Decoding Dreams & Unlocking Your Unconscious Potential with Carl Jung

in the end the only events in my life worth telling are inner experiences amongst which I include my dreams and Visions these formed the Primo Materia of my scientific work they were the fiery magma out of which the stone that had to be worked was crystallized what if I told you that you are so much more than you ever thought possible that your psyche goes deeper than you ever imagined that it's connected to an ancient mysterious ocean of symbol and wisdom not only that but it's speaking to you all the time and really the only thing standing between you and the wisdom it has to offer is you sounds Fantastical unless you're a regular consumer of these Transmissions then it sounds pretty par for the course but if we are to listen to the wisdom of luminaries like uh the late mythopoetic genius psychiatrist Carl Gustaf Yung and his ilk this is precisely what they're proposing that we are more than our egos that we have a deep shadowy personal unconscious which itself sits at top a vast Collective unconscious that said really connecting to and beginning to understand those psychic depths and its language is not straightforward taking it Beyond just a concept and feeling it in your own life is an absolutely Labyrinth and really lifelong undertaking I am determined to do it and I'm determined to help you do it and the good news is there are accessible yet powerful methods for making progress on this journey for really learning to understand the language of your psychic depths and you can start using them right now or more likely tomorrow morning because in this transmission we will be exploring the mysterious realm of Dreams why are dreams so important and what are we really trying to do here first this is not about connecting to these psychical depths that I'm talking about so that we can have orc slay Maiden saving Adventures at night though dream intelligence if you're listening I would absolutely be down for that it's about real positive felt change in your life because inner work like DreamWork can help you identify your own pathological patterns what you're avoiding how you might be sabotaging yourself and in a broader sense it does turn up the dial on the mystery and what we really are as beings in what we're doing here Dream Work is also vital because uh as you'll see through actually doing inner work or just reading Yung uh the unconscious has more than its own unique language it has needs and it expresses those needs through dreams so as Yung and many other lay out this implies that we need to establish communication between the conscious and the unconscious we must build a bridge between the two and doing DreamWork is one of the primary methods for doing this and in case you aren't familiar with yung's goals and method in general this is really all part of a larger process of making the unconscious cons working our way toward becoming a complete whole being that truly understands itself and its nature all the way down to the soul level so DreamWork and really this entire effort that Yong is putting forth and that other depth psychologist put forth really goes beyond the standard goal of modern psychology this is psychospiritual work Yung called this lifelong process of becoming whole of discovering the soul and the capital S self as he called it individuation uh this is a very deep Topic in and of itself I just wanted to introduce it here I do have a whole transmission on individuation here if you would like to go deeper a bit more on the point of why DreamWork is so important if we don't seek out the psyche if we don't go into the subtle regions of our own minds not only will we not make progress toward this wholeness toward this individuation life feels really dis jointed things don't make sense the outer world and the inner world just never seem to rectify themselves and as Yung said in memories dreams Reflections but man's task is to become conscious of the contents that press upward from the unconscious neither should he persist in his unconsciousness nor remain identical with the unconscious elements of his being thus evading his Destiny which is to create more and more Consciousness or one of my favorite bits from yungi and analyst and author Robert Johnson in his fantastic book inner work which we'll be pulling from heavily today if we don't go to the spirit the spirit comes to us as Neurosis so this is what we're seeking by doing DreamWork this journey toward wholeness and going to the unconscious before the unconscious uh comes to us in the form of pathology as Johnson says so assuming that I've succeeded in dream pilling you there's an obvious question right at the outset how do I dialogue with these shadowy parts of my unconscious when they speak in images when they essentially speak in strange riddles well this is indeed a process that's going to be somewhat unique from Individual to individual Jung himself says that this work is more like diplomacy or statesmanship and it is always an individual matter first one has has to accept and take seriously the existence of the Shadow second one has to become aware of its qualities and intentions this happens through conscientious attention to moods fantasies and impulses third a long process of negotiation is unavoidable by the way though this exploration about dreams is not directly about the archetype of the Shadow DreamWork and the shadow and the unconscious they're all intimately intertwined and if you are interested in the shadow in particular check out this transmission that I did on the topic here so this quote about inner work or Shadow work being more like diplomacy than a hard science I would argue that it really applies to Jung's method as a whole because each person's psyche is unique what they're dealing with is unique I mean even each person's perception of their own mind is unique honestly as I was just saying that it really hit me how much of a mind that really is that we all