my sled started going faster and faster. I was going so fast that I realized I was approaching the speed of light. I looked up at that point and I saw the stars. They were being refracted into colors I had never seen before. I was filled with a sense of awe. I understood in some way that I was looking at the most important meaning in my life.”

Later in life, Einstein reflected, “I knew I had to understand that dream and you could say, and I would say, that my entire scientific career has been a meditation on my dream.” This dream led to him figuring out the mathematics of relativity theory.

Freud and Jung have argued that our dream images are not random and without meaning; with scrutiny, we can find that they contain a secret language of symbolic representation. These representations are both individual and personal, arising out of our unique experiences, but connected, especially in Jung’s interpretation, to a collective unconscious.

Structurally, dreams unfold as series of sights, sounds, and feelings that do not necessarily make logical sense. The interpretation of dreams relies upon their metaphoric and associative logic, the juxtaposition of unlikely or unrelated elements that can evoke surprising meanings. This is how many poems “work.” Take these lines from “Blue Mountain,” a poem by Roberta Hill Whiteman.

“Crickets whir a rough sun into haze.”

And “I sweep and sweep the broken days to echoes.”

To parse these lines would be to destroy their music and cadence and beauty, but we get what she means! To quote Rukeyser again: “A poem is not its words or its images, any more than a symphony is its notes or a river its drops of water…” The work a poem does, she writes, is to transfer human energy, “and I think human energy may be defined as consciousness, the capacity to make change in existing conditions.”

Poetry and dreams originate in that part of our psyche involved in our archetypal roots and mythic imagination. Einstein is only one example of how the geniuses of science and industry – and artists – respond to the world and its problems with the force of their imaginations, by “thinking outside the box.”

This is the route of mystery and surprise, of new conjunctions and startling awarenesses. As André Breton wrote in his Surrealist Manifesto, “I believe in the future resolution of these two states – outwardly so contradictory – which are dream and reality, into a sort of absolute reality, a surreality…”

Freud and the Surrealist artists he inspired looked for ways to expose the deeper substratum of psyche by freeing oneself of the ego’s conscious control. The use of drugs helped, as did alcohol. Automatic or spontaneous writing, collage, assembling unlikely elements into a painting freed artists from the constraints of tradition and conventional imagery. These methods of accessing the unconscious continue to be popular today. Writing workshops, workshops on trauma and addiction often use uncensored journal writing as a means to reach into dissociated aspects of self.

Becoming conscious is a lifelong task. Our dreams beg to be brought into the daylight world, to be honored, to be understood. And perhaps one of us will find within our dreams the insight or idea that might generate the transformation in empathy and imagination that James Hillman seeks – and which would benefit all of us.

This post appeared in a slightly different form on Dale’s blog on Psychology Today. You can find all of Dale’s blog posts for Psychology Today at

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Dreams are a marvel, worlds of wonder filled with phantasmagoric images, surreal plot twists that have their own logic even as they turn us inside out with their shifting points of view. Dreams take us high and drop us low. Whether we’re flying over the Manhattan skyline or being chased through a cornfield by a bull, we sense that our dreams are trying to communicate something—perhaps something essential—to our waking selves. We suspect that what is hidden from one part of our minds in the day-world—our unspoken worries, our secret loves, the destiny we fear to follow—becomes manifest in living color in our dreams.

As far as we know, humans have always dreamed. Some of our earliest written stories include dreams. In the first tablet of our oldest epic poem, the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, just before he encounters his doppelganger Inkidu, Gilgamesh dreams of a rock and an axe falling from the sky; his mother explains to him that these images foretell the arrival of “a mighty comrade.” In Homer’s Odyssey, Penelope dreams of fifty geese being killed by an eagle, a wish fulfilled when her husband Odysseus returns and slays the suitors plaguing her. And in the Old Testament, Joseph achieves fame by interpreting Pharaoh’s dream about fourteen cows, seven fat, seven lean.

On every continent groups still exist that consult dreams to foretell the future or connect with the Divine. Even some of us “non-believers” decorate our bedrooms with dream catchers. Why? As much as we might want to reject the notion of an invisible world that influences our day-life, don’t we all suspect there is a meaning and purpose to our dreams?

Marie-Louise von Franz, a scholarly colleague of Jung’s, wrote that dreams “are the voice of nature within us.” Dreams may be the sacred place where human and cosmos meet and interact. In The Collective Works, Jung elaborates:

“… in dreams we put on the likeness of that more universal, truer, more eternal man dwelling in the darkness of primordial night. There he is still the whole, and the whole is in him, indistinguishable from nature and bare from all egohood. It is from these all-uniting depths that the dream arises . . .” (CW 10).

