AUTHOR’S NOTE.

This paper is aimed at both the lay-person and Psychotherapists. The section “How to work with dreams in the therapeutic setting” may seem superfluous to the lay-person or client, however I see no harm in them being privy to this information. Reading this section may not only deepen their understanding of dream interpretation but could also help highlight bad therapeutic practice, such as a therapist interpreting wildly with little reference to the client’s personal associations to the dream.

UNDERSTANDING DREAMS.

Dream interpretation has long been seen as a way of understanding ourselves and the world in a deeper way. From, and probably before Biblical times with Joseph and his dreams of years of abundance before famine, humans have seen them as a mystical or spiritual message to inform us of what we cannot see, or foresee.

In more modern times Freud in his development of Psychoanalytic theory saw dreams as the key to understanding our unconscious wishes and desires. He described dreams as “the Royal road to knowledge of the Unconscious mind”. He would interpret his patients’ dreams, seeing the elements of the dream as representative of unconscious drives or instincts, acting upon the patient. He believed that by correct interpretation he could disempower these forces and free the patient from them, allowing the patient to live a normal life. Freud’s belief was that by emptying the Unconscious of it’s contents, the patient would be healed.

Following on from Freud, Jung widened the influence of the Unconscious, and his interpretation of dreams, to include his theories of the Archetypes and Individuation. Concomitantly his attitude to the Unconscious shifted from one of an adversary to be conquered, to an ally to be understood. In addition to interpreting dreams, Jung developed the technique of Active Imagination as a way of engaging with and affecting the Dreamworld and the Unconscious. Healing in Jungian analysis is seen to come about through making the Unconscious Conscious (although in reality the healing actually comes from making changes in present day life based on the understanding gained in therapy). Jung believed dreams compensate for the conscious attitude and are “invariably seeking to express something the Ego does not know” [CW17. Par 187].

My assertion, based on my experience of working with clients’ dreams for almost 35 years, is that the practice of dream interpretation, and/or the understanding of what is actually being done when dreams are “interpreted”, needs to be revised. The revision I propose is quite possibly in line with Post Jungian or Archetypal Psychology approaches but this is not for me to prove. This revision involves a different way of relating to dreams and the Unconscious, that involves far more respect for their intentions and nature. In this paper I will try to convey this difference in approach which results in becoming conscious of the Unconscious. This stands in juxtaposition to the Freudian attempt to empty the Unconscious or the Jungian endeavour to make the Unconscious Conscious. Psychotherapy is after all, to pay attention to (Therapeia) the Soul (Psyche). There is no mention of healing in this definition, just attention. The Soul is not in need of cure, it is the Ego’s discordant relationship to the Soul that causes dis-ease and the symptoms clients and their Egos complain about.

Dreams are ephemeral, difficult to grasp, immaterial and nonsensical and this makes them very difficult to write about. Their very nature makes them of little value to the rational, scientific, materialistic world of today. Trying to describe their importance is difficult because there is nothing to be grasped or measured, the whole process of interpreting them is subjective and needs to be experienced to appreciate their value. For me, I allow my dreams to guide my life, and they have heralded major changes and upheavals in my life. In my work with psychotherapy clients, their dreams give me another perspective on their world compared to the one they are telling me, which tends to be from their Ego. That additional perspective, shines another light on their world, providing insight into the impasse and difficulties they (and their Ego) are facing, that is, what they are unconscious of. Becoming conscious of our Unconscious, enables a more whole life, a more Soulful life.

An analogy I use often to describe what dreams are, is that they are like a film that is always playing in the background of the mind. At night, the film, in the form of dreams, can be seen more clearly.


A similar analogy is that dreams are like the stars. We can only see the stars at night, and likewise we can only see our dreams when we are asleep. During the day the Sun is so bright we can’t see the stars but they are still there. In this context the Sun is like our Ego, and the Stars are a million other Suns, tiny pieces of the Unconscious, always there, plainly visible at night, however invisible in the day but still present.

