Jordan Peterson: What do your dreams tell you about yourself?

I also spent a lot of time reading Carl Jung it was through Jung and also John Piaget s developmental psychologist that I started to understand that our articulated systems of thought are embedded in something like a dream and that that dream is informed in a complex way by the way we act so you know we act out things we don't understand all the time and if that wasn't the case then we wouldn't need a psychology or a sociology and anthropology or any of that because we would be completely transparent to ourselves and we're clearly not so we're much more complicated than we understand which means that the way that we behave contains way more information than we know and part of the dream that surrounds our articulated knowledge has been extracted as a consequence of us watching each other behave and telling stories about it for thousands and thousands and thousands of years extracting out patterns of behavior that characterize humanity and trying to represent them partly through limitation but also through drama and mythology and literature and art and all of that to represent what we're like so that we can understand what we're like and I see in it the struggle of humanity to arise to rise above this animal forebears say and to become conscious of what it means to be human and that's a very difficult thing because we don't know who we are what we are where we came from or any of those things and you know the white life is an unbroken chain going back three and a half billion years it's an absolutely unbelievable thing every single one of your ancestors reproduced successfully for three-and-a-half billion years it's absolutely unbelievable we rose out of the dirt and the muck and here we are conscious but not knowing and we're trying to figure out who we are Freud I suppose in some sense started to callate collate the information that we had pertaining to the notion that people lived inside a dream you know it was Freud who really popularized the idea of the unconscious mind and we take this for granted to such a degree today that we don't understand how revolutionary the idea was like with what's out with Freud is that we've taken all the marrow out of his bone so to speak unless behind and you know now when we think about Freud we just think about the husk because that's everything that's being discarded but so much of what he discovered is part of our popular conception now including the idea that your perceptions and your actions and your thoughts are all what would you say informed and and shaped by unconscious motivations that are not part of your voluntary control and that's a very very strange thing it's one of the most unsettling things about the psychoanalytic theories that the psychoanalytic theories are something like you're a loose collection of living subpersonalities each with its own set of motivations and perceptions and emotions and rationales all of that and you have limited control over that so you're like a plurality of of internal personalities that's loosely linked into a unity you know that because you can't control yourself very well which is one of Jung's objections to Nietzsche's idea that we could create our own values so he didn't believe that especially not after interacting with Freud because he saw that human beings were affected by things that were deeply deeply affected by things that were beyond their conscious control and no one really knows how to conceptualize those things you know the cognitive psychologists think about them in some sense as computational machines and the ancient people I think thought of them as gods although it's more complex than that like lage would be a God Mars the regard of rage that's the thing that possesses you when you're angry you know it has a viewpoint and it says what it wants to say and that might have very little to do with what you want to say when you're being sensible and it doesn't just inhabit you it inhabits everyone and it lives forever and it even inhabits animals and so it's this transcendent psychological entity that inhabits the body politic like like the thought inhabits the brain that's one way of thinking about it a very strange way of thinking but it certainly it certainly has its merits and so and those things well in some sense those are deities although it's not that simple and so you know it was got very interested in dreams that started to understand the relationship between dreams and myths because he would see in his clients dreams echoes of stories that he knew because it was deeply read in mythology and then he started to believe that the dream was the birthplace of the myth and that there was a continual interaction between the two processes the dream and the story and storytelling and well you know you tend to tell your dreams as stories when you remember them and some people remember dreams all the time like two or three at night I've had clients like that and they often have archetypal dreams that have very clear mythological structures I think that's more the case with people who are creative by the way especially if they're a bit unstable at the time because the dream tends to occupy the space of uncertainty and to concentrate on fleshing out the unknown reality before you get a real grip on it so it's like the dream is the birthplace of thinking that's a good way of thinking about it and so because it's the birthplace of thinking it's not that clear it's doing its best to formulate something that was Jung's notion as opposed to Freud who believed that there were sensors internal sensors that were hiding the dreams true message that's not what Jung believed he believed the dream was doing its best to express a reality that was still outside of fully articulated conscious comprehension it was because you think look a thought appears in your head right that's obvious bang it's nothing you ever asked about but what the hell does that mean a thought appears in your head what kind of ridiculous explanation is that you know it's it just doesn't help with anything where does it come from well nowhere it just appears in my head okay well that's not a very sophisticated explanation as it turns out you know and so you might think that those thoughts thoughts that you think well where do they come from well they're often someone else's thoughts right someone long-dead that might be part of it just like the words you use to think are utterances of people who be long dead and so you're informed by the Spirit of your ancestors that's one way of looking at it and your motivation speak to your emotions speak to you and your body speaks to you and it all does all that at least in part through the dream and the dream is the birthplace of the fully articulated idea anyways back to you you was a great believer in the dream and I know that dreams will tell you things that you don't know and then I thought well how the hell can that be how that in the world can something you think up tell you something you don't know how does that make any sense first of all why don't you understand it why does it have to come forth in the form of the dream it's like you're not there's something going on inside you that you don't control right the dream happens to you just like life happens to you I mean there is the odd lucid dreamer who can you know apply a certain amount of conscious control but most of the time it's you're laying there asleep and it's crazy complicated world manifests itself inside you and you don't know how you could you can't do it when you're awake and you don't know what it means it's like what the hell is going on and that's one of the things that's so damn frightening about the psychoanalyst because you get this both from Freud and Jung you really start to understand that there are things inside you that are happening that control you instead of the other way around you know it is a bit of reciprocal control but there's manifestations of spirits so to speak inside you that determine the manner in which you walk through life and you don't control it and what does is it random you know there are people who have claimed that dreams are mere merely the consequence of random neuronal firing which is a theory I think is absolutely absurd because there's nothing random about dreams you know they're very very structured and very very complex and they're not like snow on a television screen or static on a radio like those things are complicated and and then also I've seen so often that people have very coherent dreams that have a perfect narrative structure now they're fully developed in some sense and so I just deny that theory just doesn't go anywhere with me I just can't see that as useful at all and so so I'm more likely to take the phenomena seriously say well there's something to dreams while you dream of the future and then you try to make it into a reality that seems to be an important thing or maybe you dream up a nightmare and try to make that into a reality because people do that too if they're held and revenge for example and full of hatred and resentment in that manifests itself in terrible fantasies you know those are dreams then people go act them out these things are powerful you know when whole Nations can get caught up in collective dreams that's what happened to the Nazis that's what happened to Nazi Germany in the 1930s it was absolutely remarkable amazing horrific destructive spectacle and the same thing happened in the Soviet Union the same thing happened in China like we have take these things seriously you know try to understand what's going on

Channel: Essential Truth

Views: 1,109,223

Keywords: Jordan B Peterson, Jordan Peterson, Dreams, dream interpretation, bite-sized philosophy, Essential Truth, Gravitahn, PowerfulJRE, The Thinkery, philosophyinsights, ocean of freedom, Carl Jung, Freud, Freud dreams, symbols in dreams, inspirational, motivational, meaning of dreams, Your Morning, BuddhismPsychology, the agenda with steve paikin, Gad saad, Ruminate, How2findtruth, Marvel entertainment, M Czerna, Intense 5, Ramble, 50 stars, psyche matters

Id: Y5HOhwM7ELY

Length: 9min 23sec (563 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 26 2017