Psychologists Explore the Dream

In 1900 Sigmund Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams, which mapped out a way of exploring the relation of the dream to the unconscious side of man’s mental life. It is difficult to stress enough the great importance of this contribution, although Freud himself recognized it and more than once remarked that the publication of his book had been timed to coincide with the beginning of a new era. Of course he was neither the first to discover the unconscious nor the first to see the significance of dreams from a scientific point of view. But he was the first modern scientist to connect the two; he was the first to make an empirical study of any length on the subject, and the first to write about it with clarity, indeed with such convincing power that his opinions could not be ignored.

This is an impressive list of firsts, and interestingly enough, the literary world was quick to perceive his significance. Among his own profession, however, Freud met with little but contempt. It took eight years to sell out the first six-hundred-copy edition of his book. While it was difficult to ignore him, the ideas he offered could be laughed at, and for a long time laughter would be a good defense against the contribution he offered.

Even so, there had been medical men who valued dreams in almost every age from Hippocrates down. Men like Daniel Tuke, Wilhelm Wundt, Bemheim, and many others whose names are hardly remembered¹ had been seeking to explain the dream because they saw it was significant from a medical point of view. But these men failed to see that dreams had any particular relation to consciousness. They often failed to see the dream as a psychic reality, and instead they tried to tie it to the physical functioning of the brain. This was a good idea, but it was still only an idea, which has yet to be demonstrated.

There were also thinkers in other fields who had discovered the unconscious, and some of them had written clearly about this. Literature from its inception seemed to understand that human personality has deeper levels of being and a deeper purposiveness than is revealed in our conscious awareness. Shakespeare and Goethe both reveal a knowledge of this deeper level of personality, as do other literary figures. Indeed, it appears that the greater the stature of the author, the greater his understanding and knowledge of this realm of being. From the philosophical side, during the nineteenth century C. G. Carus and Eduard von Hartmann had both written extensively about the unconscious, the former in a work he called simply Psyche, and the latter in his massive The Philosophy of the Unconscious. There was no lack of thinking about this shadowy side of human personality, but it remained entirely speculative until a definite relation to dreams began to be established. Those who are interested in this period of growing curiosity about the structure of the human psyche will find an excellent study in the work by L. L. Whyte, The Unconscious Before Freud.²

Freud above all was the first to show a practical application for delving into unconscious material and the meaning of dreams. For Freud, before anything else, was a physician whose interest was in making sick people well. He had received his training in neurology under Charcot in Paris, and following the lead of the French school, he had made use of hypnotism. But he was disappointed in its lasting effect in healing mental disturbances, and so he searched for some other means of making an impact upon the personalities of his patients that would enable them to come to terms with what disturbed them and get well. He found this tool in dream analysis. What he found, in essence, was that understanding the elements of dreams enabled a man to see what was going on in the part of himself of which he was not aware, to come to terms with himself, and so recover from neurosis. To Freud dreams were interesting not only theoretically, but from a practical point of view as well.

Writing with a clarity, simplicity, and logical force that few philosophers or literary men share, Freud first presented his ideas to the world in The Interpretation of Dreams. Fifteen years later he gave a series of lecture courses at the University of Vienna, covering his entire theory of neurosis, mental illness, and dreams, which were then put into book form as A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis. These amazingly clear discussions reveal the logical development of Freud’s theories.

He began with the idea that our errors, our lapses of memory, and our slips of the tongue reveal a purpose within us that is contrary to our conscious goals and direction and often completely out of touch with our conscious thought. This was the same purpose he saw revealed in dreams. What errors betray in a small way, he realized, is continually being portrayed by dreams in a never-ending and inexhaustible panorama. Therefore, if one could come to a way of interpreting dreams, he would then be able to know those factors within men which were in conflict with their conscious attitudes and thus were causing their disruptive neuroses. But the trouble was that we had no way to understand dreams. And so he set out to erect a theory that would enable men to understand their dreams, and by this method, the method of psychoanalysis, to deal with what troubled them from within themselves, and to find health.

In very general terms, the theory went like this. The unconscious wishes to speak clearly in dreams and express its desires and meaning. But it is impeded from this by the conscious attitudes of the dreamer. Much of the dream material is obnoxious to the conscious personality unless it is distorted, and so there exists within the personality a censoring capacity that is responsible for the form a dream takes. The censor, according to Freud, supervises several interesting processes, all of them unconscious and helping to conceal the real meaning of the dream from the ego:

First the original dream thoughts are condensed; then they are turned into images, and some of the objectionable ideas or wishes are replaced by associations for the dreamer. The unconscious may even produce an opposite meaning by making transpositions or substitutions before the original ideas are translated into images. And finally, when the dream does pass the censor, there are often very important gaps in the way it is seen or remembered.

Thus, Freud made the important point that latent dream-content may be quite different from the final, manifest dream. It is necessary, he showed, to distinguish carefully between the original dream thought and the actual dream that occurs after the distortions he described as censorship. He believed that it was because of this process that so few people had ever understood dreams. The original, sexual, wish-fulfilling nature of the unconscious was disguised so effectively that we did not realize the real, primitive roots of personality. It must be noted here that this theory was based upon Freud’s own dreams and upon his listening to the dreams of the repressed people of Vienna who formed the greater part of his practice. It enabled him to get at the material that was bothering them, and many people found new life and new understanding of themselves through his method.

There was also a growing group of medical men who began to take Freud seriously, and among them were two groups. Many, of course, became firm adherents to his theory, and the first group formed around Freud. But there were others who thoroughly appreciated his monumental genius, who saw the importance of the points he brought out, and yet could not go along with his total theory of the unconscious or of dreams.

To them Freud’s dream theory seemed artificial and contrived. It did not appear to them that human personality was actually contriving to deceive itself so artfully. These men also doubted the validity of reducing the unconscious primarily to sexuality, or to the pleasure principle and the death wish. It seemed to them that out of the unconscious there arose other instinctive forces besides sex. Adler, for instance, broke away from Freud because he believed that the will to power was the basic human drive. These men also believed that from dreams and other unconscious experiences men do receive guidance and wisdom that has something to offer the conscious mind, as well as unacceptable thoughts and incubuses that would keep consciousness constantly on guard. Jung particularly felt that Freud had dogmatized too much. His separation came because he felt that there was not as yet enough evidence upon which to erect a full system and, besides this, that Freud had left out certain important data in order to keep his system neat and simple.