Another analogy would be of a large movie screen on the border of the Conscious and the Unconscious, where the screen displays a film showing something of what is happening in the Unconscious realm behind. This analogy makes a clear distinction between the dream and the Unconscious. It shows how the Ego perceives something of the Unconscious but not the Unconscious itself, an interface. In this way the interpretation of the dream is nothing more than an attempt at describing the plot of a movie, open to all kinds of differing opinions and involving no manipulation of the Unconscious.

I use the term Ego in the sense of who we believe we are and gives us the sense of “I”. The Ego has a rather a narrow sense or awareness of who we are. It relies largely on the reflective functions of thinking and feeling to form a sense of self based on our adaption to, and defence against, our life experiences. The Ego wants stability, preferring the known and the familiar as opposed to uncertainty and risk. It tends to filter experience not just because it needs to feel in control but because of the sheer impossibility of processing everything we experience. We are only aware of about 2% of what we experience.

Soul is used here as something essential and unique to each of us. Soul is ephemeral and mysterious and I am wary of trying to pin it down with objective definitions. It is said that Psyche (Soul) speaks in images, whereas I feel it has other modes of communication, notably those more eschewed by the Ego and modern society. The Soul experiences far more than we can be, or allow ourselves to be, aware of, operating more through the imminent functions of imagination, intuition, sensation and the felt-sense. The Soul, unlike the Ego, does not make reflective value laden judgements, it just is. Soul is seen as Transpersonal i.e. larger or more than the Ego, connected to all realms of the Unconscious. It can be argued that the Ego is part of the Soul. Soul is sometimes seen as the intersection of Spirit and Ego, i.e. what we come into life with, our potential and what we have become through experience. The phrases “the call of the Soul” and “the Dark Night of the Soul” imply some kind of will or intentionality associated with Soul, and whilst this may be true, it is often ephemeral and elusive. Readers may be more familiar with terms such as the Psyche, right-brain, True Self that would be similar to how I am using Soul here. The Soul is the producer of the dream.

The Dreamworld as used here is the world in which the dream takes place, the film set. It is not the Unconscious.

By the term Unconscious I mean everything that is not conscious to the Ego (not including the Subconscious, which is unconscious contents that may not be conscious to the Ego at any one moment but are retrievable at will e.g. memories, factual details etc.). The Unconscious consists of the Personal and the Collective Unconscious, including the Archetypes and the Instinctual/somatic/Pre-Conscious. Readers may be more familiar with terms such as Spirit World, The Infinite, The Void, Ground of Being, the Source and these may be substitutable.

The use here of Ego and Soul describes two ways perceiving of reality just as Chuang-tzu wondered following a dream whether he was a man dreaming of being a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming of being a man. This dual consciousness is not often experienced as the Ego dominates.

Various cultures through the ages have ascribed transpersonal, ancestral or God-like authority to what they believe are messages conveyed by dreams. In modern day dreamwork, it is assumed that whatever generates the dream has intentionality and at the least wants us to become more conscious of who we are, more whole.

The notion of Soul and it’s intentionality, is as unprovable as the argument about free will and destiny. For me, as described earlier, the dream is the film playing in the background of my mind and I believe that that film is worth watching as, after all, it is my Soul, or my Unconscious that is producing it. My Ego, or what I identify as me, is what ascribes importance to the dream. The notion that not all dreams are important depends entirely upon the Ego’s ability to understand the dream and the significance it applies to it. If the dream is not understood by the Ego, it will dismiss it as not important. The dream or the dream producer does not need, or want anything, it simply is. All it is showing us, is that we are more than who we believe are. In the end, what matters is… does it help? Does paying attention to my dreams help? Does it lead to a more wholesome, more soulful life? The wish for a more soulful life, of being more of who we are, is an implicit assumption of working with dreams.

In waking life, everything is seen through the eyes of the Ego, with all it’s inherent biases and insecurities. This is one of the the reasons why it is so difficult to interpret our own dreams – the Ego does not want to know. At night when the Ego is asleep we are open to a far more expansive view of our psychic reality. Yet when we awake, we are dominated by our Ego, and we not only struggle to remember the dream itself but we are resistant to what the dream may be showing us. We need to recognise the dream comes from a world alien to our Ego and therefore we must actively compensate for this attitude and ignorance by championing the dream.

