Jungian Dream Interpretation - Marcus West

so this morning Jungian dream interpretation I hope you've all come armed with a dream yourselves and in case you suddenly look puzzled and didn't read the small print I'm going to try a bit of an experiment when I hope you're going to I'm going to talk you through a dream that I hope you have bought later on it's a bit difficult with so many people but I think the idea is that you'll be working on it yourselves and of course dreams tell us an enormous amount about the person and a very private and revealing so what I don't want to do is you know of one person to bring out their dream and we have a little in front of you so it'll be really your own work but hopefully be able to build on what I've talked about in the talk so before I get there I'm going to talk a little bit about the ancients view of dreams and dreaming I'm also going to talk about a bit about neuroscience because I want to give you a sort of crash course in the unconscious and there'll also be a bit of a crash course on Union psychology which Jung's view of dreams was very much central to how he thinks about the Jungian psycho psyche and I'm going to be illustrating this with Jung's own dreams three of Jung's and dreams so I hope that's all going to hang together okay to start with the ancients view of dreams we know a little up more okay okay thank you and we know about the is that okay no how's that okay so we know about the ancients the Egyptian view of dreams through this papyrus which was found in off the value of Kings which has a an interpretation of 108 dreams but back in those days they they thought dreams had a fixed meaning so if you dreamt of various things they had one meaning only so this is the kind of thing that that papyrus says if you dreamt of a deep well it meant you would be going to prison she dreamt of a shining moon it would be forgiveness if you were dead it was a good omen you'd have a long life if you dreamt of a face in the mirror it meant be a new life and of course you know we can sort of understand how these things come about and I'll be talking about dream symbolism and why they may come but you know it's a little bit random but also very much related to the particular culture of the time so the last one you're making to your love to your wife in daylight it's a bad omen that your God will find out your misdeeds so a large part of the dreams back then we thought about the dream being a message from God or a message from the altar from an external source a sort of revelation I mean of course the famous dream from back then is Pharaoh's dream of the the seven cows being eaten up by the seven fat cows being eaten up by the seven thin cows interpreted by Joseph and Pharaoh took this very seriously and he put aside the grain from seven years of bumper harvests and later on when the seven lean years came he was all prepared to go and his dream interpreter became chief Vizier and did very well out of it Joe Young talked about big archetypal dreams like this dreams which often a numinous feel and maybe you yourselves have had such a dream often these dreams can change the direction of your life and but they really stay with you so we might be touching on some of those archetypal big dreams a bit but there's a question that I'll be kind of running for a little while which is do do dreams tell the future so somebody who's taught about this a long time ago was Aristotle he said that so he said two main things have very nice short papers he wrote on dreams the first one is that dreams don't have de Lyonne agency they're not the message from God his reason ordinary people have dreams and even the lower animals have dreams so obviously God wouldn't be speaking to us it's other thought he recognized that dreams don't always come true so therefore he thought they weren't therefore prophetic but what he did think was that they really tuned in very well to what's going on in our bodies and there's a very modern view this and therefore they might be very helped to diagnose bodily illnesses so that's our Aristotle and two fellows from the second century Macrobius and autumn odorous they thought in order to get over this issue of whether dreams were prophetic they divided them into two some relate to the past and the present and some write to the future so a big leap now from the past to Freud and his monumental book the interpretation of Dreams bought out at the turn of the century later years he came to consider this book really his most important one because it's not only a view of how to interpret dreams but it's a view he introduces the Oedipus complex repression his idea of primary and secondary processes and his understanding of the unconscious and I'll be talking about that in the mid his view of condensation displacement timelessness absence of mutual contradiction and replacement of external internal by external reality so one of the dreams he gives in the inter in the interpretation of dreams is there's from an adult patient of his he/she remember that as a child she'd had this dream all her brothers and sisters and cousins who have been robbing the field grew wings and flew away now for young but for Freud this was a view of the disguise that dreams employ so he saw the the essential element of the dream is the the there's a latent content and a manifest content the manifest content was the dream of the children romping and flying away but he's always was with disguising a latent content which was her hidden desire and the hidden desire was that these brothers and sisters he felt he she wished them she wished them to grow wings to become angels to be dead this was her death wish for her older siblings so this was Freud's view of so it was it was the repressed wish is the wish fulfillment of this young girl and he felt the dreams were about wish fulfillment and that their view really was about you dreamt because you were trying to preserve sleep so that you could repress these hidden wishes and it was this book from a Freud's that actually introduced young to Freud he was very enthusiastic about it and he wrote to Freud saying that he thought he had proof of repression and he was doing at the time his work on word association and the complex which is the term he introduced so he they got together and what collaborated as you almost certainly know for over a over a decade very successfully and young took on the view of dreams as even more important than Freud because in away in Freudian theory it was it there in the background it sort of doesn't take the central role it does for you so now we come to Jung's views a bit of a long quote but one worth looking at and unpacking dreams are impartial spontaneous products of the unconscious psyche outside of the control of the will they are pure nature they show us the unvarnished natural truth and are therefore fitted as nothing else's they give us back an attitude that accords with our basic human nature when our consciousness had strayed too far from its foundations and run into an impact so it's a lot in that sentence which I just unpack for you so in one of the things he's doing in that statement is he's disagreeing with Freud dreams aren't disguised he says they show us the unvarnished natural truth why is it then that they can be so bizarre and so difficult to understand and the answer for him is the nature of symbols and rich meaning and it's precisely that that I'm going to be concentrating on this morning looking at the many layers of meaning and the many layers of significance that a symbol can hold and often you can go on working on a dream throughout your whole life and I'll be talking about the different ways we can look at dreams and the the ways we can really mine the significance of Dreams and get to the different levels on which they work the other thing he thought about dreams was that they were offered a compensation he didn't say this every time but this was his it was his kind of primary view and it was when the word that bit of quite again when we've strayed too far from our foundations so it's when the dream is a message from the unconscious trying to tell you what you don't know already a dream is always trying to tell you something you don't know mary-louise font bonne France said dreams don't waste much telling us what we know already so the dream may be consciously we think have one view but the dreams is trying to tell us something we need to know that when off when our psyches got out of balance and the other thing about young is very different view to Freud's was he thought the unconscious is essentially constructive whereas Freud sometimes early on particularly saw the unconscious as the dusting of the psyche simply the place where things were oppressed things changed when as he developed his theory of ego hidden super-ego you know he very much recognized that these were needed to be integrated and was a source of richness but for young he takes it much further than that and he sees the unconscious and what he came to call the self as holding the wisdom of the psyche and for him if you like the essence of Jungian psychology is if we can only learn to listen to the unconscious to the self to what it's trying to tell us then that is the source of wisdom that's the greatest source of wisdom that we can we can hear so in order to think about the self really look at this up the neuroscience of Dreams to think about how the unconscious works and how that fits with Jung's views and Freud's usage as I said so as you may well know as our insky was studying the science