In the Dream, it made Sense – Week 5

“Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes”- Carl Jung

In dreams the mind does not always speak in neat sentences or use ordinary logic.

People, places and objects are often exaggerrated or intertwined.

In a dream, your childhood school can suddenly become your current house. A person you have not seen in years can appear as if they belong there. You may be trying to get somewhere important, but the road turns into a river, your car becomes a bicycle, and somehow you and nobody in the dream thinks this is unusual.

In the dream, it made sense.

And then when we wake up, we laugh and think, “What on earth was that?”

From a Jungian perspective, this strangeness may not be meaningless.

Jung believed that dreams often speak in symbols. They may take a feeling, conflict, desire, fear, or unnoticed part of ourselves and turn it into an image or a dramatic skit. A small worry in waking life can become a huge adventure in a dream. A feeling we have pushed aside can arrive as a strange character, a locked room, a wild animal, or a ridiculous scene.

Dreams exaggerate or show us the total opposite as if to compensate. They may turn up the volume on something so that we notice it. This does not mean every dream needs a serious interpretation. Sometimes a dream is simply funny, random, or beautifully absurd.