In Your Dreams

[This post contains spoilers for season 1 of Twin Peaks]

Hello everyone! This is the final blog post of the semester! I’ve decided to write it about  one of my new favorite shows, David Lynch’s Twin Peaks. David Lynch has a notable affinity for dreams. They are keystones of his films and television series. He is an odd director, honoring the strangeness of dreams. This dream is FBI agent Dale Cooper’s vision from the middle of the first season of Twin Peaks. I have not watched past this episode, so my analysis is all speculation.

Onto the dream!

Dale Cooper’s Dream about Laura Palmer 

[I’ve written a description in case you’d rather read about the dream:]

A very old Dale Cooper sits in an armchair in a red room across from someone who looks like Laura Palmer (the girl whose murder Dale Cooper is investigating) and a little person. The little person says “Let’s rock!” in a strange, distorted, backwards-sounding voice. The girl who looks like Laura taps her nose and stares at Dale. The little person tells old-Dale, again in a backwards-sounding voice, that the girl who looks like Laura Palmer is his cousin— and doesn’t she look exactly like Laura Palmer?

“But it is Laura Palmer,” says Dale Cooper, confused. “Are you Laura Palmer?”

“I feel like I know her, but sometimes my arms bend back,” she answers.

The little person says, “Where we’re from, the birds sing a pretty song. And there’s always music in the air.”

He begins to dance to snappy music as the lights flash.

Laura-not-Laura walks over to Dale and kisses him. They both smile. She leans over and whispers something in his ear. Then he wakes up.

The Analysis

Dale Cooper’s dream about Laura Palmer, the girl whose murder he is investigating, is a trance-like dance (literally) of mystery and intrigue. Dale dreams of a little person and someone who looks like Laura Palmer (or is it Laura?) in a red room speaking to him backwards while music plays.

One significant thing that Laura-not-Laura says is “I feel like I know her, but sometimes my arms bend back.” This could indicate, first, that Dale has intuition about Laura’s divorce from her own identity. “I feel like I know her” means that she doesn’t really know herself. This disconnect from herself could have contributed to her murder. In addition, “sometimes my arms bend back” is Laura crying out about the contortion of her murdered body. In other words, Dale is horrified about the mutilation and man-handling Laura’s body has been through, and his subconscious is manifesting a vision of Laura voicing that horror.

The kiss is also significant. Laura-not-Laura leaning in to kiss Dale shows that Dale feels an intimacy with the murdered girl through his FBI work. Dale has come to know Laura by proxy through the people he has spoken to and the items that have come into his possession over the course of his investigation. Dale may feel a sense of tenderness for the girl, which leads to him feeling anger at whoever the perpetrator is. Dale’s closeness to the case ties him to Laura emotionally, and also puts him at risk physically like Laura was in her last moments.

Laura-not-Laura and the little person’s voices also bear signficance. The backwards voices are a representation of Dale’s need to decode clues and signs to crack the case. In order to understand the backwards voices, one must listen closely and carefully, straining to hear what the little person and Laura-not-Laura are saying. Similarly, in Dale’s investigation, Dale must pay meticulous attention to the details of the case and the suspects, never wavering. The voices represent the effort Dale must take to make the clues of a case make sense.

The line “Where we’re from the birds sing a pretty song, and there’s always music in the air” has a twofold function. First, it shows that Laura Palmer is pure at heart. She is innocent and didn’t deserve to be murdered. Anybody who is from a magical land where birds sing and there is music in the air is a pure soul. Second, the line could be a clue to the murder. The murderer could be someone musical, or the murderer could work or live somewhere where music plays.

Overall, Dale Cooper’s dream shows Dale’s care for Laura, his horror at the state of her body, the lengths he must go to crack the case, and Laura’s innocence. Stay loose and dream lucid!