of dreaming and he noticed that dreams mostly occurred in REM sleep and with kleitman in 1953 he suggested that there was this period of sleep that this period of sleeping when the when we have REM rapid eye movement phase that most dream that dreams occur and then a French researcher Michael of juve in 1962 was working on cats and he discovered that by removing the pons a deep part of our brain stem that in humans and all animals that cats the REM sleep was prevented so Hobson and Macaulay had a view theory which they called the activation synthesis theory so dreams they set up activated by the firing of the primitive part of the brain the pons and this triggers the brain to synthesize these meaningless random dismiss images into some kind of narrative so this was a view that was very much taken up early on by the press not so much in the psychology field and Freud's view of the significance of Dreams was still held sway there but this was a sort of a science rebuffed to that Hobson says if consciousness is in the forebrain we can completely eliminate any possible contribution of ideas to dreaming this was his view but through various challenges I'm just going to describe in a minute he has changed his views over time and he's had to recognize that the lower brain functions are associated with a mood emotion and feeling in particular so his view then went on to say that actually we can ignore the content but it's the bizarreness sort of the bizarreness is view to the undisguised emotional content of a dream and I think this also reflects the way our understanding of ourselves has changed we used to think of ourselves as very cognitive beings but I think now we very much recognize the centrality of effects of emotion and that this in a way I don't you've ever read the maseo's excellent book the feeling of what happens where he describes how cognition thinking follows directly from our emotion it's built out of and on top of the notion but the one thing I want to pick up on is Hobson also thinks that the bizarre nature of dreams is due to the sleeping mind making too many associations dreaming he says is a hyper associative state and whilst I disagree with him on many things that I completely agree with him and I think that is the key to being understand be able to understand symbols and symbolization so this is mark tsoumas he's a he's a south south african Freudian neuroscientist and he pointed out that dreaming doesn't just occur during REM sleep there are actually three types of Dreams there is what called sleep onset dreams which are those dreams we get just as we're drifting off last weekend I spent weekend digging in the garden and just as I was going to sleep I found myself going like like this it's kind of a strange movement which is precisely what was left over in my body and those those sleep onset dreams often they're very much somatically led then there is REM sleep if you wake someone in REM sleep 90 to 95 percent of the time they will describe dreams of a bizarre nature the bizarre nature that we kind of famously think of in relation to dreams however if you if you wake people in non-rem sleep you find that five to ten percent they still talk and we'll describe bizarre dreams but if you asked him what was going on was any thinking going on fifty percent of the time they will tell you yes there was something going on but they'll describe it not in that bizarre way they will describe it in terms of something worrying I was thinking about an exam or thinking about a difficulty at work it's a sort of really emotionally based kind of experience and actually as the night goes on we have what's called non REM to dreams which which they're sort more like the REM type dreams we get more of the kind of typical bizarre nature dreams so he felt that was one of the main critiques of that Hobson and Hobson McAuley's activation synthesis model and further than that he discovered that destroying the pons daughter doesn't stop dreaming in humans and of course they didn't do this experiment list of people who had some kind of brain damage in one person only did that was that successful however they did find people who'd had brain damage but there were three times when was stopped firstly when the dopamine pathway so between the two hemispheres had been severed and this he related to the goal seeking behavior of human beings so he very much felt this supported the Freudian view of wish fulfillment but you could also see that girls seeking behaviour is very much about our interest in the world and what we do so it sort of it's a bit broader than that also when there was damage to the right parietal lobe so that's the visuospatial area of the brain dealing with perception and memory but most significantly he found that the when the damage to the occipital occipital temporal parietal Junction and this is the part of the brain which takes our everyday experience and related to abstract thinking so it generalizes and this is very much what dreams are doing at night they're generalizing from our particular experience and so if some said dreams and higher function of the brain are therefore essential for dreaming so the purpose of dreaming if I just sort of it's air for you to read but it's about the affective reorganization of Mary it's it's about taking those experiences that we have every day seeing how they fit in with how we feel us feel about ourselves what's going on about the particular relationships we've had all that experience we've had during the day too much to to deal with consciously the dream reorganizes that and over time these dreams construct the powerful subconscious or preconscious effective psychological patterns that make us the people we are honest Jaak panksepp who is a guide recently but a brilliant arrow near a scientist hobson also has come to recognize that dreaming helps us develop a secure sense of agency as the eye integrates the individual different experiences and sense of self so that's the modern near a scientific view and as you'll see as you're here now very much coheres with Jung's view so I'd like to think about signs symbols and the unconscious and how the unconscious works another quote from Jung dreams are a spontaneous self portrayal in symbolic form of the actual situation in the unconscious but what's a symbol so here are 4 images symbols and I'd like you to think to yourself for a moment what they symbolize to you you might even like to just quickly check out with the person sitting next to you to see see what what they make of them as well we'll just don't take two minutes to do that see see if you go here or see where the differences are okay I don't if you want to shout out a few things well that takes you back to school too much as is the weekend and university after all but the tree what do you get for the tree life piece growth okay lovely thank you the crocodile power danger advertising the baby innocence I missed that one yeah and the Duff oh yeah I miss unfortunately it's a bit spoiled of isn't it because it's symbolically it's being used in that way but okay I mean you might ask yourself why I do these things symbolize that yeah what is it about those things well so to kind of dig a bit more deeply into that so Freud thought that dreams worked sorry the unconscious worked in five ways condensation displacement timelessness the absence of mutual contradiction and replacement of external by internal reality so if we take that dream of the the fillings growing wings and flying away we could say that things were sort of condensed there so the various meanings were condensed into one one place and the wish to kill off for being displaced into them growing wings and flying away there was a timelessness if the dreams have a timeless meaning that apply not just at one moment but future moments and you know someone can be alive and dead in the same dream or at different times alive and dead and really it's about internal reality when it seems to be about external reality I don't if you've heard of South American psychoanalyst called Matthew Blanco a brilliant man who worked a lot with with maths and he analyzed Freud's view of dreams and said actually can we put really simply what the unconscious does is it recognizes the sameness is the symmetry between one thing and another so we go back to those symbols we were looking at we could say that the crocodile symbolizes danger because it's got big teeth anything dangerous is going to be simple symbolized by that a tree growth family connections you know the root we're working on the connections and the similarities and this picks up Hobson's view that the dreaming is at a hyper associative state the other way that Freud differed from young or young different from Freud rather is that he felt Freud very much was interpreting his symbols in a particular way towards sexuality particularly an infantile sexuality so that you know anything long and feared would be a penis anything that contains stuff would be a vagina but for young a symbol has much more meaning like that many layers of meaning so he felt that a symbol was finding out the essence on the pattern of something it points to more than Jungmann well just one reference and the unconscious therefore works by finding out the sameness is a link and you can see why this is so important so if you see how this works for infants it's really important that the infant can find out whether this person is similar or indeed the same as the warm mother I saw yesterday whether they are the same friendly qualities it really is essential to