perceive our minds and the world differently that said there are a whole host of ideas and techniques that we should familiarize ourselves with if we want to do this kind of inner work or Shadow work and two of those primary tools are dream workor and active imagination obviously in this transmission we're focusing on DreamWork we will return to active imagination in a future transmission and why are these tools important both Dream Work and active imagination because when we go into this realm of Dreams or deep enough into the imagination we in the OS sense lose control of the situation we are no longer consciously in charge of what's going on in the mind so it is those Realms we must explore in those Realms we must play in if we want to make the unconscious conscious much ink my friends has been spilled on the topic of DreamWork even if we're staying within the Fairly narrow confines of Jung and his philosophical tradition there is a lot out there but for this video I'm going to look primarily at the work of Robert Johnson and his fantastic book inner work I do recommend you grab a copy because of course I cannot even begin to exhaust all of the knowledge in those pages but in it Johnson lays out a really valuable practical four-step approach to DreamWork we're going to go through each one of in detail but just to summarize here so you have the overview Step One is capturing the dream image and making associations step two Dynamics this is the step where we apply those captured images to our own inner lives step three this is the interpretation stage which of course entails interpreting those images and their meanings and step four rituals this is really the most mysterious and probably most overlooked stage and that's a shame because because it's a particularly uh powerful uh esoteric element of this whole equation so this first step associations this is again about capturing the dream images and making associations that begin to decode the hidden message in the symbolism of the dream and by the way when I say dream image this could literally be an image or not it could be anything a color a sound a situation a character a setting in the dream really any bit of data that you can remember the basic idea and technique is as follows immediately upon waking no phone no anything really you want to capture anything that you can remember about the dream as I was saying before literally anything is valid here as long as it spontaneously arises on that note do not try in this part of the process or really any part of the process do not try to make the dream about something don't reach for convenience into meaning because this is exactly what we don't want to do this is allowing the conscious mind and the ego to take control of this sense making process this actually runs counter to what we're trying to do here because remember we're trying to make a connection with the unconscious we're trying to gain wisdom from the unconscious parts of the psyche so once you have this dream image identified what exactly are these associations it's what you associate or what even could culturally be associated with that that you captured it's really about asking the unconscious actually Johnson puts it this way he says it's like asking the unconscious what its intent what its meaning might be by showing you this image I know so far this may be a little bit foggy so I'm going to give a specific example that Johnson talks about in the book and I also really like this because it's a simple example it's a really small piece of data and it's the color blue and we're going to demonstrate how just something like a color may contain a lot of information so how is that how could a sense of remembering that you were dreaming of something blue a blue room a blue scene how can this begin to yield wisdom and how would we start looking for that wisdom by creating associations with the color blue one way that Johnson suggests is a hub and spoke method I really like this method essentially you place your image this would be blue in this example in the center in the hub position and then each association with the color would be a Spoke so one Association is cool or detached True Blue uh phrase that means honest or faithful my blue sweater that I own the fact that I usually wear blue clothes or the phrase I've got the blue so blue as in sadness so again this can be a total scattershot you're not looking for what makes sense to you specifically quite yet you're just thinking of a associations with the color blue eventually Johnson points out though of course we're looking for meaning so what we want to do and this hearkens back to Yung himself is find an association that clicks that when you write it down you pause and you feel some kind of stirring of energy so this is an important hint on where to focus the subjective feeling like you found an association that clicks now once you have done that once you've captured all of your dream images and made associations with them you can move on to phase two the Dynamics phase so this is about taking that image and the associations that clicked and applying them to your own inner life to the Dynamics in your own life so to stick with that example of the color blue perhaps that Association that I gave before about depression is what clicked maybe you have been feeling a sense of depression in your life finding the Dynamics here looks like asking yourself what part of me is this where am I feeling depression in my life where do I feel it maybe even in my body somatically how have I seen this depressive blue Spirit functioning in my life lately and again this is just an example you can literally replace this Association this example of blue with any dream image that you've experienced you know what part of me feels strong what part of me feels weak Johnson notes that there may be Temptation here and really throughout this whole dream interpretation process to try to make a dream image about something other than your own psyche