I have always had vivid dreams all through my life. A few years back, after I had moved from India to the United States, my dream world was especially alive with rich, meaningful images.
In that period of huge change, I was more permeable, more open to opening the door wider to listening to my dreams.
It was then that I started learning about dreams and the psychological theories that talk about dreams. This week, I want to talk a little about three separate approaches to understanding dreams.
Sigmund Freud’s thoughts on dreams.
When I was growing up, one of my own thoughts about dreams was that maybe, they were like a playground in which your out-of-control, destructive impulses could play out, bang against each other and self-immolate. That way, your animal nature, so to speak, would not spill out into your own day-to-day life. They were, in a way, a built-in safety mechanism.
This line of thought is kind of on the lines of the Freudian theory about dreams and their function. Freud thought that dreams could be interpreted as disguised wish fulfillment. The unconscious contained all those impulses and wishes that had been repressed, which had gone underground. In dreams, they broke through, albeit in a distorted form. In dreams, they could be fulfilled.
From the Freudian perspective, dreams conceal or disguise psychological truth, things like thoughts and emotions that have been repressed, which would be very threatening to our conscious egos if they broke through.
Carl Jung thought differently from Freud.
Jung is the man who was the originator of some of the most well-known psychological concepts we know, such as extraversion and introversion and the psychological complex. Jung was, at one time, an avid supporter of Freud because of their shared interest in the unconscious. Their association was so close that he was, in fact, heir apparent to Freud, supposed to be the one who would carry forward and build on his work.
But there came a bitter break between Freud and Jung when Jung’s ideas about what the unconscious contained started deviating from what Freud thought. After a lot of struggle after this breaking away, Jung clarified and formulated his own theories on the unconscious and what it contained.
Unlike Freud, Jung thought that the unconscious does not simply contain repressions. That’s just part of it. In our dreams, we meet our undesirable aspects, but we also find what’s gold, so to speak. According to Jung, dreams did not disguise or hide psychological truth, but actually revealed them.
The reason dreams were so hard to understand was because they spoke in a language that we were no longer familiar with, the language of images. It was, in fact, the language of nature. What we needed to do was to become familiar with this language.
Dreams, in Jungian thought, can help us become whole by offering images that tell us about our own possibilities for growth.
Frederick Perls and his Gestalt dream interpretation are also present-focused.
Gestalt dream interpretation, as developed by Frederick Perls, also focuses on what the dreams reveals about the dreamer and his or her challenges right now. In Gestalt dream work, the dreamer is asked to identify with every image in the dream, assuming that everything in the dream stands in for a disowned or projected part of their own self. Even inanimate objects are aspects of ourselves. For example, I have written about houses in dreams previously. If we go with the Gestalt view, suppose you dream of a run-down, decrepit house, you are in fact, dreaming of an aspect of your self. “Being the Object” in the dream (such as expressing your feelings about yourself as the house) is a potent tool we can pick up from Gestalt dream work.
For me, all three views have valuable points I can take from.
I think dreams are multi-layered. They can mean many different things. But I identify a lot with the Jungian view, that although repressions are part of our dream world, the unconscious is not just a dumping-ground of unwanted thoughts and feelings. When I think of my dreams, they often mirror what’s going on in my life. At a time when my feelings were not flowing, I had a dream of frozen structures on the sides of an ocean. To me, that was the dream expressing that my feelings were frozen, as they, in fact, were. The dream wasn’t hiding something from me. It was revealing something I wasn’t paying attention to.
Something intelligent also shows up in my dreams, something that almost makes suggestions, tells me about a possibility, things I am consciously not considering.
Also, with its emphasis on myth and its concept of something called the collective unconscious (a term coined by Jung that refers to structures of the unconscious mind that are shared by all people), Jungian psychology is close to my heart. It resonates with my soul.
It is images that come up from the collective unconscious, like archetypal symbols like The Great Mother or the Tree of Life and instinctual images like images of animals that we might not have personally encountered, that form the base layer of what it means to be human.
People do say that if you are more of a “religious” bend, then you will resonate with Jungian psychology. (I am not religious per se , but someone who believes in something bigger. Maybe, you are like me) It dares to go into those aspects of the psyche and inner life that are not easily explained. It touches upon mystery.
Jung himself says there is no simple or definite interpretation of any dream. Always, you are working with something you don’t know completely.
But it’s this mysterious, numinous thing that makes dreams and listening and speaking to them so fascinating, so valuable, so amazing. In the end, we have to find our own relationship to this mystery, and remember what dream workers tell us. No one else can tell you what your dream means, though they might offer suggestions. It is up to you, up to your own inner “a-ha,” the resonance you feel, that tells you whether something about a dream has revealed something new for you.
It is a personal relationship, fraught sometimes with trials and dangers and misunderstandings, as inner, subjective things are, but also something that contains the meaning and mystery at the heart of our lives. It is the promise of a new adventure, the opening up of new worlds.
If you want to start working with your dreams, you might also enjoy this post on getting started with dream work.
What do you think? What thoughts did you resonate with most? Where do you think dreams come from? What meaning might they have for you?
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