the way we can identify things in the world begin to form representations so this is the way the unconscious works from very early on in life and yeah I'd say that here this is why the loss of the occipital temporal parietal Junction is fatal to dreaming because you can't make that that abstraction from the concrete reality to the abstract view of so if you showed someone who'd had that part of them brain damaged you've shown one of those pictures earlier of a baby and they were to say it's a baby okay the other way to get into Young's dream interpretation a bit more and this is where the different levels come in he interpreted dreams on four different levels the objective subjective the transference and the archetypal levels this might seem a bit clunky at first but I hope you'll bear with it because it it really gives us the different ways we can think about dreams okay so the objective level on the objective level a dream applies to things in the real world either historically or currently so we have a dream of driving too fast in a car and crashing what does this mean is this a prophetic dream that means we're going to crash or if we treat it can we treat it symbolically does it mean that in various ways we are driving too fast we're taking risks we're doing too much there was a famous dream that that young recounts a number of times of an fellow he met in a Zurich bar who said to him hey Karl are you still doing that ridiculous dream interpretation stuff I had this dream I was up walking on the mountains you know how much I loved that I was walking higher and higher I felt fantastic and I got to the top of the mountain and I just carried on walking and you said to him next time you go mountain climbing make sure you take two guides with you he said rubbish but three months later he was off climbing this mountain and he was seen to step out into thin air apparently just like he had in his dream he fell unfortunately taking his young companion climbing companion with him so very much that's the dream on the objective level so when we have a dream of driving too fast should we drive more slowly PACS indeed we should perhaps we should be also thinking more generally about how to take care about are what we're doing in what ways where we're driving too fast in what ways we're not being careful in what ways we're taking risks Young's interpretation of this mountain climbing dream is very peculiar because he he just took it on the external level he describes this man as as very headstrong now if you tell someone who's headstrong don't do such a sanction they're not very likely to listen to you and so you know perhaps that might account for it but you could almost think that actually if you listen to these dreams that the prophetic element of them wouldn't wouldn't come about because he would have stopped driving so fast or he would have taken some more guides with him so our dreams prophetic well I'll give young the the words on this one and for him it's about the perspective the forward-looking purpose of the unconscious so he says it would be wrong to call dreams prophetic because at bottom they are no more prophetic than a medical diagnosis or a weather forecast they are merely an anticipatory combination of probabilities which may coincide with the actual behavior of things but need to necessarily need not necessarily agree in every detail only in the latter case can we speak prophecy so actually you might think that a medical diagnosis or a weather forecast is pretty prophetic how does this work Jung says it happens because that the prospective function dreams is sometimes greatly superior to the combinations we can consciously fill see is not surprising since the dream results from the fusion of subliminal elements and is thus a combination of all the perceptions thoughts and feelings which consciousness has not registered because of their feeble accentuation so translation of that our unconscious is picking up all this stuff all the time it's kind of working on it all the time much more than our little consciousness which you can apparently can only deal with five things at any one time the unconscious working all these things and it comes up with these answer this is this is what holds the wisdom if you like they aren't this unconscious functioning and he calls this one element of it is the self so the next level is the subjective level this is very much associated will with Jung in this level where every object in the dream refers back to aspects of the dream of themselves so if you have a dream of being attacked by a violent stranger yes do take care when you go out that's the objective level but also perhaps this is a part of yourself a violent part of yourself that you are strange to that you haven't thought of before another kind of peculiarity of dreams people do funny things I married my sister so there's a sort of a real charge that well perhaps it's will be coming to the male and the female aspects of the person personality and it'll well but perhaps it's coming together of the you're kind of predominant male side with your feminine side speaking as a man Freud criticized Jung for saying that dreams are always like if he didn't if they do so it's clear because he outlined before but he did put quite a lot of emphasis on the subjective level the transference level is the relational level those of you who are therapists very interesting to take your patient stream as a commentary on what you're doing so you know if you person dreams of being attract attacked by a violent stranger you know perhaps they found the last session quite attacking something that they didn't expect from you was funky they felt to be violent so very much him worth listening to on that level so it's a real supervisory aspect there and then the archetypal level this relates to the archetypal level is that the powerful and universal level as and the typical level that maybe we all have in common but also the primitive and early aspects of the dream symbols so it's kind of the way I think about it is the upshot it's the way it works this is the way we think the world runs is on the archetypal level and sometimes dreams take it on this level as I said at the beginning could have called bigger archetypal dreams which really feel like they're trying to tell someone something really important and have a sort of numinous kind of otherworldly quality about them and when you look at the the the archetypal meaning of dreams you kind of do uncle this amplification are they giving you example in a minute so one more thing so my particular interest in dreams is that they tell us in the way nothing else can really about our early patterns of behavior so I only have patterns of maybe that we think of now in terms of internal working models this was Bowlby's term these this was the way up primary caregivers related with us our internal working models they became part of who we are they become part of our personality the way we react their implicit so we're not then we don't do it on purpose we are we are behaving in this way automatically it's part of our procedural memory and the these patterns are very much picked up by dreams and again I'll be giving you some examples in a minute but these again these patterns effective on all the different levels in our relationship with people in the real world our relationships with ourselves in relation our relationships with to our therapist or our main relations and in the way we think the world works so if we had a a kind of a really strict parent that's the way we think the world works if we expect to be criticized we expect things to to occur in that way and these put you have these patterns I put here apply on all the different levels so in this way dreams don't just have one means they can have many meanings many levels of meaning and keep on unfolding famous example from the past a rabbi from forget which century now he had twenty-four dream interpreters and they each gave him 20 for each 24 different interpretations and predictions and he said they were all right so each dream interpretation could pick up some bit of the truth which is why you can carry on discovering more and more over time from the same dream also worth recognizing Young was very selective about the way he applied this to his own dreams and let me give you an example so this is the first of Young's dream so I'm going to look at with you so this was a dream he had he had been travelling to America with Freud they'd been lecturing over there on the way out Freud Jung had been talking about these dead bodies that have been found in these peat bogs and Freud had fainted and he young had noticed this on the way back Jung told Freud this dream that he just had I was in a house I didn't know I've condensed it a bit it was my house with another story in Rococo style belief that there was a more basic red brick medieval ground floor and then there was a cellar dating back to Roman times and underneath that there was a primitive cave with broken property broken pottery scattered bones and two human skulls in it well perhaps you can imagine the bit that Freud was interested in he said who are those two skulls and he was very much thinking that you wanted to kill him off it was his this is his understanding of the oedipal complex that actually does the Sun young was the Sun whilst young the point was like the king and and so he says who's that you lied he said I think it's my sister and my cousin you know my wife my cousin I beg your pardon Young had a tendency to do that Freud was also