WELCOME TO Module 6

This Jungian Life @ www.thisjungianlife.com

 

Lisa Marchiano, Jungian Analyst, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Joseph Lee, Jungian Analyst, Virginia Beach, Virginia

Deborah Stewart, Jungian Analyst, Cape Cod, Massachusetts

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 Module 6: Association & Amplification

THIS JUNGIAN LIFE DREAM SCHOOL EDITED TRANSCRIPT

 Joseph: This module focuses on association and amplification, core concepts in Jungian dream interpretation that we hope you’ll dive into with gusto. I’ll say a sentence about each and then we’ll unpack them. An association occurs when you have a dream with, for example, a tree. You then ask yourself what comes to mind as I reflect on the tree? We might notice some very personal associations, such as it looks like a tree that I had in my backyard in second grade, or it reminds me of a tree I fell out of. We have to be curious about what that tree “lights up” in our personal memories and write it down. Amplification, on the other hand, is the rich process of looking at dream images and themes for parallels in myths or fairy tales—an archetypal resonance. Sometimes this includes historical or cultural themes, but overall, amplification uses images and themes beyond personal experience. Then we weave it all together to see how our associations and amplifications of dream images enrich our understanding.

Deb: Both association and amplification are meaningful. To take your example of a tree, there are certainly personal associations to any particular tree, and tree is also a universal symbol for life, like the world tree in Norse mythology. Association and amplification are the two sides to a powerful coin that we use as currency in dream interpretation.

Lisa: Jung was clear that personal associations are of utmost importance, although it can be compelling to look at mythological references. In his Collected Works he says that if someone has a dream about a table, you have to know about that particular table. Was it a table that had been in the family for generations? A backyard picnic table? You need to ask the dreamer.

Deb: Jung illustrates this with an example of a hypothetical client who dreamed of a table. It turned out that he sat across from his father at that table while the father sternly reprimanded him and banished him to make his own way in the world. So this dream table had great emotional significance for the dreamer, whereas at first glance it might seem like an innocuous piece of furniture.

Lisa: You usually wouldn’t be able to understand the dream without personal associations. That’s why we start with personal associations when working with dreams.

Joseph: The personal associations can also be a little bit mysterious, because there is often some kind of tension around dream images. That is one of the reasons the dream is given, and is therapeutic. If I asked someone what comes to mind when you think of a table, the person might initially say that nothing came up. Jung studied these “going blank” responses in his Word Association Test, and found that when people had a hard time making an association, it often meant that their energy was blocked. So it’s not uncommon to need to take a moment, meditate on the image, and let the personal association emerge.

Lisa: One technique for doing this is journaling about each element in the dream. We’ll say more about this in the materials for this module. If there’s a table in your dream, what do you remember about that table? Sometimes we don’t have crisp images in dreams, but if the image is defined, does it make you think of anything? Was it like a table you had in childhood? Let’s illustrate this with an example of eliciting personal associations to show how this works. I’m going to share a dream I had about a year ago, and Deb and Joseph are going to ask me some questions. These are the kinds of questions you could ask yourself as you’re working with dreams. Here’s my dream: I’m with some people in a place where there are shallow pools of water. We used to keep a little critter here. I look for him and easily find him. He’s much bigger and healthy. He seems happy to see us and sits on my shoulder. He used to be tiny, and is a combination of a crayfish and a dragonfly larva. I’m glad he’s doing so well.

Deb: What about this critter that’s a combination of crayfish and dragonfly larva? How he has grown?

Lisa: My association to crayfish is a nature expedition I was on a number of years ago. We were fossil hunting in a stream somewhere in the middle of Pennsylvania. I lifted up a rock and there was a little crayfish. It was semi-translucent and looked like a miniature lobster. It might have been the first time I ever saw a crayfish. It seemed like it didn’t belong in a stream in Pennsylvania because it looked like an ocean crustacean. It was sort of magical. I also think that crayfish are very sensitive to ecological issues, so you won’t find them unless the stream is pretty clean. It was really wonderful to discover these incredible little creatures. The dragonfly lava has a similar feeling for me. I love dragonflies. Who doesn’t? They’re beautiful and amazing. They fly so fast and their colors are gorgeous. Once, when I was a child walking on the banks of a pond, I saw something crawl out of the water that caught my eye. I sat down and watched while its skin cracked open and a dragonfly emerged. When I started watching it, I didn’t know it was a dragonfly larva or nymph. This memory has an almost dreamlike quality, but it was a remarkable thing to see the metamorphosis from larva into dragonfly. Dragonfly larva actually live in water. They’re fully aquatic and hunt bugs and even small fish. It was amazing to see it go from living in the water to flying. So those are my associations to this critter.

