Interpreting the Wisdom of the Dream

Dreams are the language in which all aspects of a person’s individual psychology express themselves in an uncensored form. Dreams are the threshold into the unconscious from the conscious.

“Only the dreamer knows the true meaning of his dreams.”

– Edgar Cayce.

“The dream is a little hidden door in the innermost and most secret recesses of the psyche, opening into that cosmic night which was psyche long before there was any ego consciousness, and which will remain psyche no matter how far our ego consciousness may extend.”

– Carl Jung.

The 4-Step Approach:

1. Making Associations
A dream may contain persons, objects, situations, colors, sounds, or speech. Each of these is a distinct image and needs to be looked at in its own right. Write down all the images that appeared in the dream. Starting with the first image, ask yourself; “What feeling do I have about this image? What words or ideas come to mind when I look at it?” Your association is any word, idea, mental picture, feeling, or memory that pops into your mind when you look at the dream. It is literally anything that you spontaneously connect with the image. Again with the second and subsequent images, write down the associations.

2. Connecting Dream Images to Inner Dynamics
By inner dynamics we mean anything that goes on inside you, any energy system that lives and acts from within you. It may be an emotional event, such as a surge of anger. It may be an inner conflict, an inner personality acting through you, a feeling, an attitude, or a mood. To perform the second step, we need to go back to the beginning and again deal with each image one at a time. For each image ask; “What part of me is that? Where have I seen it functioning in my life lately? Where do I see the same trait in my personality? Who is it, inside me, who feels like that or behaves like that?” Write down each example that you can think of in which that inner part of you has been expressing itself in your life.

3. Interpretations
The interpretation ties together all the meaning you have drawn from the dream into one, unified picture. It is a coherent statement of what the dream means to you as a whole. At this stage you ask questions like; “What is the central, most important message that this dream is trying to communicate to me? What is it advising me to do? What is the overall meaning of the dream?

4. Doing Rituals to Make the Dream Concrete
Up until now, you have done your best to understand the dream with your mind. Now it is time to do something about it. You need to ask yourself; “What am I going to do about my dream?” For some people this is a difficult stage of the dream work yet, with a little practice, you can learn to use you imagination and invent ingenious rituals that will give your dream immediacy and physical concreteness. The fourth step requires a physical act that will affirm the message of the dream. It could be a practical act; As a result of your dream, you may feel that you need to pay your bills on time, or straighten out a relationship that has become confused. Or it may be a symbolic act – a ritual – that brings home the meaning of the dream in a powerful way. For example, if your dream tells you that you spend too much time on work, that you need more physical relaxation, you could make a ritual of taking yourself to the beach, or to the country, focusing your eyes on the colors of the earth and sky, reconnecting to the physical world.


Reference:
Johnson, Robert A., Inner Work: Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth, Harper San Francisco, 1989