Dreams, and grand dreams

We explore further into the concept of what Jung called grand dreams or big dreams. Jung relates an unusual incident.

One day he met a colleague in the street who was a bit disparaging about dream analysis. The colleague actually described to Jung a vivid dream about climbing a mountain peak. He felt so euphoric in the dream that he stepped aside from the mountain face, away from his companions. He found himself climbing alone through the air. There were some other details he added. Jung was alarmed and implored him not to climb alone and to take much greater care. It happened a few months later that Jung's colleague fell to his death while climbing without companions.

During his lifetime Jung analysed tens of thousands of dreams. Many of his conclusions are quite compelling. It is helpful, for example, to distinguish between a sign and a symbol in order to appreciate how Jung understood dreams.

A signpost points to something, indicates the direction to some kind of fact or objective. The study of signs is semiotics and this is part of philosophy and the study of language. Most dreams are straightforward and the signs in dreams point outward to some everyday occurrence or fact.

Symbols in dreams are altogether different. They may point to something, but they are also participating in what they point towards. They are signs which are connected to the destination.

The destination is the cosmos within us, the realm of the psyche. The study of symbols leads to the world of religious experience and its mythologies.

Jung called these the big dreams or grand dreams, often associated with childhood. Yet, it is a fact, that big dreams are often obscure, not straight-forward. For Jung, this was very important. Freud used the concept of free word association to get to the meaning of a dream. But Jung advised the opposite, “Stick to the image!”

The outer world, apparently objective, is populated by people, events and places in the cosmos that we know. So too our inner world is populated by people, events and places in its cosmos. It is obviously subjective. Yet embedded in its subjectivity are the common archetypes of humanity, the world of the collective unconscious.

Think of it this way, suggests Jung. The dream is to the individual as the myth is to a culture. In that sense the big dream defies our understanding. Just as we live out of our myths embedded in our culture so we live out of our dreams embedded in our psyche.

This is crucial. Jung goes so far as to say don’t even try to understand the grand dream initially.

Instead, “When we take up an obscure dream, our first task is not to understand and interpret it, but to establish the context with minute care.”

I referred in a previous chapter to a recurrent grand dream I have had all my life. Usually it is best to share grand or big dreams only with a trusted group or mentor or therapist. This is because other people may misinterpret it. But most of us who try to interpret our own dreams also want to rush ahead. We look up a book or reference list which describes interpretation of dream symbols.

That will only go some little way to unlocking the meaning of a big but obscure dream. Sometimes it is only when there is a series of dreams that real progress can be made. Jung developed the method of amplification to overcome this problem. By sticking to the context of the images in the dream, meaning emerges. Fundamental to this process of amplification is the fact that it is not the meaning imposed from without but rather meaning found from within.

As Jung notes, “We know that we do not conquer thirst by repressing. The dream-content is to be taken in all seriousness as something that has actually happened to us; It should be treated as a contributory factor in framing our conscious outlook...It should be clear now why I have made it a practical rule always to ask, before trying to interpret a dream: What conscious attitude does it compensate? As may be seen, I thus bring the dream into the closest possible connection with the conscious state.”

You should try this for yourselves. When you next have a grand dream try to bring the dream into a close connection with the outer world. It may turn out that the dream is trying to tell you something of vital importance to your life.

Add your thoughts on this topic in the unit 6 forum.

The quotations are from Jung's classic work Modern Man in Search of a Soul which I thoroughly recommend.

6. Dreams which Shape Our Soul This page is part of the collection 'Carl Gustav Jung | An introduction to the basic concepts'.

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