How to Decipher Dream Meaning

In order to understand dream meaning, you have to know that dreams are not mere imprints, snapshots, or images of the day’s experience. Our dreams do use the material of our daily lives, but only in order to make a connection with the ego. With the exception of some archetypal dreams (discussed below), each dream meaning is specific to your current circumstances, attitude, and state of mind.

What do dreams mean?

Dreams are not mere imprints, snapshots, or images of the day’s experience. Our dreams do use the material of our daily lives, but only in order to make a connection with the ego.  With the exception of some archetypal dreams (discussed below), each dream meaning is specific to your current circumstances, attitude, and state of mind.

Your dreams are an expression of your inner life, and they can show you through what false attitude you have landed yourself in impossible situations.C.G. Jung, The Meaning of Psychology for Modern Man

If you wake up and immediately think you know what your dream means, you've already missed the dream meaning.  The same goes for getting a canned answer on a typical dream site.  To really answer the question above and get to the heart and soul of dream meaning, we must be willing to self-reflect in a way that is far beyond just thinking about ourselves.

Whenever I speak of reflecting on your dreams, I am not talking about your ego-consciousness reflecting on itself.

I am talking about Self-reflection.  This means that we must remember that our dreams are an expression of that indwelling, Living Intelligence to which I refer in the introduction to this site.  Thus, we are reflecting on the dream as a message from the depths of the human soul.

Whenever we are reflecting on dream meaning, we first need to consider ourselves honestly from every possible angle.  Next, keep in mind that the dream shows us an angle we can’t see.  As Jung said, the dream symbolically shows us where our blind spots are.

No dream image has one meaning for everyone.  This is why I discourage online dream dictionaries.

Dream Meaning: Breaking down your dream

As I said in the introduction to dream interpretation, if you really want to get to the deeper levels of your dream meaning, you should have some kind of guiding principle to your process of dream interpretation.

In this post, we are going to look at how Carl Jung broke down dreams into one of four categories.  The dream category helps you determine the dream's purpose.  By purpose, he meant, the effect that the dream meant to have on you. 

The dream is a little hidden door in the innermost and most secret recesses of the soul. Carl Jung, The Meaning of Psychology for Modern Man

We already know that your dream is meant to fill in something that is missing from your current perspective.  

Here's the basic idea behind this theory of dream meaning.  By its very nature, ego-consciousness is limited.

Jung likened the attention of consciousness to a spotlight in the dark.  Whatever we shine the spotlight onto can be seen.

Everything onto which we do not shine that light is still there, but it is in the dark.

However, something else in us is not limited by those same restraints.  It perceives everything that consciousness cannot and it speaks in the language of dreams.  I'll cover what that something is in more detail in our next post.

The dream symbolically shows us everything our  conscious mind misses about our life situation.

You can further break down your dream meaning by looking for a structure, something we look at in the next post.

Discovering Dream Meaning: Types of Dreams and Dream Categories

Jung noticed a four categorical possibilities for unpacking your dream meaning.  I will cover them in detail below, but here's the quick list.

I would suggest starting your dream interpretation by looking at these and then figuring out which one applies to your dream meaning.  I realize that the term unconscious conflict may be confusing, but I'll explain that later.

I'll give you a dream example and an interpretation of the dream meaning for each one of these categories.

Whenever you don't understand something I have said, leave a question in the comment box below.

1.  Dreams are an unconscious reaction to a conscious situation

In this category, the dream is either complementary or compensatory to your conscious situation. The idea behind this category is that our conscious mind is limited by the narrow perspective of our ego.  By its very nature our conscious mind contracts our perception of things.

I will delve deeper into the structure of the human psyche in the post that follows this one. For now, just the basics.

Both consciousness and the ego are latecomers in the evolution of psyche per se. Unconsciousness, however, was our original state of being.  Consciousness grew out of the Unconscious, just as a tree grows out of the earth.  And as a tree is rooted in the earth, we too are rooted in the Unconscious, and thus, all of its underlying processes still have powerful effects on us.

The unconscious has infinite perception. It perceives and records everything that our conscious mind cannot.  It's this unconscious stuff that comes through in the form of dream symbolism.