It is true that Jung could not accept Freud’s systematic doctrine of sexuality, but there was a far more important and fundamental reason for the break. Freud was a rationalist, and rationalist he remained, while Jung was an empiricist through and through. Freud assumed that the unconscious thinks rationally and wishes to communicate in this way through dreams, and that it is only impeded by a censorship working quietly in the rational mind to distort these essentially rational communications.

Jung, on the contrary, suggested that the unconscious does not think rationally to begin with, but rather symbolically, metaphorically, in images. And this, rather than purposeful distortion, accounts for the difficulty we have in understanding dreams. The difficulty is that we have either forgotten or have never known how to think symbolically. The task of dream interpretation, according to Jung, is that of learning a strange language with many nuances, of learning to understand the symbolic communications of the unconscious, the language of art, literature, mythology, and folklore. He saw no attempt on the part of the unconscious to deceive or distort. It is simply using the best method of communication available to it. And this we need to learn to understand.

About 1912 Jung set down his independent ideas in a book published in English as Psychology of the Unconscious. In this work—which he later rewrote and which is now published as Symbols of Transformation—Jung introduced his study with a discussion of man’s two ways of thinking, analytical thought and symbolic thought.³ He showed that in one kind of thinking we are active, in the other passive. In one we lead; in the other we are led. One is the thinking of logic and science, the other the thinking of imagination, of poetry, art, and religion, and also of dreams. In its analytical function the conscious mind uses known facts; it sorts and directs them toward a particular order. In symbolic thinking the function is quite different, for here the mind is flooded by new images, symbols of something that has been unknown, or has been laid aside and forgotten.

Jung went on in this work to demonstrate the importance of this latter kind of thinking in approaching the unconscious. Taking for his material the dreams and fantasies of a young woman whom he knew only from these bits of writing (and much later from her doctors), he showed quite accurately how the unconscious was leading her to serious mental disorder. Yet at the same time it outlined for her a picture of new life and greater wholeness if she had only had the help to understand and act upon these directions. They were directions that Jung recognized because they had appeared over and over again in the myths and religious stories and works of art of every kind of people. It was clear how important such dream experiences were to the religions of mankind and how much attention had once been paid to them.

At the same time Jung was coming to know a similar realm of experience in himself. He saw that if he were to allow his patients’ dream experiences to speak for themselves as facts, then he had to treat his own dreams in the same way. As he did, it became evident how little was actually known about the contents of the unconscious and the almost incredible realm that was opened. Dealing with these contents, Jung wrote, “brought home to me the crucial insight that there are things in the psyche which I do not produce, but which produce themselves and have their own life.”⁴ From this fact came the certainty that reality, and frequently the best of reality, is found in these depths. This is also reality that demands a religious attitude from man, and it is found only when one allows himself to be led by the thinking of the unconscious, symbolic thinking that can be found in fantasy and dream, and myth and story.

It is almost impossible to put too much stress on symbolic imagination, for this way of thinking has been almost entirely ignored in the development of modem Western culture. It is of primary importance to religious people; it puts into their hands a method through which they can come to know and understand the religious depths of themselves and perhaps get intimations of God speaking through these depths. This method of meditative, devotional, imaginative thinking is an approach to experience at which Christians ought to be adept.

For Jung this way of thinking was vital to an understanding of human personality. It offered a basic approach to the unconscious which allocated to the psyche all the complexity and the amazing depth that were often found in it. It offered the only view of men that satisfactorily reflected the empirical facts. Therefore Jung made it his business to listen to dreams and other productions of the unconscious in a way that practically no other psychologist has attempted. He also spent most of his life describing and integrating what he learned. His approach is one that has something constructive to offer Christianity, something that is hard to find elsewhere.

From the beginning Jung seemed to know that he was to listen to the psyche and hear what it had to tell him. Now and then he encountered some very strange experiences that made him know the different quality of the contents with which he was dealing. One of these, which occurred early in his career, was the vision that a paranoid patient in Zurich tried to show him. The man, who had been hospitalized for years, called Jung into the corridor one day to instruct him how to squint and move his head in order to see the phallus of the sun and how it moved from side to side; this, explained the patient, was the origin of the wind. Jung noted this experience in 1906; then in 1910 he was reading one of Albrecht Dieterich’s works when he came across words from an ancient papyrus that had recently been published, to which his patient had had no possible access, and realized that he was reading almost exactly the same vision. It told how to see “hanging down from the disc of the sun something that looks like a tube,” which is “the origin of the ministering wind.”⁵ It did not take many experiences of this kind to convince Jung of the need for a religious point of view in dealing with unconscious contents.

Indeed, he gave an essentially different value to the unconscious than other psychologists. About 1930 he wrote:

But new understanding does not spring full-fledged like Minerva from the head of Zeus; “a living effect,” he went on, “is achieved only when the products of the unconscious are brought into serious relationship with the conscious mind.” Above all, the unconscious does not need to be further dissociated from consciousness; too many people are already suffering from inner incompatibility, from an inability to make out with unconscious drives and still get on with their conscious aims. The first thing needed was to hear what the unconscious really had to say, and so Jung listened to the dream as “one of the purest products of unconscious constellation.”⁷ For fifty years he studied and wrote about dreams.

He did not try to get around the fact that most dreams are attempting to say something that is not in accord with conscious wishes and intentions. Instead, he suggested, they are agents for an independent function in the psyche, and in this sense they act autonomously. In this way they also act very differently from daydreams, whose subject matter and direction is already present in consciousness, simply waiting to gather other elements around it. Daydreaming may be built around anything from wishful thinking about Hawaii or a new car to things of the spirit, and this has its place, but it is not the same as dreaming. The dream chooses its own time to speak, and we are not asked what topics will be brought up or what they will mean to us, or even what objects will be chosen to represent this meaning, for consciousness does not make the rules. Dreams operate autonomously in this realm, if not beyond it.

Since this is the case, the language of dreams does present a real challenge to man’s understanding. In the first place, dreams are like cartoons or parables. They signify something beyond themselves. They attempt to tell a meaning, or many meanings, by means of images, in much the same way that the cartoon artist expresses his meaning by the use of symbols. The cartoonist uses an image because it is well enough known to readers to evoke the memories, feelings, ideas that go with a whole situation. The dream does essentially the same thing as best it can, by switching on the picture of an experience that at least once was associated with a group of memories and feelings and ideas.

