We’re doing something a little different this week in discussing dream analysis and archetypal dreams—those dreams that come straight from the unconscious. If you haven’t read along so far, you should probably backfill, or you may find yourself a step or two off the general pace. So, without further ado:
Do an internet search for Jung and dream analysis and you’ll find more sources and background materials than ever you wanted to see. You can get lost in them, and no few people have. It can be bewildering, and most people who seek to learn about dream analysis from Jung come away as self-described experts.
I am not that. I’m far from an expert. Jung spent his entire professional life looking at dreams and their possible meanings. I have not done that—far too lazy, for one thing. I suspect strongly that the value of this particular diary will be proven in comments, so I’m going to lay out a few things to start off.
Freud believed that dreams were the mind’s way of resolving the issues of the day. Jung did not disagree, and often wrote that most dreams were the subconscious mind’s messages to the dreamer, helping work out things that need to be paid attention to. The typical “at work in your underwear” dream is a flavor of this kind of dream, indicating that you’re overwhelmed or stressed.
Jung requested his patients keep dream notebooks, and in his general writing suggested everyone who did would benefit from the practice. Only over time, he argued, can a dreamer come to understand what each dream means, because each person’s consciousness is different. Also, the act of recording a dream restores the memory of it; if you start by remembering a single image in your dream, often in writing that image, you’ll remember more, which leads to more memory, and still more. Eventually, with practice, you can remember whole dreams, and dreams themselves, in time, form pageants replete with personal significance.
Despite his enormous body of work, Jung was especially careful not to do what so many “Jungians” since have done: make handy charts that signify x dream symbol should be interpreted as y and only y. He warns repeatedly in his works that any dream interpretation is a meeting ground between the dreamer and the analyst where nothing is certain, but that a good analyst, holding in mind a database of symbols drawn from all across the world and through time, might offer suggestions to help dreamers understand the messages from their unconscious.
In that spirit, and very generally, here are a few common symbols and what Jung thought they might be:
- Darkness in a dream often means a turning inward. If you’re in a group of people, even if they wear familiar faces, they are often different aspects of you. Similarly, strange houses often represent the mind itself, and strange rooms or wings are unexplored parts of the mind. Lower levels and basements = the subconscious/the unconscious.
- Earth, as a symbol, is cthonic: female, dark, emblematic of both birth and death. Mother as life- giver and life-gobbler. The moon. Ships traveling at night—journey through the underworld, from life to death to rebirth.
- Light or the sun, as a symbol, is father, flame is life. The sky god that fertilizes the earth/the spirit fertilizing the consciousness.
- Sometimes a cigar is more than a cigar, but a phallus isn’t always a phallus. It’s often representative of creativity itself. The libido in dreams is not specifically sexual but more generally creative, indicative of strong wishing and striving.
- Water commonly (but not always) connotes the unconscious.
- Snakes—ah, now that’s a tricky one. Wisdom, healing, the unconscious, the phallus. Snakes coming out of water—messages from the unconscious. Often, dream snakes feel threatening, but rarely are, and are more often than not beneficent.
- And don’t forget the animus/anima, that wise and frightening guide of dreams, that other half of the self.
As you can tell, this is all strange and tentative. It takes learning the totality of the symbolism and its histories to get at the archetypes that lie behind the symbols. They’re living forces; they flex and change. They can mean different things to different people, and don’t always mean the same thing from dream to dream, which is one reason why Jung advocated keeping records. Recurrent symbols in dreams will often mutate, as the dreamer’s awareness of the message from the subconscious grows.
Finally, about these subconscious kinds of dreams: the more vivid and memorable they are, the more urgent the message, the more needful to pay heed. Most dreams fall in this category—things that you’re working out on a subconscious level, things your subconscious wants you to pay attention to.
Then There’s The Other Kind….
Archetypal dreams, straight out of the unconscious.
This is one: The Man-Eater, one of Jung’s own dreams, dreamed when he was a very small child. Read it and you won’t sleep well afterward.
And then there’s this, from Man and His Symbols, a series of dreams from a ten-year old child:
1. “The evil animal,” a snakelike monster with many horns, kills and devours all other animals. But God comes from the four corners, being in fact four separate gods, and gives rebirth to all the animals.
2. An ascent into heaven, where pagan dances are being celebrated; and a descent into hell, where angels are doing good deeds.
3. A horde of small animals frightens the dreamer. The animals increase to a tremendous size, and one of them devours the little girl.
