How to decipher a dream and learn new things about yourself?

In most traditional cultures, a dream is seen as a revelation sent down by ancestors, gods, or the universe itself. It needs to be deciphered in order to resolve complex conflicts, whether in our own lives or in the life of an entire community.

In modern Western culture, of course, we look at dreams not as prophecy, but as “the royal road to the unconscious,” in Freud’s words. Dreams hide our desires and fears, but they can also reveal to us unknown sides of our personality, new life paths, resources to which we can access. Jungian analyst Stanislav Raevsky offers several steps to enter into a dialogue with your unconscious.

First you need to see a dream, or rather, remember it. After all, everyone sees dreams, only for someone upon awakening they are completely erased from memory. What does it depend on? From how developed our ability to self-observation. The more fully we are aware of what is happening in reality, the more aware we will be in a dream. To be conscious means to be able not to get involved in events, but to look at what is happening from the outside, to notice what is happening to us: what do we feel now? what do we think?

This ability can be trained, for example, with the help of mindfulness meditation (another name is the practice of mindfulness). To remember dreams, it is useful to be in a state of meditation while falling asleep, noting for ourselves how we slowly fall into sleep, how our state changes. Or just give yourself the installation: “I want to see and remember dreams.” When we set ourselves up in this way, we no longer miss sleep, do not turn away from the “screen” on which we are shown a “movie”.

Zero step. Remember what happened yesterday

The task is to understand how sleep processes daytime reality. Why is the morning wiser than the evening? Unresolved issues, affects, complex collisions of the past day – all this spins in a dream, mixes up, turns to us in different directions.

At the same time, in a dream, we have access to the “common system”: figuratively speaking, not only to the monitor of our laptop, but to the entire World Wide Web. Weak, but still there is access. And from there, important information can also come to us.

All this is connected together, synthesized – and in the morning we suddenly wake up with a clear solution to a complex problem. This is how discoveries are made in a dream, whether it be the periodic table or breakthroughs in personal relationships.

Step 1. Write down the dream

The dream you see must be written down and this record should be postponed. After some time, we write it down again or narrate it. Why is it important? The second story will definitely be something different from the first: some details will be lost, others will appear. Our consciousness has already done the work, adjusting the initial story to the scheme of describing the world that we are accustomed to.

After all, we all the time compose stories about our lives, or rather, they compose themselves. But everyone has their own key narrative, each of us sees his own “movie”, different from what others see. What corresponds to our key narrative, we remember, the rest we discard and forget. By comparing two descriptions of the same dream, we can see exactly how our consciousness transforms reality.

Step 2. Gather Line Associations

This method was proposed by Sigmund Freud. He believed that the message of the unconscious in a dream is presented to us in an encrypted form: what is shown to us actually means something completely different, and our task is to understand what it is. This sign has two sides, and, therefore, we need to go from the signifier to the signified: then, perhaps, we will get some insights.

Let’s say you dreamed of a customs officer. What do you associate it with? With a concierge at the entrance. And what is concierge associated with? With an older brother with whom you have a difficult relationship. It is the brother who is actually the hero of this dream. This is how we step by step build a chain of associations and, overcoming the censorship of consciousness, we move from the external symbol inward, to the original image, to the figure that is important to us.

Step 3. Gather Circular Associations

While the linear association method certainly works, it has been criticized by many. In particular, Carl Gustav Jung was skeptical that one could just as well interpret a newspaper. After all, it is already clear where Freud’s analytics will lead in any case: to the primary figures of mother and father, well, perhaps also brothers and sisters, and their relationship. And since everything is known in advance, then why bother interpreting dreams?

If Freud emphasized such a mechanism of dream work as displacement, then Jung considered condensation more important, when a cloud of meanings appears around one symbol, and then we see the symbol more clearly. Therefore, instead of linear associations, Jung proposed circular ones. Graphically, they can be represented as a sun: in the center is a signifier (symbol), from which “rays” depart – all the associations that come to our mind.

So, with regard to a customs officer, we may have such associations as “power”, “fear”, “rules”, “border”, “passport”. To this, Jung suggested adding amplification, that is, supplementing personal associations with commonly used ones (for example, a customs officer = “law”, “order”, “punishment”). Then our individual symbolism of the image is complemented by cultural one, the possibility of understanding expands.

Step 4. Understand what the dream tells us

Classical theories offer different options. Thus, Freud considers sleep as the fulfillment of desires. Indeed, in some cases this is true, especially in children’s dreams: the child was not given ice cream, and he gets it in a dream. Initially, in psychoanalysis, destructive dreams were interpreted in the same way: we see someone’s death, which means that we have an unconscious desire to get rid of this person, but we are not aware of this desire due to the censorship of our superego.

Unlike Freud, for Jung, sleep is a compensation for a conscious attitude. For example, all our thoughts are focused on a career, but at the same time, we dream of children every now and then. And then this is a signal from the unconscious that there is a clear imbalance in our life and we need to somehow restore the balance.

But the Jungian analyst Hans Dieckmann does not agree with either Freud or Jung. He believes that in a dream the same thing happens to us as in reality. If you are so shy that you cannot buy anything in the supermarket, then in a dream you come to the supermarket and do not buy anything. In the process of psychotherapy, says Dieckmann, changes begin first in the client’s dreams, and then in his real life.

Indeed, our “I” behaves in a dream in exactly the same way as in reality. And it can be more convenient for a psychologist to work out exactly the dreams of a patient for whom this is less painful: he is not responsible for his dreams. But such work affects his life.

Step 5. Listen to the prompts

We analyzed our dream from different angles. What to do with this knowledge now? How to use it?

Option One

We tell ourselves that the dream confirms what we already know: “Of course, I thought so!”, “Well, yes, everyone always offends me,” “I can’t do anything.” Then all we have learned from our interpretation is an increase in self-esteem: we have confirmed our insight. But we remained in the cage of our mind, nothing has changed in our life.

Option two

We use dreams as an opportunity to expand our perception, and therefore to change. Let’s say in real life we ​​have a bad relationship with our parents, and in a dream we hug them tenderly. We can shrug our shoulders and stop there, or we can continue to think about it: why is it so in life, but otherwise in a dream? And this will correct our position in relation to parents. Or, let’s say, in a dream we see our unfulfilled desires: a trip to an exotic island, a love relationship.

We can ask ourselves the question: why do not I embody my desires in life? What internal obstacles are preventing me? Thus, with the help of sleep, we can make our picture of the world more voluminous, increase our cognitive complexity. It is best if we maintain some awareness in a dream, for example, we understand that we are dreaming, or we know how to interrupt an unpleasant dream. For some, this is an innate gift, but the ability to lucid dream can be developed.

By the way, Jung was not very fond of working with dreams, because he believed that in a dream we are too unconscious: we go with the flow and do not control what is happening. He suggested that patients add awareness to sleep through active imagination.

I dreamed about a customs officer yesterday – so let’s talk to him now. To do this, you need to close your eyes, enter a half-sleep state, imagine this customs officer in front of you, ask him questions and get unexpected answers. We ourselves choose the dream with which we will work, and we can better understand its message.