Dreams – A perspective
This post comes as a spin off from this other post on dreams, so please read it first if you haven’t yet. A lot of issues rose from that post, and many ideas that did not find their way out (I started to feel alarmed when my reply to Raul’s comment became longer than the post itself!)
About Jung
Carl Gustav Jung has been mostly misunderstood by the dumb ones, and censored by the wicked ones. Unlike other psychoanalysts like Freud, Klein or Lacan, he was a scientist. His system of thought was not something he ‘figured out’, but the result of wide research and comparison of results on a world basis.
For example, his archetypes are not a list of ‘characters’ he took out of his head on an inspired morning a la Tolkien. They emerged after comparing myths from all ages and places. If a Ukrainian tale from the XIIth century and a fable from Australia’s bushmen have the same narrative elements, and you can discard the possibility of any communication between those two peoples, then you have a pattern. If you can repeat that pattern N times, with N different peoples who have not had the least possibility of transmission of information, the conclusion is that those elements are universal to every human, that are conditioned by the way we humans are wired. And we can decipher them and learn from it.
I have heard a lot of people who haven’t read Jung saying a lot of stupid things about him. Read ‘Man and His Symbols
Dreams – A perspective
Dream is nature’s bunker. It’s like it says ‘OK, today you’ve been fooled, you’ve lost your path and done a lot of stupid things. Things that go against your own interest, against your health, against your sanity. No problem, that’s why you have free will to choose after all. Now I’ll heal you, and I’ll have my say so you have a takeaway for the morning’.
Our unconscious acts in a compensatory way, like a thermostat. I like that definition of dreams that goes ‘the part of reality that happens during night’. Dreams are not less real than our actual awaken life.
As I mentioned in my previous post, dreams can work with whatever elements you give them. They convey their messages using things we can recognize, elements from our day life. But they turn them into symbols. For men, a female character in a dream has the meaning of a counterpoint of his personality, and the reflection of the ‘Natural force’ called Anima in Jungian theory (or Chi in Taoism, or Holy Spirit by Christians, or Universal Mind in the law of attraction, or ‘the force’ in Star Wars, etc etc etc…).
The same happens with women dreaming of male characters (there are some differences in the way they show up, but I don’t want to go into too much detail). The natural force in this case is called Animus (male termination – a complementary).
But, again, everything that shows up in a dream has value as a symbol only; it is not literal. That is very soothing, for example, in that kind of dreams when someone of your family dies. Rest assured that there is nothing wrong with your father or your daughter. Within the dream logic, they both are are you, parts of you in struggle, growing, or complaining they feel fat or exhausted, doing their best to gain the attention of your conscious part.
Nature does things for a purpose: growth and stability of the whole. Sceptics say that dreams are only random discharges of the nervous system, but if such discharges had no object they would have been reduced and then eliminated along evolution, and the energy they consume saved or put to work for a better purpose.
So pay attention to that part of yourself. First only limit yourself to listen, do not call it ‘nonsense’ or ignore its warnings. Nature usually knows better than we do (see here). Avoid to make judgements, remember that the rules in there are different. But do listen.
I would like to add that this conception of dreams does not exclude the possibility of lucid dreaming (the first part of Raul’s comment put me on the track of such possibility). I haven’t ever experienced it, but after all it would only mean that we impose to our unconscious the means it must use to express its message. You feel like surfing? Then you do your lucid dreaming thing and surfing will appear in the dream. But your mind will find a way to make its point using surfing boards and the like. The message will come in anyway because our conscious part has only 0-80 years, while the unconscious accumulates 500,000 years of experience, the age of the whole human species. Personally, I’m not much interested in that kind of experiences: I like being surprised, and I’m more interested in the contents than in the shape the dream takes. I don’t have the need to control everything. I mean, what will be next? Taking care of your own digestion with a pick and a bucket? 
I hope it is not a taboo if I ask you what’s your relation with your dreams. Do you dream often? How do you see dreams? How do you relate to ‘that part of reality that happens during night’? Do you practice lucid dreaming and think that I don’t get it? Gently let me know in a comment