On the scientific side, we are learning more about the neuroscience of dreams than ever before. As Sander van der Linden describes in an article in Scientific American, one hypothesis, based on where dreaming occurs in the brain, speculates that dream stories “may be stripping the emotion out of a certain experience by creating a memory of it.” Other scientists speculate that the purpose of dreaming may not be psychological but physiological. Rapid Eye Movement or REM sleep has been thought to help the brain process memories, but a new research in the field of ophthalmology suggests the purpose of REM sleep might be to oxygenate our corneas.

Though we can study the hard facts about our dream-brain, the dreaming mind still remains a mystery.

After losing his mentor and father-figure in a professional split with Freud, Jung suffered a tremendous psychological upheaval, a twenty-year period Stephen A. Diamond describes in his PT post “Reading The Red Book: How C.G. Jung Salvaged His Soul.”

Like Freud, Jung understood dreams to be messages from the unconscious, but rather than viewing dream images as manifest symbols of latent pathology, a storehouse of unwanted and dreaded content, Jung, through his own self-analysis, concluded that our darkest dreams might contain imagery that illustrate our internal conflicts and point to their cure as well.

In an essay on Jung, psychoanalyst Joan Chodrow describes the process by which Jung experimented with ways to restore his emotional equilibrium through dialoguing with fantasy and dream images as if these characters existed in the day-world. She writes:  

“… he made the conscious decision to ‘drop down’ into the depths.  He landed on his feet and began to explore the strange inner landscape where he met the first of a long series of inner figures. These fantasies seemed to personify his fears and other powerful emotions.  Over time, he realized that when he managed to translate his emotions into images, he was inwardly calmed and reassured.  He came to see that his task was to find the images that are concealed in the emotions.”

Jung later called the process of working with dream figures “active imagination.” In his autobiography Memories, Dreams, Reflections, he describes terrifying encounters with his unconscious, which often threatened to overwhelm him. His gradual discovery of how to work with the fearsome material flooding his psyche has been posthumously published in The Red Book.

Written closer to the end of his life, Memories, Dreams, Reflections details perhaps more objectively Jung’s actual experience during the time of his turmoil and outlines how he came to use his own frightening encounters with his psyche to form some of his most lasting theories about conscious and unconscious material:

“… I did my best not to lose my head but to find some way to understand these strange things. I stood helpless before an alien world; everything in it seemed difficult and incomprehensible. . . . But there was a demonic strength in me, and from the beginning there was no doubt in my mind that I must find the meaning of what I was experiencing in these fantasies.

“I was frequently so wrought up that I had to do certain yoga exercises in order to hold my emotions in check. But since it was my purpose to know what was going on within myself, I would do these exercises only until I had calmed myself enough to resume my work with the unconscious. As soon as I had the feeling that I was myself again, I abandoned this restraint upon the emotions and allowed the images and inner voices to speak afresh…

“To the extent that I managed to translate the emotions into images—that is to say, to find the images that were concealed in the emotions—I was inwardly calmed and reassured. Had I left those images hidden in the emotions, I might have been torn to pieces by them…. As a result of my experiment I learned how helpful it can be, from the therapeutic point of view, to find the particular images which lie behind emotions.” (MDR, p. 177).

What if dream figures could step out of our dreams and talk to us, and tells us why they have appeared and what they want?

Using the imagination as a tool for transformation is what drew me to Jung and, later, to work with active imagination. As a writer, I inherently trust the wisdom of my unconscious mind to lead me to the story inside the story. To show me what I am not looking at, what escapes my awareness but wants to be seen. What a revelation to discover that the nightmares that wake us, shaken and despairing, might indeed be coded messages of a healing source within!

Try it yourself. Sit in a quiet place and recall a figure that has appeared to you in a dream. Talk to it. What is your second grade teacher doing in a dream? Why is she grooming a parrot? Why is this happening in your grandmother’s yard? To find out the meaning of the dream, active imagination encourages the dreamer to dialogue with dream figures in waking life. We ask and through their answers we associate what these figures might mean to us. Do they bring any stories, myths or fairy tales to mind? Looking at dream images through an archetypal and a personal lens allows us to see, alternately, the broadest and the most precise meaning of our dreams. What I’m suggesting is a simplified process but many good guidebooks exist. In the animate world of dreams, cars, trees, shoes, dogs can all speak, and what they have to say has everything to do with your life.

Recommended for further reading:

Inner Work: Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth by Robert A. Johnson

Jung on Active Imagination, edited and with an introduction by Joan Chodorow

Dreams, A Portal to the Source by Edward C. Whitmont and Sylvia Brinton Perera

This post appeared in a slightly different form on Dale’s blog on Psychology Today. You can find all of Dale’s blog posts for Psychology Today at

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One of the many things that fascinates us about our dreams is that they hint at an alternative life. Anyone who has ever tried to recapture or re-enter a dream knows that dreams live in us but are autonomous and impervious to our will. They visit while we sleep, transporting us to landscapes real and surreal, offering wild and awesome narratives, oracular portents, and often hilarious outcomes. The uncanny wisdom or cleverness or solemn warnings of our dreams seem to have everything and nothing to do with us.

