Working With Your Dreams

Welcome to Digital Yung, a podcast about living a symbolic life in a technological age. Man cannot stand a meaningless life. I'm Jason Smith, Jungian Analyst and Author of "Religious But Not Religious - Living a Symbolic Life". And in this episode, I discuss some of Jung's advice for working with dreams, and suggest some questions that you can ask when working with your own. It's the human soul. That's the buried treasure. The human soul. One would do well to treat every dream as though it were a totally unknown object. Look at it from all sides, take it in your hand, carry it about with you, let your imagination play around it, and talk about it with other people. Treated in this way, the dream suggests all manner of ideas and associations which lead us closer to its meaning. So this is a follow-up to episode 25, "Preparing to Work with Your Dreams". And in that earlier episode, I responded to a listener who had asked me about the practice of dream work. That episode, you could say, was the first part of my response to his questions. And in it, I spoke to the issue of examining one's assumptions and expectations when engaging in this kind of practice. But what this listener really wanted to know was what questions one might ask when working on a dream. So, in what follows here, I'm going to offer a few possibilities to that end that you might try out. Of course, it's not going to be quite so simple as that. As always, there are some preliminary considerations to address first. As I suggested in that earlier episode, every question carries its own point of view, its own perspective that will affect the kinds of answers that you get. And the perspective of this podcast is, of course, the symbolic life. And this has some very specific implications. In some way, everything about the practice of the symbolic life is learning how to slow down. It's learning how to wait and be receptive to that depth of experience that is known by many different names. The self, the unconscious, the imagination, the soul, and many others. And this means becoming familiar with the experience of knowing through not knowing. Which, as I explain in my book, is a kind of religious sensibility that we bring to the symbolic life. Involving a giving up of certainties and an opening to what Jung calls the irrational facts of experience. So, what I want to do here first is to reflect in depth on Jung's suggestion in that opening quote that one would do well to treat every dream as though it were a totally unknown object. And I want to do this by suggesting three images corresponding to three attitudes of approach that reflect the unknown-ness of the dream. Inviting its insights into our lives while maintaining a respect for its autonomy. And the first image is the dream as guest. When approaching a dream, we shouldn't demand that it reveal its secrets to us, but rather we should welcome it the way we might welcome a guest into our homes. Now, that sounds very nice, but what does it look like in practice, right? What does it mean to welcome a dream? Well, to receive the dream as a guest means, first of all, that we are attentive to its needs over and above our own needs. And this means recognizing that the perspective of the dream is towards the overall functioning of the psyche. That is, it's oriented to our wholeness and not just the short-term needs and desires of the ego, our habitual consciousness. One function of the dream is to assist in the self-regulation of the psyche in the same way that the body regulates its temperature, for instance, keeping it within normal and consistent parameters. So the dream, in a sense, lets us know when something is out of balance, something is out of alignment, something is missing, or not being adequately attended to. And in this way, the energy of the dream expressed through images and symbols and emotions can cause important internal shifts when our thoughts and our feelings have become stuck, or in some way dysfunctional. And so, just as with a guest, the proper attitude is one of being of service, right? In this case, being of service to our own optimum psychological and spiritual growth. In Jungian language, we would describe this as the ego being in service to the self. It's not what we think we want, but rather what is being asked of us that matters. The second image is the dream as environment in both the sense of being an atmosphere as well as being a world. And as an atmosphere, it's a reflection of the psychic background that exercises influence over our day-to-day experience, whether we're aware of it or not. We know that our physical environment has an effect on our physical being, right? If the air is thick or smoggy, it's difficult to breathe. And if the water is polluted, our very survival may be threatened. And just so does the psychological atmosphere affect our well-being. Moods, attitudes, beliefs, relational dynamics all form aspects of our psychological environment. And these are reflected in and even sometimes triggered by our dreams. I mean, it's not unusual to wake up, for example, in the grip of a dream's mood, even if we don't remember the dream very well. Dreams can alert us to the atmospheric conditions that are surrounding us and that are affecting us. But the dream is also a world. And generally, it's a new and unfamiliar world. And when you're traveling in an unfamiliar world, you can't rely on what you already know. And this is certainly true for those dreams where the imagery is particularly bizarre or seemingly opaque, right? And in such a case, it's easy to get confused and even disoriented. And for Jung, we could say, approaching the dream as an unfamiliar world is the starting point of his own method. "So difficult is it to understand a dream," he writes, "that for a long time I have made it a rule when someone tells me a dream and asks for my opinion to say first of all to myself, I have no idea what this dream means." After that, I can begin to examine the dream. And we too can use this attitude as a means of guarding against too much knowing in the face of the dream. It's okay. It's even helpful to let ourselves be disoriented. As the Jungian analyst Robert Bosnack notes, this feeling reflects the frustration of the rational mind having to admit that it can't figure things out and thereby leaving space for non-rational faculties. And this leads us to the third image, which is an encounter with the dream as mystery. I've suggested before in this podcast that dreams