Deb: It seems that crayfish in a shallow pond or a stream close to home means that the stream is healthy, vibrant, and generative. And the same thing about a dragonfly larva that metamorphoses, can fly, and becomes beautiful. The feeling tone of your associations is joyful. The crayfish looks like it doesn’t belong there because it looks like a lobster, and the dragonfly larva is somewhat primordial–these creatures are unexpected and somewhat exotic. What an amazing miraculous little bit of surprising life in your own backyard, experiences of the numinous aspect of Mother Nature.

Joseph: As I think back, the first time I ever saw crayfish I was astounded—it was like finding a miniature dragon. Nature has revealed a secret to you, and seeing it firsthand infuses it with lived experience. It incarnates something into the senses and feelings and makes it active in the psyche.

Deb: This shows how important and powerful personal associations can be in a dream. We might not immediately associate all this magic, discovery and sense of awe with two creatures like a crayfish and a dragonfly larva. We need to know that to understand the dream.

Joseph: This dream remains interesting as we move into amplification. The dream goes from a naturalistic moment into a fairytale moment. The dragonfly crayfish is on your shoulder and is your buddy.

Lisa: Right! Yes.

Joseph: You’re in the world of talking frogs, friendly crayfish, and ants that help sort the grains of wheat and barley. This is the introduction of a mythic feeling.

Lisa: Absolutely.

Joseph: That’s the next stage of working with dream images. Amplification was central to Jung’s psychology and what he called his synthetic method. When things are synthesized, they’re brought together in an amalgam, or relationship. At the core of Jung’s view of human existence is that as our personal experiences and images are integrated into memory, they are organized by archetypal structures. Therefore, we are both personal and transpersonal as we move through the world. We don’t “make” this happen, because it happens naturally, but if we become aware of it, we expand our understanding. We add amplification to a dream in order to connect it with universal imagery, connect it with conscious understanding, and expand meaning.

Lisa: We relate images that might at first seem ordinary into the mythological realm and their archetypal dominants, or categories. Let’s take another example: a dog. Dogs are featured is many stories, myths, and art.

Deb: A personal dog belongs to a much larger category that has been meaningful throughout mankind’s history, from taming dogs to the dog that guards the gates of hell. We are always part of a much larger whole. Without that larger context, we wouldn’t be able to make meaning of a personal dog. If we don’t understand what “dogness” is–big ones, little ones, wild or tame–then we don’t have a framework within which to make meaning of our personal experience.

Lisa: It helps in understanding a dream to know where to put the emphasis–the personal versus the archetypal. If you dream about your dog or cat, that is different from dreaming about a dog or cat. Dreaming about your cat, your bosom companion, is embedded in this larger mythological tissue of cat, whereas the Cheshire cat is less likely to have a personal referent.

Joseph: Everything that’s personal, whether or not we’re aware of it, has threads into the web of the universal. While we’re unique, we also have a tremendous number of similarities to universal patterns and psychic functions.

Deb: We are more closely connected than we often realize to the great store of human experience–stories, symbols, culture–the great web of humankind and history. It’s not evident every time somebody dreams of a dog or a cat, or a tree or a table, but it undergirds our lives. Jung felt it was important to see ourselves in the context of a much larger whole.

Lisa: There are also some dangers with amplification. Dreams with a powerful mythological reference are exciting. When we’re working with our own dreams, we can get carried away, intellectualize, and distance from the meaning of the central images in the dream. Putting too much emphasis on a mythological reference can be a defense, so we have to be a little careful with this.

Joseph: Then again, if the “medicine” in the dream includes intense feelings, mythological amplifications can lift us out of the personal realm and protect us from being overwhelmed by experience that feels solely personal, like it’s all on us.

Deb: Mythological and symbolic references can be both very reassuring and inflating. They can help to ground and companion us or waft us off into realms that take us away from ourselves. The point of dream work is always to bring us home to ourselves. We need to see where the connection to an image is personally meaningful without deflecting into an intellectual realm.

Lisa: If we’re paying too much attention to archetypal aspects of a dream, we can get led astray, which is why it really makes sense to start with the personal, get grounded there, and then see if amplification adds something.

Joseph: Many people don’t necessarily have access to a library of myths in the back of their heads, or a library of fairytales. So part of the personal work on dreams also includes a bit of research.

