Dreams are unintelligible texts, according to Jung, and such texts are diverse, unfamiliar, unknown, uncertain, rich, and deep. Approaching a dream, attempting to decipher its meaning and what it might be revealing to us about us through interpreting its symbols and signs, is a process that is not different from our attempts at reading texts whose meaning might seem at first to be evading, elsewhere, or enigmatic.
How Does the Understanding of an Unintelligible Text Take Place?
In order for any enigmatic text to be understood, it must first be read, and in order for that to take place, we must first learn not only what reading generally is, or how it is carried out, but also what the reading of that specific text requires and consists of.
Going behind the text in order to disclose and meet its depths is not the first step in understanding; learning to read the text in its specificity, peculiarity, and uniqueness must precede any going behind of the visible signs and symbols through which the meaning of the texts unfolds.
Going behind is a later stage in any understanding of any unintelligible text, that is, of any dream. Jung says that “we would do better to say that we are dealing with something like a text that is unintelligible, not because it has a façade, but simply because we cannot read it. We do not have to get behind such a text in the first place, but must learn to read it.”
Nothing is guaranteed or certain in dream analysis, not even this initial attempt at learning to read. The only certainty, according to Jung, is uncertainty concerning everything, that is, the text, its meaning, our reading, and our attempts to learn reading so that we could go behind the read and readable sign toward and into a hidden and deeper meaning. There lies the danger because despite this uncertainty, upon dream analysis and dream interpretation depend life and death. Jung says that dream analysis “is a matter of life and death”.
Dreams as Fragments
To such an unintelligible text belongs something peculiar, a peculiarity of its own, which is that a single dream, on its own and by itself, says nothing much, despite being possibly revealing, and therefore stands in a constant need for other dreams so that a web of symbols, signs, and therefore meanings can be formed.
This need for other dreams means that a single dream is only a fragment, a piece detached from a whole, whose meaning becomes clearer as soon as another fragment, that is, another dream, is encountered, connected to other fragments, and included within a still uncompleted and perhaps incompletable network of signs.
Reaching certainty in interpreting dreams requires dealing with “a series of dreams”. For only when there is “a series of dreams” do we approach some reality or concreteness concerning the unconscious. Jung says that “every interpretation is hypothetical, for it is a mere attempt to read an unfamiliar text. An obscure dream, taken by itself, can rarely be interpreted with any certainty, so that I attach little importance to the interpretation of single dreams. With a series of dreams, we can have more confidence in our interpretations, for the later dreams correct the mistakes we have made in handling those that went before. We are also better able, in a dream series, to recognize the important contents and basic themes.”
Dreams-Analysis as a Relation Between the Scientific, the Personal/Philosophical/Religious, and the Ancient in Thought and Mythology
Dreams are complex and unfamiliar texts; they reveal to us about us something deeper, more distant, and more hidden than unutterable fears or suppressed wishes. Thinking that the unconscious only hides within itself silent fears and suppressed wishes oversimplifies unconsciousness and possibly misses its force and truths forever.
Jung says that dreams make known and disclose inevitable truths, plans, philosophical beliefs, fantasies, illusions, telepathic visions, irrational experiences, memories, plans, future events, “and heaven knows what besides”. Perhaps that which is most enigmatic is the relation between dreams and our future, about which Jung says that dreams enigmatically and mysteriously sometimes reveal a future yet to come and through them, warnings from our future are given expression to in our present. They also reveal the most hidden in personality and the most distant in character. Dreams reveal, disclose, and bring to light in such a way that they themselves are our paths toward ourselves, toward the deepest in us, the most secret, and our potential.
Every dream, every text, has its own unique symbols and no interpretation, no reading, is ever possible without first understanding the context within which this dream is sent forth. Yet this context and its symbols are not fixed but always changing, depending on the dreamer’s philosophical attitude toward life, religious beliefs, and moral convictions. But this does not mean that no fixity concerning symbols and signs ever exists.
There is some fixity from which interpreting might begin. Jung says that “if there were no relatively fixed symbols, it would be impossible to determine the structure of the unconscious. There would be nothing in it which could be in any way laid hold of or described”. But that which is fixed must not prevent from realizing the specificity of each dream against the backdrop of the dreamer’s philosophy, religion, spirituality, culture, society, and morality.
