How do dreams mean? A Jungian Answer

I went through the Topical Guide to the Scriptures on the topic of Dreams and found the collected references quite insightful.  The scriptures do not give us a dream encyclopedia, just a reminder that the interpretation of dreams is a spiritual gift.

Fascinated by how dreams communicate to us, I have collected some examples (with a little bit of underlying theory) of what people have learned from dreams.

One Jungian theory is that some dreams are "compensatory or complementary."  They "balance a one-sided attitude of consciousness" or "complete what is lacking in the contents of consciousness which are too narrow or are not considered sufficiently valuable."

Some examples of such balancing dreams

1.  "...someone who suffers from feelings insecurity and inferiority and in a dream finds himself in a hero role."
2. "Jung relates the case of a lady who was well known for her stupid prejudices and her stubborn resistance to reasoned argument.  One night she dreamed she was invited to an important social affair.  Her hostess greeted her with the words, 'Oh, how nice you have come!  All your friends are here already and are expecting you.'  The hostess then led her to a door, opened it and the dreamer stepped into - a cowshed!  'The woman would not admit at first the point of a dream that struck so directly at her self-importance, but its message nevertheless went home.'"

"Sometimes a dream...gives advice like a well meaning person."

1. "I had a rich elderly woman analysand who had been alcoholic and had given up drinking.  But the neurotic problems that lay behind her alcoholism, especially a general demoralization and slovenliness, still had to be worked out.  Once she dreamed that a voice told her, 'You need a breakfast corset.'  I asked her in great detail what time she ate breakfast, what kind of corset she wore, when she put it on, etc.  I discovered then that out of vanity she wore a very tight corset but never put it on in the morning; rather she breakfasted in her dressing gown, then dawdled around the apartment in her negligee the rest of the morning and put her corset on around noon.  Only then did her day actually begin.  After this information, the dream no longer needed interpretation, and we both laughed heartily.  I would ask her, 'How is it going with the breakfast corset?'"
2. "I once had an analysand who had to give up alcohol, which he did bravely for a couple of months.  Then he said to me, 'Listen, don't you think I could dare now to have one glass of beer in the evening at the Sternan Hotel with Betty?  Just one glass?  I am always so lost in the evenings, so lonely.'  Although I knew this was not advisable, I just said, 'I don't know, I don't want to be your governess.  Try it and we will see how your unconscious reacts.'  He did this, drank his glass of beer, and went home.  That night he dreamed of driving his car up a mountain, all the way to the top, but when he got there he did not brake properly and the car rolled backward all the way down the mountain until he was back where he started....He immediately realized that 'only one glass of beer' would not work."

Quotes from
Marie-Louise Von Franz
Dreams

A Jewish "Falling Away"

Like Christianity, which must confront the difference between modern times and the miraculous, charismatic events of the first century, Judaism has had to ponder the end of the prophetic era.

"After the death of Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi, the last of the prophets, the Holy Spirit ceased from Israel."

Tosifta Sot. xiii, 2
quoted by
Abraham Cohen
Everyman's Talmud

"By the rabbinic period, prophecy - direct communication from God - had given way to textual interpretation: exactly what we are doing.  The sages preferred to interpret the Torah actively rather than passively awaiting new revelations.  Further, I suspect that they were suspicious of new revelations, which potentially undercut their authority.  They preferred an established system of commentary to charismatic religion.  For the rabbis, active prophecy ended with the biblical books of the Minor Prophets, Haggai, Malachi and Zechariah.  From that point onward, the rabbis engaged in midrash, the searching out God's will through interpretation of the scriptural canon."

Rabbi Burton L. Visotsky
Sage Tales

"The men of prehistoric times, being able to use the Holy Spirit, gave names to their children which indicated events that were going to happen to them later in their lives; we, on the other hand, who cannot employ the Holy Spirit, name our children after our ancestors."

Genesis R. xxxvii, 7
quoted by
Abraham Cohen
Everyman's Talmud

Self Regard

"Every man is prompted by the love of himself to imagine, that he possesses some qualities, superior, either in kind or in degree, to those which he sees allotted to the rest of the world; and, whatever apparent disadvantages he may suffer in the comparison with others, he has some invisible distinctions, some latent reserve of excellence, which he throws into the balance, and by which he generally fancies that it is turned in his favour."

Samuel Johnson
The Rambler, 29

Jung and the source of Dreams

I've been reading and thinking about dreams a lot lately.

Jung and his disciples had a fascinating approach to the dream that verges on the religious.  The following quotes are from Marie-Louise Von Franz, a close associate of Jung and a well known interpreter and influential diffuser of Jungian ideas.

"Who or what is this miraculous something that composes a series of dream images?....it must be a being of the most superior intelligence - judging from the depth and cleverness of dreams....each time we succeed in understanding a dream and morally assimilating its message we 'begin to see (the light)'....one sees oneself for a moment through the eyes of another, of something objective which views one from the outside as it were....This eye which looks at us from within has to do with what we usually call conscience."

