Carl Jung on Dreams

The reality of dreams and their usefulness in 3 parts (+ DOWNLOADABLE SUMMARY 📝)

“We do not live only by day.

Sometimes we accomplish our greatest deeds in dreams”

– C.G Jung, ‘The Red Book,’ p. 113

Wheatfield with Cypress (1889) Vincent Van Gogh

Dream interpretation is massively misunderstood.

The moment you enter the slightly vague and spiritual world of dreams and their symbols you’re met with occultists and fantasists. Real dream-work is a lot more grounded. This isn’t to say it’s no less profound, only that they’re some rules and guidelines you need to know if you actually want to use dreams to your advantage.

A game needs parameters to be playable; inner-work needs a framework to be useable.

This is a comprehensive guild to the nature of dreams.

Part 1 will cover the most common mistake people make. Part 2 and 3 will explore the 2 types of dreams. You need the basic Jungian theory I’m going to give you now to make the most of this. Carl Jung was prominent psychologist of the early 20th century.

Though using dreams in a therapeutic setting wasn’t unique, his approach to it was.

The 17th century was the dawn of the scientific age (The Enlightenment).

The feeling and emotional era of the prior Romanticism was being replaced thinking and calculated attitudes. Simply, irrational things like religion and superstition were being ousted. And obviously, some of this stuff we’re better without.

But this is where Jung showed his genius.

Like all breakups, everything becomes emotionally charged and black and white.

Only years later in retrospect do most of us look back and regret deleting all trace of that person from our lives. We remember the good times, and can appreciate them now the initial ego-damage has subsided.

This is the 21st century story of religion.

We dump it her for sexy science; now the cracks are starting to show.

The message of Carl Jung isn’t a reversion to the religious fervour of the Medieval Ages. Quite the opposite. He made the very polarising point that life isn’t black and white, and is in fact full of nuance.

With the expulsion of religion, we threw out the baby with the bathwater.

Within each of us is a complex psyche with needs and billions of years worth of evolutionary data.

The hubris of the scientific age is thinking it’s not tied (and ultimately controlled) by these animal instincts. This is basically the story of all sci-fi: the power of technology in ape-like hands of humanity. The Freudian ironically took the Christian approach of trying to shame, coerce, and guilt your very nature out of you.

Jung saw the stupidity in this (it’s not going anywhere).

The only way to overcome destructive human nature is to integrate it.

In the Jungian philosophy, everything is happening to achieve this psychological equilibrium between the rational ego consciousness, and the irrational unconsciousness. Jung dubbed this deep unconsciousness we all share the Collective Unconscious.

When spiritual people talk about God or wisdom coming from within you, this is what they’re referring to.

“The collective unconscious contains the whole spiritual heritage of mankind’s evolution, born anew in the brain structure of every individual”

– C.G. Jung, ‘The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche,’ para. 342

So what is the significance of dreams?

They are the primary way the unconscious communicates with us.

Here’s The reality of dreams and their usefulness in 3 parts…

(See end for downloadable summary 📝)

Part I. Literalism vs Symbolism

“A representation, which is collectively mistaken for an ultimate—ought not to be called a representation. It is an idol”

— Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances, p. 38

Barfield was a British philosophy who essentially made the point that “literalism is idolatry.” (Idolatry being a Christian term for the worship of false idols). What’s really interesting is the fact he was in the same literally group as J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis.

What most people get wrong about dreams, myth, and religion is simple:

They take it (sometimes believe in it) at a face-value it doesn’t exist in.

I.e. literally. Think of a road sign depicting a man with a shovel. We all know this symbol isn’t an actual man, but a representation of the man further down the road we need to not run over. The problem the Church has had over the last century is all due to everyone taking it too literally.

The following statement:

“Jesus loves you, died for your sins, and when you take the eucharist, you are eating his flesh and drinking his blood”

has no right whatsoever to be taken literally. It is literally not true. There is no Jesus in the phenomenal world; he couldn’t have died for your sins if you hadn’t been born yet to commit them; and the bread and wine a priest gives you is empirical not flesh or blood.

BUT earlier Christians never took these statements literally.

Us moderns are clearly more technically intelligent.

But are ability for nuance and compartmentalisation of thought is hilariously bad compared to archaic man. Religion used to work because people understood Christ dying for your sins, or Buddha coming back to save us, were symbolic events.

They happened, but they also didn’t.

Isn’t that also what a dream is?

I dreamed last that I saw someone, went to sea, and fought dragon. In my mind, this happened, but upon awakening I realised it was a dream. But it still happened, just not in the world. Now, we could go into how everything happens in your head anyway – so what even is reality?

But it’s funner if you do that.

Dreams operate on the symbolic level.

Our modern mind is so fundamentally fixated on literalism, even when we do start to explore dreams, or return to religion, we commit the same sin of idolatry (literalism). This is why spiritual people are often caught in a delusion, or religious people are so bone headed as to not see reason: they’re still operating literally, and have to warp reality to fit their narrative.

Jung showed us that science and religion really aren’t as incompatible as we think.

I study a science (psychology) and believe science can achieve miracles.

I also believe in God, and that much of life’s meaning and advancement is found through spiritual quests. Science and religion aren’t non-compatible, they need each other. This wonderful and bizarre universe we’re in can be explored further with science, while science needs a means to advance maturely so that we don’t kill ourselves with its discoveries.

Now dreams come in 2 main categories:

1. Prognostic (i.e. foretelling)

and

2. Common

Part II. Prognostic Dreams

These are the classic movie portrayal of dreams.

A glimpse of the future, a foretelling or a warning for the protagonist and viewer to contemplate. These are not only extremely rare, but ultimately useless, and not at all what you think. Jung had a very interesting prognostic dream/vision we’ll cover in a second, but first some theory so this doesn’t sound mental.