Lisa: I want to say a few more things about why amplification is important. First, amplification frames the issue in universal terms. When we’re struggling with something, have a dream, and recognize that some elements in the dream connect us to a myth, we are no longer alone with this problem–we’re part of a universal web. The second important element is that if we understand the myth or the fairytale, we also have a sense of the telos. We know where it goes in the myth, which can help us understand where it wants to go in us. This needs to be used judiciously but it can be powerful. I’ll give an example from a dream, but to set the stage, this dreamer was going through an extraordinarily difficult time and felt quite vulnerable. She had just made a major life decision and wanted to open herself up to new sexual experiences. She had a lifelong wound concerning her body and sexuality and felt a great deal of shame. Here’s her dream: There’s a young twenty-something woman in the dream. She is foreign, possibly from an Eastern European country and is very fair-skinned and slender. She is staying or living in a house that belongs to someone I know slightly. When I first see her, she is wearing a white T-shirt with some sort of design on it but no underwear–nothing else, and her pubic hair is entirely shaved. The whole area is very pale and entirely visible. I feel startled and somewhat disgusted. Someone tells me later that this woman eats her own feces as some sort of health or sexual practice. I feel more disgusted and repelled but the woman is also compelling and it’s interesting to me that she is so beautiful. She has a sort of pure and innocent look about her, and very milk-white skin. I heard this dream and had no idea what to do with it. So–per Joseph’s point about research–I consulted my symbol dictionary. There, I read about an Aztec goddess who endlessly swallows her feces and then excretes them. This practice paradoxically pollutes and purifies her, for her bodily waste emerges as a flower. She is shown in a Central American glyph that symbolizes female sensuality–by implication, she also presides over childbirth. The Aztecs collected human waste to fertilize their fields, and it decayed into humus or “earth filth,” which is also this goddess’ name. They believed it was generated in her bowels in the subterranean land of the dead, an unspeakable place that also gave birth to life-sustaining corn. Her name derives from a root meaning filth, vice and disease. The Aztecs confessed their sexual misdeeds to her on their deathbeds–shameful, excremental stories that the goddess greedily consumed. The Aztec word for disgrace was to be smeared in excrement. Yet their word for gold meant divine excrement, or the sun’s excrement. Similarly, alchemy claimed, and psychology supports, that the gold of transformation is found in filth. My client’s dream image was related to this Aztec goddess. She didn’t know anything about this goddess and neither had I, but it brought up the issue she was struggling with about bodily shame and sexuality. In a very precise way, her dream landed her in the mythological realm. It universalized this matter and gave her permission to see it as something that had meaningful human and mythic roots.

Deb: This mythological context must have been deeply meaningful to the dreamer. It tells her that others have been there too.

Lisa: For thousands of years!

Deb: What was shameful to her in the dream and waking life was also something transformative and generative. This is a great example of how amplification can open a window into a greater web of meaning that can lift us out of the personal—and that allows us to see something bigger and different.

Lisa: The mythological context opened up the sense of where her psyche wanted to go–the idea of telos that was particularly important to Jung: psyche is going somewhere.

Joseph: Myth gave this dreamer an opportunity to see what was happening beyond her personal complexes. At first glance, this dream seems to evoke disgust about the body and bodily functions. The Aztec myth let the dreamer step into a whole different perspective, which freed something and expanded the meaning of the dream. In the realm of metaphor, we can consider other possible meanings that suddenly make initially off-putting content tolerable. It’s not uncommon, for example, for a client to come in with addiction problems. Sometimes people talk about the way their addiction surges and recedes and what it compels them to do. But addiction also evokes the myth of Dionysus, the god of ecstasy, and the ecstatic process that led to his dismemberment. Then Dionysus regenerated from his heart. When I think about the urge toward an addictive substance, I reflect on how something in the individual soul is looking for an ecstatic experience, something that could dismember ego defenses and provide a momentary experience of divine union—connection with something larger and pleasurable. Sometimes there is a dangerous hope that everything will be transformed and the person will emerge from the experience feeling fresh and renewed. When the archetype of Dionysus gets mixed up with drug abuse, people can find meaning in their drug seeking behavior and also be realistically sobered, because drug use leads to destruction that only a god, Dionysus, could survive. Gods can survive encounters with archetypal forces, but people can’t.