The Dreamworld does not make usual logical sense to us, its language is imagery, symbols and metaphor, requiring a different kind of understanding. A Soulful understanding rather than an Ego based understanding. The Dreamworld often seems unable to draw on the specific figure relevant to the daytime world but uses its best possible approximation from its library of images. It can take some time for a specific real world figure to be stored as an image in the Dreamworld’s library, and the Dreamworld will often merge stored images, coming up with it’s best possible representation. These conglomerations may actually be more informative than an accurate portrayal, in that they show how we may be experiencing a real world figure coloured by our experience of the other people in that conglomeration. It is not uncommon for a man’s Dreamworld image of his female partner to be made up of elements of the partner, his Mother and/or former partners. We project the contents of our Unconscious, just as if the film always playing in the background is projected over our experience of real world people. Who our projections fall upon usually requires some similarity, they need a hook, or to put it another way, we don’t project onto a blank screen. Who is to say what is true? Do we ever see another person for who they truly are? Is it possible to fully remove the Ego’s goggles of misperception?

Dreams tell us how things really are, reality, the whole picture, or more precisely they complete the picture. Dreams do not tell us what to do, they just tell us how it is. An example of this would be a client’s dream that was told at a Lecture I attended. The Lecturer described how her male client was not able to maintain relationships with women. She then recounted a dream where he was standing on mudbanks of an estuary and in the distance a woman was struggling in quicksand. In the dream he did not go to rescue her, distracted by something else. The Lecturer said this showed his problem, that he didn’t attempt to save the women in his life. If we take the dream as showing how it is, not what to do, then it shows that he is not bothered by the woman sinking in the quicksand. The lecturer applied her own judgement of what was wrong and what he needed to do. To me the dream said he is not interested in women who get themselves into danger, and he is more interested in something else. I would be interested in what that something else was and discussing how he seems to attract women who need rescuing into his life and that that might be why his relationships don’t work. It is critically important when interpreting someone’s dream not to import one’s own real world values and ethics and then proceed to impose them on the dreamer’s Dreamworld.

When dreams are seen to be foretelling the future this is only because the Ego’s narrow version of reality lags behind the reality of the dream. When a dream comes true, all that has happened is we have caught up with total reality, a reality that includes (some of) what we were previously not conscious of. We are always behind the dream’s reality. Or put another way, and by definition, our Unconscious always knows more than we do. It knows what we are not conscious of.

The Unconscious is not some hostile landscape out to get us that needs taming or emptying as Freud would have had us believe. Neither do I believe it needs to be managed like some farmland for the benefit of man as befits Jung’s attitude to it. The Unconscious is wilderness. Wildness. Ecologically, we need to allow spaces of wilderness, places where nature is trusted to look after itself. It is the arrogance and hubris of (Egocentric) humanity to believe it knows best. We need to learn from nature, recognise we are part of nature. In our so called development and civilisation we have separated from nature, from our Unconscious. Nature, our Unconscious is seen as something other, something to be colonised and exploited for our own gain, rather than realising that we are nature, that our Unconscious is us.

HOW TO WORK WITH DREAMS.

Trying to teach how to work with dreams and hold this perspective of respectful non-interference is very difficult, and whilst I offer some guidance here, there is nothing like as a teacher said to me, “getting dreams under your belt”. The truth in her words remains with me today. Experience is key. Only with experience, will you get a feel for the Dreamworld and how it works. Techniques or formulas will not work, that is not the way of the Dreamworld.

When working with dreams it is fundamental to remember that we do not know. There is no certainty in this realm, only that which is imposed on it by the Ego and it’s need to know. It is essential to hold the dream lightly with an attitude of respect and humility, as the dream is far wiser than we are. Yeats sees dreams as the cloths of heaven and tells his lover -
“I have spread my dreams under your feet.
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.”

Becoming engaged with your own Dreamworld is obviously key to working effectively with dreams. When you engage with the Dreamworld it will respond. Client’s often say to me that they don’t dream, or don’t remember their dreams but simply placing pen and paper beside the bed with the intention of recording dreams, often awakens the Dreamworld (or wills the Ego into remembering them!). Dreams are like gossamer, and writing them down on waking is to be encouraged. This can be quite challenging when rolling over and returning to sleep is so inviting, or partners will be disturbed by bedside lamps being turned on. However the Ego needs to be resisted, as it is intent on the dream being forgotten. The more awake you are, the more the Dreamworld slips away from consciousness. If you are unwilling, there and then, to write the dream down, giving it a headline, a one line title can be a brilliant aide-memoire. That one image is often sufficient enough to bring back other parts of the dream when it does come to writing it down.