your own inner life do your best to avoid this to return to your own psyche what this means for your own inner life do not project this into the outside world and depending on the dream this can be really challenging like if you have a dream that seems to be about someone in your own life maybe even your partner maybe they're stepping out on you maybe they dilly dally and the cute neighbor the desire to act out toward them or at least feel some kind of pointed emotion toward them in the real outside world may be really tempting but dream images both Jung and Johnson emphasize are almost never about the outside world they're almost always about the dreamer psyche and yes quick sidebar Yung does definitely contradict himself here because he does say that he had some precognitive dreams some actually incredibly impactful precognitive dreams but this is exceedingly rare in the scope of all dreams and I think this is just ripe territory for shadow projection or just plain ego masquerading his wisdom uh as Jung puts it in this quote here quote precognitive dreams can be recognized and verified as such only when the precognized event has actually happened otherwise the greatest uncertainty prevails also such dreams are relatively rare it is therefore not worth looking at the dreams for their future significance one usually gets it wrong another powerful potentially very awkward question to ask yourself here is what do I in the ego waking conscious sense have in common with this dream image the discomfort and awkwardness comes in when this is an image that you're not comfortable with or you're dis disturbed by maybe it's a violent image or it's something that by waking standards is totally unacceptable Behavior you know let's turn the above example inside out maybe you're the one doing the dream diddling of course there's going to be temptation to pretend it never happened or to just reject the idea not return to it and I get that experiencing extreme dreams or just unethical ones not to mention coming back to them and analyzing can be extremely uncomfortable but that doesn't mean that they aren't important in fact they might be speaking to something of huge import this may be some deep unmet archetypal need that your psyche is trying to make you aware of but now that I've mentioned this archetypal need idea let's stay here for a minute let's stay with this uncomfortable example of the dream diddling just to maximize the cringe perhaps here there's some kind of dionan or erotic need that's unmet and when I say erotic I mean this more in the Greek sense of Aeros uh though I guess it could mean the Contemporary use of the word as well point being whatever the dream image is even if it's extreme or uncomfortable it's probably Perfectly Natural because we all carry all of these archetypes and extremes grab our attention you know you could see an extreme image as the unconscious yelling at us as a kind of urgency from the unconscious or even uh an archetype trying to get us to acknowledge or address something especially if it's really repressed it's buried in the shadow and this is probably a good time to note that this doesn't necessarily have to be something entirely negative this could be pointing to a talent that you have that you haven't used in a while a part of you that's looking for expression maybe you used to be an artist and you haven't painted in years the unconscious will absolutely speak to you about needs like this as well this is because as Johnson points out and I think I just briefly mentioned we require all of these archetypal energies they're all looking for catharsis and expression through US Johnson brings up this idea of understanding who's Turf you're on what archetypes Turf you're on for instance if you're dreaming about being at your maternal grandmother's house let's say you may well be in the sphere of the great mother archetype but what does that mean well it depends on the circumstances are you locked out of of her house are you enjoying her cooking are you hugging her and again this could indicate anything from an unmet need to being on the verge of some kind of epiphany about the divine feminine personal example I've been having a lot of dreams that seem to have a competition or conflict backdrop I will pause here take a guess whose archetypal Turf you're on in a dream like this this would be like the Aries or the Mars archetype energy before we move on to step three one more quick word about archetypes I absolutely don't want to just gloss over it here this is such a deep Topic in and of itself I encourage you all to dive deeper once again I do have a transmission a primer specifically on the topic of archetypes you can check it out here this has been a bit of a long windy section so I want to review the main points of this Dynamic stage again again we take that Dre dream image and the associations that clicked for us from step one and we ask questions like what does this want from me what part of me feels this what part of my body does this live in where have I been behaving like this so once you've captured the dream image you've created the associations found the ones that click and seen how they are manifesting themselves in your inner life um you've already gone a long way toward yielding Insight from the dream and now you can start to ask big questions about what the dream means what is the core message that the unconscious is trying to communicate to me through this combination of images but just because we can ask these questions it doesn't mean an answer is going to flow easily it doesn't mean we're going to come to some kind of clear understanding right away you know let's return to our example of the dream image blue and US deciding that yes the dynamic here does seem to be that we're actually experiencing depression in our lives um what do we do now you know let's say we've even identified the place in us where the depression is coming from it may not be easy to remove that thing from our lives