Dreams

1. Etymology

Dreams (Old English drēam; German Traum) name independent, spontaneous manifestations of the unconscious—fragments of involuntary psychic activity just conscious enough to be recalled waking. Related: compensation; symbol; amplification; interior drama.

2. Plain summary

Dreams are nature speaking in images—not clever lies, not costume drama for a censor. Jung treats them as spontaneous self-portraits of the actual situation in the unconscious, usually in compensation to waking one-sidedness. They can warn, balance, sketch a future possibility, or—sometimes—tear down what consciousness clings to.

He kept Freud’s and Adler’s insights where they fit (wish, power) but centered the dream’s symbolic message and its role in psychic self-regulation. Interpret on the subjective level (figures as parts of yourself) and the objective level (figures as themselves). Sequence of dreams often maps individuation. Related to active imagination, complex charge, and the autonomy of the unconscious.

Examples (exhaustive house list for this Index lemma — common dream-related figures and motifs named across Jung’s essays and standard Jungian lexica; not a claim that Jung’s CW contains only these):

spontaneous self-portrayal in symbolic form; natural phenomena that do not deceive or disguise; express what the ego does not know; picture current psyche from unconscious viewpoint; autonomy of the unconscious / opposition to conscious will; wish-fulfilment / sleep-preservation (Freud) acknowledged; infantile power (Adler) acknowledged; compensatory self-regulation; three compensatory positions (opposite / variation / reinforce); interior theatre (scene, player, prompter, producer, author, public, critic); subjective vs objective interpretation; association + amplification; commentaries on complexes; prospective aspect / sketch-map not prophecy; nightmares that disintegrate to compensate; “big dreams that redirect a life; dream series and individuation; dramatic structure (exposition–development–catastrophe/lysis); danger of over-rating the unconscious / seductive numinous dreams; relation to symbol and transcendent function.

3. Academic elucidation

4. Lexicon

Dreams. Independent, spontaneous manifestations of the unconscious; fragments of involuntary psychic activity just conscious enough to be reproducible in the waking state. … Dreams are neither deliberate nor arbitrary fabrications; they are natural phenomena which are nothing other than what they pretend to be. They do not deceive, they do not lie, they do not distort or disguise. … They are invariably seeking to express something that the ego does not know and does not understand. … In symbolic form, dreams picture the current situation in the psyche from the point of view of the unconscious. … This is what I call the autonomy of the unconscious. … a dream is a theatre in which the dreamer is himself the scene, the player, the prompter, the producer, the author, the public, and the critic.

(Sharp, 1991, p. [provisional — unverified])

Dreams … Jung defined the dream in broad terms as ‘a spontaneous self-portrayal, in symbolic form, of the actual situation in the unconscious’… He saw the relation of the dream to consciousness as basically a compensatory one… causal tends toward uniformity of meaning purposeful point of view ‘perceives in the dream image the expression of an altered psychological situation. It recognises no fixed meaning of symbols… association… [plus] amplification… subjective level objective level prospective aspect, ‘an unconscious anticipation of future conscious achievement’… Dreams seen in sequence often disclose the path of one’s individuation…

5. CW concordance — sample, not exhaustive

As against Freud’s view that the dream is essentially a wish-fulfilment, I hold with my friend and collaborator Alphonse Maeder that the dream is a spontaneous self-portrayal, in symbolic form, of the actual situation in the unconscious.

Since the meaning of most dreams is not in accord with the tendencies of the conscious mind but shows peculiar deviations, we must assume that the unconscious, the matrix of dreams, has an independent function. This is what I call the autonomy of the unconscious… Compensation must be strictly distinguished from complementation… If the conscious attitude to the life situation is in large degree one-sided, then the dream takes the opposite side. If the conscious has a position fairly near the “middle,” the dream is satisfied with variations. If the conscious attitude is “correct” (adequate), then the dream coincides with and emphasizes this tendency…

(Jung, 1948/1969, CW 8, pp. 373–374, ¶¶545–546)

…a dream is a theatre in which the dreamer is himself the scene, the player, the prompter, the producer, the author, the public, and the critic. This simple truth forms the basis for a conception of the dream’s meaning which I have called interpretation on the subjective level.

(Jung, 1916/1969, CW 8, p. 345, ¶509)

What are dreams? Dreams are products of unconscious psychic activity occurring during sleep… The dream is a spontaneous process resulting from the independent activity of the unconscious, and is as far removed from our conscious control as, shall we say, the physiological activity of digestion. Therefore, we have in it an absolutely objective process from the nature of which we can draw objective conclusions about the situation as it really is.

(Jung, 1928/1954, CW 17, pp. 5960, 113)

See also: compensation; unconscious; symbol; amplification; complex; active imagination; individuation; ego; transcendent function; numinous; transference. (Queued — not yet linked: big dream, nightmare.)

References

Jung, C. G. (1954). Child development and education. In H. Read, M. Fordham, & G. Adler (Eds.), The collected works of C. G. Jung (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.) (Vol. 17, pp. 59–60, ¶113). Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1928)

Jung, C. G. (1969). General aspects of dream psychology. In H. Read, M. Fordham, G. Adler, & W. McGuire (Eds.), The collected works of C. G. Jung (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.) (2nd ed., Vol. 8, pp. 341, 345, ¶¶505, 509). Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1916)

Jung, C. G. (1969). On the nature of dreams. In H. Read, M. Fordham, G. Adler, & W. McGuire (Eds.), The collected works of C. G. Jung (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.) (2nd ed., Vol. 8, pp. 373–374, ¶545–546). Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1948)

Samuels, A., Shorter, B., & Plaut, F. (1986). A critical dictionary of Jungian analysis. Routledge.

Sharp, D. (1991). Jung lexicon: A primer of terms & concepts. Inner City Books.