Writing dreams down is to engage with them. Even if you don’t interpret the dream, the Dreamworld seems to know it is receiving attention, it is being engaged and responds.

When journaling your dreams it can be useful to watch where your mind goes. When the Ego is engaged in the act of turning images into words, other things may come to your attention. Why has your mind wandered off? Where did you go when you were engaged in writing that particular part of the dream? Something in you may have been triggered whilst recording the dream image. This may be useful and is worth noting. (Writing the dream on one page of your journal and making associated notes on the opposite side can be useful.)

Also worth noting is the feeling tone of the dream both within it, and on waking. Often more than one feeling may be present, even perhaps conflicting. There is no need to resolve conflicting feelings, let them be there. These feelings give a tone to the dream, indicating how you were experiencing the contents of the dream and help with understanding it’s relevance to waking life.

There are other ways of engaging with dreams.

Simply sharing them with a friend or partner, a dream sharing group or even in a psychodrama enactment gives them more attention.

Drawing and painting the images will also deepen the experience. There is no need or requirement to interpret or analyse the dream for it’s meaning. That said, a Jewish proverb says “An unexamined dream is like an unopened letter (from God)”. The risk is that by reducing it through interpretation to - it means this, it means that, is to delude oneself into believing one understands what the dream is showing.

Similarly such care needs to be taken when using the technique of active imagination to engage with the dream. Active imagination is a bit of a misnomer, but it involves re-entering the dream in a relaxed daydream state, allowing the imagination to free float and interact with the dream. Often Psychoanalyst’s will use this method to work with dreams. I am extremely wary of it as a technique and very rarely use it. My concerns, and experience, has been that the client’s Ego soon manipulates the dream to it’s own agenda. This to me is disrespectful of the dream, as if editing a film to produce the ending you want. Similarly I disdain the practice of lucid dreaming, or becoming dream aware as it also called. In lucid dreaming someone becomes aware they are dreaming, and in the dream proceed to steer the dream where they wish. With active imagination and lucid dreaming etc. the risk is we delude ourselves into believing we know the Unconscious, how it works and what it needs. Again the Dreamworld and it’s wisdom is disrespected, as if wearing muddy hobnail boots on Yeats’s Cloths of Heaven.

I was once using active imagination with a fellow trainee’s client’s dream in front of my peers on my Psychosynthesis training. In the dream three old women were dominating the scene, and I was reproached for not naming them as Witches. They bore all the resemblance of Witches, acted like Witches and even came in the classic number of Witches, three. For me though, I felt clear that as soon as they were named as Witches, all kinds of associations and prejudices to do with Witches would be applied to them, when what was needed was to stick to the image. James Hillman and the Archetypal Psychologists’ maxim of “stick to the image” is relevant here. It does not matter that they were Witches, what they were doing was what was important. The teacher said “if you give them a name, then you have put a handle on them and can move them around”. This is anathema to me. “If the handle was screwed to the floor you would not be able to move it” I replied. It betrays an arrogant, Soul blind, Ego biased attitude, as if the world (or the psyche) is subject to the wishes of the Ego. Where is the respect for the dream and the Unconscious, for Other? Unlike Freud’s attitude of the Unconscious being a tank to be emptied, the Unconscious is who I am, the I I do not know.