In some cases of compensation dreams, the dream contains our true feelings about our situation.

By real feelings, I mean that the dream shows more than just what the ego thinks or feels.  It shows how the unconscious feels about our situation. For example one of my clients had the following dream:

The woman was the proverbial black sheep of her family.  For years, her family had projected their own weakness, darkness, and negativity onto her.  She had never had any kind of real relationship with any of her family members. No matter what, they simply never even knew her, much less accepted her.

Up until that dream, the woman had never actually expressed the pain that her family life had caused her. She certainly showed a lot of anger, peppered with understandable resentment, and had finally reached a point of tolerable resignation to her family situation.

Tolerable resignation is not the same as conscious integration.  Resignation is passive acceptance and can have the same effect as suppression or repression.  All of these will manifest in symptoms of anxiety, depression, and other forms of psychic illness.

Dream Meaning:  Complementary Dreams

The dream illustrated her real sadness over it - a sadness that she never expressed, much less processed. Unresolved sorrow leaves a terrible mark on a person.

As Jung says, dreams "contain ideas, feelings, and thoughts whose absence from consciousness leaves a blank which is filled with fear instead of with understanding."

This woman had suffered from severe anxiety and depression. It was only after realizing her sadness that those symptoms of anxiety and depression started to wane.

She had been so blindsided by her resentment and anger toward her family, that she never realized the tragedy of her situation. Once she could deal with her grief, even the anger and resentment resided.

And not only that, she was able to remove herself from that family dynamic without any guilt or bitterness.  She could consciously accept that her situation simply was what it was.

To be able to accept something as it is has very deep significance, especially when we look at it in terms of this Goddess figure who appeared in the dream.

Dream Meaning:  Healing Figures

Two healing figures show up in this dream. One is a strange man who comes up from behind and comforts her.

That this man comes "from behind" says that something in the Unconscious reaches out to comfort her.  I talk about this kind of figure in my post on Dreams About Cheating.

The other figure is a Great Goddess image, though in the form of her grandmother.  We know this figure is an archetypal image and not her actual grandmother because she has a strange glow about her.  This is called a numinous image, and as such, it has a profound implication for dream meaning.

I'll cover this kind of figure later in the post, when I talk about the significance of archetypal dream figures.

This Goddess, as a weaver of our fate, had a special message for the woman:  I'm sorry honey.   The message wasn't so  much apologetic as it was sympathetic - sympathetic to the plight and destiny of this woman, not as an individual, but as a woman.

I realize that talking about Goddesses may sound like new-age talk, but for anyone who has had an archetypal dream experience understands first-hand their value.  I can only hope that if you have not had this experience yet, that you will stay open to it.

Dream Meaning:  Beyond Our Personal Problems

As suggested by Jung in the quote below, instead of continuing to blame her family, and asking, "why me?"  the dreamer instead asked, "how many before me?"

The wise learn only from their own guilt.  He will ask himself: Who am that all this should happen to me?  To find the answer to this fateful question, one must look into their own heart.C.G. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy

The woman realized that her horrible childhood and family wasn't personal on the grand scale of meaning.  She had always known that - deep down - but this dream gave her a perspective beyond her biography.

We can even go a step further with this dream meaning. Because the Goddess appears in the form of her grandmother, it could very well mean that at the psychic level, her grandmother is sorry for how she has treated her.

I'm talking about psychic reality here, something which runs very deep in the worldview of Jung.  When you have an experience of psychic reality as such, it heals you.

Dream Meanings and Compensations Dreams

Here's another example of compensation in dreams. This one I can illustrate with one of my own dreams.

So, let's say that you really admire a person to the point where if they show disapproval of your perspective, then you doubt yourself. This happened to me once. I met a man who had written several books for which I had a profound respect. He was originally an academic, but his writing was deeply spiritual.  He'd mentioned Jung several times, so I assumed that we were on the same page in our views.

He and I struck up a personal relationship. It was one that I deeply respected. I really saw him as a kind of mentor.

Soon after, however, some of his behavior became more and more questionable. His self-righteousness was unbearable.  He even started announcing himself  to the general public as a mystic. 