Hello everyone! It is a joyous day—Thanksgiving break starts soon! I hope everybody has been having the kind of dreams where you salivate over turkey (or ham, or vegan or vegetarian Thanksgiving options, if that’s more your style). Today we are going to talk about a dream from a friend of mine, Mark. It is, quite aptly, about a joyous occasion: a wedding. However, that joyous occasion comes with a strange demand. Mark needs to be painted gold.

Onto the dream!

Paint It Gold 

[The following are a direct quotes from Mark, with minor edits for brevity and style]

“I had y’all [Mark is referring to me and our friends from high school here] over to hang out and swim in the pool, and everyone was outside having a good time and I was about to join in, but was stopped by my mom. She told me I had to be painted gold for some person’s wedding. She started helping me get painted gold, which was taking a while and I was standing around thinking ‘this sucks, I want to go have fun and hang out but here I am being painted gold because someone’s wedding is happening.'”

“We ran out of gold paint and my mom started looking for more, but I wasn’t allowed to go outside because the paint wasn’t dry and also I wasn’t done being painted. At that point I was starting to get really angry with the situation because I didn’t know if I was a wedding gift or if I was just a decoration for the wedding, and my mom had to go buy more gold paint which was going to take even longer.”

“I distinctly remember being told to calm down because I was making a scene kind of pacing around the family room just angrily yelling about how stupid the whole thing was. And that’s where it cuts off in my memory.”

The Analysis 

In this dream where Mark is painted gold for unclear purposes, feelings of frustration and anger, most prominently, but also exposure and bewilderment are evoked. The emotional landscape of a dream is vital during analysis because the underlying emotions can begin to unlock the overarching message of the dream. It can also link the dream to events in the dreamer’s life that parallel the dream and bear similar emotional responses. Mark is angry, exposed, and flabbergasted by the demand that he be painted gold and the continuation of the ordeal. Events in Mark’s life that elicit the same or similar emotional responses may be linked to this dream. 

Let’s take a closer look at the feeling of exposure. Mark says that he doesn’t know if he is a wedding gift or just a decoration for the wedding. Both questions lead back to the feeling of objectification, which is tied to exposure. Mark is made a literal object in being painted gold. He is made gaudy and bright, a shiny thing for people to look at. He is stripped of his identity as a thinking, feeling human being with the ability to connect with others, laugh, and love. The first option Mark considers for himself (gift) leads to a future of him being used as someone’s belonging. The second option Mark considers for himself (decoration) leads to a future of him being ogled at. Neither affords him the opportunity to express anywhere close to the full scope of his capacity as a human being. Mark being painted gold paints (ha) him into a corner where he is limited in his expression and limited, too, by others’ perception of him. 

There is meaning in the fact that the event is a wedding, as well. A wedding is a joining of two people, and Mark is made a gift or decoration for this wedding, stripped bare of his identity as a person who can connect and love. It is almost as if Mark is being mocked, rendered inhuman and without love while two people wed as personal punishment. 

Finally, there is rich symbolism in the gold paint. Gold is the color of precious stones and minerals and symbolized achievement and wealth. Paint hardens and makes the object or person being painted stiff. Mark being painted gold shows that Mark is like a trophy, a symbol to the wedding party of success, love, and prosperity. The fact that the gold and shiny paint will likely stiffen and make Mark immobile further objectifies him. 

Overall, Mark’s dream tells a tale of objectification made real by way of gold paint, which symbolizes prosperity and luck in love that Mark can’t have as a painted object. Stay loose and dream lucid! 

 

Hello everyone! With the end of the semester on the horizon, I’m sure you’re all having stress dreams. I know I am. Today we’ll be talking about and analyzing one of those stress dreams.

Onto the dream!

Bog Body 

[My dream was actually two dreams, straddling settings and switching between both. One dream took place above water and the other dream took place below water.]

When I am above water, I find myself in an abandoned preschool, fighting monsters I can’t see but can hear and feel. It is swampy, with my feet sticking in grey, muddy water. I ease through the school and out into the street where the water gets deeper. There, I find a dead body next to a silver truck. I nudge the body with my arm. I think it’s my mom. I’m pulled underwater.