There is a non-simple relation between the fixity of symbols and their specificity to the dreamer in the sense that they are also rooted in the dreamer’s own unique lived situation, which also must be taken into consideration in any attempt at interpretation or understanding.
That which at issue here is the relation between science and the dreamer’s philosophy, theology, spirituality, morality, etc. That is, a relation between the wholly determined, determinable, and calculable, and that which is conditioned and determined by what challenges and exceeds all calculation and every determination. Jung says that “it is therefore advisable…to look for the meaning of symbols as they relate to the conscious situation — in other words, to treat them as if they were not fixed”.
This brings symbols and signs to the sphere of the unknown, which grants the dream the uncertainty that it essentially is. The symbol announces the unknown and brings us face to face with something that is “hard to recognize and not fully determined”. This means that although theories of dreams exist, they might distance us further from the already unknown and uncertain dream rather than bringing us closer to its meaning.
Archetypes of symbols exist in such theories, but they do not give the needed or required thought, questioning, and understanding to the lived situation of the dreamer, from which the dream and its symbols are sent forth. The scientific in its generality and potential disregard for the still enigmatic, the singular, and the personal might obscure the dream together with its meaning.
Yet dreams still stand in constant need for the scientific and its fixity, for not only is there the evading and complex personal, philosophical, religious, and cultural, but also the ancient in human thought and mythology, which also sends forth hints through dreams.
Jung says that dreams, in their symbols and signs, exceed the individual existence of the dreamer, that is, the dreamer’s lived situation and immediate background, to include signs sent forth from ancient times and cultures.
Such signs and symbols are kept in the structure of the psyche, inherited from distant times, secured within language, and shared among all peoples through all times in the sense that all humans share a distant memory of an ancient meaning within an inherited symbol from times preceding the dreamer’s immediate existence.
Interpreting such dreams requires, according to Jung, “comparative studies in mythology, folk-lore, religion, and language” so that symbols and signs could be determined in “a scientific way”. This means that unconsciousness harbors within itself secrets that consciousness often cannot enter into a relation with: “The evolutionary stages through which the human psyche has passed are more clearly discernible in the dream than in consciousness. The dream speaks in images, and gives expression to instincts, that are derived from the most primitive levels of nature. Consciousness all too easily departs from the law of nature.”
The Relation Between Consciousness and Unconsciousness
The unconscious is vast, rich, complex, and beyond any delimiting. It sends signs from ancient times, warnings and hints from a future yet to come, and symbols from a present that is not fully understood. The unconscious reveals extents, ways, and experiences that the conscious mind cannot even catch sight of and therefore knows nothing of their existence. Jung says that “it is the way of dreams to give us more than we ask”. Unconsciousness evades consciousness by delivering us signs and symbols revealing our “subjective state as it really is.
Unconsciousness exceeds consciousness in its contents, and this is because unconsciousness is openness, abundance, and inclusion of radical otherness; unlike consciousness, “which is characterized by concentration, limitation, and exclusion”. Yet both are not separated from each other: “The dream is not an isolated psychic event completely cut off from daily life. If it seems so to us, that is only an illusion that arises from our lack of understanding. In reality, the relation between consciousness and the dream is strictly causal, and they interact in the subtlest of ways”
But this does not mean that consciousness welcomes and invites the unconscious and its unfamiliar worlds. There is a struggle between consciousness and unconsciousness. In this struggle, it is the unconscious that is always being pressured into silence, absence, and disappearance by the conscious mind. Jung says that “the dream gives us a true picture of the subjective state, while the conscious mind denies that this state exists, or recognizes it only grudgingly”.
The unconscious is neither a “monster” nor something “demonic”, but “a thing of nature”, which cannot be controlled by consciousness, which refuses and escapes all attempts at constraining, and, by doing so, reveals us and our world to us. Jung says that “no amount of skepticism and critical reserve has ever enabled me to regard dreams as negligible occurrences. Often enough they appear senseless, but it is obviously we who lack the sense and the ingenuity to read the enigmatical message from the nocturnal realm of the psyche”.