part0012

For every symbol in a dream the unconscious is ready to provide the associations that explain the symbol’s meaning. The unconscious contains within itself the references for every symbol that it generates; therefore, the symbolic language of the unconscious can be decoded. Our task begins with waking up to the associations that spontaneously flow out of us in response to symbols.

First, go through your dream and write out every association that you have with each dream image. A dream may contain persons, objects, situations, colors, sounds, or speech. Each of these, for our purposes, is a distinct image and needs to be looked at in its own right.

The basic technique is this: Write down the first image that appears in the dream. Then 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 image in the dream. It is literally anything that you spontaneously connect with the image.

Usually every image will inspire several associations. Each brings to mind a certain person, word, phrase, or memory. Write down each association that comes directly from the image. Then go back to the image and see what other associations come to mind. Keep returning to the dream image and writing down each association that is produced in your mind. Only after you have written all the associations that you find in that one image should you go on to the next image and begin the same process.

At first, this may feel like a lot of work. But after you do it a few times and discover the amazing power of this technique to key you into the meaning of your dream symbols, you will feel that it is well worth the effort. You will also begin to see why symbols have such power over human beings: Symbols connect us spontaneously to the deep parts of ourselves that we have longed to touch.

At this point you should not try to decide which association is the so-called right one. Often the first connection that comes up, the one that seems so obvious, is not the one that will work best for you later on in the process. The unconscious doesn’t follow the pathways of ego-logic. An association that feels silly, off-the-wall, irrational, may turn out to be the one that makes the most sense after you work awhile. Sometimes all the associations turn out to be relevant to your dream, although they seem contradictory at first. So don’t try to choose among them at this point. Just write them down.

Suppose you have a dream that begins: “I am in a blue room.” The first image you have to work with is the color blue. These might be the associations you would produce:

It is no accident that the unconscious produces the color blue in one scene, but uses red in another or black in yet another. Blue is used because this particular color expresses the dynamic at work in the unconscious. The meaning that blue has for the unconscious will be found somewhere in the associations to this color that the unconscious produces.

Depending on who the dreamer is, the color could represent clarity and detached contemplation. This use of the symbol might, when interpreted in step three, turn out to mean that a person who is completely controlled by feelings needs to be a little more cool and clear. For another person, the color blue could turn out to be a comment that things are too cool, too abstract, without enough redblooded human energy or Dionysian feeling.

For one person, the blue room could represent a depressed feeling: the dream here would refer to the colloquial expression “I feel blue” or “I’ve got the blues.” Your own association could be to your general reaction to that color: “I feel quiet and peaceful when there are blue things around me.”

It does not matter how farfetched the association seems to you. This is the stage of dream work in which you simply gather information from the unconscious. You are, in effect, asking the unconscious, “What are the meanings that you associate with your own symbol?”

Many different reactions will come out of each person. The purpose is to find out what your own unique associations are, not what someone else tells you they ought to be according to some book or some theory of psychology. So don’t be embarrassed by your associations; don’t censor them; don’t try to make them sound more elegant or “proper.” Just take them as they come.

Each time you make a connection, be sure to return to the original dream image. Make a new association from the original image. Always go back to the dream image and start over again from there. Don’t make chain associations.

Chain associations are when we make connections with the associations rather than with the original dream image. (This is also called “free association.”) You make your first association, then you make another association to that one, and then another association, to that one, until you have a whole chain. If we do this we never get back to the original dream image.

An example of chain associating would be this:

You can see that this chain leads farther and farther away from the original image, the color blue. By the time we get to “hospital” or “Aunt Jennie” we have already lost any direct connection to the color blue.

The correct method can be pictured as a wheel, with the dream image at the hub, and the associations radiating out like spokes from the center. All associations proceed from the original image. We always return to the center of the wheel before we go to the next association. One woman I know does all her dream analysis this way, diagraming each image as the center of a wheel :

Many of the associations that come up spontaneously are colloquialisms. The unconscious often uses symbols that bring up colloquial phrases like “I’ve got the blues.” This is because our colloquial expressions come out of olden times, when our language was richer in concrete imagery and closer to the archetypes. They come out of the simple, down-to-earth everyday life; therefore, they are excellent language for the unconscious.

A common example is the dream motif of flying. If you find yourself flying in a dream, it can bring to mind a wealth of colloquial expressions: “I’m flying high.” “My head’s in the clouds.” “I should be more down-to-earth.”

These colorful phrases all express a condition that we call inflation . The ego gets inflated when we are caught up in a power system, when we are lost in an ideal or abstraction at the expense of ordinary humanness, when the ego has been puffed up by identifying with an archetype and has lost all sense of its limits. Then we start “flying high,” and the cure is to “get our feet back on the ground.”