Underwater, I am somewhere else. It is quiet and dark. The water is clear like glass. I hear water dripping, so I slowly turn to the side and see the outline of a skull. Panicked, I look forward again. I hear distant growls. I feel something sinister behind me but I don’t turn around. I keep popping above water to get out of the depths and being thrust into the above-water dream.

The Analysis 

This dream, haunting and quite soggy, evokes fear, panic, paralysis, and disorientation. Exploring themes of nurturance and the conscious and unconscious, the dream is a deep dive into my own mind.

The settings of the intertwined dreams (underwater and above water but swampy) signify an attempt to balance the unconscious (underwater) with the conscious (above water). The swampiness of the conscious-associated setting indicates that the unconscious is filtering into the conscious, leaking out and spilling over. In the conscious world, I find a preschool, where there are monsters. These are the same monsters that were in my unconscious, underwater. They feel the same, sound the same. As I wade from the preschool into the street I find my mother’s dead body in the deeper water, which signifies that this discovery takes place closer to the unconscious.

This dream plays with levels of consciousness. Underwater, I am unconscious. Above water, I am in the conscious zone, but I range from being fully conscious to slipping out of consciousness into the secrets that are harbored in the unconscious, like the body of my mother.

My mother’s body symbolizes a loss of feelings of support and nurturance, something I know just barely consciously. The fact that the body is not certainly my mother’s body but rather a body that I think might be my mother’s body shows that the care and nurturance she represents can be generalized to other figures in my life. Her death and decomposition is the erosion of those feelings of care and love in my own life.

The preschool is another potent symbol in this dream. Monsters lurk in the preschool, haunting it. The preschool is not the preschool I went to, but it does feel familiar. Here, a motif of an abandoned childhood and abandoned childhood dreams arises. This corresponds with the symbol of the dead body that represents a lack of care and nurturance, because when one grows up, they generally receive less care and nurturance than they do when they are a baby.

In summation, this nightmare calls upon me to unify the unconscious and the conscious mind and find love and nurturance, as well as to revisit childhood dreams. Stay loose and dream lucid!

Hello everyone! I’m sure this has been a stressful week for everyone, so let’s unwind with some Japanese science fiction. Paprika is a Japanese animated film about a team of psychiatrists who have created a device (the DC mini) to enter the dreams of their clients. Unfortunately, the psychiatrists haven’t properly secured this device, so a nefarious agent hacks into the mainframe and begins controlling the clients’ behaviors in the real world through their dreams. With the help of a police inspector, the psychiatrist Chiba and her alter ego Paprika rush through the dream world to find the agent responsible for the security breach.

This week we’ll be examining one particular dream sequence that occurs early on in the movie. We will not be using Jungian psychology or literary tools to analyze this dream today; we will be using pure dream analytic tradition!

Onto the dream!

Circus Doubles 

[Here is a clip of the dream. It lasts from 0:00 to 2:35. Unfortunately I could not find any videos with English subtitles, but you should be able to get the gist of the dream from the footage above. I will also type a description of the dream sequence below for those of you who prefer to read.]

The dream opens in a circus full of children and bright colors. A lion jumps through a blazing ring of fire and acrobats fly through the air. The police inspector speaks surreptitiously with Paprika on the phone in the crowd. The ringmaster of the circus enters and pulls away a red sheet, revealing that the police inspector is somehow trapped in a cage onstage despite being in the crowd moments before. People rush out from the crowd toward him and as they come closer it becomes apparent that they all have the police inspector’s face. They reach through the cage and the police inspector falls through the floor.

He is caught in the air by a daring Paprika, who is flying on an acrobatic swing. As they fly through the air, they fall into the roles of Tarzan and Jane. They are knocked off of their jungle rope and suddenly find themselves in a speeding train, where the police inspector is cornered by a man trying to cut his throat with a wire cutter. Paprika hits the man with a suitcase.

