Month: October 2020

Hello everyone! It’s been a dreary, colder week. I hope your dreams haven’t reflected that dreariness. This week we’re going to analyze one of my dad’s dreams, which he recounted to me over the phone tonight. I will use paraphrased quotes that my dad said during our conversation. This dream is short and sweet.

Onto the dream!

Junction Dysfunction 

“My dream took place in the train station that I use I go to work and come back every morning and evening. I could tell it was my train station, but things were all wrong. Nothing was laid out the way it was supposed to be. It was frustrating because I knew I was in the right spot but everything was screwed up. I had done the right thing but nothing else was where it was supposed to be.”

The Analysis

My dad’s dream elicited in him feelings of frustration, primarily, but also confusion, disorientation, and a sense of being lost. At first glance the dream is simply about a topsy-turvy train station. But upon further examination, we unearth more about the dream… 

The setting of a train station is significant. Because it is a train station that my dad goes to every day, there is familiarity embedded in the location. The rearrangement of the familiar location indicates a loss of that familiarity and by extension a loss of comfort. My dad is trying to maintain his routine through this loss of comfort, becoming frustrated with the strangeness and disquieting nature of the changes occurring. He is becoming defamiliarized with something familiar to him, which could apply to many aspects of life. Think of the phenomenon wherein you look at someone you love’s face for too long and their features start to appear strange and foreign to you. 

A train station also invokes the idea of transition. Trains stations are liminal spaces; trains come and go and are constantly in flux. This may indicate that my dad is at a transition phase in his life that is causing him to feel a sense of disquiet. 

The phrase “I had done the right thing but nothing else was where it was supposed to be” is also worth examining. It is to be distinguished from “I was in the right spot” because “I had done the right thing” has moral implications. It seems that in my dad’s unconscious, he fulfilled Jung’s Hero archetype (by doing the right thing) but still there was not a positive outcome. [Note: Jung’s Hero is an archetype based on achieving one’s goals]. In fact, the world became disorienting and difficult to navigate. This is the root of my dad’s frustration: he is a Hero who cannot right the wrongs in the world. In this situation, the wrongs are tangible, rearranged pieces of a train station.

To synthesize the analysis thus far, my dad is subconsciously falling into the Hero archetype while potentially going through a transition phase or becoming defamiliarized with something familiar to him (or both!). With all of this being the case, we know that my dad is the calm, stable, normal element in the dream. This indicates a healthy self esteem and strong connection with the self. It is the external world that is the problem.  

If I were to apply this dream to my dad’s life I would say that it means there is chaos in his life that is upending his surroundings (which includes emotional surroundings) and making them unrecognizable, while he remains a consistent stable figure. My advice to him would be this: although these chaotic changes may be disorienting and frustrating, continue to ground yourself in your hard-won stability. Stay loose and dream lucid!

NOTE: I apologize for any formatting issues. The website wasn’t cooperating with me.

Hello everyone! I hope you felt peace in your dreams this past week. This week we are going to use Jungian psychology and literary tools to analyze a dream of mine that is haunting enough that I will always remember it.

Onto the dream!

Bloom

I stand at the edge of a forest— one from my childhood, Elson Glen. The light is leaking through the trees, the leaves casting sharp shadows on my face. It is completely silent except for a thin stream trickling to my left. There is nobody around and I do not see any animals. I do not know why I am here, but I feel a sense of purpose and calm. My heart is beating slowly, like the ticking of a warped clock. I look down at my toes, which are bare, and see how my blanched skin shines in the light next to the dark grass.

The grass begins to crawl up the arch of my foot. I do not move, calmly watching as one blade of grass sinuously twists over the top of my foot and around my ankle. The grass comes from all sides, inching up my toes and curling around my feet, encasing them. The grass crawls up my legs, wiring its way up my calves and thighs.

I sigh. A tiger lily blooms from the grass that is working its way up my thigh. Another lily blooms from the grass that has made its way up to my stomach and around my back. Another from the grass that is fastening my arm firmly to my side. More lilies begin to bloom all along the grass that is crawling up my body.

The grass continues growing until it reaches my face, where it works its way into my mouth. I open my mouth willingly, peacefully, and it grows down into my lungs, wrapping around my organs and squeezing shut my blood vessels. This is where the dream ends.

The Analysis 

Taken at the literal level, this is a dream about plants invading my body and me being more than willing to let it happen. At a symbolic level, this dream is about the creative process creating a death of the ego, or the growth of an idea and how it overtakes the individual.