To compound the paradoxical mystery of dreams, they are intensely personal, often repetitive, and yet share common themes with the dreams of others. We arrive too late for the train. We are unprepared for the big exam. We forget our house keys, lose our eye glasses. Our hair falls out, our teeth are loose, the toilet is plugged. We lift our arms and fly away. The commonality of some dream images points to universal or archetypal motifs in the human psyche, yet each dream is unique to the dreamer, its meaning and relevance part of an intimate and individual portrait of a singular unconscious.

“The dream is a spontaneous self-portrayal, in symbolic form, of the actual situation in the unconscious,” writes Carl Jung in The Collected Works. (Vol. 8, para 505)

After splitting with his friend and mentor, Sigmund Freud, Jung went on to develop his own theories of dream interpretation. For Jung, they were not manifest representations of repressed (latent) Oedipal conflicts and unresolved childhood wish-fulfillment interpreted against a more or less static system of symbol equivalents (snake=phallus; cave=womb); for Jung, dreams are a dynamic aspect of our evolving psyches.

According to authors Edward Whitmont and Sylvia Brinton Perera in Dreams, a Portal to the Source, “Each dream may be seen as aiming toward a widening of awareness. It offers comment, correction, and contributions toward problem solving. Thereby, it strengthens, coalesces or balances the dreamer’s waking views, and, thus, it serves as an important vehicle to support psychological development.”

Dreams may challenge our assumptions of who we are or may fill out what we don’t already know about ourselves. Jung believed dreams do serve in a compensatory or complementary manner by informing the conscious mind of ignored, overlooked, or denied aspects of self, prompting the dreamer with dream-dramas and narratives the ego has tuned out. Concerning this compensatory function of dreams, Jungian analyst Dr. Murray Stein wrote me: “It’s important to understand that Jung’s use of the term ‘compensation’ means ‘adding to’ and ‘balancing’ and with a prospective, forward-looking meaning that facilitates individuation.”

Viewed from this perspective, the dream is our friend, our ally, our guide over a lifetime. It presents truths that have not yet reached the level of our conscious awareness.

In The Meaning of Psychology for Modern Man, Jung wrote, “In each of us there is another whom we do not know. He speaks to us in dreams and tells us how differently he sees us from the way we see ourselves.”

In dreams, we step out of the ego world of order and certainty into the domain of the interior, where we may discover our true selves and the path to our destiny. In his essay, “Jung’s Contributions to Psychoanalysis,” Dr. Stein writes, “With the notion of transformation (Wandlung), Jung introduced dramatic openness and flexibility into the psychic system and laid the groundwork for considering the possibility of prolonged psychological development throughout the lifespan, i.e., the individuation process. With his understanding of the symbol, he radically overcame the prevailing intellectual tendency in psychoanalysis toward reductionism, including psychological reductionism and not only biological reductionism. Together, these two terms open a vast space for investigating the reality of the psyche . . .”

Several I Ching hexagrams coax the practitioner: “It furthers one to cross the great water.” So, too, our dreams encourage us to continue onward despite obstacles and rocky terrain. Over time, we encounter inner and outer conflicts. We change, and our dreams reflect these changes or the changes that still need to be addressed. A dream in which you are at a banquet but lacking silverware may mean one thing when you are twenty and something entirely different when you are sixty. Just so, a dream in which you are about to be attacked by wild dogs might suggest your instinctual life feels threatening. In later years, the pack of dogs may have metamorphosed into a loving and loyal canine friend.

We can’t think our way back into dreams, but we can re-enter them with our conscious minds. We can dialogue with dream figures much as Jung did in The Red Book, and ask them to state their intentions and enlighten us with their wisdoms. There is no finite end to the reaches of our imaginations, nor, as our dreams indicate, are there limits to our capacity to transform.

Five Things Our Dreams Could Be Telling Us

1. Dreams are spontaneous self-portraits, in symbolic form, of the actual psychological situation in the unconscious. (paraphrase of Jung in The Collected Works)
2. Dreams “offer comment, correction, and contributions toward problem-solving” in our conscious life. (Whitmont & Perera in Dreams, a Portal to the Source)
3. Dreams inform us of ignored, overlooked or denied aspects of self.
4. Dreams present the underlying archetypal and mythological motifs that direct, pattern, and give meaning to our waking existence.
5. Dreams map our psychological and spiritual transformation.

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