Similarly, when a dream says that someone is “blowing smoke” or is “full of hot air,” we immediately have a sense of what the dream is trying to say. If there is a jewel in your dream, you may ask in what respect the dream is saying that you “are a jewel.” On the other hand, if a dream says, “He is a jackass,” we may also ponder how that applies to us!

Jung had an answer that sounds deceptively simple: He said that one of the associations will “click”! As you go through your associations, one of them will generate a lot of energy in you. You will see how it fits together with other symbols in the dream. Or you may feel a spot touched in you where you are wounded and confused. You may find that this association makes you see something in yourself that you had never looked at before. In that moment, you will get a rush of conviction from somewhere deep inside: It fits. It clicks .

Although this method sounds too simple, it is reliable. Remember that dreams are created out of energy. One way to find the essence of a dream symbol is to go where the energy is —go to the association that brings up a surge of energy. Every symbol is calculated to rouse us, to wake us up. It is organically tied to energy systems deep in the substrata of the unconscious. When you make a connection that is very close to the energy source, sparks fly. It is as though you had touched a live wire. You feel intuitively that you have tapped into the energy behind your dream: The association clicks .

Sometimes it is not clear at first which association is most accurate or more useful for understanding your dream. In that case it is better to leave it alone for a while and go on to the next symbol. Don’t lock yourself into one meaning for the symbol; keep an open mind until you begin to tie the whole dream together. Let your understanding of the symbols grow naturally in you, without forcing, without jumping to conclusions.

As an example of making associations we have the following dream and some of the actual associations that the dreamer made in her notebook when she was working on it. Because we have limited time and space, I will transcribe only a few of the images from her dream with some of their associations.

The woman who had this dream comes from an Italian Catholic family. As she grew into adulthood she found herself rebelling against her Latin background and her childhood religion. She became involved in Zen Buddhist philosophy and meditation. This dream signaled a return to her cultural and religious roots, yet a graduation out of her childhood version of them. It showed her that she could make a synthesis of East and West within her own self that was true to her own character.

I am in a monastic cloister, in a room or cell attached to the chapel. I am separated from the people and the rest of the chapel by a grille. Mass begins. I participate alone in my cell. I sit with crossed legs, zazen style, but holding my rosary. I hear the murmurs of the responses through the grille. The voices are tranquil. I close my eyes and I too receive communion, although no one and nothing physical enters my cell. The mass finishes. I become aware of flowers blooming at the side of my chamber. I feel a deep serenity.

Religious life; formal religious life; community, my childhood religion; contemplation; sacrifice, medieval cloisters in Italy and Spain; separation from the world; Zen monastery I almost joined.

Container; womb; the basic component of life-forms; protection; separation from the collective; individuation; the path that must be traveled alone, outside of any collective identity or comfort.

En masse = collective form of religious experience; group worship through intermediary priest; religious form of my particular collective; form I left to individuate. One step removed = need to participate in religious experience yet not be identified with collective, outer form of the inner experience .

Last Supper, Christ’s sacrifice, sacrament, that communion song I’ve always hated; fainting during three-hour fast; mystical union; to become one with = com-union; transubstantiation = transformation; comes in nonphysical form = must be experienced on the inner plane, inwardly rather than collectively.

Practicing stillness; the familiarity I felt with the practice from the very first, like going home; practice without dogma; experience rather than doctrine; foreign to my upbringing; grief when I saw I couldn’t “belong” to Zen collective, either; Zen monastery I had to say no to.

This gives you a sample of the wealth of material that will flow spontaneously from the unconscious when we really focus on the dream image and look for every association that comes to mind. We have all this material, even though we have not yet gone through all the images.

If you have looked carefully at this woman’s associations so far, you may already see the basic relationships that are forming among the images and the various associations that seem to make coherent sense together. You will see how these associations led eventually to her interpretation.

This dream advised the dreamer of the right and the necessity for her to be an individual. The emphasis in the dream was on her living out her religious nature; she had to participate in the mystery, yet not by identifying with a particular external, collective version of religion. In the dream she participated, but remained separate from the group and the group version of religious experience. This was not because she was an elitist, but because that is her nature and her way.

The detail of receiving communion without any physical contact was consistent with her understanding of her dream. She had to experience the immediacy of the Godhead, the transformation, but she had to experience it inwardly and in her individual way, not by identifying with a collective, cultural version of the experience. In her associations she remembered that she had also considered joining a Buddhist monastery in order to be able to join in the community, belong to something, and follow in a collectively defined way. But she could not do it with Buddhism any more than she could with Catholicism.