Jung sometimes illustrated this to his American listeners by referring to our political cartoons. His favorite was a prize-winning depiction of the Democratic party in 1927 that showed a donkey being ridden by a Southern belle and stubbornly balking at the sight of a derby hat that lay in its path. It certainly does not take much knowledge of American history to see in this picture a meaningful representation of the political situation in that year—with the Southern states still in the saddle, the Democratic party was resisting being represented by Al Smith, the big-city politician who had tossed his celebrated brown derby into the ring. And basically this is the way most dreams speak. But just as a foreigner might have some trouble with the idea of someone leaving his hat in the road, or a girl in ruffles and pantaloons riding a donkey, so the language of dreams is very often puzzling to the conscious mind.

Except for the different level of meaning, however, this is very similar to the parable, the form in which Jesus so often spoke. He told the story of the prodigal son, of the good Samaritan, of the foolish virgins, not to conceal his meaning, but to express it. Furthermore, these same themes that Jesus brought out in the form of stories still come out in the dreams of people today. People dream of finding the great pearl, of coming across one beaten by thieves and caring for him, of seeing a person raised from the dead, or of watching a fire that does not go out. These are all images that have been told me from their dreams by people with whom I have counseled, and there are many other examples from psychological practice. This indeed is the greatness of Jesus’ parables. They touch the deepest level in man, the substance of his life, and it is interesting that this is how Jung described the level from which extremely significant dreams arise. He also called attention to the fact that, like Jesus’ examples, these dreams do not always have to operate upon the conscious mind in order to bring about an effect upon the personality.⁸

Most dreams do tell a story, generally with definite dramatic form, although the plot may vary from the simplest to the most exceedingly complex. They are often just like plays, staged either before one’s eyes or with the dreamer cast in an active role, and sometimes with a great variety of characters, both known and unknown. In what way, then, can the action and the people in these inner dramas be understood? If they are not to be taken concretely, but only symbolically, then what does one do with a dream about his mother-in-law? or, say, a truly frightening nightmare in which he sees a friend die in an automobile accident? I am well aware of the temptation to take such dreams all too concretely, but this brings us to the second major point about this mysterious language.

Primarily my dreams speak to me, to my own inner, psychic life, and each of the figures in them represents some part of my being. As Jung was careful to show, a dream is a way of self-reflection, and

The fact that strange, unexplained phenomena are at times associated with dreams only reinforces this conclusion. Such psychic events as clairvoyant dreams and extrasensory perception are simply given, and they must be understood in this way in order to be valued in their religious meaning. They come to such persons and at such times, apparently, as are chosen by the same mysterious power that speaks to the person’s own needs in his dreams. Jung suggested briefly how important it is to see oneself in the dream:

Behind this is one of Jung’s most basic ideas. Our unconscious life, he held, is made up of almost innumerable complexes, bundles of ideas and related thoughts and feelings that function with almost a life of their own. These complexes, then, are the parts of ourselves that are pictured in dreams, represented by the various characters and situations of the inner drama. For example, a man dreams of a religious figure, let us say of Paul. If the action that involves Paul is to have meaning for him, the dreamer must ask himself: What does this figure represent in my life? What part of me is actually like Paul? What stands out about Paul in my dream, and what does this mean to me? When the dreamer knows what this image represents to him, then the action of the dream can show how that part of himself is related to the other elements as they appeared. If the dream-figure is a familiar one, like a mother-in-law or friend, then the questions are the same; the only difference is that they may be more difficult and complicated to answer. In either case the problem is to understand the meaning that the unconscious has presented for one’s knowledge and guidance, and this is anything but simple.

Dealing with dreams is not simple, because right away it involves the individual in a realm of experience beyond himself. Jung was one psychologist who realized that dreams could not be reduced only to personal factors. Symbols from mythology and from the history of religion continually appear in them, so often that it is difficult to ignore the presence of deeper, universal meanings. Very few dreams seem to be entirely free of these elements. But even more important is the fact that “big” or “meaningful” dreams do occur which seem to carry little or no personal significance for the dreamer, but still produce a most powerful impression. As Jung pointed out, these dreams are generally difficult to interpret. Although they make a terrific impact often with forms of poetic force and beauty, they do not produce many associations from the dreamer’s own experience. One must turn to myth and parable and fairy tale to find the symbols and some illustration of their meaning.

Such dreams are no longer concerned with immediate, personal experience, but with the ideae principales of which Augustine spoke, “which are themselves not formed . . . but are contained in the divine understanding.”¹¹ These dreams reveal powerful realities that have their being in man’s unconscious, realities that he needs to touch and know because they lead the soul of man and through it often determine his whole approach to life. These are the realities that Jung called archetypes, which are probably at the core of all our dreaming. Certainly they account for the vast number and variety of figures that we dream about.

Jung found these archetypal forms represented over and over again in the characters that people our dreams, and out of this vast dramatis personae he isolated several of the important images and carefully described them. The most significant of these are the images of the shadow, the anima, and the animus.

The first is one that appears at one time or another in the dreams of every person. As might be expected, the shadow is a dark and threatening figure, usually someone unknown to the dreamer.

For instance, people often dream of Negroes at such a time as sickness, when they have no contact with a Negro at all. In fairy tales the “trickster” shows the original nature of this figure, doing all sorts of mischief for which man must take the blame. What the shadow represents is that inferior or undeveloped side of man that has been left behind in our attempt to become as completely rational and moral as possible. It is the uncivilized part of us, the primitive, which is also an essential part. Jung never tired of reminding us that this figure is usually 90 per cent pure gold when one no longer projects it out upon other people. But its real value cannot be found until one looks at these elements objectively, instead of seeing them in some other person who is hated and feared.

The other two principal figures are counterparts in the dreams of men and women. In the psyche of every man there is an identifiable female figure, which Jung called by the ancient name of the “anima,” and in a woman’s psyche it is matched by the male figure, which he termed the “animus.” In the same way that the shadow is a reality based on the instincts, these two dream-images come from something equally real and insistent in men and women. The unconscious feminine within a man and the masculine traits in women are rooted in our physical structure and are carried by our genes and chromosomes, as well as by our psychological structure and our culture. Generally this figure seems to carry all that is most foreign to the conscious personality—in a man his moods, his vanity, his touchiness, and also his belief in the good and beautiful, his knowledge of the divine, and his ability to love and make love work; and in a woman the worst of her opinionated, argumentative side, and also her ability to relate the ideal, the perfect, the true (even unwanted truth), to the hard facts of being.