As the suitcase hits the man, it becomes a guitar. Paprika and the police inspector find themselves on a red carpet with live music. The police inspector holds a camera and gestures for Paprika to pose for a picture, but then they see a shadow rushing through the crowd. They chase after it.

The police inspector chases the shadow into a back building, where he sees a boy being shot, his body falling to the ground. The shadow runs through a door down the hallway. The police inspector tries to follow it, but the floor warps, scrunching up, and he falls through the ground. This is where the dream sequence ends.

The Analysis 

This dream sequence perfectly captures just how bizarre dreams can be! Jumping from one setting to another, at a surface level the police inspector’s dream has no discernible connective tissue. However, upon further (police) inspection, we see that the dream means quite a bit.

The first notable symbol in this dream sequence is how, once the police inspector is caged, the people that rush toward him and begin crowding the cage all have his face. This produces a chilling, quite creepy effect in the video. Being caged and surrounded are motifs in dreams that indicate a fear of being trapped. This fear is evident in the way his dreams jump from one setting to the next, never settling on one place for long. He doesn’t want to get stuck in one location (even in his mind), so he keeps flitting from Setting to setting.

The fact that the people that stoke this fear of being trapped or confined all have his face shows a lack of union with the self. This could indicate that the police inspector has a dark past or shadowy part of his personality that he hasn’t reconciled with. Indeed, the movie alludes to a dark past.

Another symbol in the dream sequence is the camera that the police inspector tries to take a picture of Paprika with. Cameras are entangled with the concept of memory. To have this symbol in the dream indicates that the police inspector wants to remember Paprika and his dream when he wakes up. Because Paprika is Chiba’s (the psychiatrist’s) alter ego, the police inspector only gets to interact with her in dreams. The police inspector comes to have feelings for Paprika, which he tries to immortalize with a snapshot. She is his dream girl (literally).

This absurd dream sequence shows that the police inspector fears being trapped and confined, especially when it’s confinement of his own making. In addition, it highlights his desire to remember Paprika. Wouldn’t you want to remember a dream-hopping pixie alter ego? Stay loose and dream lucid!

 

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!

The time has finally come. After years of sleeping and dreaming (not all at once, of course), we are going to analyze a dream!

This week we are focusing on one of my own dreams. I will describe the dream in detail, to the best of my recollection. Then, I will analyze the dream using Jungian tools of analysis. Onto the dream!

Role Reversal 

I wake underwater. Droplets of water cling to my eyelashes as if I have just emerged from being underwater, but I am underwater.  Blue and white angelfish that look like Lumineon from Pokemon swim past me. I am in the lotus position. Something is beneath me. I bring my hand down through the cool water and feel the shadowy object that I am perched upon. It is smooth and slightly curved. I do not look at it. I feel around, registering its form. I come to what I realize is the top. It has formations jutting out from an ovular shape— a face. I open my eyes finally and look at the object.

It is a marble statue of Joan of Arc covered in dark algae. She is holding a longsword and her eyes are blazing. I take away her sword. My body suddenly goes rigid. I try to move my feet but they are paralyzed, unable to move even an inch. I try to cry out but I am mute. Hysteria wells deep inside of me, but I have no way to expel it. The statue twitches. Its fingers stretch out and its feet dig into the sand on the seafloor. The statue rolls over and stands up, facing me. I feel my body changing, turning to stone. I watch as the statue’s body turns to flesh. I try to slash her with her sword but I cannot move.

The statue looks at me. “Wrong one,” it says.

It swims, then, up to the surface of the sea, many miles above me. Then the dream morphs into a different dream.

The Analysis

This dream, on a literal level, is about a statue magically switching roles with me when I take its sword. On a symbolic level, the dream is about the Shadow masquerading as the Hero and taking over to render me (my Persona) helpless.

In Jungian psychology, the Shadow is one of the archetypes. The Shadow is the side hidden from the self and the world. It is marked by habits we may not want to face. The ultimate test of courage, according to Jung, is the realization of the Shadow.

