Carl Jung believed that below the surface of our psyche their lies both a personal and a collective unconscious. The personal unconscious is, in Jung’s words: “everything you know but are not at this moment thinking about.” The collective unconscious lies deeper down and is passed along to every member of a species. You could also think of the collective unconscious as genetic, or racial memory that is inherited through the process of evolution. Jung explains that the psyche regulates itself by maintaining an equilibrium between these different layers of consciousness. He also proposed two basic approaches to working with dream material; the subjective and the objective. The objective approach takes every image in a dream at face value. If you dream of your mother that image refers to your mother. The subjective approach is less literal and treats each character in a dream as an aspect of the dreamer’s personality.

The Gestalt theory of dream interpretation maintains that each part of a dream becomes comprehensible only in relation to the whole. Both animate and inanimate objects are considered parts of the dreamer’s psyche, from this vantage point. For example, if you dream of a bridge this may represent an aspect of yourself that is attempting to make connections between two separate elements within your self. The goal of this approach is to accept and re-integrate areas that may have been repressed or ignored. Role-playing is often used as a technique in Gestalt dreamwork. The dreamer can engage any image from their dream in a dialogue. This enables the dreamer to bring fragments of themselves into communication with eachother and resolve unfinished issues.

Australian Aborigines believe that the world was created by ancestral totemic spirits during a sacred epoch called Dreamtime. During the Dreamtime the designs for life were set in place. According to their views, each person dwells eternally in the Dreaming. A person’s spirit enters life from the Dreaming at birth and returns to the Dreaming at their death. Australian Aborigines also view all of life as an interconnected system that can be traced back to the beginning. They experience the Dreaming as “all at once time” rather that “one thing after another time.” This means that the past, present and future co-exist without separation. Dreams confirm this seamless reality for the Australian Aborigines because time and space lose their relevance. Exploring indigenous beliefs about dreams and reality can be an effective way to challenge and refine your own worldview.

Once you have a perspective from which to understand your dreams it can be very powerful to express them artistically.  To take something intangible and give it form.  This also serves the purpose of honoring the dream itself and signals to your unconscious psyche that you are listening. Dreams can be drawn, painted, acted out, turned into stories or even sung.  Small gestures such as these will strengthen the relationship between your conscious and unconscious. Your conscious mind then sprouts wider roots into the depths of your psyche. This, in turn, sets a fertile foundation for sustained personality growth.

Five aspects of William James’ theory of mental life are:

1. Experience is complete chaos without selective interest. Before something can be experienced it must
be attended to.

2. Thoughts emerge from a stream of consciousness. An individual thought receives its force, focus and
direction from the thoughts which precede it.

3. Pragmatism, which holds that truth is to be tested by the practical consequences of belief. It can be
summed up with the phrase: “whatever works, is likely true.”

4. The self is really made up of many selves that exist in a fluctuating field.

5. Human beings have animal instincts, such as fear, that are inborn rather than taught.

William James was one of the most original thinkers in the field of depth psychology. His ideas continue to impact how we conceive ourselves and our world. For further reading I would recommend “The Varieties of Religious Experience” and “The Will to Believe.”

Nature has endowed us with an unconscious mind that perpetually produces streams of images which lie just below the surface of conscious awareness. The unconscious is continually active and never completely turns off. When we sleep, the ego relinquishes control of the mind and allows itself to be submerged back into the depths of the unconscious. During this time, a portion of our awareness stays intact and directly experiences the flow of these images as dreams. A random series of forms cascade over what now remains of the conscious ego. We find ourselves swept along inside of a fantastic story that the psyche simultaneously creates, observes and participates in.

The images we encounter in dreams are symbolic depictions of unconscious processes within the psyche. They animate us from within. They also strive to communicate with the conscious mind and help it to transform. Dream narratives attempt to compensate for the tendency of consciousness to become one-sided and overly literal. When we awaken, the ego reemerges from the depths and regains a sense of authority. Dreams are often quickly forgotten or dismissed by the conscious mind as meaningless fictions, concocted by an unsupervised psyche. Their messages start to sink back down into the unconscious and the images may seem to be irretrievably lost. This is not the case.

The human psyche is always dreaming.

Dreaming does not stop just because we are awake. It only appears to cease because we are distracted by the outer events of life and by waking consciousness. If the conscious mind has been unwilling or unable to decipher the cryptic messages of nocturnal dreams, it is still possible to engage with the contents of waking dreams. Personality transformation absolutely depends upon maintaining this relationship between the ego and the unconscious. It’s the only way the unconscious mind can irrigate the conscious mind and help something new to bloom within the psyche. For this to occur, the conscious mind must release the authoritative grasp it tries to hold on the psyche as a whole. When we allow ourselves to slip into reverie, the images will once again present themselves to us. As a random series of forms float past us, it becomes possible to consciously engage with what we encounter. This is called active imagination. By acknowledging and integrating the imaginal contents of the unconscious mind, we expand the scope of our conscious minds. The process is not without perils. The ego must be strong enough to loosen the filter without becoming completely absorbed back into the unconscious. It also must be flexible enough to let the images permeate the surface of consciousness.

There are dangers and benefits involved in keeping your filter excessively rigid. The main benefit is that you can persist in believing that you have yourself all figured out. You may even get to fancy yourself “sane” or “normal.” This dubious boon comes at the cost of being cut off from the movement of instinctual energy through your personality. This happens when the ego over-identifies with the persona. As a result, we believe that the façade we show to the world is all that we are. Eventually, this results in a sense of alienation from what is truly unique and alive inside of us. We become petrified inside of our own skin. We feel unable to touch, feel or impact the course of our lives. Stagnation ensues.

There are also dangers and benefits involved in greatly loosening the filter:

Someone who cannot integrate the flood of images may become psychotic.
Someone who fully integrates the torrent of images may become a mystic.
Someone who constantly strives to integrate the surge of images may become an artist.

The human psyche is always dreaming.

This article was originally published in the Spring 2016 issue of Catahoula which you can find out more about by clicking here