Deb: That’s such a good illustration of what identifying with archetypal forces can lead to. Like playing with fire, archetypal energies can warm us and be useful—and also burn. Now let’s move on to some more examples of amplification in dreams. This dream begins: I am with some people on the way somewhere. I stop to talk to a man and the group goes on without me. There are horses running around in a big circle, identical black horses with fire coming out of their chests or sides as they run. I’m fascinated. There is real momentum to the running and they seem to be in a small valley or land that is meant for them. I get slightly in the way of the running horses, but they keep running and somehow avoid me or I avoid them. I can see that there’s another valley and horses running around, black with fire. We would start to wonder with the dreamer about these black horses with fire coming out of their chests and sides.

Lisa: We realize immediately that we’re in a kind of archetypal space because these horses are not naturalistic horses.

Joseph: Anytime natural laws are being bent in a dream, our inner mythic ears pick up.

Lisa: Yes. As you, Joseph, pointed with my dream, a crayfish is wonderful, but not necessarily mythological. But when it’s crawling around and sitting on my shoulder…

Joseph: …in an intimate way…

Lisa: …then we’re in the mythological realm. And now we have fiery horses. When a dream brings in archetypal images, it will always have a lot of feeling. We want to pay attention to that when we’re working with dreams. Is there a certain quantum of energy that comes with this, and what is the nature of that? Is it fear? Is it awe?

Joseph: Or a mixture of feelings?

Deb: But first we would start with the dreamer’s association to horses and see what that would yield. We would start at the personal level and hold our awareness that fiery horses mean we are in mythological territory. There are many mythological references to horses. Often they are a symbol of libido, or energy. In Chinese astrology there are fire horses that are interpreted as impulsive, excitable, and showing initiative—they symbolize tremendous energy.

Joseph: In the Bible, the Book of Revelation (chapter 9) says the riders wore breast plates the color of fire. The heads of the horses were like lions’ heads, and fire, smoke and sulfur came out of their mouths, killing a third of humankind. The power of the horses is in their mouths and tails. Their tails are like serpents with heads and they inflict harm. This is a mysterious symbol system that is woven into Western culture–many people have steeped in biblical references. So when I think about the fire horses in the dream, I think about them as a purgative force meant to shift the collective “ego” of humanity away from materialistic values. The intention is to liberate them by challenging them to embrace a more spiritual orientation in order to survive an apocalyptic crisis. So I might ask this question: is the dreamer resisting a shift of attitudes and priorities? Is there something in the dream that is demanding that the ego orient to a relationship with the Self?

Lisa: Horses in many cultures are also seen as harbingers of death because they carry the souls of the dead into the next world. This is true in German mythology, and in Celtic mythology a shape-shifting creature called a pooka could appear in horse form as an omen of death. There are a lot of associations between horses and death. The dreamer’s feeling was fascination. She said she was a little scared of getting knocked over, but realized that the horses didn’t hurt her. In this dream is something dying or need to die?

Deb: These horses are black and Hades, the god of the underworld, drove a chariot with black horses. I think we’re circumambulating an image of tremendous psychic energy and power from the dreamer’s underworld, the unconscious. The dream says the group left her behind and went on without her. In the context she provided, she’s trying to find out which way she is heading. Although she is worried, feeling lonely and scared, she feels she will find the city she is to live in next. She also mentions a relationship that is ending. It seems there’s so much psychic energy around this transition in her life that it’s being imaged in an archetypal way, as fiery horses pounding the earth. If she were here, we could see if that’s the case, and explore how she could use this energy in waking life without being overwhelmed by it.

Lisa: The sense I get from the dream and from our amplifications is that her life is in a state of upheaval. She is cut off from the group she’s been traveling with and ending the relationship with them. There is also the break-up with a significant other with whom she is still living. So a lot is in process and moving, but hasn’t dissolved yet. Perhaps this dream was a demand that old life structures finally end so something can get resolved and lead her to something new.

Joseph: There’s often an opportunity in a dream for a correction of the ego attitude. As she talks about the main feelings in the dream, I notice that she’s not particularly worried about the horses. She feels they’re not going to hurt her. Instead, she’s concerned about where her colleagues have gone and how she’s going to find them. That’s very surprising. I imagine if any of us were in a field and fiery horses were galloping around, it would be astounding and mesmerizing–a manifestation of the divine–but the dream ego treats this rather casually. If this were my dream, I would wonder whether I was treating the numinous aspect of my life a little too casually. Was I alienating myself from the impact of breaking up and its deeper spiritual implications?