Dream interpretation is the analysis of a dream through the use of personal association and ascribing a meaning to the contents of the dream, elements, symbols, narrative etc. so as to be more conscious of the Unconscious. Classically in dream interpretation it is assumed that the Soul, the Unconscious etc. is trying to communicate some message and complete the Ego’s view of that reality. However there is a subtle difference I am wanting to convey here. To repeat, if the Soul is only showing reality in its own way of seeing i.e. through symbol and metaphor, there is no intentionality on it’s part. It is the Ego that ascribes the intentionality. In this sense there is nothing to interpret, as what is being shown is just a different perspective on reality that is relational, holistic, non-reductive, even non-judgemental in contrast to the attitude of the Ego. In dream interpretation we can only get a sense of the dream’s meaning and an understanding of the Unconscious through the Ego’s goggles of perception. Unless we are very clear that this is what we are doing we risk a heavy handed reductionist attitude. By holding any interpretation with an attitude of not knowing, we don’t risk muddying the water. In this sense we interpret the dream knowing we do not understand it and that we are likely to misread it. There is a crucial difference between the dream being to educate, or correct the Ego, and the Ego needing to understand the dream. The former speaks of the Ego having the corner on truth and being dominant or superior to the Unconscious, whereas the latter the truth lies in the Unconscious to which the Ego is it’s servant. In Hillman’s words “Life is a mystery to be lived not a riddle to be solved”. If we treat life as a riddle we remain Oedipal, forever trying to solve the Sphinx’s riddle, forever trying to know who we are rather than living the mystery of life. In this sense, it is not, as many including Jung claim, to make the Unconscious Conscious but to become conscious of the Unconscious. A subtle and crucial difference. The former is Egoic colonialism, the latter respectful relating.

When interpreting a dream, be it your own or someone else’s, it is essential to get personal associations to elements of the dream. When interpreting your own dream, the associations will come quite naturally or intuitively when recording the dream, and it can be worth noting these associations as they come. These help to flesh out the dream and link it to waking reality. Probably the biggest problem when interpreting another person’s dream is the risk of projecting one’s own material, perceptions and understanding onto their Dreamworld. This is why their personal associations with elements of the dream are so important. A black cat to one person, may not mean the same thing to another. Whilst a google search throws up a multitude of possible meanings, if the person had a black cat as a pet, or was attacked by a black cat, then this is likely to be far more relevant than any collective interpretation garnered from the internet or a dream encyclopedia/dictionary. Any interpretation via association, be it by book or another person is always going to be second best (at least) to that of the dreamer. Even then, an attitude of “never knowing” what the dream or an element is about, needs to permeate the whole process.

Given dreams portray what may be going on in the Unconscious, they are liable to show discordance with the Ego. For me, dreamwork happens in the therapeutic setting, so I usually already know the client’s inner world, life history and present circumstances and challenges. Often dreams are mentioned near the end of the therapeutic session, in which case I may have an idea of what the dream is about because I know what the client is struggling with. A client spent the whole of her session discussing with me the difficulties in her relationship with her partner. When, nearing the end of the session, I asked if she had any dreams, she said dismissively “only Zombie Apocalypse dreams”. That information alone gave a better description of the dynamic than we had arrived at through normal therapeutic dialogue. She was walking Zombie like into an apocalypse.

Another example of the dream knowing and expressing something better comes from a dream of my own. I once spent the best part of a therapy session discussing with my Jungian Analyst/Supervisor, the best way of describing my Psychotherapy work in an advert I had running in a local alternative monthly magazine called, The Spark. The advert had been successful and the primary source of clients in my early days of private practice. At the end of discussing this and deciding that only a very minor alteration was needed, I was asked if I had had any dreams. I then read from my dream journal how I had been working on my car, tuning it up and had removed the spark plug only to see that it was in good condition, needing only a very light wire brushing and that the gap did not need resetting. If only I had said the dream at the beginning! How beautifully the dream had put it, even using the magazine’s name, Spark and “plug” which is another name for an advertisement. The dream pointed out the need for the very slightest of maintenance on my spark plug, and could also have been saying, that given it was me working on my car, it was about how I went into the world, my work (for anyone wondering if this was about my real car – that was a diesel car - they don’t have spark plugs). The dream shows something of what had already become apparent in the session, but most importantly, and valuably it often offers a different way of expressing the same conclusion, through imagery and metaphor rather than logical thinking. When this occurs, there is a sense of wholeness and truth that is difficult to describe. It is as if a two-fold vision has been achieved which is superior and more satisfying than the Ego’s monocular vision and understanding. A successful dream interpretation comes with this sense of completeness, of it fitting, sometimes manifesting as a coherent paradox. A coherent paradox gives the sense of two truths simultaneously existing, likely confirming the existence of the two fold vision produced by both the Ego and the Unconscious, the Ego and Soul. Similarly, “Aha” moments occur when the Ego’s narrow view of the world has been shattered by an unexpected connection or insight brought about by the surprising or devastating truth revealed by the dream.