interested you could say on the objective level you say well what's this applied in the world now is you know what's what's this about between you and me what's going on for you that makes you think just like this you're young on the other hand took this dream very difficulty looked on the subjective in the archetypal levels the house he said this is a view of the psyche and we can see that all these different levels there so we have are the upper levels of the house we have our understanding of the kind of what consciousness are proper ways of behaving but as we dig down we get to deeper and deeper levels of the psyche until eventually at the the bottom layer we get to what he called the collective unconscious where there's the wisdom of the previous generations are collected down in the collective unconscious so he felt that actually this the dream telling us something about archetypal about the way we are and about psyche now actually you can see that the dream operates on all those levels because it was this very dream and it was Jung's work on the psyche that led him to break from Freud so perhaps it was very much one of the dreams and things that led him to kill off Freud precisely as he said and I mean perhaps the other skull one might think of was Jung's own father who like Freud had been very warm towards him and taken him on and the special son but Jung thought he'd outgrown this father who was a pasta and kind of rather disparaged him and and they they parted ways but as you will undoubtedly know young and Freud's parting in 1913 was very much more traumatic for both so I'd like to say a little bit about archetypal symbolism this is when in a dream there are certain elements that particularly occurs when the person doesn't have any personal association so what's really important in dream interpretation is to ask the person for their associations and when we get to your dreams in a minute that's the thing we'll be concentrating on looking at your particular associations to all the elements in the dream but sometimes the person doesn't have any or sometimes there are particular themes in the dream and we can look at those in an archetypal way and you'll call this process amplification so when you're looking at the archetypical elements of the dream and often these turn up in kind of Universal ways reflected in myths fairy tales stories film culture they'll be different to every culture so you know somebody might if you want a dream of a hero it might well be kind of Luke Star Wars to a lad built up in the 80s in in the West or something very different to someone born up brought up elsewhere but what's particularly helpful in looking at dreams is there are certain archetypal things that I find very helpful when film brings a dream to start to orientate myself to what they're saying about themselves and these are the parts of the personality has described by young so these are the self the persona the animal the Animus etc so let me go through those so Jung felt that the house was very much talking about the personality itself what kind of house are you in people will often bring a dream where they suddenly discover they've got four new rooms or a lot more space or that they're there the house that they have it suddenly become grand or finally got a hole in the roof or suddenly the walls are falling down you know you should have get the symbolism of what that's going to mean so the house as a starting point is perhaps the personality and what part of the house are we looking at so if we were up in the attic maybe it's the thinking area this it's very much to do with someone who's getting stuck in their head perhaps what's going on in the Attic you'd look at that the next thing is the bedroom this is the most intimate area perhaps to do with sex or sexuality another element would be in the kitchen food what's going on a place where nurturing is being received something good is being a seat who's doing the cooking and then down in the basement we've got the unconscious to things perhaps we we don't want to to know about things we don't know about so well things the place where it's sort of dark and unheard of and these are very much starting places so we'd also be asking the person what their particular associations are to this house why this house is it one of the familiar to you is it something that's happened in that particular place the next thing is the persona so often people are dreaming of getting around from A to B of a in a car are they going to bike away in a plane oh what's happening what kind of car is it you know it's it is it looking and you're looking very flashy looking a bit too flash have you lost your car in the car park you're not sure how to get around at that particular time have you driving in the middle of the road it suddenly become very dangerous what are you doing what are you doing in your personality that's being reflected in that way bike if you use a bike as your main means of transport then perhaps that reflects that but perhaps you know more exposed way of getting around perhaps you're feeling more exposed at the present time the trait I had one person who's given me permission to talk about her dreams she was all the time dreaming about being on a train going on certain journeys and was very afraid of getting involved in a in an intimate relationship I think because as reflected by the Train you get on and then you someone else is taking you somewhere and when she started suddenly dreaming of about driving a car she could drive perfectly well It was as if she discovered her ability to take control of things and within a couple of weeks of this dream she had started an intimate relationship so you know a train but you know it's a limited way you're fixed you vertigo someone else's way you know just one association to it I mentioned the animal in the Animas earlier so Young's early view of the anima animus was that a man has an animal within him this was back in the 1920s where he we're kind of like gender stereotyping was going on and a woman has an animus which is the male part so the man's anima is that the female part the Contra sexual part of one's personality one of the developments of Jungian psychology thankfully he's been to recognize that we each have male and female parts and they're in constant dynamic interchange with each other and but in looking at those the gender of certain figures in the dream may be very much looking at those parts of yourself so this is taking on the subjective level taking about parts of yourself and then the shadow this is the undeveloped aspect of the body of the person I think modern personality so I think one of the I've put the baby there often something we're most afraid of is our vulnerability is our dependency and it's the undeveloped parts that may very much be a very much lie in our shadow that we think ourselves we had to be kind of very proper and adults but it's the sensitive infant parts that very much need developing perhaps traditional aspect of the shadow things were afraid of perhaps aggression murderous Ness hatred and I put something not quite sure what this represents but something kind of shadowy maybe something maybe the spirituality maybe things other things that we haven't developed enough personal teeth so that's the shadow and so that's a kind of very quick view I mean there are a lot more long to say about those but I'm aware of time and I want to just illustrate these with Jung's own dream so two more of Jung's own dreams but a little bit bit of background about Jung first of all this is him aged five and a quote that I think very much sums up Union psychology every experience of the self the deeper self is a defeat for the ego so our ego is the way we see ourselves it's what we're conscious of and it's the way we feel we are but in fuel it has to experience a defeat to be open the way to something new coming in something from the self so you're born 1875 he was the first surviving child he was he had a brother Paul who'd survived for only five days so his arrival was you know a heralded but his mother was soon indifferent to the young Karl she was a strange woman and she kind of having given birth to him she took to her room and he was more or less brought up by the maid for many years his father on the other hand was a kindly loving man nursed him when he was ill lived in the same moved into the same room for him for a while and Karl's earliest experiences that he reported what I mean in personal ones the glorious beauty of the day it's a blossom on a tree spooning up milk and bread from his plate so sort of the relational stuff didn't go so well for young early on other than with his father he was terrified of grades funeral services Jesuits Jesus and drowned bodies he lived in this massive there was a massive waterfall right by him and people would always be falling into the falls and there was one body that was kept in an outhouse where he was that he was completely fascinated by so he was very much a man young a young boy of the kind of the wilds his first dream actually was of a 15 or 12 to 15 foot phallus in an underground cave I'm not going to go into that one not for reasons of discretion but I just don't think there be time but I mention it in passing because it's important we've already looked at this dream here was him you're on the right there with Freud on the left this was just before this is when he was kind of in the heart of the psychoanalytic movement for he split from Freud and and part of this bit just after that split he had this dream the