In cultivating a new practice or skill, it helps to become acquainted with some basic, underlying concepts and terminology. This is also helpful for dreamwork, though not essential, as you can engage with your dreams in a casual and unstructured way without understanding the theoretical foundations underpinning Jungian dream analysis. However, having this basic theoretical foundation helps make working with your dreams as rich, fulfilling, and beneficial as possible.
Looking Back and Looking Forward
Jung’s ideas of reductive and prospective dream interpretations are a good place to begin. With reductive interpretations, you are linking dreams and specific elements that appear in dreams to personal experiences and issues in the past and present. Often, though not always, these include our complexes, traumas, and unresolved psychological conflicts. With prospective interpretations, you are mining dreams for insights about what the dream means for your future development, including how you can grow through past and present limitations and fully develop your personality, which Jung called individuation. In simple terms, you could say that with reductive work, you look backward, while with prospective work, you look forward. While some dreams may lend themselves more readily to one approach or the other, dreams can often be approached simultaneously through both a reductive and prospective lens.
Let’s use a common type of dream to illustrate. Imagine a dream where you’re at an important social function. Everyone’s dressed according to common standards, but you suddenly notice that you’re dressed in dirty or disheveled clothing. No one seems to notice, yet you are deeply embarrassed and terrified of the seemingly inevitable moment when you will be discovered. Reductive interpretations of this dream can vary depending on the person and details of this dream, but let’s say that you are someone who feels like an outsider and has struggled with a sense of inadequacy or low self-worth your entire life. The dream might express an “outsider” complex illustrated in the contrast between your clothing and everyone else’s, reflecting your struggles with self-worth, fitting in, being on the outside, and your inclination to feel different when comparing yourself to others.
At the same time, the aforementioned dream can be interpreted through a prospective lens. To do this, let’s zoom in closer and consider some details. While it’s true that, in the dream, you feel self-conscious and embarrassed about wearing dirty or disheveled clothing, no one else in the dream minds or even notices. From a prospective perspective, this could suggest that this is mainly an internal problem and that other people at the event seem to like you just fine the way you are, disheveled clothing and all. Perhaps what you are wearing in the dream represents an aspect of your authentic self that others accept but that you reject and are needlessly ashamed of being or having. This perspective may suggest that embracing that authentic aspect of yourself would bring you more confidence and ease in your interactions with others, which would likely result in them enjoying your company even more. The same dream therefore not only highlights issues from your past and present that hold you back but also reveals a path for personal growth and the possibility of a better future.
Knowing Your Dreams Inside and Out
This brings us to two additional types of interpretation that Jung identified in addition to reductive and prospective dream work: the subjective level and the objective level.
At the subjective level, the elements of a dream are interpreted symbolically, metaphorically, and intrapsychically—that is, the dream elements reflect aspects of your mind, psyche, and personality and symbolize aspects of the inner world of your psyche. Again, we will use the dream of showing up to an event in bedraggled clothes as an example. Since it is less likely that you have done this in real life, the dream could reflect how social interactions with this group are messy, disheveled, and tiring. The clothes that others in the dream are wearing could be said to symbolize certain standards that you feel you need to live up to. Your clothes in the dream could signify your outer image, what Jung called your persona, which may or may not reflect an authentic aspect of your multifaceted self. The shame you feel about your dream clothes could, therefore, reflect the conflict between those social standards and a part of yourself that you feel doesn’t live up to them. Transferring feelings associated with something in your real life (this authentic aspect of yourself) onto an object or element in the dream (your dirty dream clothes) is called displacement.
At the objective level, the focus is on the people, places, and events in your outer world, and interpretations are objective, relational, and interpersonal. When assessing the dream at the objective level, you consider the object’s qualities and whether they accurately depict actual people, places, and events in your life. From an objective level, perhaps, your threadbare dream clothes accurately reflect that your style and manner of dressing differ from your social group. This dream element may realistically express how you are different from others socially and culturally. For example, you may feel a social class difference from your friends and community as expressed through your clothing in the dream. This dream object may express whatever feelings of shame or inferiority you might have when comparing your clothing or possessions to others. The dream can raise your awareness about these real aspects of your life that may be challenging to acknowledge, which can help you evaluate and make choices about your current life. If your dream does not portray objective parts of your life, then interpreting it on a subjective level, which explores what the elements could symbolize, especially intrapsychically, may be more fitting. As with reductive and prospective interpretations, subjective and objective level meanings frequently overlap in the same dreams, and they can and should, therefore, be considered together. This phenomenon, where multiple issues and ideas are represented by a single element in a dream (such as your dream clothes), is known as condensation—a term first used by Freud but also used in Jungian dream analysis.
Whether doing dreamwork with a therapist or on your own, a basic grasp of these foundational concepts will facilitate and enrich the work and provide a foundation for integrating additional dreamwork methods and techniques, which we will continue exploring in subsequent articles.