offer a direct encounter with the kinds of non-rational experiences that are the heart of the symbolic life. And therefore they enable us to make contact with the numinous. But this contact doesn't come through rational knowing. Dreams shut down our usual modes of perception and understanding and knowing. And according to the Jungian analysts Edward Whitmont and Sylvia Pereira, it's in the realm of felt intuition where the meeting with any symbol takes place. And so we need to access our intuitive knowing, which Whitmont and Pereira tell us requires an artistic and spiritual sensitivity. Though she wasn't writing about dreams, the mystic Simone Vai gives a wonderful and I think very helpful description for how to make use of our intuitive knowing, which she calls attention and which provides, I think, an invaluable guide for how we can work with our dreams. Attention consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty and ready to be permeated by the object. It means holding in our minds within reach of this thought, but on a lower level and not in contact with it, the diverse knowledge we have acquired, which we are forced to make use of. Our thought should be in relation to all particular and already formulated thoughts as a man on a mountain who, as he looks forward, sees also below him without actually looking at them, a great many forests and plains. Above all, our thought should be empty, waiting, not seeking anything, but ready to receive in its naked truth the object that is to permeate it. Simone Vai's advice here is not so far from Jung's in that opening quote. Though he's specifically referring to the dream, well she is speaking more to that mysterious matrix from which things like dreams arise. When Jung counsels us to look at the dream from all sides, take it in your hand, carry it about with you, let your imagination play round it. He's suggesting, of course, that it has hidden depths to it that will only reveal themselves to us over time. The dream is not just one thing, but many. Just as all true symbols are not just one thing. A symbol is polyvalent. That is, it has multiple layers of potential meaning, and every dream has multiple symbols in it that interact with our consciousness and with each other in a variety of ways. Revealing ever new and surprising aspects, depending on the angle from which we apprehend it. When we're able to sit patiently with the dream in a state of what might be called "pregnant unknowing." When we carry the dream around in our imagination playfully, without imposing any preconceived ideas on it, we may find that suddenly, out of that unknowing, a gestalt of meaning begins to emerge. Now, I said I would suggest some possible questions that you can ask when working with your dreams. And that's going to be the takeaway for this episode. And the questions I'm going to suggest all speak in some way to the unknown-ness of the dream. And they're designed to challenge our usual way of thinking and seeing. And one of the first questions to consider is this. Where does the dream take place? What's the setting? The setting of the dream can give clues to the psychological landscape that you're in. To be in your childhood home, for instance, is very different from climbing a mountain in the wind and the snow. The setting tells you a lot about the psychic atmosphere that's operative. Another question is, who's there? And maybe even more to the point, who's not there? Is there anyone or anything that is conspicuous in its absence? Often, what is missing is a major clue to something that is missing or needed in our daily lives. Another question, what does the eye, the ego, do? Consider the dream as if everything that the eye figure does is a mistake. The dream ego often is a portrait of our habitual consciousness, our entrenched ways of acting and responding to events. How does it tend to get things wrong? That's a useful lens through which to look. And building on this, what might it be like to try to see through the eyes of the other figures in the dream, especially the ones in the dream that maybe you disagree with or dislike? What perspective do they bring to things? These are just a few suggestions, but they can be very powerful by themselves. And of course, I would urge you to ask all of these questions in the spirit of exploration, in the spirit of play that we talked about in the last episode, that proceeding through not knowing, right? Not knowing where things are leading and allowing where you end up to be a discovery, as opposed to something predetermined. The purpose of all of this work is the experience of more aliveness. And though it may sound obvious to say it, aliveness stops being aliveness when we kill it through too much analysis. Who wants to understand the poem, wrote Goethe, must go to the land of poetry. And the same is true of the dream. Whoever wants to understand the dream must enter the dreamscape. And at first this can feel disorienting, as I said earlier. Our rational mind goes silent and our understanding goes dark. But the silence evoked by the dream is not an emptiness. It's a world teeming with life. And the kind of empty, wading readiness that Simone Vai speaks of. That attention, which is a suspension of all that we know and think, puts us psychologically into a state where we can enter the dream's world and be ready for that moment in which something new can be revealed. And this is a moment that's described by the poet Mary Oliver in her poem, titled, appropriately enough, "Dreams." And in that poem, she uses the image of buds that blossom on a tree to describe the experience of the dream. And when we awake out of that dreaming state, she writes, we do so with but a memory. Not yet of a word, certainly not yet the answer. Only how it feels, when deep in the tree, all the locks click open. And the fire surges through the wood, and the blossoms blossom. Until next time. You'll find information in the show notes for all the sources used in this week's episode, as well as links to connect with me on social media. Let's make this a conversation. If you have any comments or questions about anything you heard in this episode, or that you'd like me to address in a future episode, send them to me on Facebook or Twitter. And finally, if you want a deeper dive into the kind of material explored on this podcast, please check out my book, Religious but Not Religious, Living a Symbolic Life, available from Chiron Publications. Thanks for listening, and take good care. [music]