The way he treated the people he called his students was appalling.  Sometimes he was even outright cruel.

He started doing dream interpretation in his circles and they were so far off from my own view of dreams that I began to doubt myself. (This was in my early days, when I was still psychologically vulnerable.)

Some pretty famous people had touted him as the next Joseph Campbell or C.G. Jung, but given his attitude and behavior, this was just preposterous.

Still, though, I doubted myself. I began to question everything I'd studied the 10 years prior. I lost sight of the direction I was headed. This caused me a tremendous amount of suffering. And then I had the following dream:

Dream Meaning:  Compensation Dream

Now the point of this dream was not to show me, "this is how Mr. X really is!".  The dream only says to me, “you are putting this person too high up in relation to yourself.”

Now that dream cured my self-doubt instantly!  Upon waking from that dream, I knew that I had to stand my ground with this man and that's exactly what I did.

Of course, that meant the end of our relationship, not because I couldn't handle it, but rather because he was too stuck in his narrow perspective.  But that was okay. I needed to go my own way anyway.

Anytime you have a dream about someone you admire or respect acting in some kind of outrageous way, it's probably a sign that you have too little value in yourself.

These two examples of compensation dreams illustrate why it's so important to thoroughly explore your conscious attitude whenever you are trying to extract dream meaning from your dreams.

Dream Meaning:  Complementary dreams

A complementary dream confirms a conscious situation.  These dreams can let us know that we are headed in the right direction or they can confirm something that we suspect to be true.

For example, the woman in the above Goddess dream had difficulty in relationships with women.

She seemed to attract women who were exactly like those women in her family, and because of this, she had suffered many betrayals in friendships.

Miss X , who had supposedly been a good friend to her, seemed suddenly to turn on her.  Their interactions became contrived and stressed and she had been specifically excluded from the social events organized by her friend.

The dreamer was feeling anxious, not only about the friendship, but also about herself. She started feeling overwhelmed with self-doubt and fear about what she could have done to cause this rift.

We had spoken about the anxious feelings she was having about her friend, but given her pattern with women, we decided to wait and see how it played out.  We didn't know whether what was happening was real or simply a projection.

She eventually had the following dream:

Sitting together at one table means relationship, being connected or “put together.” The round table indicates that the figures have been brought together for the purpose of wholeness.C.G. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy

Well, this dream gave us a good hint about the real situation. My client could then take a consciously measured step back from this relationship and thus avoid yet another conflagration with a possible untrustworthy woman. My client stopped worrying about what she had done wrong. She could finally let that go. Unlocking this dream meaning meant real relief for my client.

My client could trust herself again and take comfort in the fact that the dream supported her.

And as a matter of fact, everything came to a head shortly after this dream.  It turned out that Miss X was actually quite the troublemaker, who often found herself at the center conflict in their community.

Dreaming Meaning:  What inner figures mean in dreams

Here's another point to keep in mind about this dream.  As Jung implies in the above quote, sitting together at a table means being psychically connected.

This means that Miss X is also a part of the dreamer's psyche, meaning that Miss X is part of an inner dynamic in the dreamer.

That inner dynamic manifested as a cruel inner voice who constantly persecuted the dreamer. This inner voice infected this woman with chronic self-doubt, guilt, and self-loathing.  My guess is that it formed due to her tumultuous relationship with the women in her family.

Furthermore, that the table is square (instead of round) could indicate that Miss X is not a part of her whole personality, but is rather a hindrance to it.

2.  Dreams depict an unconscious conflict you

A dream in this category is one which shows you that something else in you wants a life very different than the one you have planned.

In each of us there is another who has a totally different perspective on our lives than we do. I can better explain this with another dream from my own past. But first, I'll give you some background.

We must be willing to let go of the life we planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us.Joseph Campbell

I came to the work of C.G. Jung at a time of deep personal crisis. The nature of the crisis made it very difficult for me to find an appropriate therapist. I knew I wanted a Jungian analyst and there just weren't any where I was.

Abject despair and desperation forced me straight to the source, Jung himself.

