Going Long
Crafting long-form dream narratives
Do we even need to interpret our dreams?
Carl Jung believed that our work toward individuation — that is, the achievement of self-actualization through integrating our conscious and unconscious — or, better, — the fine art of balancing out all the conflicts in our psyche for what might colloquially be called “getting our act together” — was happening all the time within us, whether we’re working with our dreams or not. A dream interpreter, like an alchemist, “merely assists and accelerates the natural process.”1
Unexamined dreams can certainly have a healing effect all on their own. Last night, for example, I dreamt I was unbelievably angry at some business associates of mine over a recent real-life issue. My anger was absolutely explosive, fire-breathing, red hot. And when I woke, I felt as if a great wave of psychic energy had been released by my unconscious in the dream, that the unexpressed anger I had in my waking life had found an outlet. And, indeed, I felt a slight, but definite, sense of healing around the issue.
I narrated the entire dream into my hand-held recorder, in all its details, before I got out of bed, and boy oh boy let me tell you, there were a lot of details. My dreams are often Fellini-esque that way, an ever-changing mise-en-scène of landscapes and dramas and people in one long, ever-continuous tracking shot of picaresque adventure. There’s never just one person involved or one singular thing going on. It’s almost always an entire novel which, I suppose, accurately mirrors the sheer number of disparate projects I’m always juggling at any one time in my waking life — including the writing of an actual novel.
I didn’t feel the need to go into full analysis mode for this dream, at least not right now. The scenario and elements and feelings of that dream may find an echo or rhyme in a future dream, and that then will be a good time to look at why, for example, the cops who were there didn’t do anything, or who all those other visitors were in that house, or why Lady Gaga and Taylor Swift and I were singing together, kicking out a powerful EDM jam. That then will be a good time to look for any patterns of a long-form narrative that my unconscious is weaving for me, trying to get my attention.
One-off v. Long-form Interpretation
I’m often surprised at how people constrain themselves when it comes to dream interpretation. They have a really memorable dream with powerful, vivid elements — heck, they may even have been fully lucid in the dream — and then they focus in on that one dream as if it holds The One Grand Secret to unlock the mysteries of their life.
While there’s certainly a lot of psychological benefits that can be derived by analyzing any one-off dream, or any one dream element from within any one dream, long-form narrative interpretation rarely comes into play. It’s as if you watched one scene from a movie, made an interpretation of what the movie is about based on that one scene, and then left it at that.
Let’s say you’re a young man and you have a dream about the Greek goddess Artemis: You’re walking down a long darkened tunnel and there she is, in statue form, as beautiful as anything you’ve ever seen, as breathtakingly gorgeous as Marisa Berenson in that full moonlight balcony scene in Stanley Kubrick’s “Barry Lyndon.” Artemis is holding a silver chalice, which is empty, and extending it out to you. You stand in sheer awe of this goddess, not knowing what to say. And then you wake up.
Maybe the first thing you do is go to Artemis’ Wikipedia page and learn that she is the goddess of the hunt and wilderness, and is identified with the moon. Then you go to dreammoods.com and look up silver and chalice. And then gradually you start to piece together some associations in your life between all of these dream elements.
Maybe you ask yourself: What am I hunting for in my life? In what ways do I need to be more wild, more in touch with lunar cycles? Chalices in dreams are said to represent the need for spiritual nourishment; What can I do to find deeper spiritual meaning in my life? Then, maybe as a result of all of these questions, you decide you’re going to make a dedicated effort to devote more of your life to spiritual pursuits, and that you’re going to start aligning those efforts to the phases of the moon. It could happen.
And this is all very well and good. There’s nothing wrong with a one-off dream interpretation of this kind. You may feel a really strong connection to all the personal associations that came up, and that everything about this interpretation felt 100% spot-on. It may have even changed your life.
But, what if you saw Artemis as part of a larger dream narrative, the first image on the first page of a new chapter in your lifelong dream life? It doesn’t get more collective unconscious archetypal that the Greek goddess Artemis. I mean, for Zeus’ sake, she was standing there in full Jungian anima form. There might as well been a flashing neon sign behind her reading, “Anima, anima, I am your anima.” What more do you need to see exactly?
Narrative Dream Crafting
A dream like this is the perfect opportunity to start crafting a dream narrative. You have met your anima in a dream; how cool is that. So why not now program your dreams so you can meet her again and have a dialog? Maybe ask her why she’s there? What message does she have for you? Does she have a gift for you? (Dream people love to give you gifts, FYI). Maybe you could ask her to take you on an adventure?
I think it’s far more exciting (and appropriate, if you ask me) to try to flush out a dream’s interpretation from the dream symbols and elements themselves from within the dream. Now you’re drinking the water directly from the source. When you move a dream, and its elements, onto the conscious plane, and start “thinking” about what it all “means,” you’ve removed it from the realm from whence it came — the unconscious, the wondrous space of the dreaming mind.
When you start to work like this, working dream interpretation from the inside out, that’s how you can start to craft a long-form narrative of your dream life.
