Paraphrasing Jung: If you examine your dreams long enough, you will develop an opinion about the unconscious. More importantly, the unconscious will develop an opinion and you.
There are few guides for understanding and working with dreams. Three that I generally subscribe to are: 1. Every dream is an attempt to heal or help the individual in some way. 2. Everything in the dream--setting, people, unfolding drama--is just as it must be with the possible exception of the "I" (the dreamer him/herself). 3. The dream is an attempt to restore some balance between consciousness and unconscious contents so that considering the compensatory nature of any dream can be helpful.
An important dream I had some 30+ years ago might illustrate some of the above.
The dream: I am in a waiting room. Chris comes in and starts creating havoc.
My analyst asked me a few simple questions.
A: "Who is this Chris?"
R: "A man I worked with for a time. He was great at making mountains out of molehills to create havoc."
A: "So, what happens when you get into a "waiting" kind of situation?
Bingo! I was too embarrassed to tell him that the day of the dream I had taken my car in for service. The computers were down so there was a long delay. I was irate and reacted badly, truly making a mountain- out-of-a-molehill scene. The dream message delivered a stern message, one I would not have accepted had it come from another person: My entitled, "I'm special" attitude was abhorrent. Until I had the dream, that part of my personality resided in shadow and, no doubt, caused me and others difficulty. The dream was a powerfully effective way of delivering a necessary correction.
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