Dreams and the unconscious

“The general function of dreams is to try to restore our psychological balance by producing dream material that re-establishes, in a subtle way, the total psychic equilibrium.”

C.G Jung, Man and His Symbols

I’m amazed, but mostly baffled, about the way the unconscious operates. Carl Jung emphasised how little we know about it and how important it is to learn more and to engage constructively with it.

Only a few days ago I had a powerful experience that caused me to reflect about dreams and the unconscious. My partner and I were on holiday in far-north Australia and wanted to see the Great Barrier Reef, so we joined a half-day boat tour for snorkelling and whale watching. I’d never been snorkelling and I’m not a confident swimmer – I learnt the very basics in a few days on my own in a hotel swimming pool when I was nine and still need to feel the bottom with my feet or hold on to something after a few strokes. Our guide said that would not be a problem because he had devices to keep me afloat.   

After we made it to the reef and the other tourists jumped into the water with their snorkelling gear, I plunged in – and panicked. I don’t know what I was expecting, but the deep water and the idea of somehow floating while breathing through a strange plastic mask suddenly brought on fear. I gulped sea water and managed to grab the steps of the boat. My partner and the guide were good. They coaxed me into holding on to a life ring, which the guide then pulled through the water as I learnt how to breathe through the snorkel. And within a few minutes I was actually seeing the reef, gradually relaxing in the water.    

My partner and I found it difficult to talk about the experience afterwards. I was embarrassed and needed time to digest and integrate. That night we had broken sleep with disturbing dreams: mine were a mishmash of images, a collage of strange visions and fragmented energies. Though none of them were clear to me, I connected them to my hapless time in the water. A small trauma, a little wound had been created, and the psyche was responding. As Jung pointed out, the unconscious, through dreams, acts as a kind of balancing pole to keep the total mind in equilibrium. Our ego, the personality we present to the world, is in fact quite fragile; beyond it is the vast and largely mysterious unconscious. The ego is subject to myriad stimulations and phenomena every day, all of them registering in some way in the personal unconscious. If we are generally stable in ourselves and in our lives the ego can be solid and firm, but it is always subject to upset or imbalance. New experience is one of the main ways to tip us over.

Unless the ego is mature and flexible, open enough to embrace or relate playfully with new experience, it can be knocked off balance. In that case the unconscious arrives to fill the breach, with its assorted bag of fears, irrationalities and dreams. It is the instinctive and primal counterforce to the developed rationality of the ego. Some experiences of course are just too strong to be absorbed gracefully by the individual ego – on the extreme end I think of wars and natural disasters, which can fracture the psyche and lead to long-lasting imbalances where the unconscious has too much power over a personality. 

Developing a constructive relationship with the unconscious is an important function of psychology. Often we consign the most truthful and telling parts of ourselves to the far reaches of our mind, yet the unconscious continues to speak to us in dreams and other ways, providing balance to the total psyche. Its language is that of images and symbols, which is difficult for the ego, particularly one conditioned in a rationalist, scientific culture. I try to write down my dreams and make a stab of interpreting them, my method a simple one of image association. It’s not easy, the insights coming slowly over many years, but fascinating and rewarding nonetheless. An attitude of holding and accepting mystery is, I think, crucial. Jung was often at pains to point out that the unconscious needed to be taken seriously – we can’t afford to write off dreams, visions or the non-rational as unreal and unimportant – because it reveals so much about our inner selves. At the very least it demands to be noticed and given credence in our lives.  

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