Jung on Dreams: How Jungian Dream Analysis Works

A dream is not a disguise

For Freud a dream was the disguised fulfilment of a repressed wish. Its visible story, the manifest content, hid a latent content that an inner censor had distorted, and analysis had to see through the disguise.

Jung disagreed. He held that the dream means what it says, but says it in the language of images, which is older than the language of words. A dream does not conceal; it expresses something that consciousness does not yet know. The task is not to decode it but to understand its symbolic language, and that requires patience with the image itself.

Compensation: what the dream adds

The central idea of Jung’s dream theory is compensation. The psyche, he argued, is a self-regulating system, and dreams balance the one-sidedness of the conscious attitude. Someone who looks up to another person uncritically may dream of that person in a humiliating situation; someone who undervalues themselves may dream of being honored.

Jung also spoke of a prospective function: some dreams anticipate possible future developments, in the way a weather report anticipates rain. He was careful to distinguish this from prophecy. He set out these ideas in “General Aspects of Dream Psychology” (1916, revised 1948).

The objective and the subjective level

Jung proposed two ways of reading the figures in a dream. On the objective level, a figure refers to the real person it resembles: a dream about one’s brother is about the relationship with the brother. On the subjective level, every figure represents a part of the dreamer: the brother stands for a quality of one’s own that the brother embodies.

Which level applies depends on the dream and the situation. Jung tended to use the objective level when the person is important in the dreamer’s actual life, and the subjective level for strangers and for figures from the distant past.

Amplification instead of free association

Freud used free association: starting from an element of the dream, the patient follows a chain of associations wherever it leads. Jung felt this led away from the dream into the patient’s complexes in general. He preferred to stay close to the image, which he called circumambulation, walking around it.

His method was amplification. First the dreamer’s own associations to each image are gathered. Then, where appropriate, parallels from myth, religion, fairy tales and art are added to bring out the typical, archetypal dimension. A dream of descending into water, for example, might be compared with myths of the night sea journey. Jung also put more trust in a series of dreams than in a single one, because a series shows how a theme develops.

The structure of a dream

In “On the Nature of Dreams” (1945) Jung observed that many dreams are built like a drama, in four parts:

Exposition

The setting, the time and the characters: where the dream takes place and who is there.

Development

The plot begins to move and tension builds.

Culmination

The decisive moment, when something happens or changes.

Lysis

The solution or result. When a dream has no lysis, or ends in disaster, this is itself significant.

Big dreams, recurring dreams and nightmares

On his journey to Mount Elgon in East Africa, Jung learned that the people there distinguished ordinary dreams from big dreams, which matter to the whole community. He took over the distinction: some dreams are personal, while others are full of archetypal imagery and stay with a person for life. Such dreams often come at turning points.

Recurring dreams, in his view, point to a situation that has not yet been understood or resolved; they often change or stop when it is. He gave special weight to the first dream a patient brings to analysis, the initial dream, which can outline the whole course of the work. His seminar on children’s dreams, held in Zurich from 1936 to 1940 and published in 2008, explored how early dreams can foreshadow a life.

Why Jung rejected dream dictionaries

Jung distrusted any list that assigns fixed meanings to dream symbols. The same snake can mean one thing to a person afraid of their instincts and something quite different to a person on the verge of renewal. Archetypal parallels can enrich understanding, but only together with the dreamer’s own life and associations.

This is also the position of Archetype Matrix. We do not interpret anyone’s dream. We count which images people log, in which countries and with which moods, and show what Jung wrote about the most common symbols.

Frequently asked questions