Why Do We Have Recurring Dreams? A Jungian Perspective

Why Do We Have Recurring Dreams and Nightmares?

Have you ever had a dream that has visited you many times, perhaps during a strenuous period or consistently over years? Perhaps it is the exact same storyline every time: going on a mission, falling into a well, being chased by some unseen man or monster.

Other times the repetitions are subtler, playing out in various scenarios united by a theme. And, if you work with them with respect and patience, you may even start to see these themes, characters, and scenarios start to change shape entirely.

You might even start to notice a change in yourself.

Recurring dreams often indicate unresolved emotional conflicts, developmental challenges, or neglected parts of ourselves. From a Jungian perspective, recurring dreams are not random – they are repeated attempts by the psyche to bring vital unconscious material into awareness.

In our conscious-centric culture, we pay little attention to our dreams which seem removed from the affairs of practical life. Dreams are rarely remembered, and if they are, we often do not know what to do with them.

But it is not a matter of “what” to do with them, but “how” to relate to them. Recurring dreams and nightmares are not random events, nor are they trying to torture us. Rather, they point to things we ordinarily keep out of our awareness. Paradoxically, engaging with our dreams might be one of the most effective routes of personal healing.

What Do Recurring Dreams Mean

Roughly 60-75% of people will have recurring dreams sometime in their life (Zadra, 1996). While only 2-6% will experience recurring nightmares, that number jumps to roughly 80% for PTSD survivors.

"[Dreams] point to unresolved conflicts, unlived potential, or emotional realities waiting to be acknowledged. When we engage with our dreams, we engage with these parts of ourselves, thereby lending us a greater sense of wholeness and agency."

Dreams speak to us through their imagery and narrative. Every part of the dream is meaningful, and everything you experience there: the objects, other people, mythical creatures, buildings, settings, is some part of you. What is unconscious in us comes alive when we are, of course, unconscious, and if we carry our dream back into waking life, a transformation starts to take place.

If themes recur, and more importantly, if particular dreams replay, it is the psyche’s attempt to get us to look at something that we normally hide or deny because it is painful. They reveal where our wounds are, how we have personally adapted to them, and which roads will take us to greater agency and self-actualization. 

Recurring Dreams in PTSD

This phenomenon becomes clear in cases of PTSD, in which ~80% of survivors experience recurring nightmares, often symbolically or literally depicting episodes of their trauma.

If we elaborate on this thesis that dreams are the psyche’s attempts to get us to connect to something essential, then PTSD stands as a clear example. An experience has shattered a person and the world they lived in. They have encountered the darker sides of human nature: malevolence and exploitation. They are now psychically/emotionally dis-integrated, with a flood of repetitive psychic material emerging in the night.

This is a difficult experience that many live with, and survivors can feel like they are being tortured by Universe, their psyche/brain, or the world. However, if we can turn towards the dream itself and encounter what is happening there, we might be able to reclaim a sense of peace that was lost, perhaps one more enduring than it was previously.

Lucid Dreaming as PTSD Treatment

Charley Morley, a healing practitioner well-versed in Tibetan Buddhism, has developed a clinically effective protocol in using lucid dream therapy to alleviate symptoms of PTSD in veteran populations, including recurring nightmares.

Over the course of one week, participants meet (virtually or in-person) for group work to establish emotional safety, practice lucid dreaming skills (e.g. “reality checks,” dream journaling, setting intentions), and consciously waking up in the dream to confront the nightmare (Morely, 2021).

The results are quite fantastic. 85% of Morley’s participants experienced clinically reduced PTSD symptoms, with 76% able to have at least one lucid dream. This reveals to us both the real-life value of dreamwork and that getting started may not be as difficult as we think. Lucid dreaming is generally considered a difficult skill to acquire, but 3 out of 4 were able to have one after a one-week intensive.  

If participants can heal the nightmares that opened in them in war and find more peace in their lives, what potential do our dreams have for those of us that received our scars away from the battlefield?

How to Work with Recurring Dreams

Morely’s protocol requires becoming an active, conscious dream participant. This involves strengthening the conscious mind, the ego, over the experience, allowing them to integrate it and return to baseline functioning. In Morely’s context, this is highly appropriate.