killing Siegfried dream and young at that time was keeping a journal of his dreams and his thoughts in what's called the red book which was published in 2009 I don't know if you've heard of it fascinating view into his most personal psychic life and this was a painting he made of the dream in the red book so in the dream he and an unknown brown skinned man a savage he says lie in wait in a lonely Rocky Mountain landscape at dawn they shot the Magnificent heroic secret as he rounds the corner driving at furious speed on his chariot made of the bones of the dead young is anxious to avoid blame and is relieved when a tremendous downfall of rain wiped out all the traces of the dead but an unbearable feeling of guilt remained so that was his dream so if we think about this on the various levels so on the objective level this came just after his split from Freud and it's not too hard to think of Siegfried being Sigmund Freud so he had killed off the magnificant magnificent Sigmund who was by this point making a quite a name for himself in psychoanalysis on the subjective level this was the emergence of his own murderous shadow aspects his killing off he in a way as I said earlier killed off his father as well but most importantly taking it on the subjective level for young this is about killing off that the idealism the heroic idealism of the ego this is the ego that wants to be in control and for him symbolically meant getting rid of the that part of ourselves which tries to impose our will on the world in order to let to let the self through we have to be abandoned we have to abandon the ego for their higher things in the egos will and to these we must bow so basically it's about bowing to our own nature and this dream for him really began to crystallized that on the transference level we've got killing of Sigmund as I said killing off his father another in authority figures and their archetypal level he felt this applied to all of us in his book modern man in search of a soul he felt we'd all become too caught up with control our will the ego wanting things to go certain way we've been caught up in the head and we needed to be able to sacrifice that to some extent in the way that previously had happened through religion in order to be able to get in touch with our deeper self phonic personalities that was that dream and on those various levels for me like no one could unpack this a lot more I'm afraid you're getting a very quick bite at it this is young in his mature years in his garden looking rather pleased with himself and the last of his dreams that I want to come to is a tree of life dream and this was if you like the fulfillment for him of his psychological understanding so if dreams in 1927 it was in Liverpool it was a dirty City it was night and winter and dark and raining he was with another of a number of Swiss companions and they climbed from the harbor up the the alley of the dead to the cliff top city on the plateau reminded him of Basel on a square there with various courses the city arranged ray-ray deal around the square but in the center was a round pool and in the middle of this with a small island while everything round about it was obscured by rain fog smoke and dimly lit darkness the little island blazed with sunlight on on it stood a single tree at Magnolia in a shower of reddish blossoms it was as though the tree stood in the sunlight and was at the same time the source of the light his commute companions commented on the abominable weather and did not see the tree they expressed surprise that another swiss had chosen to settle there whilst young thought he knew very well why he had done so so Young's association the the liver is that by which we we are able to live this is why he was able to live at all so for him at that time he had introduced his companion Tony wolf into the family wasn't going well surprisingly not very not surprisingly and he his white wife threatened to leave him on three occasions so and he was at one point apparently had considered suicide I recommend Deirdre Betts excellent biography of young to you which she was given unique access to the young archives and it has a lot of important information so that was the dark side of things that was the objective level but on the internal level he saw that here the goal had been reached one could not go beyond the center the center is the for him herself and through this dream I understood the self is the principal and archetype of orientation and meaning when gulfs I say the Liverpool the organ which processes the blood from the stomach breaking down balancing and creating nutrients for the body to use whilst getting rid of harmful substances there were some things that this dream says young couldn't couldn't work through he couldn't work through the difficult things so if we we look at the elements in the dream this left the fog the darkness the rain you know I would suggest I've written about this in and analyzed dealing in in my other book in turn into the darkest places this was his early experience of loss and sadness that the mist in this is everyday self and this is what he's surrounded by but actually through that he's been able to come to his understanding of the self so on the subjective level it's the balance between the ego perspective the everyday have the sudden the rain and the self which is the tree of life which are the sort of things which enabled him to work so so well-known the archetypal level this is the way we're all able to overcome these early experiences the early depressive experiences and find a source within us that enables us to work through these difficulties the objective level this was his his it describes his journey up through the ally of the dead so all his experiences of death and rebirth these experiences of failure loss whether it's related to Freud and work he actually gave up various posts in order to allow himself to go into the unconscious experience those those deaths and kind of find out that source so those are so those it's a kind of real - through really significant dreams of Jung's I hope that's made some sense how we doing for time yes we're doing it okay so and if you have questions I hope you okay to hold those to the end but I'd like to look at now is interpreting your own dreams so if you're ready to do that are you with me so far okay so do you have a dream in mind I hope you have a dream in mind and if you might like to write it down or think about it or bear it in mind but before we do that I'd just like to quote from your so difficult is it to understand a dream that for a long time I've made it a rule when someone tells me a dream and asked for my opinion to say first of all to myself I have no idea what this dream means after that I can begin to examine the dream and it's really important for really quite a long time to say to yourself I have no idea what this dream means you know you can't force meaning onto a dream you have to wait for it to emerge from from the dream and your own dreams are particularly difficult to understand of course because you're so close to them and you can't see what's what's in your own shadow it's sometimes much easier to be able to understand someone else's dream so the first thing I would ask you to think about in relation to this dream is I guess I think I've said these ones already about so we first think we have to do is explore the dream before we can even think about beginning to interpret it and so we have to ask for associations and the mistake that everyone makes it with dreams is just to jump in with your your own views on the dream without thinking of asking the person themselves for their associations so if you can think about every element in your dream you might like to write it down but you single out the different elements there you know is it a dream about various people of the people in the dream they sort of how do they figure and if you can think about what do you think about that person or so if it's a particular person so say I dreamt peculiarly of of my old classmate Jane Simmons and you might like to think yourself also who what was what a Jane Simmons is qualities and it turns out that she was perhaps a best friend who was always there for me when I needed her and she was someone who's warm and supportive so you know if you can go through the different elements in your dream associating to those and just to give a background you say born to think about where the dream is located so you know are you in the dream in an exposed dangerous place how old are you in the dream you know as is this you is it going back to something from your youth is it some young part of you that's big got in touch with and when where where is the dreaming in terms of you know it is a school is it at work dream is what place is it so can you sort of pick out the different elements in the in the dream and make your particular associations to them on the archetypal level another element of the dream is you know the earth air fire and water with sort of the earth is and this is the grounded place that you you are it's a kind of there so what's the what's again what's the place are you in the dream of you in a dry desert like this are you climbing a rocky mountain like that dreams about air or flying it's about ideas thoughts feelings you're getting getting up into the air dreams about fire tend to be about passions about things that you're being consumed by and dreams about water very much about emotional states you kind of in the middle of the ocean is there a tidal wave coming what do you