I found myself in a 14-month long personal journey into the Collected Works. I worked 14 hours a day, reading Jung and doing my own dream interpretation.  Never in my life had I been so consumed by passion.  Sometimes I'd ask myself, "Why am I doing this?"  I mean, it was certainly necessary for my own healing process, but it felt like something so much more.

Once I came out of my crisis, I felt a profound sense of remorse and regret because I realized that I had missed my calling.  This was the work I wanted to do, but it seemed that I had found it too late in life.

Dream Meaning: How to know when you are headed down the wrong path

So, I tried to improvise by pouring myself into teaching yoga and writing because yoga and Jung are actually very similar points of view.

I started doing yoga teacher training all over the U.S., with the intention  of bringing together, Jung and yoga.

However, door after door closed for me. Even writing became so excruciating that I couldn't write anymore.  I also lost my teaching voice and simply couldn't transmit anything in my classes.

Everything I had been so good at was gone.  I became utterly neurotic and unable to function - AGAIN.

Finally, I decided that I had to make this yoga thing happen one way or another. I booked another expensive training in the hopes of finally opening some doors for me. Then I had a dream. It was quite long, so I'll give the condensed version of it.

It was a plane crash dream.

Dream interpretation of an unconscious conflict

When I awoke from this dream, what resonated the most was my dream ego's statement regarding the plane: it was only going to crash if I was on it.

In that moment, I knew without a doubt why all of the doors to yoga had closed for me and why I could no longer write about it.

I had to let it go, something which caused me great suffering.  I knew where my heart was: finding a way to get to Zurich and train as a Jungian Analyst.

Yoga had been a stepping stone for me, but yoga was not my path. It was someone else's. Now for me, this was a frightening moment, because in my mind, yoga was the only way I could ever practice some form of Jungian psychology.  But still, I knew that I had to let yoga go.   So, I surrendered into the unknown.

I had to make a huge leap of faith in this dream. If my dream had made the effort, so to speak, to inform me of this inner conflict, then I suspected that life would eventually reveal my new path.  And it did.

Indeed I was supposed to practice Jungian psychology.  And not some improvised form of it, but the real deal. Once I let go and made that leap, doors began to open and I eventually made my way to Switzerland, where I now have my practice in Jungian analysis.

3.  Dream Meaning and Types of Dreams:  Dreams  aimed at changing your attitude

The dream example comes from a story Jung told in his Collected Works.  It is the dream of a man who Jung happen to meet on a train.

Dreams invariably seek to express something that the ego does not know and does not understand.C.G. Jung, Analytical Psychology and Education

He was a staunch army general who was feared for being “a crusty old disciplinarian who meddled with the most trifling matters that were no concern of his.”  He was so petty that he even went through his underlings' knapsacks, just because he could.

I think almost everyone knows someone like this. Maybe even you are like this in some way. It’s easy to say that a person like this is just a jerk. But we need to keep in mind that there is always a path which led up to that kind of attitude. If we remember that, perhaps we can discover the real meaning of “understanding”.

The following dream offers insight into this kind of behavior in a person:

Dreams that aim a change in attitude

I was on parade with a number of young officers, and our commander-in-chief was inspecting us. Eventually he came to me, but instead of asking a technical question he demanded a definition of the word beautiful. I tried in vain to find a satisfactory answer, and felt most dreadfully ashamed when he passed on to the next man, a very young major, and asked him the same question. This fellow came out with a damned good answer, just the one I would have given if only I could have found it.

The man told Jung that the dream gave him such a shock that he woke up.  The key to note here is that this dream gave the old man “a shock”.

An emotional jolt such as this one is a key factor in the interpretation of dreams.

This is what we are looking for in dream meaning:  the emotional factor.

This emotional factor is especially important when we consider the general attitude of our crusty old friend.

The man asked Jung if he thought the dream had any meaning. Jung asked the man if anything about the young major in the dream had made any impression on him.

The general told Jung that the young major reminded him of what he was like when he was younger.

Now we are getting into the value of your associations to your dream imagery. Our associations to our dream imagery help us to establish our dream meaning.  When you make your associations, you have to stay with the dream imagery, i.e. do not free associate away from the dream.

Dream Meaning of the old crusty general

Well, then, [Jung said] it looks as if you had forgotten or lost something which you were still able to do when you were a young major.  Evidently the dream was calling your attention to it."

