HELPFUL WAYS TO LOOK AT THE ROLE OF THE "I" IN A DREAM

Paraphrasing C.G. Jung:  If you examine your dreams long enough, you will develop an opinion about the unconscious.  More importantly, the unconscious will develop an opinion about 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 heard some 30+ years ago might illustrate some of the above.  

I was sitting in a waiting room when Bill came in, loud and boisterous, upsetting everyone in the room.  My question:  “So, what happens when you get into a “waiting room?”  The dreamer remembered that on the day before the dream she had her car serviced at a dealership.  The dealership computer system went down so there was a long delay. She became very angry and complained loudly.  

"And what about Bill?"  The question introduced a bit of humor into a delicate situation, both of us silently remembering the film, "What about Bob."  "Bill is a man I work with.  He makes mountains out of molehills."   

Bingo!  The “waiting room” in her psyche was very real and very troubling.  When she got into such a place in her real life, her unconscious "Bill," a very real factor in her psychic economy, was her trigger for anger as he grossly exaggerated small issues.  The dreamer had suffered from an unconscious complex that had caused her much trouble in her life.  Information delivered by the dream helped free her from that complex.

 

It was obvious to the me (and probably to others in the dreamer's life) that the dream was attempting to resolve one of the dreamers’ adaptation problems, but I knew a direct approach would raise up great resistances and would serve no purpose.  A profound reasons for working with dreams is that we will accept a lesson from a dream that not even a saint could deliver with mere words.