Dreams can be fascinating. Wild. Beautiful. And sometimes frightening. What kind of dreams do you remember? We can gain insight from writing down a dream as soon as we awake. How quickly we tend to forget. At least I do.
There are so many variations of dreams. A precognitive dream gives us knowledge of a future event. Have you ever experienced déjà vu? Déjà vu dreams involve the strange feeling that in some way you have already experienced what you are currently experiencing. Could it be that being awake is no guarantee you aren’t dreaming?
Do you ever experience reoccurring dreams? Research suggests that we tend to dream five to seven dreams every night. Visitation dreams are some of the most common, a visit from a deceased loved one who has a message to convey. Holy scriptures from seemingly most every religion are filled with visitation dreams.
Ever wonder what a dream might mean? You wake up and think about it and even try to make something of it. One of the key players in dream analysis is Swiss Psychologist Carl Jung.
He is a voice from the past, but a well-respected one. His contention is that dreams are sort of like letters from home, a kind of message from you to you, the unconscious self who messages the conscious self.
Could it be that dreams are a kind of intelligent force, one that has something to say? Jung believed that all dreams have your best interest at heart and are not intended to bring you harm, but rather to help you. A dream is a communication from your larger hidden self to your smaller conscious self.
Emotional states from the dream are important. How did you feel in the dream? How did you feel afterwards? What is most memorable about your dream?
Looking at the archetypes of the dream is a critical part of dream interpretation. Images from are part of the language of dreams. Some images are universal. Think about the hero/heroine image. Animals can also be archetypes. What does the image of a wolf, for example, suggest to you? Some make equate the wolf with protection, while some might think of death. What might a bird represent to you? It certainly might depend on what kind of bird, right?
There will likely be multiple associations of images. Perhaps one of the associations will “click” with the dreamer, which is the place to focus. Jung believed that these archetypes from dreams call about a meaning we are prompted to explore.
What does the dream want to bring to the reader’s attention? All of this is pertinent to the inner life, which Jung clarifies is much more than the outer (personal goals or political and religious preferences – that which is known to us). The inner life is every bit or more real. Most of who we are is inner, more prevalent than the outer (which is what is known to us). Jung believed that one’s inner life is born the very day of our birth.
Jung brought attention to the psyche, which includes ego and the personal and collective unconscious. The ego is one’s public personality, the part of you that you show to others. The unconscious is the private you that is on the inside, but that you rarely show to other people. Jung suggested that 80% of our total self is unknown to us, our unconscious self, and that dreams give us a way in.
We tend to sometimes dismiss even a memorable dream as “just a dream” and that tendency implies that dreams are rather insignificant. But dreams sure seem more than random neural firings in our brains. They are a language that can enlighten us to our unconscious. Jung believed that your experience from a dream is in every way as real and meaningful as your experience in the physical world.
Dreams can have multiple meanings. There is not necessarily a definitive interpretation. But the more you work with your dreams, the more intrigued you become and the more adept you become with interpretation.