Lisa: That’s a good point, Joseph. You’re bringing up something that we haven’t addressed in this course yet, which is that the least trustworthy attitude in the dream is often that of the dream ego. We always have to hold in mind the possibility that the Self is trying to give the dreamer—via the actions of the dream ego–a snapshot of where she might be off base.

Deb: None of our ideas about this are “the answer.” We can’t really know what is going on in this dreamer’s psyche without the dreamer, but the fiery black horses illustrate how amplification can work. Amplification is literally a way of amplifying—like turning up the volume. We can make a dream image “louder” so as to better “hear” its meaning.

Lisa: We started this module by talking about personal associations. In the case of a dream about horses with fire coming out of their chests, there are no personal associations, unless it was something you read in a book or were otherwise fascinated with. An image like that does not come from personal experience, so we have to amplify it with mythological material to make sense of it. If you do this with your own dreams, where are the resources for finding amplification material? A good start is the Internet—see what you find on Google. Another excellent resource is a good symbol dictionary such as The Book of Symbols. We have several symbol dictionaries listed on This Jungian Life Dream School website.

Joseph: There’s great scholarship by classicists and analytical psychologists that examines images across antiquity. All this can help us enrich the image, but it’s still up to us to link it to our personal psychology. That is a deep process, which may not happen with the first amplification. For instance, I referenced a passage from the Book of Revelation about horses as portents of death. It may take some discipline not to dismiss that immediately because it doesn’t “light you up,” but it’s important to be able to mull it over in your journal or diary. See if thinking about these various archetypal dynamics shifts a little something inside of you. With time, it can create a resonance that yields meaning.

Lisa: That’s a really good point, Joseph: we might have to sit with mythological references a bit. We might at first feel defensive about what psyche brings. Also, as with fiery black horses, we may know right away that we’re in archetypal territory, but sometimes the archetypal element presents more subtly. If we know that it’s important to look for mythological elements, we can keep our eyes open for them. Here’s an example from a 37-year-old man’s dream: I’m investigating an old, abandoned building. I feel an enormous sense of dread and decide to leave. As I’m exploring, an old man comes out. The old man has a kind and wise presence and we talk for a while and he makes me feel safe and welcome. He then goes over to one of the shelving units and finds a dusty old amulet that he places in my hand. He tells me that I will need this amulet to protect me as it is time to face the house of death. He then walks me back up until we reach a road, and as I reach the road I look up and see a dark house that fills me with a mixture of awe and fear. I know it is the house of death. As I stare, a leopard appears at the brow of the hill and walks toward me. It has a kind of strong masculine presence, but I feel no danger from it. It passes me and allows me to stroke its back. The leopard joins the old man who is still standing behind me, and the old man warmly wishes me luck as he and the leopard walk away. That dream is filled with some strange imagery, but what I was first struck by was the image of the old man.

Joseph: This is an image with a universal quality that Jung referred to as the senex, an ancient Roman title for an old man known for his good standing, wisdom, and contribution to the community. It seems to be a universal pattern as evidenced in literature and mythology.

Deb: I want to add that it’s important to notice how you feel when working with a dream. What do you resonate to? Where does your mind intuitively leap? With this dream, I immediately leapt to Harry Potter and The Sorcerer’s Stone. Then I did something very mundane: I opened my laptop and Googled wise and old and man, and the wise old man popped up on Wikipedia. Amplification does not have to rest on vast knowledge of mythology and symbols. You’ll know by how you feel, what strikes you…

Lisa: …and by the quality of the energy in the dream. Because even though we don’t have the dreamer here, I imagine that if I had this dream, I would have a very strong feeling about that old man. Deb, you thought of Dumbledore, and I was thinking of Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars, or Gandalf from the Lord of the Rings. The wise old man image in these tales sets the hero on his path–the classic hero’s journey that Joseph Campbell described so well. Merlin is another example of the wise old man.

Joseph: All this tells us that these helpful and powerful figures have been part of the human psyche since antiquity. They are also part of every movie season! I’ve always been fascinated by Athena, a figure from Greek mythology. As Odysseus was setting out, she wanted to help and bless him. Athena was the goddess of wisdom, and created what today we might call an avatar – like in a video game. The avatar was called mentor, and it was through this figure that Athena dispensed wise and helpful advice, particularly at pivotal moments. So the archetype of wisdom lives as a process in the human psyche.

Lisa: In this dream, the dream ego is afraid of taking on a challenge. The intervention of this wise old man with his leopard and the amulet enables the dream ego to go on his hero’s quest and face the house of death.

Deb: This dream illustrates how readily the dream maker takes us into mythological territory—it’s part of our human substrate and has access to symbols and the vast store of human experience.

