Dream Analysis: How to Analyze a Dream the Jungian Way

Dream analysis is one of the oldest tools in psychology, and one of the most misunderstood. Almost everyone assumes it means looking up what each symbol stands for.

Psychologist Carl Jung did it another way. He treated a dream as a self-portrait of what’s happening in your unconscious right now, painted by a part of you that sees what you can’t.

What is dream analysis?

Dream analysis is the work of finding out what a dream is saying about your life. For Jung, every dream answered something going on in the dreamer at that moment.

That changes the question you ask. You stop asking what a snake means and start asking why your mind sent a snake this week.

How is dream analysis different from a dream dictionary?

A dictionary gives every dreamer the same answer for the same image. Analysis starts from your memories and feelings about the image, because they decide what it means.

Jung thought it was foolish to look up a symbol in a book. You can read more about that in our dream dictionary guide.

How did Jung analyze a dream?

Jung read a dream like a short play, and it nearly always has four parts. First comes the setting, then the plot thickens, then a crisis, then whatever happens at the end.

He paid the most attention to the ending. How the dream resolves, or fails to, tells you where things are heading.

Then he worked through the images in order. He asked the dreamer what each one brought to mind, and he kept asking until the answers ran out.

Only after that did he bring in myths and stories where the same image had appeared. He called this amplification, and he used it to widen the dreamer’s own answers.

Who are the people in your dream?

Jung said you can read a dream figure two ways. It can be the real person, or it can be a part of you wearing their face.

His rule of thumb was about closeness. Someone in your daily life right now may be themselves, and someone distant or from long ago is usually a part of you.

Why does the timing of a dream matter?

Jung believed dreams balance whatever your waking mind is leaning too hard on. He called this compensation, and it is the heart of his whole method.

So always ask why this dream came now. Look at what happened the day before and what you’ve been telling yourself lately.

Can you analyze a series of dreams?

Jung trusted a run of dreams more than any single one. One dream can be hard to read, and ten dreams in a row usually show where your mind is going.

That’s why a dream journal matters so much. Patterns you’d never spot in one night become obvious over a month.

A Dream, Analyzed Step by Step

Jung analyzed one of his own dreams this way in 1913. He dreamed he and a stranger hid on a mountain at dawn and shot the hero Siegfried as he rode down the slope.

Step one is the setting. A mountain at dawn, with a companion Jung didn’t know and later read as a part of himself.

Step two is the crisis. Jung kills the hero, and he wakes with terrible guilt.

Step three is his waking life. He had spent years pushing his will on the world and insisting on his own way.

Step four is the ending. A heavy rain falls and washes away every trace of the killing.

Jung concluded the hero in him, the part that always had to win, had to die. He wrote that there are things greater than the ego’s will, and the rain showed the conflict inside him easing.

The Bottom Line

Dream analysis is a conversation between you and the part of you that dreams. To have that conversation about your own dream, tell it to the DreamDancer app on the web or download it on iPhone, and it will ask you the questions that matter.

Sources

• C. G. Jung, General Aspects of Dream Psychology and On the Nature of Dreams, in The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, Collected Works vol. 8 (Princeton University Press). The dream as a self-portrait of the unconscious; its four-part structure; compensation; dream series.
• C. G. Jung, The Practical Use of Dream-Analysis, in The Practice of Psychotherapy, Collected Works vol. 16. Associations and amplification.
• C. G. Jung, Dream Analysis: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1928 to 1930 (Princeton University Press, 1984). When a dream figure is the real person.
• C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1961). The Siegfried dream.