The good news in all of this for her was that she could return to her Catholic and Christian heritage but with a new understanding of it that allowed her to participate and to see the essential spirit at the center of the cultural and collective forms. She could be in community, yet not be swallowed by it. She could participate, yet remain an individual going her own unique way.

The flowers that bloom in her cell at the end of the mass she found to be a symbol of new life and new consciousness resulting from the synthesis that she has made in the dream between her childhood religion and her adult experience of the spirit. More accurately speaking, the flowers express the synthesis itself. Such a symbol points to that archetype—the self—that transcends the opposites by revealing the central reality behind them and thereby unites them.

Flowers are not only symbols of the feminine but also of the unified self: in Christianity, the rose that represents Christ; in Eastern religions, the thousand-petaled lotus that portrays the One. By this dreamer’s way, which is the path of stillness, she brought the flower of the self into bloom in her life. She found the universal kernel of spirit that is at the center of both her Christian roots and her Zen experience—that transcends both and is not identified with the outer form of either.

Some important things happened to this woman as an aftermath to this dream. When we get to the fourth step in dream work, which is to do a ritual to express the meaning of your dream, we will return to this Dream of the Monastery. This dreamer’s ritual for her dream, and the events that followed, are very instructive.

There is another way of finding associations to dream images: archetypal amplification . It is basically a process of gathering information about the archetypes that appear in our dreams by going to sources such as myths, fairy tales, and ancient religious traditions.

I have already given you a simple example in the Dream of the Monastery. I spontaneously associated the flowers that appeared in this woman’s room with their role in Christianity, Buddhism, and other religions as symbols of the archetypal self. That, in turn, keyed us into the other information that we already know about the self—that it is the transcendent function that combines the opposites, that draws the fragments of our totality into a unity. And all of this, of course, added greatly to our sense of the meaning and power of the dream.

Jung became aware of the archetypes by observing that the same primordial symbols appear equally in ancient myths and religions and in the dreams of modern people. He was startled to find that images appear in people’s dreams that refer to some very ancient symbol, perhaps from a completely different culture, that could not have been known to the conscious mind of the dreamer. From these experiences he began to see that our dreams draw on universal, primordial sources that are deep in the collective unconscious of all humankind. We can often see more clearly how the symbols in our dreams are tied to those universal streams of energy when we encounter the symbols, as Jung did, in myth, religion, and other ancient sources.

It becomes possible to go to a myth where the archetype appears and find the collective associations that the human race as a whole has to that archetype. We can read in the myth all the qualities in us that are contained in the archetype and that are associated with its symbols.

Jung has demonstrated that myths and fairy tales are symbolic manifestations of the unconscious, just as dreams are. In a sense they are the collective dreams of the human race: They reflect the collective unconscious of a tribe, a people, or a culture rather than the local, personal unconscious of one individual. Therefore they are rich sources of information on the archetypes. They go back to the preconscious era, when the human race was closer to its archetypal roots. We may also look to esoteric philosophical traditions, such as medieval alchemy and ancient astrology, as sources of information regarding the archetypes.

The archetype that appears in your dream is a universal quality, a stream of energy that finds its way into every human being. As the archetype is universal, so is its imagery. Each archetype tends to express itself with its own characteristic symbolism.

The image of the Wise Old Man, for example, is ubiquitous throughout all cultures and races. His image varies from myth to myth, culture to culture. But once you learn to recognize him, you see him in the dreams of a Hindu as well as those of a Westerner.

He may take the form of Saint Peter holding the key to heaven, as he did in one of Jung’s dreams. He may appear as a personification of God the Father, as in the vision of Michelangelo on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel; in the dream of a Buddhist as a roshi (master) or bodhisattva (demigod); in a Hindu’s dream as a guru or a sunyasin (ascetic holy man).

There is a common quality that runs through the symbols of the Wise Man—a feeling of wisdom that transcends generations, agelessness in the sense of being outside the flow of time. Here we find him as he appears in a modern myth from the hand of J. R. R. Tolkien:

His hair was dark as the shadows of twilight and upon it was set a circlet of silver; his eyes were grey as a clear evening, and in them was a light like the light of stars. Venerable he seemed as a king crowned with many winters, and yet hale as a tried warrior in the fullness of his strength…(Tolkien, Fellowship of the Ring )

Archetypal amplification begins with recognizing that an archetypal presence has entered into one’s dream. The dream that contains an archetype often has a mythical quality. Instead of scenes that seem like the everyday world, the dream takes you to a place that feels ancient, from another time, or like a fairy tale. You find yourself in a legendary place like Baghdad in the time of genies, magic carpets, and magicians. Another sign is that things are bigger than life or smaller than life. Archetypes may also present themselves as otherworldly animals: talking lions, griffins, dragons, flying horses.