The Hero is another one of the archetypes. It is known for saving others and doing good. St. Joan of Arc as a historical figure fits into the hero archetype.

However, her statue fits into the Shadow archetype. In the dream, it says, “I bring my hand down through the cool water and feel the shadowy object that I am perched upon.” The statue proceeds to do morally objectionable things, like trapping me inside of my own body and leaving me for dead. This is not the Hero we know and love. This is something masquerading as the Hero.

The act of reversing our roles— of having the statue become the active life-liver and me become the petrified statue— shows that the Shadow has overtaken the Persona. The Persona is the side of a personality that is projected out to the world and it reflects our role as dictated by society. In this dream, the statue, which represents the Shadow, has forced me, the Persona, into its former role.

This represents not only anarchy of the Shadow self but also a seizure of autonomy. The statue is preventing me from unveiling my Shadow self on my own terms. I cannot pass the test of courage (remember: Jung said that the ultimate test of courage is the realization of the Shadow) because my Shadow self is unveiling itself for me. We can tell by the end of the dream (“It swims, then, to the surface of the sea, many miles above me.”) that the Shadow is headed toward the light and I have no say in that.

If I were to extrapolate the meaning of this dream into my daily life I would take it to mean that the side of me that I hide from the world is forcing itself out and will come to light without my permission.

 

Feel free to post your own interpretations of this dream in the comments. Stay loose and dream lucid!

Vocab for this post: Shadow, Hero, Persona 

Hello there! I see you have stumbled upon my little corner of the internet. This introduction would go much more smoothly if we were both sleeping and I could jump into your dreams and explain everything there, but alas, the modern world has not yet invented technology for that kind of thing. For now, I will introduce myself in the waking world. My name is Alyssa. I am a student at Penn State University majoring in Psychology and English and I am fascinated by dreams. Disturbing dreams, nonsensical dreams, transcendent dreams: you name it, I want to hear about it. I have created this blog with the purpose of analyzing dreams—my own dreams, the dreams of my peers and loved ones, and dream sequences from literature, television, and movies. My hope is that in analyzing these snippets from the subconscious, you (my readers) and I will gain a deeper understanding of ourselves and the internal motivations that rule us.

Dreams have found their way into our cultural consciousness and often pervade our waking life because of their popularity as an artistic device in the art we love. From movies like Inception (2010), a film about a man who can enter people’s dreams and steal their secrets from their subconscious, to Paprika (2006), an animated Japanese film about a device that allows psychiatrists to visit the dreams of their patients, dreams are everywhere. This prevalence makes it that much more important to analyze dreams so we can begin to understand their effect on our lives.

For analytical purposes, I will be drawing from both Jungian psychology and the literary tradition. Jung divided the psyche into the conscious and the unconscious. I will classify daily waking stimuli under the “conscious” category and dreams under the “unconscious” category. Jung also theorized that the ego, the personal unconscious, and the collective unconscious were all part of the psyche. The ego is the conscious aspect of the self. The personal unconscious is all thoughts, feelings, and urges that are not in one’s conscious awareness. The collective unconscious is everything in the psyche that has been inherited from the human collective, such as innate tendencies to react a certain way. These three aspects of the psyche will likely come up in future analyses.

As for the literary tradition, I will often analyze symbolism in dreams as I would if I were analyzing symbolism in literature. This means classic motifs will be treated as they would usually be treated in a literary analysis unless there is some personal association that I am aware of that changes the analysis. For example, a rose is a classic symbol that stands for beauty and danger. I will use those interpretations unless I know that the person whose dream I am analyzing was mauled by a prize-winning rose farmer.

In the coming weeks, I plan on doing personal dream analyses (of my own dreams), featuring analyses of the dreams of my loved ones and peers (potentially with short interviews), and showcasing dream analyses of film, television, and literature. I’m looking forward to digging into the depths of everyone’s unconscious. Stay loose and dream lucid!