pertinent personal example while I was still in my day job I was experiencing a tremendous amount of anxiety I was having a lot of tumultuous dreams and just difficulty sleeping in general I knew years ago that my career was the primary source of this psychic dissonance and this eventually did lead to me quitting that job to focus on this but it was a years long process of preparing of processing of things as practical as just saving money so even if we take these messages from the unconscious seriously and we succeed in decoding them uh it's not a straight line line from that to completely closing the loop but to get back to the more meta and methodological for everybody listening Johnson does offer four tips for dream interpretation that I think are indispensably important the first one is to choose an interpretation that shows you something you didn't know remember this is about making the unconscious conscious so if you're reaching for an interpretation that fits in with your preconceived Notions are you really doing that or is the ego taking over to avoid an interpretation that inflates the egoo or is self- congratulatory dreams don't tell us how great we are they point to unfinished business they communicate symbolic archetypal information looking for catharsis or recognition that they aren't currently getting so a dream should always point to something that's unknown something that was previously need that was unmet three avoid interpretations that shift the responsibility away from the self again for example if you have a dream about someone you dislike or someone in your life doing something that you don't like the dream isn't trying to tell you that you're right the dream is trying to point to something in your own inner life or something you're not doing or a need that's unmet and four learn to live with dreams for the long ha understand that sometimes in a particular case it takes time and really the whole Act of becoming fluent in the language of dreams also takes time on the topic of specific dreams that seem to elude a good interpretation as Johnson puts it some dreams come from the frontier of your Consciousness they're too big too alien these are the kind of dreams that need to ripen we need to live with these are dreams that you have to take special note of of and return to from time to time if you want to really succeed in interpreting them in this section Johnson also points out that if we're realistic sometimes we have ambivalent feelings sometimes it's not uh an emphatic clicking with a single Association from step one or some dynamic in our own life sometimes we're just not sure and in these cases we should absolutely be honest with ourselves and not grasp again for any one meaning that we're not totally sure about you know let's go back to the color blue I actually quite like the color blue I wear it often I may see blue as a symbol for the depth of the psyche as the great Joseph Campbell points out and I'm sure Jung himself points out water which is obviously blue is often a symbol for the unconscious for the mythological for the other realm uh this stuff all excites me so these are potential positive associations with blue that might also click for me feeling this kind of ambivalence does not mean you've made a mistake it doesn't mean you're wrong this is completely natural and that ambivalence may stay or it may fade over time and you might feel that you've truly made the correct interpretation either way you're not doing anything wrong so once you've captured the dream image you've identified the associations that click identified the Dynamics and found an interpretation that really seems to speak to that dream image we move on to the final most mysterious stage ritual the ritual stage is about doing something consciously and physically to honor the dream to really close the loop on the dream and yes this may sound foreign it may sound woo if you're not used to thinking ritualistically and admittedly this for lack of a better term ritualistic muscle is really something that I've just started working on fairly recently and as Johnson emphasizes this is the step that is really something akin to the magical act this is the step in which the unconscious dream content enters the physical world that we transmute it from psychical to physical and conscious quote doing a physical act has a magical effect on DreamWork it takes your understanding of the dream off the purely abstract level and gives it an immediate concrete reality to help elucidate this more another fantastic quote from Johnson here ritual is one of our most powerful tools for making a synthesis between the polarities of human reality it is an art that ties our two halves together the archetypal spiritual Yang needs to be tied to the Here and Now earthiness of our Yin nature the masculine spirit that gets so lost and abstraction and Theory needs to be anchored in the feminine Earth you know me I love that esoteric way of putting it but I do need to be clear that often times and again Johnson emphasizes this the ritual is not abstract or esoteric it's really straightforward and practical you know perhaps you've come to the conclusion that your dream interpretation uh is telling you that you need to apologize to someone to address some Deb that you have the ritual in this case would be apologizing to the person you've wronged or paying off the debt that you owe uh let's return to that dionan Aeros example from earlier maybe it really does just mean that you need a night of partying of blowing off that erotic steam but in situations where it's less direct where it's less clear how you should execute this ritual step Johnson says that there is power in just doing something something as simple as lighting a candle or going for a mindful walk with the intention of it being for the dream these simple actions serve as rituals as well overall the point is to not be overly analytical and theoretical here there's power in this act of making the