what are your emotions doing is it nice and calm so those are the those are those kind of archetypal in terms of the dream so are you able to put those onto your dreams of those these kind of ideas beginning to fit can you kind of make those associations thinking to yourself that you don't understand what this dream means and you're you're going to hopefully make those make some various associations of various elements in the dreams it's very difficult for me without knowing all your dreams I'm afraid but if you can begin to sort of think what those elements are and the second thing to do is look for the patterns so what's going on in the dream who's doing what to whom what's being symbolized overall here what are the what are the models so so if we think about Jung's dream you know they made this journey and they'd found something at the end so this is about this was about his journey to find the self the tree of life so if you think about life in terms of your dream what's what's the main drama what's and how does this apply and some other sort of archetypal symbols about things that go on in dream so death so people often rather alarmed by death in dreams but it might well be that something needs to die off that part of yourself needs to die off if you dream to say say that your mother's died and so on the objective level you think well if I miss something is a shield I hadn't noticed if your mother's still around or maybe there's something some part of that relationship with mother that needs to die off and often the most traumatic things for people of dreams where they're dying but maybe that your own self needs to die off so that's treating the death symbolically birth something new coming into the world a new part of yourself being born often really important thing heralding something new coming marriage two parts getting together you with another person perhaps you with someone that you wouldn't have thought likely but perhaps what are they symbolizing what are they symbolizing that you need perhaps to to have in your personality sex rather a wooden version I fear things coming together some impregnation something being some impact from yeah coming together anyway so sex can very much be related to a very creative coming together and toilets unfortunately is a you ignited scream I think I'm being given lots of wonderful dreams the most frequent dreams I am told are of people trying to find the toilet or trying to find and they fight the final choice they find it's blocked I find its overflowing they find a thing got walls or doors these are the things how do we deal with the of our lives to the difficult feelings the anger that you're in these are the things that we really struggle with so if your dream happens to have that in you're in good company with it with the rest of us the other thing I'd ask you to think about in relation to your dream what's the emotion in the dream what's the feeling often that's a clue to the whole dream really is that feeling state but it may well be that the feeling isn't congruent with what you think so I was told like cancer but I was pleased you know why would that be and this also relates to the position of the self in the dream so you know I use a protagonist to use the person doing the dream are you sort of you V for example angry one or are you being attacked no no you use the attacker or the attacked are you kind of the subject of the dream looking out or are you looking down on something that's happening sort of often people dream of a film so it's something going on that you can't and be directly involved with and so but maybe need to be more involved with to recognize the these dynamics now you were sleep in the dream some dreamt of hearing a voice saying wake up wake up what did they need to wake up from you drunk in the dream and what way are you not in touch with with reality or you on stage are you feeling really exposed so this is the different ways the eye can be it's also important to think when did you have the dream and the dream will apply primarily at that time it'll be trying to tell you something about what's going on at that moment and it's a compensation it's a message to balance your conscious position at that time yet it may also on other levels highlight something ongoing you maybe hopefully will reach down and illuminate something about your internal working models something about the way that some pattern from your early life that it can tell you about in the way nothing else can and then finally where and on what levels does this dream apply so hopefully you've got the idea by now of these different levels the objective level worthy this is just by foot before where the image corresponds to project in the real world subjective level of transference level the relational level and the archetypal level so and hopefully as we've gone through these beginning of feeling about your dream might emerge if you've got one and I hope you doing some of that and you might begin to apply it but it sort of don't don't worry if the meaning doesn't come immediately it may well come later and you know I'm working on the dream you know you very much want to involve the other person in therapy and it's a it's a it's a job for two people really okay I think that's probably all I want to fire at you and I'm probably ready to stop and think about anything you want to say either about that process of that dream interpretation or anything else earlier yeah question the back what's my understanding of the integrated state hypnagogic hypnagogic state oh yeah those those dreams will you have when you are just waking up in the morning and well it's a bit like those that sleep onset dream that I mentioned you know but when you say hypnagogic state do you talk of talking about surely that's one for Charlie this afternoon isn't it but but I mean I guess the thing about I don't think this properly directly impacts on what what on your Thorburn weren't you supposed to forget dreams if we're remembering a dream it's some extra work that we need to do you know all this stuff goes on all the time in our unconscious ease and the purpose of dreaming is is to process it and to forget it but if we are left with a dream and it carries on into the day particular mood it's something that we haven't been able to process and therefore it comes into consciousness and we it's an opportunity to do some work on it it's a half an answer useful so the question is in case you didn't hear it anyone who says they can nail down the meaning of a dream is kind of perhaps a bit deluded but is it useful it can be useful yeah or not but yeah and the gentleman found it useful I mean yeah I mean I hope what I've said which is clear that you can't nail down a meaning of a dream and that actually it's it's got many different meanings and layers and levels of meanings and I've read something in the paper the other day about there's a book out and the moment that my American woman who had looked at very few dreams and said if you dream of that it means that and I think that's going back to that view of the Ancients of you know fixed symbols and I think that's you're on really dodgy ground with that kind of dream interpretation but you know just working with dreams and over the years you just get to know that they they're just trying to tell you something I mean it I mean I guess I know that's a subjective statement but it's just so clear that that's something that you've been struggling with with someone over many years perhaps all weeks or months just the dream will capture it and it's so helpful you know someone has yeah that's a very nice example so case you didn't hear and dream of spiders this gentleman dreamt of spiders and has a really nice relationship with spiders whereas his patient is terrified frightened of spiders I think really underlines the important thing is the first thing to ask is the person's particular associations so all that I was saying about the archetypal associations back there really if someone has got a particular personal association to something that trumps it so you know you know someone who might dream about a dog and you think I'll great we're on to sort of something about fidelity and friendliness and personality or it's a black dog is it about depression something follows you around but actually first first question what's your association to dogs to this particular dog you know maybe the person was bitten by dogs maybe they hate dogs you know that's where you've got to start thank you [Music] so question about the healing nature of dreams and particularly repetitive dreams do they have to be can they be worked out unconsciously or do they have to be brought into the conscious mind so even Freud recognized that one types of dream that didn't fit in with his wish fulfillment theory were dreams that were traumatic and he recognized that that people who suffered trauma had these repetition compulsion dreams just go over and over the traumatic events and this is the psyche trying to work through the trauma each time you go through it horrific though it is the psyche is hoping for mastery however if you have if you're just going around it again and again it's probably a sign that the psyche is saying help and you almost certainly do need to be working with it on the conscious level precisely because it's drawing your attention something was so massive that you're dreaming about it all the time so whilst the psyche can do quite a lot unconsciously I think there are times when we need to to recognize that and get help with it I