Plants, in the literary world, are a symbol of creation and fertility. In this dream, plants function as an emblem for the idea, that which we create. I encounter the plants not knowing why I am around them or how the encounter will go but with a sense of purpose, much like what occurs when one is creating a piece of art. The idea then begins to interact with my physical body and overtake it, which is analogous to how an idea starts off as a small seed during the creative process and grows into a dominant force that overtakes the psyche, especially when you are creating something large like a novel.

The creative process can cause an ego death, as exhibited in this dream. Carl Jung defines the ego as the conscious mind. It is responsible for our individual identities. When creating something, one may revert to a more unconscious than conscious state, relying on free associations and instinct rather than conscious thought. This is analogous to what happened when the grass and lilies entered my mouth, thereby entering my unconscious.

It is noteworthy that I felt a sense of peace while the plants overtook my body. When one experiences an ego death or an idea overtaking them, they are allowing themselves to feel one of the most profoundly human sensations: creative satisfaction. Wouldn’t you, too, feel peace at your most human? Stay loose and dream lucid!

Vocabulary: ego 

Warning: This post contains vague spoilers for Wuthering Heights

Hello everyone! I hope you have been getting enough sleep and dreaming in long sequences. This week we are going to analyze a dream scene from Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte. Since this is the first time I’ve analyzed dream from a piece of media, I’ll explain how this will work. I will write out the scene below. It will be a direct excerpt from Wuthering Heights with minor cuts for brevity (in coming weeks, it may be clips from movies or shows or excerpts from other books). Then, I will analyze the scene like I have been doing in previous weeks, using Jungian and literary analysis tools. You know the drill by now.

Onto the dream!

Mr. Lockwood’s Dream about Cathy 

Warning: violent imagery

“I must stop it, nevertheless!” I muttered, knocking my knuckles through the glass, and stretching an arm out to seize the importunate branch: instead of which, my fingers closed on the fingers of a little, ice-cold hand!

The intense horror of nightmare came over me; I tried to draw back my arm, but, the hand clung to it, and a most melancholy voice sobbed,

“Let me in – let me in!”

“Who are you?” I asked, struggling, meanwhile, to disengage myself.

“Catherine Linton,” it replied, shiveringly […] “I’m come home, I’d lost my way on the moor.”

As it spoke, I discerned, obscurely, a child’s face looking through the window – Terror made me cruel; and, finding it useless to attempt shaking the creature off, I pulled its wrist on to the broken pane, and rubbed it to and fro till the blood ran down and soaked the bed-clothes: still it wailed, “Let me in!” and maintained its tenacious gripe, almost maddening me with fear.

The fingers relaxed, I snatched mine through the hole, hurriedly piled the books up in a pyramid against it, and stopped my ears to exclude the lamentable prayer.

The Analysis

Although this is Mr. Lockwood’s dream, Mr. Lockwood is the least important character in both the dream and Wuthering Heights. He merely acts as a narrator in the story. In the dream, he is an unsuspecting vessel for the foreshadowing of what is to come. Catherine, the main female protagonist of the story, is the main event.

In the dream, Cathy has come back to Thrushcross Grange, her family’s home, as a ghost. She is locked out of her home and mournfully demanding that a stranger, Mr. Lockwood let her in. Cathy’s displacement from her position of nobility and her death leads readers to believe that something awful has happened to her. And something awful will happen to her, later in the book!

I am going to take an avant-garde route of interpretation and expand Jung’s Shadow archetype, which is usually contained within a single person, to a relationship between two people. This dream shows the wreckage and underbelly of what will later in the book be Cathy and Heathcliff’s tumultuous relationship. In this sense, the dream harbors the Shadow of not just Cathy (although it does depict Cathy’s Shadow as well), but also of Cathy and Heathcliff as a single destructive unit. Dream-Cathy is the Shadow of all of real Cathy and Healthcliff’s mistakes. Dream-Cathy represents the consequences of their foolish choices.

Those of you who have read more than one of my posts have probably noticed that I talk about Jung’s Shadow archetype often. This is because the Shadow and the unconscious are intimately intertwined. Often, the things that are lurking in the unconscious are the parts of ourselves that we are ashamed of, or that we don’t want to face. When we dream, those hidden impulses come to the surface. In the case of Wuthering Heights, it is not Mr. Lockwood’s unconscious we are inspecting but the unconscious of the story itself. Mr. Lockwood is simply the messenger. The story breathes through him.

Mr. Lockwood’s dream about Cathy, which is disturbing and lyrical, is a portent for the future of the story and encapsulates the Shadow not only of Cathy but also of the relationship between Cathy and Heathcliff.

Stay loose and dream lucid!

Hello everyone! I hope you’ve all been having some vivid dreams lately.