DREAM INTERPRETATION IN THE THERAPEUTIC SETTING.

1. Ask the dreamer to recount their dream.

This may be from memory, a journal or a scrap of paper grabbed in the night. Often in the telling other parts may be remembered and added to the recounting. Once the client has finished telling the dream the first thing to ask is how the client felt in the dream, and also, upon waking. This gives a sense of how the dreamer’s Ego, has been affected by the dream, and what their response is to it.

2. The dreamer’s understanding of the dream.

What the client has made of the dream is important. This will be based on their own perspective and Ego and this needs to be allowed for. Sadly, often clients have made nothing of the dream and have not reflected on it, preferring to wait for the therapeutic hour. Not every dream can be interpreted in therapy, so it is beneficial if the client learns to interpret their own dreams and not rely upon a therapist. Of course this comes with the caveat of the limitations of interpreting your own dream described earlier. Learning how to be with one’s own dreams is an essential part of relating to the Unconscious.

3. Getting the dreamer’s associations.

The various elements of the dream e.g. locations, figures, objects and actions are significant and whilst classically these would be said to have been chosen by the Unconscious for a reason, this is a misunderstanding from my perspective. They have not been chosen, they just are. That they are the elements that “just are” is significant. In this, I also reject the commonly held practice of eliminating day time “remnants” or “residuals” from a dream interpretation. To me, that something remains from the day is significant. So many things could have been retained from the day, and the question becomes - how come this particular thing? Why it deserves to be deemed irrelevant is beyond me.

By getting the dreamer’s associations, i.e. what does this element symbolise to the dreamer, we ascertain it’s significance. Sometimes this does prove tricky though, so I have a variety of questions that often help, such as “What is a Lion to you?”, or “what is the dictionary definition of a Lion?”, or even “if I am from Mars, what is a Lion?”. Sometimes the client’s response is so literal, so objective, that it lacks any personal association. In these cases, asking “how come a Lion not a Tiger?”, can draw out a more personal response. This form of questioning “why this not, not that?” can also be applied to activity in the dream e.g. “how come the Lion was laying down, not sitting up?” What the client responds is often surprising, as it does not fit with what I expect, with my perceptions and biases. This is important as it helps remove my own associations and projections onto the dream material. A recent example was of a client telling me about a dream set in a circus. So when I asked “What is a circus?” I got the reply “Hell”. Not exactly what I was expecting! I was expecting something along the lines of a place of entertainment that moves from one location to another. The dreamer’s association was essential in describing the background or tone of the dream, and the reality of the situation in waking life, which I would have drastically misinterpreted had I gone with my association.

5. Interpretation.

Interpretation is not free from the interpreter’s bias. The interpreter will inevitably make judgements about which elements to focus on, where to place the emphasis and try to fit it to some kind of narrative that makes sense to their own, and the client’s Ego. Whilst I have emphasised the importance of the dream’s sovereignty and that of the dreamer’s associations, I must hold my hands up and admit, this is not how it always works out in practice.

The most satisfying dream interpretations for me are when I simply repeat the dreamer’s telling of the dream back to them, and the penny drops. There is no way I can claim that even such simple re-tellings are untainted by my own Ego’s need to make sense, or prove my effectiveness at interpreting dreams. I may omit parts of the dream in the re-telling, change my tone of voice to create emphasis etc. all of which are my bias. Such influence is never truly objective and is best recognised, or owned, rather than denied. Similarly when making an interpretation I cannot deny that I am not prejudiced by what I know is troubling the dreamer, so I am likely to be looking for associations to the problems they are experiencing in every day life.

When making an interpretation, I nearly always preface it with “I don’t know but…” so that I “own” the interpretation as mine and not necessarily true. It is always my intention to place the interpretation between us, so the dreamer can choose to pick it up, or not.

