Your Dreams Are Speaking in Symbols: A Jungian Starting Point

I had my first lucid dream this year, while I was taking a graduate course called Consciousness of Sleep and Dreams. I’d like to say that was a coincidence. It probably wasn’t. When you spend weeks reading about dreams, writing about dreams, and going to bed thinking about dreams, your mind eventually takes the hint.

It was a long dream, and most of it I’ll spare you. At one point I got into a car and started driving. Then, somewhere along the way, I wasn’t driving anymore. I was flying. If you’ve never had a lucid dream, it means knowing you’re dreaming while you’re still in it, and I can tell you that being aware enough to register that you’re flying is a very different experience from the usual dream logic where you just accept whatever is happening and move on.

When I woke up, the first thing I did was write it down. Key moments first, then the symbols. The car. The road. The moment the car stopped being necessary.

I’m not going to tell you what I decided it means. That isn’t me being coy. It’s the whole point of this post.

Why dreams speak in symbols

I came to Carl Jung through my coursework, and what pulled me in was his view of how the unconscious communicates. It doesn’t send memos. It sends images. A dream isn’t a coded message hiding something from you so much as the psyche’s native language, which happens to be pictures, feelings, and stories instead of sentences.

Jung was clear that dream images are meant to be read symbolically, not literally. Dreaming about a car is rarely about your car. Dreaming about your sister may not be about your sister. That’s both the frustrating part and the interesting part.

It’s also why dream dictionaries don’t get you very far. A dictionary tells you that flying means freedom, or ambition, or escape. Maybe. But a symbol is shaped by the person dreaming it. Flying means something different to someone who loves airplanes than to someone with a fear of heights. Jung advised staying as close as you can to the dream images themselves, rather than wandering off into general associations or borrowed meanings.

A few Jungian ideas to start with

You don’t need to read Jung’s collected works to begin. These four ideas are enough to change how you look at a dream.

Compensation. Jung saw the psyche as something that regulates itself. When your waking attitude leans too far in one direction, dreams often bring in what’s missing. Someone who is relentlessly confident during the day might dream of being lost. Someone who insists they’re over something might dream they aren’t.

This doesn’t mean every dream shows the opposite of your waking life, but it’s a useful question: what might this dream be adding that I’ve been leaving out?

Subjective and objective levels. A figure in your dream can be about the actual person, which Jung called the objective level, or about a part of you that the person represents, the subjective level. For inner work, the subjective level is usually the richer place to start. If you dream about a bossy coworker, it’s worth asking where the bossy coworker lives inside you.

Amplification. Freud’s free association moves away from an image, one link at a time. Jung’s amplification circles around it. You stay with the image and build up its meaning: your personal associations first, then, when it feels relevant, what that image has carried in myth, folklore, and story.

Dream series. One dream on its own can be hard to read. Jung preferred working with dreams over time, because recurring themes become clearer, and later dreams can correct a reading you got wrong. This month, I’ve had multiple dreams with bicycles in them. One bicycle dream I might shrug off. Several in a few weeks gets my attention.

How to start remembering your dreams

The most common thing I hear is “I don’t dream.” You almost certainly do. You just don’t remember.

What has worked for me is simple. Every night before I fall asleep, I set the intention to dream and to remember. Then, when I first wake up, before I reach for my phone or start thinking about the day, I try to recall what I dreamed.

Sometimes I’m sure I’ve got nothing. Then a small piece comes back, an object or a feeling, and the rest starts to unfold from there, one scene pulling the next one along. It’s a strange experience, like remembering a conversation in reverse.

Your mind is more responsive to intention than most people give it credit for. Set the intention consistently, and before long you’ll start to remember. Keep a notebook by the bed and write as soon as you can. Dreams fade fast.

How to work with a symbol

Once you’ve written down the key moments, go back and pull out the symbols. Then, instead of looking them up, ask yourself questions like these:

• What does this image mean to me? Not in general, to me.
• What was I feeling in the dream when it appeared?
• Where else in my life does this show up? A memory, a person, a situation I’m in right now?
• If this image were a part of me, which part would it be?
• Has it shown up before?

That’s what I do with the bicycles. I’m not asking what bicycles mean. I’m asking what they mean to me, and why they keep appearing now.

Don’t take the dream literally. Treat it as a symbol, and let the meaning be yours.

Dreams aren’t the only door

Dreams are one way the unconscious talks to us, but they aren’t the only one. Jung developed a practice he called active imagination, where you engage an image deliberately while awake, letting it move and respond instead of steering it. Meditation, art, and yoga nidra can open some of the same territory. Nidra in particular works right at the edge between waking and sleep, where images tend to show up on their own.

The common thread is getting quiet enough, and curious enough, to let the images come without immediately deciding what they mean.

Start tonight

Set the intention before you fall asleep. Keep something to write with nearby. In the morning, give yourself a minute before your phone gets to you first.

You may not get a lucid dream, and you may not get anything at all for a while. That’s fine. You’re starting a conversation with a part of yourself that speaks a different language, and the first step is simply showing up to listen.

Keep going: Yoga Nidra for Beginners explores that edge between waking and sleep, and What Happens When We Become Quiet Enough to Notice? is about the other kind of listening. When you're ready to practice, rest with me in Yoga Nidra.

Sources

• Dreams, International Association for Analytical Psychology
• Dreams in analytical psychology
• Jung on the Nature and Interpretation of Dreams, PMC