This week we are going to be analyzing a dream from my friend Jen. This is our first time analyzing someone else’s dreams, so I’ll give you a rundown of how this is going to work. For posts where I analyze a friend, peer, or family member’s dreams, I will give direct excerpts from the person’s texts describing the dream or paraphrase their verbal account of the dream. Then I will analyze the dream using the usual tools— Jungian psychology and the literary tradition. The only difference between the analysis of someone else’s dreams and my own dreams is that analyses of other people’s dreams will have someone else’s account of their dreams in the post.

Onto the dream!

The Alibi

[Note: The following text is taken directly from a text conversation with Jen, with permission. I have made minor edits and omissions for grammar and brevity’s sake. In general, I believe in only making minor edits and omissions to the other person’s account of the dream in order to preserve the chain of memory that is formed when someone recalls a dream or talks about their dreams.]

“Here’s one: I was working with a lawyer to try and prove this girl’s alibi that she was buying coffee at the time of the crime, but the only way I could see the security camera footage was by pretending to be a garbage truck driver (so I could casually talk about the case and they just like showed me the footage??). So after I got the security footage which showed the girl and one guy entering the coffee place (but now the guy was a suspect?? rather than it being an alibi), I had to drive the garbage truck which was very hard because we were in NYC.

“There was another guy in the truck with me who I was trying to trick into thinking I did this for a living – anyway this guy was telling me where to go. Then we were on campus and he was part of my investigation team so we went to our office and I kept getting stung by mosquitos?? – so we went in the office and the rest of our Team was there but I didn’t tell them what we found because I thought that the room was bugged so we started looking for recording devices.

“We found recording devices (and they were huge and weird looking and all in one corner of the room). I shared the room with one of the prosecutors for some reason (who was also the professor I’m doing research with in real life), so I didn’t want to tell her what was going on in case she had something to do with it. But of course she walked in right at that moment, so to avoid talking to her I pretended that I just got my tonsils removed?? And the funny part is in the dream I had gotten my wisdom teeth out (which was also a valid excuse?? but I just wanted to lie). She kept telling me to go lie down cause I just had surgery but I was crawling on the floor looking for recording devices so I didn’t want to.”

The Analysis  

Jen’s dream has themes of blurred roles or role confusion, secrecy, subterfuge, and paranoia.

She starts the dream as the Hero figure, one of Jung’s archetypes. She stands for justice— she is trying to prove a girl’s alibi. However, Jen uses deception to achieve her ultimate goal of justice by pretending to be a garbage truck driver to get the security footage. This distorts the Hero archetype and leads it to mingle with the Shadow. Jen continues to deceive others, tricking the man in the truck into thinking that she drives the truck for a living. She even pretends she got her tonsils removed in front of the prosecutor despite having just gotten her wisdom teeth removed. She “just wanted to lie.” The hold of the Shadow has insidious effects on her, and she begins to exhibit (perhaps reasonable) paranoia, believing that the room is bugged. At the end of the dream, Jen has wholly succumbed to paranoia, crawling around the floor looking for more recording devices, unable to engage with anything other than her mounting paranoia. Primal hypervigilance overtakes her.

All of this was to defend one person against accusations of a crime Jen doesn’t even know the nature of. We witness in this dream the corrosion of Jen’s moral sense because of her desire to protect this girl. Who is this girl? What does she represent? Perhaps only Jen herself can answer that question.

There are two motifs in the dream worth further examination: the mosquitos and the tonsils.

Jen gets stung by mosquitos when she goes back to her office with the man from the garbage truck. In literature, mosquitos can represent the draining of someone’s psychic or physical energy. They are associated with intense irritation and blood. In Jen’s dream, they serve only as a minor irritation, but they are noteworthy because they are a common motif. They may represent the feeling that the investigation is draining her— protecting this girl, whoever she is, is draining her.

Jen also pretends that she just got her tonsils removed when she in fact had just gotten her wisdom teeth removed. Teeth are another common motif in literature and dreams. Teeth being removed can symbolize a loss of identity or a lack of ability to communicate directly. In the dream, Jen may feel that through protecting this girl, she is losing herself. Alternatively, the teeth removal may indicate that she feels unable to communicate with people directly because of who she is protecting, so she lies and deceives endlessly.

Jen’s dream speaks to a need to balance the responsibility of protecting or caring for someone with the maintenance of moral integrity. If I were to apply this dream to Jen’s waking life, I would say that Jen needs to figure out who or what she’s protecting, caring for, or overextending herself to nurture and make sure she isn’t losing herself in that process. Stay loose and dream lucid!