mean personally I'm also working with trauma right I'm trained in EMDR so you know so if you can work with those traumatic event or traumatic experiences very effectively with EMDR as well with therapy but as an adjunct where you're really getting to the affective the emotional call of the the traumatic event it's amazing what can come back and I mean you know the simplest thing to say to someone is say to yourself I want to remember my dream in the morning and then if you can easily want hopefully train yourself to do so sometimes some people do really struggle with that but but if the person's remembered something if they've remembered um remember they've woken up in a bad state so what what feeling state had they been left with I mean people who are people who've had a difficult childhood often will wake up in a depressed state and it might be way into the day before hopefully they are able to get out of it so you're working with that effective state that often clings after waking so you've got your conscious mind is able to get out of that but what happens at night is that all the rest the stuff that you haven't yet digested comes back to you in the shape of your dreams and the feelings so often that's what you're waking up into so that's the bit that you need to address okay EMDR it's it was Francine Shapiro was a psychologist work she went for a walk in the 1990s really worried about something and she realized that the River Walk she felt better and she what she did a lot of thinking about this and what she realized was that actually when you're walking you're kind of you're stimulating the different sides of your brain so what you do with EMDR simply is that you ask person to focus on their trauma and then it might sound rather ridiculous but you you do this with your hand and you ask them to follow it with their eyes and then so you do this for like 20 or 30 passes and they follow it while they're thinking about the traumatic event and then you say well what's coming to you and then it's really very psychoanalytic because what they're doing is they are free associating and they are working through and working on the traumatic feeling and the traumatic feeling that's lowers so often if you come up say you start with it simple one like a fear of spiders you can start with someone who's you know you asked how distressed are you about this fear aspire to say eight out of ten I really can't stand it and you know after a number of sessions of EMDR you know maybe they down to this level of to distress because what happens is you your level comes down and you're working through the dramatic complex oh so if that's what I movement desensitization and reprocessing so you're reprocessing the trauma through desensitization and through eye movements ladybug again there are apparently other than those who've got the brain had the brain injuries that I described there are some people who don't have dreams and they're people who've there's something about that we need a certain part of the brain to form images but they're very rare mostly we just forget dreams because we're supposed to forget dreams because because well like I was just explaining a few months ago and but why I think well most people will find it at certain periods of their life they will remember more dreams than others particularly we're going through a very difficult time then our dream life will be full of because our unconscious is busily working away trying to work out stuff trying to process it but there are some people who remember few dreams and they're you know people have different kinds of gyms so if you like a rule of thumb for me someone who's had a really traumatic time will often their dreams will be less detailed and it'll be more about an emotional thing so as we were saying here that you'll be waking up into difficult emotions whereas someone who sort of is more cognitively based they'll have these rich kind of odd little nuggets of dreams well this weird stuff is going on you can you know in a very kind of interesting cognitive way all the essence really is still the affective stuff that the unconscious is trying to process but we each do it to our own particular personality so the question is you didn't hear it when do we know that what we're remembering what we're recalling is a dream or a memory and of course dreaming is about the reprocessing of memories so so in a way and it's I think I think what's Freud you thought that actually about a week after something had happened then we might start dreaming about it because then we then it would start being being processed but in a way there's always going to be an element of memory in there because that's the stuff of our lives if the stuff that has been happening to us but not does that answer your question are you saying is it a memory memory how do we you know if we dream of something did it mean we're actually just remembering it is yeah well and often that is precisely the time it was when the conscious ego is sort of gone is letting go and then then stuff can come to you rather there's otherwise held out of consciousness and often there's a you have to also ask why that time you know maybe the person is finally feeling safe enough or something you know often people feel ok and then they get in a new relationship pause they get married or they go into therapy and they suddenly all this stuff comes back and I think why I'm happier I've never been so happy in my life and it's because they're safe enough and their psyche thinks all right you can deal with this now here it comes so question K she didn't hear how much detail do we add to dreams after we've had them and Freud thought they were he called this secondary revision and he thought they added a lot and you know for Freud's way of interpreting dream was he was more interested with where we went after the dream than the dream itself you'll kind of treated the dream in a really sacred lion went back to what's the dream trying to tell us but Freud was very much aware of this second revision where things get changed and they do get changed in a way you're still working with what the psyche is doing to them if you're changing them why are you changing them and why you elaborating them but I think if you kind of train yourself to write down dreams remember them actually you're getting pretty close to what actually happened in the dream and often is in the retelling of it you'll find that you'll forget certain bits or maybe it'll get a bit elaborate it and certain young told that house dream a number of times and actually it did start to change at the time so you know it's like he does weird stuff but hey that's what it's all about so gentleman here first the reason they gave a whole lot of money to dream research laboratories in the 60s 70s 80s was they thought that dreams would have the the onset of psychosis and clearly what happens in psychosis is the ego isn't functioning as well and that you're operating in in this kind of primary process way as Freud would call in where you're making lots of associations and you're not able to process them so you feel terribly exposed kind of I'm generalizing about psychosis a great deal there's a lots of different types but so you're entering that kind of that statement which is whether the way the unconscious works where you know the there isn't that organizing ego functioning effectively which is vital and when that goes when it's taken over by these various traumatic complexes the person might might be thought to be in a psychotic state but that's a very rough answer to your question lady bound you but you know if you need so the question if I'm caught you rightly is can you build up the kind of a narrative related to your dreams whereby you're kind of developing yourself through the dreams and taking it you mean taking back into the dream as well not can you believe so can you build up your personality in that way so on the one hand surely a question for Charlie Morley at the end of the day because he works that but but I think really dreams are central I mean particularly if you're not in therapy or you've been in therapy central to the way of understanding yourself and taking you deeper in and they will change over time so they do do build up a narrative and Jung was particularly interested in series of Dreams so that you know the the dream how it develops over time and it very much it's a matter of working on those things and and developing certain aspects and seeing how it's changing and the dreams kind of confirm it and point you in the next direction a bit more and you know much easier to do if you're working with someone on them but you know if you've left there if you've left therapy then do your dreams are the way that continually tie you back into yourself and remind you when you can going astray so question about what difference like psychos psychoactive substance about having a dream well I mean they are surely doing that issue of knocking out the ego in some way and putting you in touch with this the unconscious his way of making these links so it you feels you know you're having sort of many different types of psychoactive substance but and so you might be able to feel if you're having a blissful trip you know you're feeling in touch with the universe so you that sameness recognizing aspect of the unconscious so that you're feeling at one with things so that you can feel you know life in a stone or you can feel you know life everywhere if that's one a good on a good day you know so surely those substances will enhance those kind