Unquestionably it is difficult for people to face and to come to terms with these realities within themselves. It seems far more agreeable to cloak the anima and animus in a cult of romantic love than to set these conflicting impulses loose within ourselves. Nor is the shadow a burden many of us want to bear, it is not pleasant to realize that our own lives contain primitive and destructive elements that cannot be escaped. We much prefer to see these things in other people. Unfortunately these images do not stay put when they are unconscious and only projected. The man who only searches for an appropriate person to carry his psychic counterpart finds sooner or later that this kind of love turns sour. The shadow that is hidden from the outside world can burst forth and make the kindest of men into a tyrant within his own family, and we have seen what happens to an educated, hard-working nation like Germany when these unconscious shadow elements break out and transform a whole people into demonic destroyers.

But these are the penalties of unconsciousness. Through dream experiences these elements can come into consciousness within man, so that he finds the very creative springs of life in them instead of conflict and turmoil. Of course, this is never automatic, never simple or easy. It is sure to cost whatever we have, and to be worth it. As the shadow and the ego with its awareness come to form a harmonious team, one finds that much of the zest and creativeness in ordinary daily living originate from these rejected parts of himself. The images of the shadow often change from dark, distasteful figures to pure gold. The man who comes to terms with his inner feminine qualities finds even deeper values; he finds his very soul and the peace of wholeness and detachment along with a new level of creativity and relationship. Similarly, a woman, in finding her inner masculine function, will find her life inwardly fructified and made whole and satisfying.

The importance of dreams and of the proper understanding of dreams in these processes cannot be overemphasized. Through dreams these inner functions appear in images that come alive for us and can be dealt with. Otherwise they remain unconscious and man falls into projection. When he does not deal inwardly with the shadow and the anima-animus, he is led by one into the cult of war, from the iron curtain within his own home on up to global war, which our time has brought to such awful perfection; or by the other into the cult of love, the idolatry that destroys the very foundation of life and society. And this at the cost of his birthright of finding himself, which has its beginning in the creative imagery of the dream.

The three figures we have discussed only begin to suggest the variety of forms that can appear. There are as many archetypes as there are typical situations in life, and these three happen to be the most common, the ones everyone must meet in one way or another. Jung went on to draw quite detailed pictures of others, such as the child archetype, the wise old man, the maiden, the Self (or inner redeemer), the holy marriage; and he once remarked that it took so much research material to be sure what the symbols meant that he learned not to lecture about it. He risked putting some people to sleep if he offered enough explanation of such symbols to make valid comparisons with the way people react today.¹² Most of us, in fact, are a little afraid to imagine that we are connected with the great symbols we see moving in history, in art and religion and poetry.

In addition he outlined the meaning of many non-human images that are important in understanding dreams. For instance, the sea often symbolizes the vast unconscious out of which man’s conscious life emerged and from which much of its sustenance still comes. Many people dream of the house that is their personal dwelling, or the automobile in which they get around in life, representing one’s conscious life and his ego, as against images of hotels, or of trains and railway stations, which speak of group life and mores. These are fairly easy to comprehend, as is the realization that animals often stand as symbols for the instinctive life within us. But there are many, many images, like the rock, the fountain, the bird, vessels of many kinds, even the father, which leave the dreamer cold until their original, usually religious meaning can be found and brought to life. The journeys that are made in dreams frequently represent one’s inner, spiritual quest, while earthquake or disaster may signify that a great, perhaps overwhelming change is taking place in the psychic structure of one’s life. Going back to childhood experience, say to a school classroom, usually represents the process of psychological reorientation and learning again, of growth. Indeed, there are too many such figures and images to ignore the fact that dreams speak a basic general language that can be understood.

It must be made perfectly clear, however, that these symbols can NEVER be studied from a book to give an easy, shorthand method of understanding dreams. Like any living language, they must be read in context, in connection with the personal associations they hold for the dreamer. In fact, as Jung often pointed out, dream interpretation is never a static process, but always an evolving one. Before any attempt at interpretation can be made, one must know the dreamer and the general state of his psyche, as well as all the facts that relate to the particular dream. It was the failure to see dreams in this light that kept the ancient dream interpreters from catching the full significance of the material that went into their dream books. They seemed to be seeking an eternal, dependable language rather than the parable of an inner life, and so they missed the meaning of many dreams. And yet, like Synesius, they did realize that no dream is meaningless.

There are several different ways in which dreams express meaning. Primarily because they picture what is not present in consciousness, they bring a person memories, experiences, images that can reveal the unconscious element in his relationships. Simply because they do not depend upon consciousness, but bring up the images and associations as they occur, dreams often reveal dormant qualities in the personality. In fact, Jung observed that they very often stand in glaring opposition to conscious intentions, particularly if a person’s attitude toward life is very one-sided.

In such cases there are sometimes striking examples of the compensatory behavior or function of dreams; a dream may speak directly to the person’s situation, calling attention to qualities of life which he has forgotten or ignored. One dream like this that I will never forget was told me by a very sweet old lady, who confessed with horror shortly before she died that she had a recurrent dream of strangling her mother. Yet nothing could have been further from possibility; and that was just the trouble. This woman would have had good reason for anger at her mother, who had ruined her life. But she was too nice to face such horrid thoughts, and so her dream reminded her that she was not being honest with herself. This same principle of compensation can also act with opposite force, like the instances in which criminals have been known to dream of acts of kindness and generosity which they would never think to do consciously.

This principle also accounts for many of the dreams that were seen by the early Christians as the work of the devil or demons. Since many of these men actually were one-sided, both in the way they lived and in the way they looked at life, they had dreams that simply seemed evil to them. It did not occur to them that these dreams represented a function of compensating for one’s view of life. But when the hermit dreamed of his voluptuous women, something deep within him, whether we call it the devil or not, presented him with this fare. A part of his own deepest self was offering him a reminder of what he was denying and sacrificing. And if the sacrifice is not conscious, is it indeed a sacrifice?