This said, there are common motifs or symbols that occur. It is impossible to learn all of these and whilst I used to resort to Symbol dictionaries (never dream dictionaries… first books on the fire come the revolution as far as I am concerned) what is needed is a kind of metaphorical mind. The following are a few examples. Again, and I cannot emphasise it enough, the dreamer’s personal associations are paramount. I am a guide. I am familiar with the types of landmarks, features etc. in the Dreamworld, in the wilderness, aware of the pitfalls and dangers that may occur. However I do not know this particular landscape, this person’s psyche. I have not walked their landscape before.

Location.

Where a dream is set is usually what the dream is about, it literally gives the setting. A dream set in a workplace is likely to be about the dreamer’s work or job. Set in their home, about home-life, or their relationship to themselves. Dreams set on a mountain can indicate a sense of perspective and also a remoteness from civilisation. A crowded city might indicate a large, possibly overcrowded social life. Bodies of water, seas, lake, rivers are associated with different forms of feeling or emotion especially when additional information such as choppy, calm, stagnant, polluted are added. The sea, with it’s vastness represents the Unconscious and its depth the Collective Unconscious. The phrase “being all at sea” comes to mind. Beaches are located between the land and sea, so the dreamer is seen to be between the Sea, the Unconscious and the Land, the Conscious.

The Home.

Houses and other residential buildings can represent the dreamer’s sense of self. A dilapidated house would show someone who is run down, a Mansion someone with a large sense of self. Classically going into the attic (and upwards in many contexts) is seen to be entering the Higher Unconscious, or Spiritual realms, opening to new insight, being nearer the light. Going into the cellar is a descent, and like other descents is seen as moving down into the Personal Unconscious realm, and further descent into the Collective Unconscious. Likewise moving into the dark, or shadows is to enter where one cannot see – the Unconscious. Often people will discover new rooms or wings within buildings, and moving into these signifies entering new areas of themselves or their life.

Transport.

The motor car is our way of going out into the world. Whether we are driving, or a passenger is significant. Cars give us freedom of direction, and sense of power and control. Trains run on tracks and there is no control of where they stop or you can get off, possibly giving a sense of being railroaded. Aeroplanes may give perspective or an overview, however they are not grounded. Bicycles, I was taught are the ideal form of transport as they are an efficient use of energy, and are self propelled, not overpowered like cars. You are in charge of the steering and can go pretty much anywhere you want and they require you to be balanced. Confident in this knowledge I was flummoxed when a client presented himself in a dream in his ideal transport - a single skull rowing boat that requires balance and self propulsion and given its narrow design, very efficient at going through the water. Additionally, of course there is likely to be some personal significance to be found in, travelling on water and going backwards! This only goes to show the importance of personal associations, that there are no rules in the Dreamworld and the danger of assuming what something symbolises.

CONCLUSION.

I hope in this writing I have managed to convey the appropriate attitude to dreams and the Dreamworld. I have deliberately left open the questions of whether there is such a thing as the Soul and whether it, and/or the Unconscious have intentionality. This hopefully leaves people with differing beliefs or understanding open to my main assertion that the Unconscious is not our enemy but who we are. There is a subtle but crucial difference between making the Unconscious Conscious and relating to the Unconscious. The former risks Ego inflation and grandiosity whereas the latter relativises the Ego, keeping it in it’s appropriate place, enabling a more Soulful life. Throughout this paper I have deliberately capitalised “Conscious”, as if it is a place, a thing, a proper noun, in order to distinguish it from, “conscious” (lower case) as an adjective. As an adjective, it implies life, that it relates to something rather than trying to change it into else, something fixed, something lifeless. Naming something kills it. Given we have had a hundred plus years of Psychotherapy and the World is still getting worse, maybe this subtle but crucial shift in attitude to the Unconscious, is what is required to heal our therapeutic theory from it’s Patriarchal forefathers. Psychotherapy is proving itself to be complicit in our World’s demise and impotent in effecting change. Only when we can truly respect our own Unconscious do we stand any chance of being able to respect, rather than exploit or abuse, Mother Nature and our Environment.

FURTHER READING.

James Hillman. Dreams and the Underworld.

Mary Louise von Franz. The Way of the Dream.

Robin Shohet. Dream Sharing.

James Hillman. We’ve had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World is getting worse.