All dreams are good dreams. They’re giving you information which you need.
Robert A. Johnson
Until you make the unconscious conscious it will rule your life and you will call it fate.
Carl Jung
The main point of any sort of therapy is to bring form or consciousness to what was previously unconscious.
One method to do so is to better understand your dreams, which could be said to contain images, thoughts and feelings that were previously unknown to your conscious mind.
But there are a lot of barriers:
- Most people don’t believe there is any value or meaning in unconscious material.
- Dreams are not only seen as unimportant, but culturally stigmatized as weird and kooky.
- For a number of reasons, it’s difficult to remember and record them.
- Dreams are primarily images and don’t spell things out like a business report. So it’s very hard to understand them straight away.
For those reasons, I doubt many people interpret their own dreams. Providing tips in this area feels a bit like writing about the correct nutrition strategy for Antarctic distance running.
And I will admit that interpretation is hard, frustrating and I’m not very good at it. For most of the dreams that I write down, I take one glance at it and never read it again.
But I’ve been experimenting with offloading some of the dirty work to ChatGPT and other AI tools and found it to help, even if it’s just the feeling that I don’t have to do it all by myself!
The process I’ve outlined below is based on Robert A. Johnson’s method he writes about in Inner Work. Johnson was a protege to Jung and really was able to translate and popularize dream work to the masses.
Step 1: Write out the dream
It’s important to have clear source material. Dreams quickly become fuzzy, but if you’ve got a couple of sentences on paper, it’s much easier to interpret.
How AI can help: You could skip the rest of the steps and try and grab an interpretation straight away. For better results, provide some recent events or how you are generally feeling. Eg. I’ve been interviewing for a new job and feeling very disappointed with how I’ve been going so far. You could ask it to visualize the dream (see jellyfish image above) which can lead to some fun results, and is a worthwhile practice in itself.
Step 2: Make associations
What does a dream with lightning in it mean? If you ask google, you’ll get a lot of different, contradicting results. What really matters is less about what some dream dictionary says, and more about your own unique, personal associations.
Take this dream for example: “I’m in a town square in San Francisco where the mayor, a black woman, was waiting for people to show up.”
For me, I associate San Francisco with things like home, America, ambition, freedom, technology, money, business, career. That’s because I’ve lived and worked there and that’s how I feel about it. If you’ve never visited and spend a lot of time on the internet, you might associate it with hell or homeless people. Dreams rely heavily on images to communicate their messages, and do so with “maddening economy. They won’t use two words when one will do. And they leave out connectives like so or therefore.” 1 It’s our personal associations that can help us ‘double click’ on these images rather than reading the dream like a linear story, which usually won’t make much sense.
How AI can help: A tool like ChatGPT doesn’t know anything about how you personally feel about red socks or the hamburger you cooked last night, but it can help a lot with bigger, more collective associations. Let’s look at the town square image from that dream. Jung saw the town square as a symbol for the Self, symbolizing the integration of various aspects of the psyche into a cohesive whole. The town square is also the ‘heart of the town’ and is a public space that could represent concerns about public image, reputation etc. These broader associations might not feel right to you, but occasionally can flick on a lightbulb. Humans have been working with symbolic images for thousands of years, and GPT can tap into that vast database and make associations that you might not have made by yourself.
Step 3: What part of you is that?
It’s normal to distance your conscious self from all the images you might encounter in a dream. For example, it’s easy to dismiss the image of a soldier as someone else or simply meaningless. Maybe you’re unable to draw out any associations, personal or collective, that make any sense. But in this step, you want to ask is there any part of yourself, a trait or dynamic, that you might share with that image? For me, I struggle to see anything ‘war-like’ in my life or self, but I could admit there’s a part of me, or a dynamic in my life, where I can blindly follow orders and switch off my critical thinking without questioning a task or speaking up for myself.
Step 4: Interpret the dream
If you’ve made it this far, you’ve got a dream, associations, reflections, and hopefully some insights that have naturally arisen during the process. It shouldn’t be too hard to take a stab at what this dream might be trying to say.
You know you’ve done a good job, when you feel a little shocked, embarrassed, sheepish or even annoyed at what you’re looking at. That’s just your conscious mind smarting as it contacts and understands something it didn’t want to admit to be true.
How AI can help: Your own interpretation will likely be best, but it’s still easy to deceive ourselves and say ‘oh yeah, it’s about work’. But a second opinion from the LLM gods can help you catch anything you missed or unconsciously brushed over. You could ask it to come up with an alternative interpretation or play devils advocate.
For most people, dreams will remain far away from the spotlight of the conscious mind. But that doesn’t mean they don’t exist, or contain useful, practical information that you would probably be better off knowing about. Accurate analysis will likely to continue to be tricky for most of us, and require a good amount of patience and intuition. But hopefully tools like GPT can help with some of the heavy lifting: to amplify associations, research symbolic meaning and look at our psyche from new angles.
Buddha Bike 