At the other extreme, there are dreams that simply emphasize the conscious attitude, or only introduce variations in it, and these also suggest the process of compensation. These dreams suggest at an individual’s conscious attitude is “adequate” toward the psychic forces within him; it takes in enough of the unconscious to be in balance with it, at least for the moment. These dreams are very often abstract; they deal with images and figures that symbolize the complex situation within the person, but they often stress form and relationship by putting the emphasis on geometric, numerical, or even color arrangements. One example of this is certainly found in Ezekiel’s vision of the wheels (1:15ff.) and in several places Jung discussed such dreams.¹³

Once in a while these dreams may take the form of clear, direct statements, although this does not happen very frequently. The unconscious, however, out of which consciousness has arisen, is quite capable of speaking consciously as well as symbolically. The dream we have described that came to Dr. A. J. Gordon in his Boston church was one of these. In it the setting, the people who were members of his church, and the words they spoke were all perfectly clear and familiar. Only the figure of Jesus, appearing as an ordinary churchgoer, had to be identified for him. It was dreams of this kind which were so highly valued in ancient times, undoubtedly because so many people hoped for specific guidance in this way.

Dreams of somewhat the same quality have also been reported by scientists at times when they were wholly engrossed in some problem. A story of this kind was told over television not long ago, of a physiologist who had been concentrating on a problem without reaching the solution. One night he was awakened by a dream that described the solution to a T, and he wrote it out and went back to sleep. In the morning his memory was not exact and his notes were undecipherable, but they were identified three nights later when he dreamed the same dream all over again.

Between these two extremes are all the “ordinary” dreams that take up bits of yesterday’s experience and play them out as a strange new drama. These dreams are often profoundly symbolic, and it is my experience that they generally offer greater help and guidance than those that are clear and direct. Just because of their compensatory behavior an understanding of them can disclose new ways of approaching the day’s problems. But this is not all. Over a longer period something far more important can be observed.

Where attention is given to dreams over a long period of time, as in the analytical situation, a vital process of development appears in the personality itself. Age-old dream symbols appear which represent a new center of personality, a higher center. In the isolated dream this process remains hidden in the compensation of the moment. But “with deeper insight and experience, these apparently separate acts of compensation arrange themselves into a kind of plan. They seem to hang together and in the deepest sense to be subordinated to a common goal.”¹⁴ This is what Jung described as the process of individuation, by which a man becomes at one with his own individuality, and at the same time with mankind, with the humanity of which he is a part. The process that Jung has described may well be the most important reason for paying attention to dreams. It is an inner way that is quite natural in man, but as is very obvious in today’s world, it is by no means automatic. To bring together both the dream world within one and the outer world of real people and things is a living process that is demanding and difficult and can easily be sidetracked. Jung stressed the religious nature of this process in many ways, particularly in his discussions of the dream symbols that move men toward this goal. ¹⁵

In addition, there is the clairvoyant or telepathic dream that sometimes brings spontaneous knowledge of something in the future or at a distance. This is abundantly clear from the numerous examples in the literature on dreams, although it is not understood. Jung has suggested that the constraining forces of time and space do not limit the unconscious as they do the conscious mind. It appears that, while the conscious mind is limited and circumscribed, the unconscious [the eternal, immortal soul?] is not contained within the boundaries of either time or space. The recent controlled experiments at Maimonides Hospital in New York¹⁶ leave no doubt about the ability of the unconscious mind to receive information in some way other than by sense experience, and then to represent it in dreams.

We do not have any explanation of how these dreams occur, however, nor any real insight into the reason for them, even though there are many proven instances. [See web author’s footnote.] For this reason it is probably wise, as we have already suggested, to value the occurrence of such dreams without making them an end in themselves. Jung suggested the basic nature of this problem in his excellent discussion of “A Psychological View of Conscience.”¹⁷ There is no question that such dreams come from a wisdom beyond our own. But we will wait a long time for our consciousness to start catching up with the wisdom of God if we ignore the dream that has personal religious significance and sit around waiting for an ESP experience. Many of the men who come the closest to a real understanding of dreams, and who have themselves experienced fruitful dream lives, have never once had a dream of a telepathic or prophetic nature.

Last of all, there are experiences of the numinous dream, the dream that is lightened by a special light and power and quality. These dreams tell us that we stand in a holy place. There rises within one a holy fear and awe, the very foundations of life tremble, and one finds himself in the very presence of God. It may be possible to understand certain attributes of these numinous contents, as Jung suggested in several places, but when it comes to the total effect one can only say as Jung did that a light has burst forth in the darkness which the dark cannot catch up with.¹⁸ Something incomprehensible, which has all the quality of a religious experience, has taken over. Such dreams are as meaningful as a waking religious experience and, like any other divine encounter, are valuable in themselves. The symbols of the unconscious may even slip away and we know the one who gives us our dreams, the one who has fashioned life, the one toward whom our lives turn as the lodestone toward the magnetic pole.

It takes skill to understand and interpret dreams. There will probably not be much argument about this as a general proposition, but it is a subject on which Jung was quite specific, and one which emphasizes the difference of his whole approach. It is also a subject he continued to write about. At least once he even recommended it to the Protestant clergy because of the great and unique opportunity he felt was given them in the world today. ¹⁹

About the only hard and fast rule Jung made, however, was to listen to the unconscious, to approach it without deciding beforehand what it has to say. If one reminds himself first of all, “I have no idea what this dream means,” then he is forced to let the dream and the associations around it tell him what he wants to know. Once the memories and experiences associated with the dream are known, then the exacting task of actual interpretation can begin. And this “needs psychological empathy, ability to coordinate, intuition, knowledge of the world and of men, and above all a special ‘canniness’ which depends on wide understanding as well as on a certain ‘intelligence du coeur.’” ²⁰ One is reminded of the church’s own words in the Renaissance, the recipe phrased by Pererius for an interpreter, “who, as it were, grasps the very pulse of man’s social and individual activity . . . [who is] divinely inspired and instructed.”

Where, then, does one get the ability, let alone the courage, to attempt this? There are five ways, each of them indispensable. In the first place, there is no substitute for practice. By listening, by asking and offering explanations, one gains experience. He watches to see which thought clicks, both in the person’s mind and in his life, and also which interpretations misfire, and gradually an instinct develops, a feeling for the meaning of one dream and also of many dreams. There is no other way but to try.

