The Golden World
Robert Johnson and Jung's four-step process
Robert A. Johnson, who died in 2018 at age 97, was one of the most popular Jungian scholars of his day. His best-selling books helped explain Jung’s complex theories to a general audience.
In his autobiography, “Balancing Heaven and Earth,” Johnson described a near-death childhood experience where he had a mystical vision and was transported to a realm he called The Golden World. With this began his lifelong study and contemplation on the reality that exists beyond our normal waking consciousness, especially the world of dreams.
While studying at the Jung Institute in Zürich with Carl and Emma Jung, he had a one-on-one with Herr Doktor to discuss a powerful archetypal dream he had. Johnson said Jung advised him to live a life of solitude, where he could do “the inner work.” Jung also told him that the unconscious would protect him and give him everything he needed for his life.
Johnson’s East-West spiritual credentials were top-shelf for his day. He was a student of Krishnamurti, studied at the Sri Aurobindo ashram in India, and spent four years as a Benedictine monk. His writings — which often emphasized the Buddhist idea of dukkha, or suffering — inspired countless people to appreciate the value of their dreams as a way to guide them through their lives and enhance their spiritual connection to themselves.1
The Four Steps
In his seminal work, “Inner Work: Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth,” Johnson describes in detail the four basic steps of Jungian dream analysis.
1. Making Associations
The first step is to discover all the associations you have with the images in the dream you’re studying. It’s the brainstorming part of the process and should be fun. Let your imagination off its leash. Don’t think, just let the words, memories, and feelings flow spontaneously.
Do this for every image in the dream. What’s most important here are the feelings you have about the images. (Check out my ant associations in the “Ants in My Pants” essay.)
Circle back when you’re done and re-read what you’re written, see if any new associations come up. Repeat the process until you feel you’ve uncovered all the associations. Know that one association is bound to stick out more than the others in your mind and you’ll instinctively feel it is the most meaningful image of the dream.
2. Connecting Dream Images to Inner Dynamics
Next comes some introspection and self-reflection. Again, look at each image in the dream under consideration, one at a time, and make a connection to a specific dynamic in your inner life.
An inner dynamic, Johnson writes, is “anything that goes on inside you, any energy system that lives and acts from within you. It may be an emotional event, such as a surge of anger. It may be an inner conflict, an inner personality acting through you, a feeling, an attitude, a mood.”
Take a good look at what’s going on inside your head and in your life right now. Are you fearing anything? Are you anxious about something? Do you feel like someone in your life is going out of their way to try and get your goat? What has happened recently that you may be repressing or trying to forget?
Let’s say you have a dream where a massive river is flooding a busy street, it’s a powerful torrent. Identify with and personify the raging river image with a part of your personality, a part that acts or feels like a raging river, and then ask yourself: in what way is this “raging river” aspect of myself showing up in my life right now?
Pop Quiz: If this was a dream you had actually had, what might that inner dynamic connection be for you, for the raging river?
3. Interpreting
It’s said that an uninterpreted dream is like an unread letter. Now it’s time to open the letter and review the associations and inner dynamic connections you’ve made with your dream images and summarize the dream’s possible meaning, to decipher what the dream (i.e., your unconscious) is trying to say to your conscious mind so you can see how this relates to your life.
Storytime…
Way back in the late 1990s, during the dotcom bubble, I had some stock shares with the company I was working for. When the bubble started to slowly deflate in early 2000, I bought into the false optimism that was fostering among my co-workers. It was a sentiment nearly identical to the HODL thinking just before the bitcoin crash of 2022: Don’t worry, it’s just a correction. It’ll go back up. Hang tough.
Coupled with this false optimism was also a sense of fear. I didn’t want to lose the nice little nest egg I had going, but I also didn’t want to miss out on even more gains. There was also the fear that if the stock kept dropping, there might be layoffs and I could lose my job (which I eventually did). I don’t think the market at the time had settled into the official Wall Street definition of a bear market, but it was pretty close.
Now, I’m afraid of bears. And despite what so-called “statistics” say about the low frequency of bear attacks, or what people who encounter bears on an everyday basis tell me, I don’t feel it’s an unfounded fear (cf. “Grizzly Man,” “The Revenant”).
As more and more air continued to seep out of the stock price, one night I had the following dream:
I’m in an empty parking lot. I look across the way and a gigantic bear is standing there on its hind legs, just staring at me. My heart races with fear. But before I can do anything, the bear gets down on all fours and starts charging at me, full speed. Terrified to death, I wake myself up.
Compared to other dreams I’ve had, this interpretation was a no-brainer: the association to a bear market was pretty obvious, and my unconscious could not have picked a more apt symbol, a more personalized image — a bear — to associate to the inner dynamic I was experiencing, fear.
I literally rolled out of bed, called my stockbroker, and had him sell all my shares right then and there. And it was a good thing I did because it wasn’t long after that that the dotcom bubble completely burst and the stock became worthless.
4. Doing Rituals to Make The Dream Concrete
The whole idea behind doing Jungian dream interpretation is to bring unconscious content into consciousness. Jung’s work is especially designed to guide you on your road to individuation. It helps you birth a new self-awareness, free of neurosis and psychological anxiety.
By performing a physical ritual for a dream and its interpretation, we honor the unconscious message of the dream by bringing it into our waking conscious life. This is a very personal step in the process, so be creative. Again, have fun. Own the ritual, make it memorable.
The ritual I performed for the bear dream, right when I woke up, so it was very in the moment, was a pure American ritual: picking up the phone, selling some stock, and making a wheelbarrow full of money.
Hey, Try It
So these are the basics of Jungian dream analysis, as described by Robert Johnson. Other writers and psychologists might put their own flavor or spin on it, but the key aspects of this four-step process are almost always primary to the mix.
Of course, this is all quite surface-level. Jung was a deep thinker who scientifically probed the very depths of the unconscious mind. There’s way more to Jungian dream analysis than presented here.
But these four basic steps can get you going.
Why not pick a recent dream and give it a test drive?
The ancient Aryans, who brought the Sanskrit language to India, were a nomadic, horse and cattle breeding people who travelled in horse or ox-drawn vehicles. Su and dus are prefixes indicating good or bad. The word kha, in later Sanskrit meaning "sky," "ether," or "space," was originally the word for "hole," particularly an axle hole of one of the Aryan's vehicles. Thus sukha meant, originally, "having a good axle hole," while duhkha meant "having a poor axle hole," leading to discomfort. — Winthrop Sargeant, “The Bhagavad Gita”