4. A small mouse is penetrated by worms, snakes, fishes, and human beings. Thus the mouse becomes human. This portrays the four stages of the origin of mankind.
5. A drop of water is seen, as it appears when looked at through a microscope. The girl sees that the drop is full of tree branches. This portrays the origin of the world.
6. A bad boy has a clod of earth and throws bits of it at everyone who passes. In this way all the passers-by become bad.
7. A drunken woman falls into the water and comes out renewed and sober.
8. The scene is in America, where many people are rolling on an ant heap, attacked by ants. The dreamer, in a panic, falls into a river.
9. There is a desert on the moon where the dreamer sinks so deeply into the ground that she reaches hell.
10. In this dream the girl has a vision of a luminous ball. She touches it. A man comes and kills her.
11. The girl dreams she is dangerously ill. Suddenly birds come out of her skin and cover her completely.
12. Swarms of gnats obscure the sun, the moon, and all the stars, except one. That one star falls upon the dreamer. (1. p. 59)
These dreams, almost all of them, involve destruction and restoration. Jung wrote that when he first read the child’s dream notebook he “had the uncanny feeling that they suggested impending disaster,” since they would have been far more appropriate had they been the dreams of someone elderly and approaching death (1, p. 63). Within six months of writing down her dreams, the girl died. Jung saw this dream sequence as the child’s unconscious reaching out to prepare her for death.
These are the kinds of dreams that are not the subconscious processing the events of the day. Instead, they’re wtf kinds of dreams, deeply unsettling when dreamed. They point toward issues of cosmic, albeit personal, importance.
Although I didn’t want to relate any personal dreams to analysis, and I’ve pondered this all week long, I’m going to share with you the one dream I’ve had that I know is archetypal. Make of it what you will.
Here’s the background: I had spent a whole summer in the hospital in chemotherapy for recurrent cancer. Chemo is cumulative in effect, each course hitting harder than the last. It’s intentional—it’s the way you beat down cancer. Now, I was preparing for a bone marrow transplant and had just taken “conditioning chemo,” which was roughly twice as powerful as the usual course. Three days in the hospital for 72 hours of taxol and 3 doses of cytoxin 24 hours apart, and I’d be sent home, invariably to pick up an infection and within two days I’d be back in the hospital on IV antibiotics. It was a marathon and a grind.
This particular course, my last course, had me feeling as bad as I’ve ever felt before. I knew I’d be going back to the hospital in the morning. I’ve been closer to death than I was that night, but I’d never felt as bad, not even during the transplant. Just so you have the context.
I dreamed I was standing on a high hill on a warm night, overlooking a lighted city. At my feet was a swimming pool. Lights shined out from recessed spaces at the bottom, illuminating only the bottom of the pool. All along the lighted edge, cables with computer connections floated in the water. Jewel-colored fish swam in and out of the light, and I knew that, if I swam down there, I could plug into one of the terminals and I would learn how to think in multiple dimensions. I dove in and hit a layer of orange erosion fencing suspended just below the surface. I pulled myself along to the edge of the fencing and looked down, and knew that if I went down there, I could plug in, but I didn’t know enough yet to do it properly and I’d only screw up the opportunity. So I pulled myself back to the edge of the pool and climbed out.
That’s the dream. I woke up knowing exactly what it meant. Right after that I went back to sleep and found myself crawling through roots. I was at base level, moving through matters of life and death. Strangely I don’t remember any dreams at all during the bone marrow transplant. Everything I needed to know had been resolved in that one night.
Okay, so what do you think? I know some people believe that dreams are misfired neurons, or elaborate hallucinations. Others consult them as oracles. Personally, I think most dreams point to what’s important that we’re not paying full attention to, but occasionally, just occasionally, we get a telegram from the deeps that defies explanation.
Note: In the previous installments of this series about Jung and archetypes, linkage has been explaining theories of Thom’s Seven Elemental Catastrophes and their relationship to Jung’s archetypes. He’s developed his explanation into its own introductory diary that deserves reading and commenting. So go and check him out at tonight’s Street Prophets diary, and encourage him to keep explaining. It’s a fascinating conjunction of two potent ideas.
References
1. Carl G. Jung, “Approaching the Unconscious,” in Man and His Symbols, eds. Carl G. Jung and M.L. von Frantz. NY: Laurel, 1968, pp. 1-94.