He thought for a while, and then he burst out, "That's it, you've got it!  When I was a young major I was interested in art.  But later this interest got swamped by routine."

Jung said the man remained in deep reflection for the rest of the train ride.

You see, the dream deeply impacted that old man. The first impact was the dream itself. The second, most important impact, was his, that’s it, you’ve got it!, moment.  If we don’t get that kind of resonance with our dream interpretation, then we have missed the mark.

This is how we know it works.  When these two factors - the emotional impact and the aha! - come together, then we have the opportunity to change something about ourselves.

Dream Meaning:  time for self-reflection

Now, what about our gentleman?  We know that at the very least, it made him sit back and reflect on himself.  And this is the point of the dream. He had gotten so one-sided in his role and routine discipline that he became neurotic about it. The dream reminded him of a softer side of his nature.

This is the meaning of compensation. It shows us the side of ourselves which we have disregarded or left behind. If our old general chose to really listen to the dream, he could have revitalized that crusty old nature with a touch of feeling and compassion.

It is very easy to get caught up in our daily routines and forget that we have other passions. We often have to think and act in certain ways - in our jobs, families, or social groups - which run counter to who we really are, or, who we really want to be.

At the very least, our routines require us to suppress who we really are. We put off doing the things we love so many times that before we know it, we have forgotten parts of ourselves. Eventually though, it all catches up to you in the form of physical illness, bad attitudes, or even depression and anxiety.

Finding your true purpose through dream meaning

Sometimes we end up on a life path that somewhat forces us to act, think, or live in a very particular kind of way.

For example, let’s say a man is born into a family where all of the men were well-established doctors.

Maybe this man really wants to be a teacher, a poet, or a writer. But instead of doing what his heart wants, he becomes a doctor. He may even be a really good doctor. He goes on and lives his life as a good doctor, but eventually, some vague discontent starts nagging at him.

This kind of thing is the beginning of a midlife crisis. The nice doctor runs off with the hot young resident because he believes that she has re-awakened something in him.

The problem is that it really has nothing to do with the actual hot, young resident. She’s just a living symbol for his forgotten inner life.

You can be assured that in a case such as the one I just mentioned, our poet-doctor had dreams that would have pointed in the direction of his inner passions. I have seen it many, many times. Had he rekindled his love for the arts in some form or fashion, he would have discovered something authentic in himself, instead of chasing it in another person.

Our longings are far better realized when we reach within to satisfy them.

4.  Dream Meaning:  Archetypal Dreams

Archetypal dreams are those dreams that have no connection with our conscious situation, but are instead experienced as a revelation.  If you can recognize the significance of such dreams, they can be profound and life-changing. In a wonderful documentary on C.G. Jung and his work called Matter of Heart, Jung himself tells of a profound dream that one of analysands had.

The backstory is that a very smart young woman had a powerful transference onto Jung. She was attached to him in a fatherly way, attached by what we would call a father-complex.

Here's the part of the documentary where he talks about this young woman. I started the video at the point where he talks specifically about his case.  I'll share the transcript from that section below, where we'll talk about the specific elements of archetypal dreams and why they are so significant to our lives.

Jung Speaking: Archetypal Dreams and Their Significance

Jung's commentary here is one of the most profound examples of an archetypal dream and its healing capacity that I have ever come across.  You can see the whole movie at the end of this page.  I owe thanks to the Gnostic Society Library for the transcript.

JUNG: I had a case that was an intelligent young woman. She was a student of philosophy, a very good mind, where one could expect easily that she would see that I am not the parental authority. But she was utterly unable to get out of this delusion.

And in such a case what one always has recourse to is the dreams. It is just as if one would ask the unconscious, "Now, what do you say to such a condition?" You see, she says, through the conscious, "Of course I know you are not my father, but I just feel like that, it is like that, I depend upon you:' And then I say, "Now let's see what the unconscious says."

Dream Meaning: Learning to Bear the Tension of Our Unbearable Problems

Jung said that when a life situation becomes impossible, meaning that we can neither remain where we are, nor move forward in life, the unconscious will produce a solution to the problem.

