Jungian dream work: Discover hidden strengths and healing within

Dreams seem to speak a curious, and mysterious language. They are often cryptic, they can be mundane and seem to have obvious and uninteresting meanings, they can be frightening, exciting and adventurous and occasionally they can be truly joyful, but, however they present themselves, they are always deeply personal.

Working with dreams has shown me that beneath this puzzling surface lies a reservoir of personal, often untapped, wisdom that is pertinent to what you are experiencing right now in your life, but that also connects the present with longstanding emotional problems that can reach right back into your childhood. 

How can this be?

Over 100 years ago Freud talked about the 'day residue' and this is now a commonly used idea in our understanding of the creation and purpose of dreams. In its original usage the term ‘day residue’ referred to unresolved emotional content from the day or days just before the dream, but its understanding has been expanded to include long-term and whole-life emotional content that has not yet been resolved. Put simply it is the part of your experience that is still with you, that still upsets or haunts you, and that has not been dealt with. These experiences continue within you even as you sleep, and they show themselves in symbolic and metaphorical form in dreams.

For example, the day residue may include experiences from the day or week before the dream:

Example: you have a minor bump in your car during the day and you dream of being on the fairground dodgems. 

Or it may include representations of a life experience from years past that still upsets or affects you:

Example: you came out of an abusive relationship where you felt trapped and from which you never fully recovered, you dream of being in a locked, windowless room while hearing footsteps outside.

Or it may include haunting memories of a less-than-perfect childhood:

Example: you had an unhappy childhood where you were not well cared for, and you dream of your childhood home, but it is all broken down and your bedroom is full of rubbish and dirt.

These powerful images can be layered and interleaved combining to form a narrative that tells a story using images from your life as well as new symbolic or metaphorical images created by your psyche.

How can dreams be useful for psychological growth and healing?

Freud saw Carl Jung as his intellectual heir and they worked closely together for many years, but whereas Freud considered dreams to be speaking in metaphor to hide uncomfortable truths from the dreamer, Jung believed that metaphor and symbols are the natural language of the unconscious mind and that far from trying to hide meaning from you, dreams were trying to give you messages to help you heal, grow and become your complete authentic self, a process he called individuation.

Your dreams know what you’re missing

Jung talked about the compensatory function of dreams. This is a key concept in Jungian dream work, it suggests that dreams serve to balance and compensate for conscious, waking attitudes by presenting unconscious material that fills in the gaps, challenges biases and brings hidden inner conflicts to your attention.

Because dreams deal with the day residue – unresolved emotions from the present, from personal history as well as from childhood – this compensatory function is specifically directed towards helping you resolve this unfinished emotional business so that you can heal, become more psychologically resilient and complete and move forward with your authentic life.

Dreams as a glimpse of what’s to come

Clients will often have a series of dreams which link together to show their inner personality landscape, where it came from and where it can go. 

For example, a client may have three dreams, the first showing the cause of disruptive inner personality dynamics from the past – this may be a representation of an imperfect or hurtful childhood for example. The second shows the situation created from this in the present – for example, the chaos of life when emotions are difficult to handle and get out of control. Finally, the client may have a third dream showing what life could be like if this was overcome. The last of these is an example of the prospective function – showing you the possibility of healing in the future. Encouraging you to move forward.

Rediscovering hidden strengths and resources you need right now

Attachment theory tells us that childhood is a time when we develop strategies to fit in with our particular family and context. When there is childhood trauma this can involve unconscious adaptive mechanisms formed by evolution where children become cut off from parts of their inner world, so they do not express them in order to stay psychologically or physically safe. Sometimes these disavowed parts of self contain important resources that become inaccessible.

To oversimplify for the sake of example – if anger is not accepted in the family and is harshly punished a child may learn to repress their anger – to push it into the unconscious where they are not even aware of it, but their assertiveness may be repressed with it, leaving them less able in adult life to recognise red flags in relationships and to protect themselves from abuse. In dreams, these lost parts of self often reappear as dream characters that exhibit these lost resources. They may seem alien and unlike the dreamer’s personality but by stepping into that dream character's shoes clients can rediscover these strengths and use them now in adult life, when they need them.

Because of the day-residue content of dreams and their compensatory nature, the hidden strengths that are revealed are precisely what is needed to balance the self and fill the gaps that need to be filled to address the issues you are facing right now.

Recognising progress and knowing you’re on the right path

Dreams are an invaluable guide for helping the therapist recognise when the therapy is on the right track and when progress is real.

An example:

Houses in dreams, especially a house that is the dreamer's home often represent the self – this is because we ‘dress’ our houses to reflect who we are.

A client may early on in the work, dream of a childhood home in which there are secret rooms they cannot access or locked doors they cannot open. Most often this is a representation of parts of self that were lost in childhood as a necessary adaptation to the environment they found themselves in (as described in the previous section).

As the work proceeds and the clients feel they are making progress and rediscovering parts of themselves they may dream of getting access to these hidden rooms and locked doors – this helps the therapist confirm that this is real progress, not an illusion or wishful thinking – that the change goes deep into the unconscious.

Another example:

Another common motif in dreams is unusable bathrooms, broken showers or damaged baths. This often represents a sense of being unclean or contaminated from abuse or mistreatment in childhood, and an inability to ‘wash away’ these feelings of contamination.

As we do the deep relational work of giving empathy and compassion to their inner child and making new and validating meaning out of what happened to them, they may find in their dreams sparkling clean bathrooms with a fully functioning shower or bath, and at last the feelings of shame that have sat for decades within them are gone - because there was never anything to be ashamed about – after all, they were just a child.

Making the rubber hit the road

Dreams are all very well, but the rubber has to hit the road. Dreams can be an inspiration and a guide, but the work involves looking into the past and the client and therapist together making new meaning out of childhood difficulty and trauma, finding new ways to live today and validating your experience with empathy, compassion and understanding.

Like all good things there is a lot of care and love in this work.