On Dreams, Jung, Self, and Soul
In this article, I discuss dreams, Jung, Self, and soul, as well the use of dreams in clinical practice, and the relationship between dreams and psychological wholeness.
Photo by Simon Wilkes on Unsplash
Every night, as the world outside falls silent and our body surrenders to sleep, something ancient stirs within us. In the quiet hours of sleep, we enter a realm unlike the waking world—a dreamworld filled with symbols, images, archetypes, and mysteries.
For Carl Jung, dreams were not meaningless fragments of the day, emotional or mental leftovers, or random electrical impulses. They were messages from the soul. As Jung stated, ”The dream is a little hidden door in the innermost and most secret recesses of the soul.”
Dreams speak in the language of the soul, our original language, the one we knew before we had words. Dreams speak in symbols, not sentences; in images, not explanations. From the deepest part of our being, something emerges: an image, a symbol, a voice, a message we didn’t know we needed. In our waking lives, we edit, we filter, we pretend—but the unconscious, dreams, and soul do none of that. Our soul remembers what our mind has forgotten.
In dreams, a deeper part of ourselves—what Jung called the Self—tries to communicate with our waking ego. The Self is not the personality we show to the world, but our totality, conscious and unconscious, light and shadow. Jung believed that dreams are the psyche’s way of guiding us back to our true selves. From this perspective, dreams are sacred messages, visions from a vast inner intelligence that is guiding us toward wholeness. We are not dreaming to entertain our brain, we are dreaming to remember our wholeness.
When I explore dreams in clinical practice and consultations, I do not approach them as problems to be solved, but as experiences to be lived into. Jungian dream work is about dialoguing with the unconscious. It’s about communicating with soul, not dominating it. It involves engaging with our dreams as if they are alive—because they are. So, we don’t control the dream, we relate to it. We don’t reduce the image, we expand it. We don’t observe it like a specimen, we approach it with care, and enter into it. And, perhaps most importantly, we let the dream work on us. It is not so much about interpretation as it is about initiation.
Dream work does not resemble conventional therapy. It is ritual, art, and soul work. It will change you, if you let it. Once you start listening to your dreams, you can’t go back to sleep in your life. Dreams are not an escape, they are a homecoming, a return to the Self, to the truth, and to the wholeness we are born with.
—Dr. Ciara, Psychologist
If you are interested in learning more about your dreams, click here.