However, this is only one method of working with dreams. The other does not require us to become lucid, just to remember them. Through journaling, nightly intention setting, and revisiting our dreams consciously, we can get many benefits of lucid dreaming without having to become lucid.

Working with dreams symbolically means that we relate to our dreams (and the others in them) as parts of ourselves, not this or that person or group. It means that we stop trying to force the psyche to give us answers and instead practice tuning our ears. We stay in mystery rather than leap for certainty. We grow curious about what we see in our dreams, and we carry forth their wisdom into our waking lives.

And naturally, when symbolic techniques are combined with lucid awareness, the results are quite fantastic. That is the essence of the Tibetan Yogas of dream and sleep, or like Carl Jung’s active imagination, beyond our discussion here.

Recurring Dream Interpretation Example

We have discussed how what we see in dreams is an element of ourselves, and we can interact with them directly. We can do this in real time through lucid dreaming, or later through “active imagination,” a process of consciously reentering the dream and dialoguing with the figures there (be they human, plant, animal, a location, the ocean, etc.).

The following is a dream I had while camping out at the Animas Valley Institute during one of their dream intensives. It describes the story of a confrontation with the Orphan archetype within me.

I am walking back to my car in San Francisco after a performance: a symphony or opera. I’m parked in a garage, and there are unhoused folks permeating the performance-goers in their fancy garb and “high society,” walking in the opposite direction.

One of them, a young African American man, comes to me directly. He seems to know me, communicating this with an intense gaze. He says I owe him something, to which I say I do not know him. He grows frustrated, puts me up against a wall, and presses something into my chest which I think is a knife.

He has my attention.

He tells me that he has been out here on the streets alone his whole life, and like many of our orphans, has suffered considerable hardship, abuse, and an addiction to hard drugs to cope. He is fatherless, abandoned, and it was I who left him here.

"...We stop trying to force the psyche to give us answers and instead practice tuning our ears. We stay in mystery rather than leap for certainty. We grow curious about what we see in our dreams, and we carry forth their wisdom into our waking lives."

As his eyes start to calm and shed tears, I can look down to see what he is pinning against me. To my shock it is not a knife, nor anything dangerous at all, but a fine-toothed black comb. It is clear to me how dearly this young man needed me and had needed my attention. He did not want to hurt me but communicated his urgency in a non-violent manner.

Working with this Recurring Dream Example

From an interpretative lens, the presence of the Orphan archetype is undeniable. Abandoned, abused, drug-addicted… in need of care. That I’m leaving a “high society” event and converging with them near the parking garages, ego meeting with unconscious. The boy, now young man, has come home. I am resistant to this at first but once he “threatens” me and grabs my attention, I can listen to how alone he felt, the same loneliness I have felt throughout my life.

To stop there, however, is a disservice. This is not the Orphan archetype, after all, but my orphan. The young man is not merely a representation of this inner aloneness. It might be more accurate to say that my sense of inner aloneness is a representation of the young man who still lives within me.

To understand this more, and to actually hear what it was the orphan was trying to say to me, I would need to go further than interpretation. I use a simple technique for this which involves letting dream others use your body. I mirrored the motion he did when he pressed me up against the wall and put something to my chest – “You owe me!” I shouted. Indeed, I did owe him – I owed him time, patience, recompence, absorbing his pain and his difficulty and helping him find his way to center like any good father should.

In the years since I still have difficulty sitting with that loneliness, with this young man, but there is more space. I have had other dreams in which he has returned to a boy, this time with a home and a father. The father still has some work to do, believe me! But he was there, and he had gotten his son off the streets (and they’re both me).

When we start to explore these divisions within ourselves, possibility for curiosity and life expands. We grow more compassionate towards ourselves and towards others, can hold ourselves stronger through times of difficulty, and let go more fully when they are simple. We find harmony in our inner diversity.

I’ve created a free 10-day dream mini-course to help teach symbolic awareness and ignite your dream life. Sign up for it here.

References

Morley, C. (2021). Wake Up To Sleep: 5 powerful practices to transform stress & trauma for peaceful sleep & mindful dreams. Hay House, London, UK.

Zadra, A.L. (1996). Recurrent Dreams: Their relation to life events. In D. Barrett (Ed.) Trauma and Dreams (p. 231-47). Harvard University Press.