Culture: Dreams can lead us away from our current culture into another culture – or leave us standing on a cliff looking over our current culture. As in Alice in Wonderland or in Gulliver’s Travels, we can begin to see our current “real” society and social norms in new ways. This “other” culture can arrive in our dreams from other parts of the world or from other times in history.
Obviously, this alternative culture is usually borrowed from movies or television programs we have seen or a book we have read. These renderings may or may not be accurate. The accuracy may be less important than the insights this “culture” generates in our dream (and life). Perhaps, as the Jungians suggest, this culture is actually an “alien” part of our own psyche – or it emanates from our collective unconscious (a very controversial segment of Jungian theory).
Regardless of the source of our culture, we should appreciate the complex and vivid portrayal that often is offered to us in the dream. It is one thing to display a specific relationship or pose a specific problem for us to solve; it is quite another thing to paint an entire culture with a wide cast of characters. I suspect that these cultural dreams often occur late at night when our dreams tend to be longer and more vivid. I also wonder if we pull out all of the stops when portraying a complete culture in order to address
Intra-Psyche Processes: The dream can also yield insights about our own internal (‘psychic”) workings. Some Jungian analysts suggest that all aspects of the dream represent some part of ourselves and that the dream represents an attempt to bring together these diverse aspects –a search for equilibrium and a process of integration that Jungians call “individuation.” Jung himself wrote extensively about and visually represented this integrative process in his remarkable The Red Book (Jung, 2009)
Jung found a mythic guide (Philemon) for his own work and declared frequently that we each need to find our own internal guide and perhaps an external guide (such as a Jungian therapist) to assist us in creating our own personal mythology. Our dreams are a primary source for the creation of this myth. In the creation of this myth, we find profound personal insights.
In many cases, each of these aspects of ourself is accompanied by a specific emotion (or several different emotions). When these parts of our self begin to interact in the dream, we also experience the interaction of the accompanying emotions. Many rich insights when we are awake can be gained from reflecting on the nature and outcome(s) of these interactions. Perhaps, as the Jungians might suggest, our psyche is sending a message to us= through the dreams. It might be wise for us to pay attention to these messages. Jungians would suggest that we do need to interpret the dream in order to gain insights, for the dream reveals more than it conceals. To quote Carl Jung: “Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.”
While Jung speaks to us about the open book being offered by our dreams, I would also suggest that our dreams can fool us. While working on an article about what brings on sleep, I dreamed of a sleep-inducing here called “golden flower.” It was wonderful. In my dreams I read the reviews and found that “golden flower” had been proven to be very effective. It was a compound with flax see as its main ingredient. This was a very impressive and detailed review. When I woke up, I raced to my computer and found that this magical herb was only in my dreams! I was very impressed with the active and detailed work being done by my dream – but it was not real! I was fooled.