Joseph: I often feel that when something archetypal constellates so overtly in a dream that it suggests psyche is using special force. This kind of imagery indicates that something big is being faced. The dream ego could easily be disoriented or overwhelmed by facing the house of death alone. That’s true for all of us when we face existential questions like our own mortality or suffer the death of a loved one. It’s a great blessing when something transpersonal activates. It enters our dream world and provides a sense that we are companioned by something larger.

Deb: Here’s another example of a dream where personal associations led to an amplification that made a difference for the dreamer. A man in midlife dreamed: I was walking along a path in new England woods. Suddenly I heard rampaging and crashing—wild, alarming sounds not far away. I dived off the path because it was coming toward me. I hid in a ditch and quickly tried to borrow under some branches and leaves and play possum. The sound came closer and closer and it turned out to be a huge elephant, so big that it was crashing into trees and branches because the path wasn’t big enough for it. It stopped beside where I was in the ditch because it could smell me there. The elephant turned toward me, extended its trunk toward me in this ditch and waved its trunk slowly back and forth over my prone body. This dream really moved the dreamer, but we started with the dreamer’s personal associations to elephants. He remembered being taken to the edge of town at dawn to see the circus arrive. The elephants were staked off on the perimeter while the tents were being set up. He was close enough to the elephants that one of them reached its trunk out, touched his chest and exhaled a big blob of black yuck onto his shirt. He had quite literally been touched by an elephant, alarmingly so. We were also in the realm of myth because there are no elephants in the New England woods where he lives, so we dived in: of the seven chakras in Hindu mythology, the elephant is the only symbol that appears twice, at the root chakra and again at the throat chakra. I was also aware that elephants and whales are often images of the Self because they are huge and have qualities of knowing in realms alien to us. We went back and forth like the elephant’s trunk to sink into this image. Much more elephant imagery could be added.

Lisa: I immediately thought of the Hindu god Ganesha, the remover of obstacles.

Joseph: I was thinking about Ganesha also, and in India, elephants were used to clear forests and move enormous objects. They were the natural engines of civilization across Asia, so it makes me wonder if a psychic engine is being offered to him, perhaps the force to clear his own forest and construct a new life landscape.

Deb: He was in a life transition. He also realized that he had felt blessed in the dream. And there it is: we don’t always need vast knowledge of mythology or symbol dictionaries or the Internet to come into a full experience of new knowing. Being able to relate the image of the elephant to the numinous and realize it was a blessing made a felt difference to the dreamer.

Joseph: As we’ve journeyed through these various dreams, we hope you’ll feel encouraged to work with your dreams in this structured way: look at the dream, identify each of its primary images, use your journal to write down what comes to mind, and reflect on it. Dreams are often related to personal mythology and history. Those things may have an intensity of feeling or they may feel quite ordinary, but psyche weaves a mythological story from our personal experience. After you do that, perhaps with a bit of research or knowledge you already have, create a synthesis by adding a universal layer to the dream. This might involve myths, fairytales, movies, literature, or poetry–then sit with that. These pieces may not all come together immediately like a patterned quilt. You may have to stitch it together slowly to see the pattern that emerges and its impact and meaning.

© This Jungian Life 2021 all rights reserved throughout the universe in perpetuity, in any and all media now known or hereinafter devised.

 

By Lisa Marchiano

Working with our dreams presents a significant challenge: we must disidentify from the waking, conscious attitude and attempt to inhabit the radically different perspective presented by the unconscious. This is not easy to do, and Jung said that when faced with a dream, he often began with “I have no idea what this dream means.” (I suspect he was being somewhat disingenuous, but it’s nevertheless reassuring.)

 

We can remedy our initial immobility by “taking up the context”: meticulously collecting our personal associations, adding explanations, and seeking archetypal meaning through mythological referents. I will delineate a way of working with associations and amplifications that can help us hear the perspective of the unconscious.

 

There are three levels of meaning to plumb when considering a dream element, and it’s best to consider them in a particular order. These are: personal associations, explanations, and archetypal amplifications. The “correct” meaning of a given image may involve all three levels, and if you consider them carefully and in order, you will have the greatest chance of comprehending a given dream image in a way that “clicks.” Let’s go through this process step by step.