Marie-Louise Von Franz
Dreams

While neither Jung nor Von Franz would go so far as to claim the "objective existence" of God, they put the kind of faith into the unconscious self (the "image of God" inside man) that allowed them the ability to have spiritual experiences in which they received guidance, and were even given glimpses of the future.

Symbols

"Symbols are the universal tongue. … Symbols bring color and strength to language, while deepening and enriching our understandings. Symbols enable us to give conceptual form to ideas and emotions that may otherwise defy the power of words. They take us beyond words and grant us eloquence in the expression of feelings. Symbolic language conceals certain doctrinal truths from the wicked and thereby protects sacred things from possible ridicule. At the same time, symbols reveal truth to the spiritually alert."

“… Symbols are the language in which all gospel covenants and all ordinances of salvation have been revealed. From the time we are immersed in the waters of baptism to the time we kneel at the altar of the temple with the companion of our choice in the ordinance of eternal marriage, every covenant we make will be written in the language of symbolism.”

Joseph Fielding McConkie and Donald W. Parry, Guide to Scriptural Symbols (1990),

 

 

 

"Symbolic language is a language in which inner experience, feelings and thoughts are expressed as if they were sensory experiences or events in the outer world.  Symbolic language is different from the language ordinarily spoken in daily life.  It has a different logic.  Time and space, for example, are not the ruling categories that they are in outer life.  Rather the ruling categories are intensity and association....

 

"Symbolic language is not only the language of dreams, but it is also the language of myths and fairy tales. It is the most basic way in which people are able to grasp an idea....

 

"Even when the symbol used denotes a physical, limited thing, it carries enlarging connotations.  The meaning is usually somewhat ambiguous, but still it carries emotional power and suggests multiple meanings.  It intimates a larger reality....

 

"....genuine symbols cannot be precisely 'interpreted' by any one single meaning.  Jung says they are always 'ambiguous, full of half-glimpsed meanings, and in the last resort inexhaustible'....Jung pointed to the danger of reducing a symbol to some specified rational interpretation."

 

Clift, Wallace and Jean

Symbols of Transformation in Dreams

Ancient associations between the temple and creation

I remember that somewhere in Nibley's writings there is a reference to the Egyptian word Benben, the primordial mound or first earth which formed the center of creation.  The temple (at least at Hieropolis) was supposed to be the site of the Benben.  I've run onto a similar tradition from the Talmud:

"Tradition relates that in the temple there was Eben Shetiyyah (a foundation stone) which was so named because upon it the world was founded, and from this as a centre the was created....

Since the Sun was not created until the fourth day, whence did light have its origin?....the light emanated from the site of the temple which...was the centre of the world's creation."

Abraham Cohen
Everyman's Talmud

The Talmudic references were Joma 54b and Gen. R. III, 4.

A Jewish Elijah Story

I collect incidents of possible translated beings.  Sorry, it's just who I am.


"A third of a century ago, on the day I was ordained a Rabbi, I went on a journey to save Jews from an oppressive government.  I traveled to the city of Bukhara...then part of the USSR.  We had the name of a family there....My mission was to bring them blue jeans to trade on the black market so they could put food on their table, let them know they were not forgotten....

"We set out on foot from our six story hotel...looking for Ulitsa Zagorodnaya 8....We got profoundly lost, wandering through the warren of winding lanes for an hour or more....I gave up finding the address I was sent to visit and approached any and every passerby, asking in broken Russian where the hotel was.  No reply....No luck....

"And then I saw a wizened old man dressed in a long, dusty black caftan, carrying what looked to be a shepherd's crook.  Gray beard down to his chest, he seemed as old as Bukhara itself.  I approached him with the hotel card in my hand, but as I drew near to him found myself saying Ulitsa Zagorodnaya?"  I didn't say the house number....With a brief nod, the old man signaled that we should follow him  In and out of the maze we went....

"The old man stopped and with his staff, rapped on an arched wooden door.  There, outlined faintly in chalk was the number eight.  Was this the house we were looking for?  Using mime, we gestured for the old man to stay put while we knocked on the door and stuck our heads in....We asked for 'Goldberg' and were immediately informed....We had found the right place.  The entire conversation took no more than twenty seconds.  We popped back out into the street to thank our elderly guide, but he had vanished into the shimmering hot air!  We looked down the street the way we had come.  Not there.  We looked the other way.  Not there either.  But we notices that the street took a short dog's-leg bend, so we scurried down the road to see if our nice old man was yet there, just out of our sight lines.  But he was gone, gone."

Rabbi Burton L. Visotzky
Sage Tales: Wisdom and Wonder from the Rabbis of the Talmud