Next, one must come to know a great deal about the other person, his conscious life, his convictions. Dream-images can only be truly understood as they are seen rising out of a total life; in this sense Jung calls them “true symbols . . . expressions of a content not yet consciously recognized or conceptually formulated.” ²¹ They come into focus in the perspective of a man’s life, and the more that is known of his life, the clearer these symbols become. Even during the hour that I am able to spend with most people I find that my understanding of the dreams they bring grows rapidly. Indeed, it is quite foolish to attempt more than very general interpretations of a person’s dreams until we do know him fairly well. To interpret the dreams of those we do not know comes closer to magic than to a legitimate art.

The third requirement is even more important. One must listen to his own dreams if he is to help other people understand theirs. There is no easy way around this; it is the only way to reach the heights and depths, the far corners of the soul’s life. Only by paying attention to the unconscious, by listening to the contents that are still unknown in oneself, can he encourage these depths in himself and others to speak. In addition, he must know where these experiences lead; our dreams often bring us into dangerous and forbidden territory where there is conflict and struggle and pain, and one needs the confidence of another person who knows the way. Besides this, it is amazing how much more someone else can tell me about the meaning of my dreams than I can ever figure out by myself. After all, they speak of what is not conscious in me, and it is simpler for me to see the meaning in another person’s dreams which his inner blindness hides from his eyes. Thus I doubt if anyone can help another person understand dreams unless he himself has been counseled, guided, enlightened by someone wise in the ways of men and God.

Then there is a requirement that is easy to put into words but is the most difficult to put into action. In order to understand dreams one must first of all seek wisdom; he must be conversant with life. According to Jung it takes a “special canniness,” or in the medieval words of Pererius, “a complete and perfect knowledge, confirmed by many tests of human character, interests, customs, and persuasions.” This is a large order. To understand dreams one must live widely and well.

And finally, one must know God if he is to recognize the divine significance in dreams. These meanings are not often discovered by men who are driven just by natural impulses and imprisoned in the commonplace. Yet there have always been expressions of the numinous or divine in dreams, and one who is open to the voice of God, whose consciousness and powers of reflection are developed, will recognize them. He must also know the religious and mythological traditions of mankind, and know them well enough to bring life the symbols and dreams and amplify their meaning. This is a truly a religious task, as our own tradition certainly shows. From Paul on through the Middle Ages the church was never without men who used the gifts of wisdom and interpretation to understand dreams. Paul was only the first of many who made a conscientious effort to understand his dreams and, to a great extent, to govern his life by them.

Indeed, Jung calls modern Christians back to the consideration of life from a point of view that was once the Christian way. For those who know what it is to be lost in the rationalism of this modem era, he has something to say that hardly anyone else is trying to express. Jung’s approach to the psyche, to human experience, offers men a way by which they can find the lively religious meaning that once welled up in Christian life. Through the symbolic, the religious approach to men’s experience, they can know that God still speaks out of the depth of the human soul, and sometimes his voice will be heard clearly. Through this quite different view of life, Christians can reach once again a real understanding of their religious heritage, making it real and vital for themselves and others, and keeping in touch with the source of revelation that God is constantly providing through the depth of man’s being. Jung’s theory of dream interpretation has significance far beyond the practice of psychotherapy.

If Jung is so important, then why is it that more clergy have not realized his significant contribution? Why has it not been more readily seized upon in religious circles? The answer is at the same time both simple and difficult. In the first place, Jung often wrote badly from the standpoint of most readers. It takes fortitude to wade through his writings unless one is already interested in Jung. For decades the only work by which he was generally known among English-speaking peoples was his first book, The Psychology of the Unconscious, which he himself referred to as one of the “sins of my youth.” Even in the revised form as Symbols of Transformation, it took many years of acquaintance with Jung before I could get through it.

Then, Jung’s writings are based upon experience, and unless one has investigated such experiences in himself or in others, it is not too likely that he will be open to believing that such things happen. Jung’s studies, which were based directly upon his own experiences and those of his patients, have appeared esoteric and farfetched to many people. The facts he presented are not generally accepted in our society, since they are derived from experiences to which few people have exposed themselves. This involves a major philosophical question, which will be discussed in the next chapter.

The last reason is the most difficult and disturbing. Jung himself underwent a direct confrontation with God in his own life journey. Those who would understand or use the Jungian method must make a similar confrontation and journey. Jung’s method must be lived. It cannot just be understood. Jung wrote in his autobiography: “These talks with the ‘Other’ were my profoundest experiences: on the one hand a bloody struggle, on the other supreme ecstasy . . .” and “God alone was real—an annihilating fire and an indescribable grace.”²² Most modern Christianity has forgotten the reality of such encounters, which are very painful, and it does not choose to be reminded.

Instead, the reminder that dream experience is very real is still coming from the scientific and medical world. In fact, there is much in the present medical work on dreaming which backs up the things we have been discussing.

It is surprising how fast our ideas can change today. Ten years ago most people held the idea that dreams were fleeting experiences that happened once in a while, just by chance. Then the reports on the new research began to be published. Using the electroencephalograph to study eye movements as well as brain waves in sleep, the investigators have discovered periods of dreaming so universal and so different from either waking or non-dreaming sleep that today these are considered a third state of existence. According to Dr. Charles Fisher, who has summarized this research for the American Psychoanalytic Association, the recent findings suggest that

A great deal has been learned about this state of dreaming, which takes up nearly 20 to 25 per cent of the sleeping time of every one of us. At regular intervals it breaks “the monotonously impassive mask of sleep,” and a whole set of physiological reactions begin which are tuned to a dream. The sleeper’s eyelids begin to ripple, indicating that his eyes are moving rapidly, and his brain waves have changed from the random zigzag of sleep to a flattened, low-voltage pattern almost like attentive waking. At the same time metabolism rises; heart action, blood pressure, and breathing are all roused from the slow, even rhythms of sleep and suddenly speed up or slow down unaccountably. In men there is almost always full or partial penile erection. Although skin resistance and arousal thresholds are noticeably higher, the chemicals that normally prepare for arousal are released in abundance. Even the fine muscles of the ear respond as they do in waking attention, and in many regions of the brain spontaneous firing of nerve cells increases well beyond the waking level. This “uniquely intense condition of nervous excitation”²⁴ is even called by the name rapid eye movement period, or REMP, which is one of several outward, muscular reactions.

