Dream Wise: Unlocking the Meaning of Your Dreams

Then you will find what supports you when nothing supports you. Then you will be comforted by, rather than threatened by, the idea that something within you knows you better than you know yourself. Then your ego consciousness will be reframed, enlarged, and deepened.

Jung distinguished a symbol from a sign. Signs represent something specific: stylized images of a man and a woman indicate public restrooms; a red light signals stop.

Dreams address the unfinished business of daily life and anticipate future events. The unconscious takes in information that consciousness misses and tells us through dreams what we have missed and misjudged. Because the unconscious is ahead of consciousness, dreams can alert us to possibilities and probabilities that may lie ahead. Dreams foster p

Having studied myths, symbols, and religious material, Jung posited a collective unconscious, a deep layer of psychic experience common to humankind. This concept is unique to Jungian psychology. The repository of prototypical, instinctual human experience over millennia, the collective unconscious is a wellspring of inherent, universal patterns an

Finally, dreams are usually about the inner world. The dream maker is mostly interested in us. In waking life, the external world demands our attention; we turn our faces outward to interact with others, accomplish tasks, and achieve goals. However, the dream maker remarks primarily on things happening in the interior. We are often tempted to see d

Though the unconscious remains distant from ego awareness, we do have the symptom, or the dream, that is conscious, and each visitant has one foot in the dual realms. By respecting and tending this manifestation of the unconscious, we can finally begin to discern the direction of the psyche’s desire for us.

Persona, the Greek word for “mask,” is the social face we show the world—it’s our relational manager. As the cornea protects the eye, our persona protects us from the social grit of disapproval and mediates social interactions. Unlike the cornea, we shape our persona in tune with cultural norms—for example, showing different aspects of ourselves at

complex is an autonomous center of energy formed by memories, sensory experiences, images, and ideas that coalesce around an archetypal core. Jung discovered complexes through his word association test early in his career: subjects’ responses to stimulus words were delayed or inappropriate if a word was emotionally loaded and caused unconscious int

As Jung put it, would you not wish to converse with a two-million-year-old sage who knocked at your door, who knows what nature knows and perhaps the dreamer has forgotten? So each night, then, this source of natural sagacity comes to us and invites a conversation. Seen this way, how could we not pay some respectful attention to such a summons?