unconscious conscious through doing something physical there's an example from this chapter that Johnson gives about a patient of his who happened to be a Monk and really skilled logical philosopher he wanted everything to make sense be backed up by theology understand exactly why he was doing every step Johnson wasn't sure how to break him out of this thinking so he did something amusing Johnson says quote he didn't see why he should do anything about the dream he thought it enough to understand it with his mind to grasp the theory one day we worked on a dream and he got angry with me as usual and said quote what do you expect me to do about this one an irrational response jumped out of someplace in my unconscious why don't you go out and look at the bark of 10 trees to honor this dream he looked at me startled stood up muttered something and backed out of the room I felt a little sheepish there wasn't anything about trees or bark in the dream I was just as startled at what had come out of my mouth as he was then about 3 hours later the monk came pounding on my door in high excitement he said you don't know how interesting the bark on trees is some of it is brown some is gray some is smooth some has great wrinkles in it and little creatures alive in it and you wouldn't believe how beautiful and interesting the bark on the tree is in that 3 hours this man awakened for the first time to his physical being and to the physical world he saw the spirit in the physical world rather than dissociated from it it was as though we had fashioned a Zen Buddhist what is the Bark on 10 tree I love that example it kind of reminds me of yung's Scarab synchronicity I actually talk about that in this transmission here Johnson's Point here of course is that to some extent we need to turn off that frontal lobe even when we are consciously engaging with the dream material this isn't an exact science you know getting back to that quote uh from yung in the beginning about this being more like diplomacy than science in a lot of ways ritual is all about turning off that logical rational part of the mind and just doing something symbolically that said in this section Johnson again right after this anecdote in fact reminds us not to get overly abstract not to get overly mystical when we don't need to that is if there's a way to directly set things straight or honor the dream as in paying the bill or apologizing that's what you should do and that my friends concludes Johnson's four steps I do hope it perked up your Wonder whiskers I do hope you will at a very minimum start capturing your dreams whatever little bits of data you can extract from them tomorrow morning and by the way I'm not saying I've analyzed every single dream image I've had in fact I have a note on my phone that's just months and months of dream images many of them I haven't even touched yet so that actually dovetail rather nicely into some final musings that I think are really important this work es and flows some mornings you just will not remember anything uh I seem to go in spurts like this all the time where I have fully formed almost cinematic dreams and then I'll go for a week where I can almost remember nothing so it can vary from incredibly subtle or completely dry to synchronous and detailed even pre cognitive yes I know I warned you against uh interpreting any dreams as having precognitive value Johnson warns against it Yung warns against it but if Yung can have precognitive dreams on occasion I think we all can but again I really do want to emphasize that when we're doing this work in the unconscious I think we're doing something that is bordering on sacred that we should treat with a lot of respect I really do think that we are playing with powerful psychic forces in the dream realm so do be respectful do prostrate the ego at the Gate of this exercise also remember even though I love Johnson's method and Jung's method nothing about this is monolithic all of this is pretty subjective you know as I said at the beginning how we even perceive our own minds is going to vary from person to person so of course interpretation of what we encounter in our minds is going to vary as well and on this point even people who are considered largely in the same philosophical vein as Yung do have different takes on dreams and dream interpretation one of my favorite thinkers for instance James Hilman has significantly different thoughts than Yung on dreams or at least about what we should do with dream images once again I actually did a transmission on Hillman's dream philosophy here and Hilman takes things really far into the realm of the esoteric the psychical the spirit realm what he even calls directly the underworld but with that my friends do absolutely pick yourself up a copy of inner work by Robert Johnson it it's seriously one of the books most densely packed with glimmering nuggets of precious wisdom and you my friends are all glimmering precious nuggets as as well do tickle that algorithm for me with a like a subscribe a comment a share all of it is immensely important do subscribe to third ey drops wherever you listen to podcast my friends because we've got hundreds of Mind melts with brilliant beings and if you want to go deeper and support these Transmissions directly join hundreds of other Wonder Dippers at patreon.com sl3 ey drops I do look forward to hearing about some of your Wonder dips into the dream realm in the comments much love to you all and I'll see you in the next transmission

Channel: THIRD EYE DROPS

Views: 5,465

Keywords: carl jung, carl jung dreams, carl gustav jung, collective unconscious, carl jung dream analysis, dream interpretation, carl jung dream interpretation, dream analysis, carl jung the shadow, unconscious mind, carl jung psychology, robert a johnson inner work, carl jung quotes, jungian psychology, carl jung archetypes, carl jung quotes about life

Id: 86UGEebEoo0

Length: 33min 34sec (2014 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 22 2024