It looks like I will be teaching a short course on Understanding Your Dreams in the spring at the Belfast Senior College here where I live. And I plan to offer an online dream group later in the spring — stay tuned for news about that. Given that, I thought maybe a small introduction to understanding dreams would whet your appetite.
Jung tells us:
“After the parting of the ways with Freud, a period of inner uncertainty began for me. … I felt it necessary to develop a new attitude toward my patients. I resolved for the present not to bring any theoretical premises to bear upon them, but to wait and see what they would tell of their own accord. My aim became to leave things to chance. The result was that the patients would spontaneously report their dreams and fantasies to me, and I would merely ask, ‘What occurs to you in connection with that?’ or, ‘How do you mean that, where does that come from, what do you think about it?’ The interpretations seemed to follow of their own accord from the patients’ replies and associations. I avoided all theoretical points of view and simply helped the patients to understand the dream-images by themselves, without application of rules and theories. Soon I realized that it was right to take the dreams in this way as the basis of interpretation, for that is how dreams are intended. They are the facts from which we must proceed.” (Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections Pp. 170-71)
It is very difficult for some of my patients to get it that I am not the expert on their dreams, that I have no magic wand to wave to magically reveal all that the dream contains. That they themselves are the experts for their dreams is a tough concept as many of them are so used to looking to experts for answers. But this is exactly what I like most about Jungian dream analysis, that we start from the patient and not from the theory.
So forget about your books of dream symbols and just be with your dreams. Ask yourself the questions Jung asks in the quote above. Let the dream talk to you. And if you must have a book to help you, here are 2 that may give you some ideas:
Inner Work by Robert Johnson
The Art of Dreaming: Tools for Creative Dream Work by Jill Mellick
Neither of them will tell you what your dreams mean, but they will give you some tools for understanding them better.
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