Yet for all practical purposes the motor system is switched off; the elementary reflexes no longer function, and there is loss of muscle tone. Even things like sleepwalking and enuresis [bed-wetting], which were always considered a part of dreaming, never occur during REMPs, or only rarely, as is the case of sleep talking. At the same time there is actually more body movement and movement of the fine muscles than there is in the rest of sleep, non-REM sleep, when muscle tone and reflexes are both in working order. In effect, the body is allowed certain expression and yet is protected from acting out its dream. It is no wonder that dreaming or REM sleep is sometimes called “paradoxical sleep.”

Dreaming periods alternate with non-REM periods in regular cycles occurring on an average of four or five times a night. The REMPs last from a few minutes to over an hour,²⁵ increasing successively in length during the night, while the non-REM periods become progressively shorter. The first rapid eye movements appear only after a prolonged period of non-REM sleep, although at sleep onset there is a brief period when hypnagogic images are appearing that is unique. It is the only time when the typical dreaming pattern of the EEG (electroencephalogram) occurs without the presence of REMs.

All people dream, whether this surprises them or not. Ninety per cent of the time, persons wakened from REM sleep remember a dream. Besides this, some kind of mental activity seems to go on all of the time. When a sleeper is awakened in any period and asked what was going through his mind, there is almost always recall of something specific. Usually it is less distinct in non-REM sleep and is less visual, more connected with the events of the day and more like “thinking” than the vivid, spontaneous memory of a dream. Yet images and even full-length dreams have been reported from non-REM sleep, and it appears very difficult to confine dreaming to just one period of sleep or to one particular kind of mental activity.²⁶ Sometimes, in fact, a pattern seems to run through all the dreams of a night, as if these various periods were all working together to produce one final, very important product—man’s conscious being.

No one doubts the direct effect of the physical body in this process. REMPs are triggered in one of the most remote and primitive parts of the brain, the pontile limbic formation, which is probably tied to instinctual drives and emotions, including penile erection. They have also been studied in babies and in many different animals that cannot be questioned about a dream and yet show all the physical reactions that go with dreaming.²⁷ But on the other hand, it appears equally certain that dreams have specific effect on the body, perhaps many of them. The best-known is the rapid eye movement that reflects almost exactly what is happening in a dream. For instance, one of the experimenters who discovered this was watching some horizontal eye movements of a subject and predicted a dream about a tennis match; when the sleeper awoke, he reported that he had been watching two men throw tomatoes at each other across a fence. On top of this, sudden changes in heart rate, respiration, and blood pressure often dovetail so exactly with changes in eye movement that these functions, as well as other movements, appear to reflect the psychic experience of dreaming. Indeed, it is difficult to ignore the inter-play of body and psyche that is being revealed by these studies. Some heart attacks may quite possibly be the direct result of psychic stimulation and excitement during dreaming. The studies are also revealing a great deal about the need to dream. Subjects who were deprived of most of their REM sleep made inordinate attempts to dream during the experiments, as many as thirty by the fifth night, and then proceeded to make up for the deprivation on the first “recovery” nights. Various effects on the personality were observed, ranging from moderate anxiety and disturbance of motor control, memory, concentration, to almost psychotic manifestations when deprivation was prolonged. In one case of a person who stayed awake for two hundred hours, psychotic episodes occurred that looked “for all the world like dream episodes during Sleep”²⁸ and seemed to reflect the same basic rhythms. Alcohol and also certain drugs like Dexadrine and the barbiturates have been found to suppress dreaming, and it is suggested that dream deprivation may play a part in delirium tremens. On the other hand, certain drugs, notably LSD, have a striking effect of lengthening REM periods.

At any rate one thing is perfectly clear from these studies. The human organism has a need to dream. This need was originally based on certain physiological mechanisms. But sometime in early development, as Dr. Fisher puts it, “these physiological mechanisms are taken over by the psychological process of dreaming and a new function emerges, namely, the regulation of instinctual drive discharge processes through hallucinatory wish fulfillment, as opposed to physiological discharge through motor patterns.”²⁹ In short, the human animal begins to dream its way to becoming a man.

Thus the scientific world continues to pile up evidence that shows the importance of dreaming in men’s lives. From the beginning of Freud’s revealing discoveries, the medical interest in dreams has gradually grown. Jung’s findings in particular offer support for the traditional religious view, and the most recent research suggests that dreams may be as important in the development of man as they have been in religious practice.