of things and have those kind of effects but how that infects the dreams or how you know if you if you like you might ask why you needing to fiddle with your psyche in that way but yeah I think so I think people are trying to get out of that fixed ego they're feeling stuck with themselves aren't they and they're you know I think often they will they will use use drugs to do that you know all kind of forms of self medication like that meditation of course is probably the best way of getting in touch with unconscious which is a bit less psycho poisonous bitter gentleman here just come police my beyond my level of knowledge I'm afraid don't know much about chemistry brain and other than yeah no I don't want to push myself beyond what I know so can't be much help I'm afraid I can't want to Charlie but yes of course what did you think about it I'm not sure I I he's written a lot on dreams I don't remember reading anything about it that doesn't mean it's not there he's got 22 volumes of the complete works that stretch this long on my shelf and I haven't read everything again no dear we're reaching the end of my knowledge based on Fred I don't know general at the back I did I miss that be free what parties the pineal at the pineal Quran does it play a part in dreaming I don't know if it specifically does they used to think that the pineal gland was the center of the personality whether it joined your consciousness to your teeth your body didn't they again you're beyond my paygrade do you know anything about that yourself yeah sorry not to be much more help here are you a Jungian they've never mentioned a dream goodness well I mean maybe you you've kind of word young-young in on your door and people come with dreams and some people kind of say in the first session have you had any dreams I don't but gosh that's weird I wonder if you will now having been here whether you'll you know you'll put out your your vibes and something will happen gentlemen here and then naked it's relaxing yeah consciousness is we're not locking it out but you know so you're sort of the question was are we looking at the ego when we're dreaming it's if you what what does happen we're dreaming the dream the body is related to it so the ego is related to the body and actually we are knocking out we are knocking out the body to some extent and because we don't move and you know if we go on a psychic journey so quite a few things that about our ordinary consciousness are knocked out and so we're making all those connections which is part of that processing that goes on to process the the memories and things and see how they relate to our past experience or our feelings about ourselves or our relationships so that's what's that's what's going on in that process lady right so the question was could I say a bit about Jung's idea about integration of the psyche and religious ideas and enlightenment and so young so his idea his primary idea is that the we get to centered in our egos and wish to control which has a limited focus and that actually we have to relinquish that to be in touch with what equals the self so and this is quite this is a radical thing this is not you know this is about he says we have to bow down to the self we had to become subject to the self which means giving up that whole view which is essentially a religious process you know he's he's his his aim was to understand what the religions had taught and to to explain he himself had experienced and to talk about that in Psychological terms so for him the self it's a peculiar word but it sounds like you're talking about yourself but you're not the self is always other than you and itself for him is God so of what people have called God in religions or you know but if you believe in God in a Buddhist religion say but that's the sense of what you're listening to it's essentially a religious process as evil or what it it has been thought of in terms of a religious process so you're tuning in to those to those forces which are beyond beyond the eye it's not about the eye it's what's beyond the eye lady yeah well he thought that in a wasting we're always struggling with we're kind of struggling in our lives to make things happened to go well or whatever it is and in a way if we do that we can get to get stuck with the ego so the defeat of the ego it may be as simple as things like a feeling of failure or a feeling of I don't know what to do prayer is precisely saying something larger than me you know I don't know I don't know what's going on here you are turning to something else you're opening yourself up to being informed by the self so you're saying the ego my ego has reached its limits I don't know what to do I don't know you know I've I can't manage it why not more likely to want to follow what I'm told yes probably that's right I don't know much about this area either but you yes when you the one thing that did kind of worry me slightly saying what you're told I mean hopefully you know you're working together with your therapist on something they have to feel right to you I mean young said and something I'm going to meet with something only the truth works you know you can sit there as a therapist and tell someone all kinds of stuff and actually if it doesn't fit with their personality it's not going to work so you might have confirmation bias because you want to you want to believe something but if and of course there there is a sort of relational benefit from being with someone else be able to discuss things be able to be yourself you could call that a kind of perceive effect but actually that's the relational heart of the process so yeah and if you're the sort of person who goes and prepared to put yourself into that and yeah maybe maybe you will benefit in that way so question can dreams be essentially prophetic well like I said he I think he didn't want to say they they could be but he saw it as like like a medical diagnosis or a or like a weather forecast you know where where we're picking up all this stuff all the time and so you could say that the Pharaoh's dream of the fat cows and the thin cows you know it's like he had a per view of the whole of his of his of his kingdom and so he would be resonating with those things and we'll be thinking about it and so that part of young that was part of Young's answer you also had a further view about synchronicity and I don't want to talk about synchronous because I'm not a particular way to go but it's like there is a sense that we can know things in a different kind of way so I think he might have been inclined to think that sometimes we could know thing and so for example a patient of his apparently shot themselves and he woke with a painful feeling of in the back of his head precisely that moment you know how did that happen and that those kind of things can happen so you know that on that level of communication that level of knowing about other things that we apparently know and there are some people who are very good at that you know I'm much more in tune with those kind of things now how that works I don't know that I hope that responded off yes it's okay can you develop a certain set of skills yeah certainly the most important one being open and being and listening you know and being open to I mean you know I don't know how far you've got with my little example of trying to talk you through a dream but you know hopefully if you can just listen to those things see what comes to you don't try and force it from your ego you know if you open to those things that's kind of the best way to to learn and to follow those thanks thank you [Music] I'm pretty strict and I don't ask people about their dreams either and I yeah I think you're just talk to you there maybe they don't want to wet their dream or maybe they think all right they're interested in dreams so I'll please him by bringing him a dream you know and then all kinds of distortions come in [Music] it's it's an interest I have heavens knows whether people who come to see me now I've got an interest in it and therefore bring them or whether they're interested and so like he was saying about you know people who come because they know what you're interested in but yeah I don't ask it's a straight answer but I'm certainly interested in and usually what happens is that because I'm interested or because when they bring a dreams something happens and we get something out of it they might well then bring another dream okay this'll probably have to be the last question because we're ending in in now more or less so dreams and the creative process so yeah just finishing now well it's specifically about art being you had a whole lot about art because I mean it's the red book is full of stuff about his his artistic worked he he drew his dreams he painted his dreams the artistic process is surely about being open to the unconscious you know people who paint and write books they they often feel they didn't do it you know that they've opened himself up so which is very much about the process of listening for yourself and listening to dreams and and being open to the unconscious and I hope that's a good point to end thank you very much [Applause]

Channel: The Weekend University

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Keywords: the weekend university, psychology lectures, Jungian dream interpretation, Carl Jung dreams, Jungian psychology, Jung dream interpretation, Carl Jung dream analysis

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Length: 98min 55sec (5935 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 20 2019