 

Personal Associations
Personal associations are what come up for the dreamer in connection with a particular dream image. Personal associations matter a lot if the dream element relates to life history, and a strong personal association takes precedence over other interpretive lenses. For example, if we dream of a car, and it reminds us of our grandmother’s old Chevy, we should pursue further elements of personal relevance. If we dream of a man it’s very different from dreaming of X, who is married to my best friend, coaches basketball, and has a twin sister. Personal associations are critical for dream images that connect to known aspects of personal experience and feeling.

 

When tracking personal associations, try to keep them brief by identifying the essence of the image. Four or five sentences are usually enough. If your high school boyfriend appears in a dream, you don’t need to dredge up everything about him. What was the prevailing truth about him or the relationship? “He was insecure and put me down when I was successful.” You’re looking for something that’s brief and has an emotional component. “He and I dated sophomore year” is not likely to lift up meaning because it’s only a flat fact.

If an actor turns up in a dream, it’s usually more fruitful to explore the characters he or she played than to focus on his or her personal life. For example, if Gary Oldman shows up in your dream, ask yourself what role you associate with him, such as secret agent George Smiley in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Smiley had to identify the “mole” and never knew whom he could trust.

 

Let’s say you’ve now collected personal associations on each element of a dream. This has helped you gain a feeling-toned sense of some of the elements. Other images remain perplexing, so you turn to another aspect of association.

 

Explanation

Jung didn’t mention explanation specifically but it’s often important to understanding dreams. Explanations are likely to be helpful when there is no significant personal association. An explanation is just what it sounds like: a straight-forward statement about what something is and how it functions. Imagine you are trying to define something for someone who has never heard of the item in question. For example: a car is a personal, mechanical mode of transportation powered by a gas engine. Or: a volcano is a mountain topped by a crater through which the earth’s hot core vents hot vapor or molten lava.

 

Let’s say you dreamed of a bread machine. You would first ask yourself about personal associations: Did you ever own a bread machine? Is it significant in some way? Maybe you got it as a wedding present and never used it… or used it with your kids on weekends. A bread machine’s role in your life will help unlock its meaning and feeling in the dream.

 

Now let’s assume you don’t have any personal associations to bread machines. You’ve never encountered one or given them much thought–yet a bread machine shows up in your dream. This is when explanation is useful. Start by asking, what is a bread machine? A bread machine automates the process of bread making; it mixes, kneads, proofs, and bakes bread in a self-contained countertop unit. It’s a modern equivalent of the alchemical vas, in which flour and yeast microorganisms combine and are transformed. Now ask, what is bread? Bread is a food staple, the symbolic “staff of life” long held sacred.

 

These musings connote a positive understanding of bread machine, but we might also note that a machine has replaced a human process that requires touch, skill, and time. Bread making has become automated and impersonal. This leads us to consider its more negative aspect. Which predominates will depend in part on the feeling tone of the dream, the images around the bread machine, and the energetic arc of the dream.

 

Amplification

The relevance of amplification should be considered only after exploring personal associations and explanation. Amplification uses archetypal material–myths, fairy tales, and images–to expand the meaning of a dream element. Mythological dream material draws from the collective unconscious, so it is infused with an extra energetic charge. It can be tempting to vault into it at the outset, but that can take us too far from the personal context and lead us astray.

 

For example, when Joseph, Deb, and I were in a case colloquium with other training candidates, someone presented a client dream featuring bees. Several of us immediately went to the archetypal level, highlighting the symbolism of bees and honey in myth and fairy tales. The presenter then shared the dreamer’s life-threatening allergy to bee stings. I was taken aback by how off-base our interpretation would have been without this vital personal association. It’s possible that archetypal aspects of bees might have deepened this dream image of bees; personal and archetypal meanings are certainly not mutually exclusive. Even opposite meanings can be true simultaneously—paradox has a place in dreams, as in life. But the personal must take precedence as the dream’s meaning is grounded in the individual.

 

So how and when can we best employ archetypal amplification? Let’s imagine that you’ve had a dream featuring a horse. You explore personal associations, but nothing significant emerges. You move to explanation: a horse is a domesticated animal used for riding and pulling loads. This also fails to increase your felt understanding of the dream. Now is the time to turn to archetypal amplification. Greek mythology alone features winged Pegasus, half-human centaurs, and Hippocampus, the underwater horse with a fish tail. Horses pulled the chariot of the sun and the chariots of underworld gods Poseidon and Hades. Looking up horse on the Internet or in a symbol dictionary will yield many more mythological references, enabling you to realize that from an archetypal perspective, horse symbolizes primal life energy. Sift through these archetypal images to see which one sheds light on the significance of your dream image.