The unconscious solution often comes in the form of an archetypal symbol, such as the pagan god-image that we see in this clip.  If we can catch hold of its meaning, that symbol is the door which can lead us out of the impossible situation.

This young woman was missing something essential in her life.  She did not know what that something was, so she sought it from Jung.  As he explained, "she depended on him."

Dream Meaning: Constellation of the Symbol

The key to the constellation of this symbolic solution lies in our ability to bear the tension of the problem.  In other words, we must suffer through the problem.  Don't pray for your problem to go away.  Pray for the strength and integrity to withstand your problem.  Wait for the door through that problem to open.

Bearing the tension of our problem also means withdrawing our projections.  Withdrawing our projections means that we stop blaming others for its cause or depending on others to solve it for you.  Stand consciously in your situation - and do it without self-indulgent pity.  Do it with self-awareness.

This is the work we do in dream analysis.  It's very helpful to have someone else there with you, watching and waiting, as your witness on the journey.

Here's what happened with the woman's dreams:

You can see the way in which the unconscious blew Jung's image completely out of proportion to Jung the man. He appeared as a mythic god-image, who protected the woman. In her mind, this meant Jung was her protector. But Jung here is a symbolic image.

We have to ask ourselves why he appears as godlike being.  What is the dream meaning of a godlike image such as we see here?  We touched on this earlier in this post when we looked the image of the Great Goddess, but now let's go deeper and read Jung's own words.

Jung's Interpretation and Dream Meaning

Now, you know when the wind is blowing over wheat it makes these waves in the wheat field, and with these waves I swayed, like that, putting her, as if it were to sleep.  And she felt as being in the arms of a god, of the godhead, and I thought "Now the harvest is ripe and I must tell her."  And I told her, "You see, what you want and what you project into me, because you are not conscious of it, is you have the idea of a deity you don't possess. Therefore you see it in me."

That clicked! She suddenly became aware of an entirely heathenish image that comes fresh from the archetype.  She had not the idea of a Christian God, or of an Old Testament Yahweh.  It was a heathenish god. you see, a god of nature, of vegetation.  He was the wheat himself, he was the spirit of the wheat, the spirit of the wind, and she was in the arms of that numen.

Now that is the living experience of an archetype. Now that made a tremendous impression upon that girl, and instantly it clicked.  She saw what she really was missing, that missing value that was in the form of a projection on myself and made myself indispensable to her.

And then she thought, well he is not indispensable.  Because, it is as the dream says, she is in the arms of that archetypal idea.

Dream Meaning:  Jung on the Value of the Archetype in Dream Imagery

I hope you can see what Jung means when he talks about the archetypal experience giving this woman an inner value, one that she can hold onto as her own.  It is as if the dream says, "I've got you and you will be okay, no matter what."

Jung continues on the Dream Meaning

Now that is a numinous experience you see, and that is the thing that people are looking for, an archetypal experience that gives them an incorruptible value. You see, they depend upon outer conditions, they depend upon their desires, their ambitions.

[People] depend upon other people because they have no value in themselves. They have nothing in themselves. They are only rational and they are not in the possession of a treasure that would make them independent.

But when that girl can hold that experience, then she doesn't depend anymore. She cannot depend anymore because that value is in herself. And that is a sort of liberation and that is of course, it makes her complete. You know, in as much as she can realize such a numinous experience she is able to continue her path, her way, her individuation.

Dreaming Meaning: The Incorruptible Value of Your Dreams

Now, I realize that Jung's words may be a lot to take in, but read or listen to them over and over until they resonate within you.

As I said before, this example illustrates the supreme value of our dream life.

When Jung spoke about our dreams, he often referred to the idea that in each of us dwells an Other.  By Other, he meant something that is far greater than our limited ego.

All of have access to the profound wisdom of this other who dwells within us.  This Other sees things differently than we do and it speaks to us in dreams and synchronicities.

If we can learn to pay attention to it when it speaks and learn to understand its symbolic language, then perhaps we can kindle the light of meaning which points the way out of our darkest and most difficult life situations.

This site is dedicated to helping you kindle that light of meaning, and as always, in the spirit of the man who brought this work to life, C.G. Jung.