Archetypal figures often have an aura of royalty or divinity. The ancient Greeks personified the archetypes as gods who created the world by shaping the contours of fate or as the heroes and heroines who were caught up in the forces that the gods set in motion .

The Great Mother quality in human nature appears as Aphrodite, goddess of sensual love; Hera, goddess of home and hearth; Demeter, goddess of agriculture. Turning to the Hindu world, we find the Great Mother personified as Kali, the terrible goddess who both blesses and destroys, gives life and takes it back, in the eternal cycle of nature.

These manifestations of the great archetypes show up in the dreams of ordinary mortals. Each of us is a channel through which these archetypal forces must find their way into concrete existence. We incarnate the archetypes with our physical lives. Our individual lives are the containers in which they materialize on the face of the earth, the battlegrounds where they fight their eternal, cosmic battles, the stages on which they perform the universal drama that becomes, in one particularized form, every human life.

Once we recognize that a figure is an archetype, the next step is to go to the myths and other sources where the same archetype appears. The figure or events in your dream may spark a memory of a passage in the Bible or a great tale from the days of King Arthur. You go to that source and see what it tells you about this great archetype that has come to you in your dream. What are its characteristics? What is its role in human life? If it is the Great Mother, for example, you go to the myths of the Greek goddesses who personify her, to the manifestations of Kali, to the varied epiphanies of the Holy Virgin.

As you amplify the information on your dream figure, you continue what you have already done with your personal associations: Write down the associations that come to you from the mythical sources. If they elicit energy from inside you, if they make sense, try them out. See what they have to say about who you are and what forces are at work in you.

This is a good point at which to caution you against using so-called dream-books and dictionaries of symbolism as substitutes for your own personal associations.

Many people unthinkingly turn to a dictionary of symbols each time they try to understand a dream. They look up each symbol from the dream, write down the standard meanings the dictionary serves up, and then believe that they have “interpreted” their dream. If you use this kind of approach you will never get to the individual, special meaning that your dream has for you.

These approaches are based on an erroneous assumption: that every symbol has one, standard, collective meaning that is true for every dream and every person. If that were so, it would be very convenient indeed; but it isn’t.

It is plain foolishness to believe in ready-made, systematic guides to dream interpretation, as if one could simply buy a reference book and look up a particular symbol. No dream symbol can be separated from the individual who dreams it…. Each individual varies so much in the way that his unconscious complements or compensates his conscious mind that it is impossible to be sure how far dreams and their symbols can be classified at all….

It is true that there are dreams and single symbols (I should prefer to call them “motifs”) that are typical and often occur. Among such motifs are falling, flying,…running hard yet getting nowhere…. But I must stress again that these are motifs that must be considered in the context of the dream itself, not as self-explanatory ciphers. (Jung, Man and His Symbols , Step One: Associations) [Emphasis added.]

Every symbol in your dream has a special, individual connotation that belongs to you alone, just as the dream is ultimately yours alone. Even when a symbol has a collective or universal meaning, it still has a personal coloration for you and can be fully explained only from within you.

This is why it is so important that you do this first step thoroughly. Find the associations that are yours, that come from your own unconscious. Don’t accept standardized interpretations as a substitute.

This advice is even more important when we get into archetypal amplification. People can get so overinvolved with searching for mythic connections that they forget that they also have personal associations to the symbols. This is the point at which the temptation is so strong to turn to a dictionary of symbolism, find out what the myths say about the symbol, and stop there.

If I don’t find my personal connection to the archetype, then all this is pointless. The archetype is present in me, acting through me, living its life through mine. When it appears in my dream, it means that something is going on between my ego and that archetype; something is trying to evolve. I have to pin it down, see how it relates to my life, now, today.

It isn’t enough to say, “Ah! That is a symbol of the Great Mother.” It isn’t enough to hang an abstract label on the dream person—Great Mother, anima, shadow—and then walk away from it. We have to push further. We have to ask: “What is this archetype doing today in my personal life? What does this have to do with me, individually?”

Strictly speaking, it should not be necessary for anyone to get involved in researching myths, comparative religion, alchemy, and so forth in order to find the universal level of meaning for a symbol. When the unconscious uses a symbol, it inherently contains within itself the meaning of the symbol. It already knows its own reference to the symbol. Therefore, if you pursue your personal associations to the dream image, the unconscious will, sooner or later, produce the archetypal connections that apply.

Nevertheless, it is a great aid to know what the symbol has meant to others, and how it has appeared in collective myths and folktales. This knowledge can shorten the process. It can also act as confirmation of the personal associations that spring spontaneously out of you.