¹ In the century or so before Freud there was wide medical interest in dreaming; among the doctors writing on the subject were David Hartley, John Abercrombie, Wilhelm Griesinger, Robert MacNish, A. J. B. de Boismont, S. Weir Mitchell, and August Forel, to name only a few. In France the purely scientific interest in dreams began particularly early and has continued to grow, as also happened later in the rest of Europe and in America. See Woods, op. cit., pp. 397ff.; also Meseguer, op. cit., pp. 39ff.
²The great philosophers from Descartes on added little to the understanding of dreams. They were almost totally absorbed in the study of consciousness, and while most of them had opinions about dreams which were mentioned in passing, none of them treated the subject on its own merits. Their opinions were divided between those who saw the dream as meaningless or merely a reflection of the organic state of the body, and those who saw it as signifying more. Among the followers of Aristotle and Cicero there were Thomas Hobbes, Pierre Bayle, Leibnitz, Kant, Nietzsche, and Santayana. On the other hand, Locke, Voltaire, Goethe, Schopenhauer, Schelling, Emerson, and Bergson could not dismiss the dream so lightly. In 1901 Bergson wrote:
“If telepathy influences our dreams, it probably has the best opportunity to manifest itself during very deep sleep. But, I repeat, I can make no pronouncement on this point. I have gone forward with you as far as possible. I stop at the threshold of the mystery. To explore the innermost depths of the unconscious, to work in what I have called earlier the substratum of consciousness, that will be the main task of psychology in the century that is dawning. I do not doubt that wonderful discoveries await it there, as important perhaps as were in the preceding centuries the discoveries in the physical and natural sciences.” Henri Bergson, The World of Dreams, New York, Philosophical Library, Inc., 1958, p. 57.
This was the period in which interest in psychic research and the occult began to grow, as Henry Holt, Frederick Van Eeden, and F. W. H. Myers, to mention but a few of the best-known, pursued the subject, which most philosophers had come to ignore. Long forgotten were the significant insights of the previous century, developed by scientists and literary men like Lichtenberg, Herder, C. H. von Schubert, C. Nodier, and Henri Amiel, which often anticipated the investigations of Freud.
³ C. G. Jung, Collected Works, Vol. 5, pp. 16ff.
⁴ C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, New York, Pantheon Books, Inc., 1963, p. 183.
⁵ C. G. Jung, Collected Works, Vol. 8, pp. 150f.
⁶ C. G. Jung, Collected Works, Vol. 4, p. 330.
⁷ Ibid., p. 148
⁸ C. G. Jung, Collected Works, Vol. 8, p. 294.
⁹ C. G. Jung, Collected Works, Vol. 10, p. 151f.
¹⁰ Ibid., p.153.
¹¹ Quoted by Jung, Collected Works, Vol. 9, Part 1, p. 4; from Migne, Patrologiae Latinae, Vol. 40, Col. 30.
¹² Ibid., p. 50. Jung wrote two entire books, Aion and Mysterium Coniunctionis, on the last two of these symbols, the self and the holy marriage. These are among his most complex and interesting works.
¹³ Particularly Vol. 11, pp. 65ff., and Vol. 9, Part 2, pp. 290ff.
¹⁴ C. G. Jung, Collected Works, Vol. 8, p. 289.
¹⁵ Some of the most fascinating of this material was presented in the seminars on dream analysis given by Dr. Jung in 1928, 1929, and 1930, in which he turned for comparative material to many experiences and stories described by Christians, often from old and neglected sources. The printed reports of these seminars are available in the library of the Jung Institute in Zurich for study by qualified persons.
¹⁶ Montague Ullman, M.D., Stanley Krippner, Ph.D., and Sol Feldstein, B.E.E., “Experimentally-induced Telepathic Dreams: Two Studies Using EEG-REM Monitoring Technique,” International Journal of Neuropsychiatry, Vol. 2, No. 5, October 1966, pp. 420ff.
Web author’s commentary I personally think that these dreams may be a result of our interconnectedness on the spiritual plane, a realm beyond the created order of time and space, for Christian and non-Christian are alike “created in the image of God,” which has much to do with the spiritual, other-worldly element of humanity, otherwise known as the inner self, the subconscious or unconscious, or the soul or spirit. Would it not be possible, if we are thus connected to the same spiritual reality already presently enjoyed by angels, demons, and other spiritual entities—and ultimately God, the Source and Giver of all that there is—that we could tap into such realm? The hierarchy of human depth seems to run, from least to greatest: intellectual, emotional, spiritual. Just as this account maintains that religion, or more accurately spirituality, involves and engages the depth of emotion, so to do I think this explains the fact that women, being most often more emotionally and relationally based than men, often sense their spiritual neediness sooner than men do—indeed, why a man’s anima is at the core of his spirituality, as has previously been suggested in this account. It is because the emotional is one “level” closer to the spiritual than the intellectual, closer to the depth of the inner person, which, as it were, is the part of the human being that is immortal, the part that will live on after the outer shell has passed away. In such case, this innermost part of humanity exists on the same level presently enjoyed by angels and demons—if you will, we already have a foot into the door of the real world, for this earthly, physical world is a mere shadow of the one to come. It is from this foot in the door that I hypothesize clairvoyant and telepathic dreams originate, for they connect us to the very essence of reality that flows from the throne room of God. In addition, since we all have this hypothetical foot in the door because we are all created in the image of God—sentient, spiritual beings—we share this interconnectedness (Jung’s collective unconscious?) with one another, and in particular, with those we love dearest. In short, if we are all thus connected, to one another and to other living beings within the universe, and ultimately to God, the Source and Sustainer of all that there is, should we have any wonder that we don’t occasionally discern something that far supersedes our ordinary individual perceptual experience, something that comes “from beyond,” something that is larger than the single individual? Indeed, as English metaphysical poet and divine John Donne writes, “No man is an Island . . .” —Eric
¹⁷ C. G. Jung, Collected Works, Vol. 10, pp. 450ff.
¹⁸ C. G. Jung, Collected Works, Vol. 14, p. 255.
¹⁹ C. G. Jung, Collected Works, Vol. 11, pp. 348ff.
²⁰ C. G. Jung, Collected Works, Vol. 8, p. 286.
²¹ C. G. Jung, Collected Works, Vol. 16, p. 156.
²² Memories, Dreams, Reflections, pp. 48 and 56.
²³ Charles Fisher, M.D., “Psychoanalytic Implications of Recent Research on Sleep and Dreaming,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, Vol. 13, No. 2, April 1965, p. 198. A visit to a sleep laboratory is invaluable in understanding the fascinating discoveries that keep coming from this new science. Here—where one can see the sleepers, the wires taped about their heads, and actually watch the electronic machines tracing out the individual rhythms of brain waves and various muscular movements in coordinated patterns—he begins to comprehend the possibilities of dream research. Even the inexperienced eye can quickly detect the distinctive difference between the waking tracing and the stages of sleep. My own initiation was under the skillful direction of Dr. Paul Naitoh at the Naval Medical Research facility at Point Loma, California, where sleep deprivation is studied. In most aspects, however, the apparatus and methods here are essentially the same as those used in many other laboratories where the content and varied significance of dreams are being studied.
²⁴ Frederick Snyder, M.D., “Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Dreaming,” The American Journal of Psychiatry, Vol. 123, No. 2, August 1966, pp. 122f.
²⁵ The original study by Dement and Kleitman showed that, for persons dreaming four times a night, the mean duration of the first REMP was nine minutes, the second nineteen, the third twenty-four, and the fourth twenty-eight minutes. Fisher, op. cit., p. 201.
²⁶ Ibid., pp. 213ff. Also, W. David Foulkes, “Dream Reports from Different Stages of Sleep,” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, Vol. 65, No. 1, January 1962, pp. 15 and 21ff.
²⁷ REMPs seem to be present at birth in all mammals, and there is good reason to suspect that they go on before birth. (Synder, op. cit., p. 125.) Perhaps Lovejoy is right in his ideas, and the brain of the newborn in infant already houses images that are active and ready to be worked on. Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Revolt Against Dualism, New York, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1930.
²⁸ Fisher, op. cit., p. 247.
²⁹ Ibid., p. 280.