 

Putting it Together

Let’s see how these three components of dream interpretation can work together to help us decode this dream (used with the dreamer’s permission): I’m in a room with my parents. My parents ask me to get something for them. I go but I can’t find it. I am feeling angry that they ask things of me all the time, and also feel guilty that I didn’t get it. I am going back to where they are when an old, deranged man on drugs jumps out and is going to stab me with a can opener that belongs to my father.

 

The old, deranged man reminded the dreamer of the homeless people sometimes seen in the park near his university. The dreamer explained old, deranged man as someone who doesn’t follow society’s rules. The personal association to can opener was that it was just like the one his father had; it was old, and the dreamer remembered wanting to play with it when as a child but not being allowed to do so. The explanation for can opener was a sharp-pointed implement that punctures the metal lids of cans.

 

With these associations and explanation, we were able to enter the dream: The deranged man doesn’t obey the rules, which the dreamer did when he was a child. He appears to want to “open up” the dreamer to something in a violent way, which was, in turn, associated with the dreamer’s father. The dreamer then stated that he often felt he failed to meet parental expectations.

 

The meaning of the dream came into even clearer focus when we considered its archetypal amplification. The dream called to mind the Grimm’s fairy tale, Iron John, in which a wild man has been imprisoned by the king and is kept in a cage as a kind of oddity. The wild man coaxes the boy to set him free by retrieving the key under his mother’s pillow. Fearful of being punished for his transgression, the boy runs away with the wild man and lives in the forest with him, where he is initiated into the masculine.

 

The deranged old man in the dream endeavors to prevent the dreamer from going back to his parental complex, where the dreamer will find himself in a familiar, regressed state of inadequacy. Like the wild man in Iron John, the deranged dream figure challenges the dreamer to open himself up to his masculine potential, and has a secret identification with the father. This is a confrontation with the urge to be initiated into manhood.

 

Wrapping Up

Altogether, these three perspectives, association, explanation and amplification, provide us with a way to begin analyzing a dream. Used in order, they are not unlike opening a can, though not in the manner of a deranged old man. They provide doable methodology for entering a dream, and once some momentum and meaning has unfolded, other interpretive lenses layer on, adding detail and depth.

 

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Try using associations and amplifications of these dreams. If these were your dreams, what would your personal associations be? Which images lend themselves to archetypal amplification?:

1.) I am in a beautiful wilderness area with a lake and it is filled with exotic large animals. I am very excited to get into the water and feel I have arrived at a place I want to stay.

 2.) The setting was something like an international festival. I was with a girlfriend and we needed to go to the bathroom. We went past a group of uniformed men, but we kept walking. There was a puddle we had to cross. Then we separated. I went to find a toilet in a building. A snake was in the lobby. Then the snake was in the bathroom, so I decided not to go in. I think I just kept getting touched by snakes, they came in all sizes. I went outside and around the building, and a python outside wanted to get near me. It wanted to wrangle me…I grabbed its jaws but it dug further around my hips. It felt a lot like the python wanted me to go back and use the toilet, or it wouldn’t let me go.

I’m in a kitchen with a male friend. We are sitting on a bench side by side eating. An easy day, beautiful weather. I ask how he is. I hear my own voice as if through his ears. There is intensity and feeling in it. Perhaps I brought the food, cake. I recognize we are in the house of an old school friend. He is cheerful, perfectly at home like he grew up there. A female friend is there, sulking and reading nearby. I feel guilt for the pleasure of his company when I came here with her. She wants to leave. But I’ve misplaced my shoe. I walk all around the house and my male friend walks with me. It’s a beautiful sunny house and he is smiling, quiet, delighted by everything. We walk into a library. He shows me to stairs that lead to a landing. From here I can see the circular layout of the house, wow! but no shoe. I head outside with him. Maybe I took the shoe off before entering? It is getting windy. There are kites on the ground for an upcoming children’s party. He takes them under the stairs so they won’t blow away. He tells me he’s tasted all the food for the party. It is delightful.

Feelings in the dream: Pleasure and happiness. Guilt/anxiety. curiousity.

Context and Associations: Life transitions include, at the time I was approaching freedom from daily childrearing as my youngest was about to start school. Struggles with purpose outside the home. I know both characters from childhood and am currently in touch with both. Along with being an actual person in my life (though fairly distant) the male character has been a staple of my dream life for a few years. He is a compelling, attractive, charismatic, difficult person (for me) in real life. Reminding me of my dad for better and worse. He is also an artist, which is the work life I am especially drawn to.