Recently, a client with whom I have been working for quite some time, asked me why she was having such trouble understanding the meaning of dreams that she attempted to work on by herself.
In our sessions together, we often worked with her dreams and she found the experience illuminating and helpful. She had a strong grasp of the symbolic imagery when she worked with me, but struggled when she was on her own.
This is a very common experience for people. The meaning of dreams can often be easier to grasp when working with someone else’s dreams. But our own dreams seem confusing and obscure.
Part of the reason for this difficulty is that dreams point us to our own blind spots. They show us things about ourselves of which we are unconscious — things that we don’t know and, perhaps, would rather not know. In short, they show us the unvarnished truth.
According to Carl Jung:
“The dream shows the inner truth and reality of the patient as it really is: not as I conjecture it to be, and not as he would like it to be, but as it is.”
Because they can be a challenge to our conscious understanding and beliefs about ourselves, our conscious minds are at disadvantage in discerning the meaning of dreams without help.
The Self-Regulating Psyche
This window into our blind spots that dreams provide is an instance of what Jung called the ‘compensatory’ function of dreams. In other words, one purpose of dreams is to provide a corrective to our conscious attitudes and behaviors at times when we have become too disconnected from our true self.
Jung understood the psyche as a self-regulating system. Just as the body automatically adjusts its functioning to regulate its system, so does the psyche.
In the body, for example, when our temperature rises too high, we begin to sweat. This is not something that we do consciously, it just happens in order to cool off the body and keep it within an optimal temperature range.
Jung saw the psyche functioning in the same way. When things get out of balance in the psyche, the dream is one mechanism by which it rights itself.
A typical case of imbalance might be someone who approaches life with a lot of intellect, but without much attention to his or her emotions. Such individuals often experience dreams that are full of very powerful emotions. I have worked with many people who controlled their emotions during the day, but were violently woken up by the same emotions in the form of a nightmare in the middle of the night.
This lack of balance in a person’s life Jung called “one-sidedness”:
“The more one-sided his conscious attitude is, and the further it deviates from the optimum, the greater becomes the possibility that vivid dreams with a strongly contrasting but purposive content will appear as an expression of the self-regulation of the psyche.”
The Compensatory Meaning of Dreams
One-sidedness is inevitable in any life. It simply means that some aspects of living are given more attention than others. For some people this might mean that they have developed a rich intellectual life, possibly at the cost of neglecting their physical needs. Others have focused on relationships, but have not given the needed attention to their own creative potentials.
For some of us, we live according to cultural demands and expectations, perhaps seeking the trappings of an outwardly successful life, while inwardly feeling unsatisfied, that our true potential has not been fully realized.
In all of these situations, our conscious experience calls forth a response from the unconscious. Most of us ignore the “message of the unconscious.” We do not pay attention to the meaning of dreams. Perhaps we even doubt that dreams have meaning.
In this way, says Jung, we lose the healthy compensation that the dream can provide:
“The message of the unconscious is of greater importance than most people realize. As consciousness is exposed to all sorts of external attractions and distractions, it is easily led astray and seduced into following ways that are unsuited to its individuality. The general function of dreams is to balance disturbances in the mental equilibrium by producing contents of a complementary or compensatory kind.”
The Flower of the Psyche
One of the great challenges that dreams present us with is the awareness that our psyche is not only what we know about ourselves, it is also so much more than we know about ourselves. This means that we are not just beings who use our wills to achieve our desires. It means, in a very real way, that something is desired of us, that something is willed through us. It means that we are called to align ourselves with the deepest part of ourselves.
The unconscious holds a wisdom that contains more than we could learn in one lifetime. Jung believed that the powerful instinctive forces of the unconscious could have a beneficial effect on our waking lives, if only we could engage them in a conscious, creative way.
In that sense, the unconscious is like a rich and fertile soil from which the garden that is our lives can be cultivated. Our nightly dreams are like so many flowers blooming in that soil and the attention that we give those dreams is the water that will help them to thrive.
“Dream symbols are for the most part manifestations of a psyche that is beyond the control of consciousness. Meaning and purposefulness are not prerogatives of the conscious mind; they operate through the whole of living nature. There is no difference in principle between organic and psychic formations. As a plant produces its flower, so the psyche creates its symbols. Every dream is evidence of this process. Thus, through dreams, intuitions, impulses, and other spontaneous happenings, instinctive forces influence the activity of consciousness.”
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