Why Dream Dictionaries Don't Work from a Jungian Perspective

Imagine you have a dream about a black snake. It uncoils from the corner of some unfamiliar room and starts slithering slowly towards you. You are afraid, but stay where you are out of curiosity, not fear. The snake starts to rub its head on your ankle almost affectionately – then, without warning – the snake bites.

If we were to consult a dream dictionary on the symbol of the snake, we might be warned about seemingly benign but transgressive people or that we are avoiding something difficult until it’s too late (source), or as a representation of anxiety. This can provide useful information but it excludes crucial context such as your fear and curiosity towards the snake as well as what the snake represents in you.  

To the fledgling dreamer, dream dictionaries can help us understand what otherwise would seem like random events. From a depth psychological perspective, dream symbols, while esoteric, abound with highly personalized meaning. This means that everything in the dream symbolizes some unknown or unconscious element of the dreamer.  

Dream dictionaries don’t work because they are mostly devoid of context, one that is revealed by the dreamer’s hidden shames and aspirations, the difficulties they have encountered, and the unfolding of their life story. The limitations of dream dictionaries arise from the fact that dream symbols have more meaning than can be contained within a singular definition.

At best, dream dictionaries can help us to understand the background of dream symbols so that we might apply them to our interior life.

At worst, they become prescriptive and greatly reduce the potential for inner work. Focusing on externalities and reducing symbols to rote definitions, they perpetuate harmful behavioral loops by limiting awareness away from the causal nexus.

In this article we will discuss dream dictionaries and how to use them for deeper inner work, how to apply the “definition” to our own individual “context.”

What Are Symbols?

Symbols cannot be reduced to rote interpretations – snake means a betrayer, the ocean means mother, etc. One dream can mean many different things to one person throughout their lives. And if we reduce the multifaceted meaning structure of dream symbols to such simple objects to delight our ego, then we lose sight of what and who is behind them.

Returning to our earlier example, if our exploration stops at any of the definitions we mentioned, we miss out on something crucial. Let’s say we accept it as a representation of anxiety. What are we then to do with the anxiety? Modern psychology might try to remedy this with cognitive-behavioral techniques or medication.

Swiss psychologist Carl Jung had a different view of dream symbols. Jung would not regard the snake as anxiety, but a powerful force of personal development (what he called individuation) by which our normal sense of ourselves (e.g. our ego) is threatened. It is certainly not the anxiety itself.

Jung would also consult his vast knowledge of world cultures and mythology, noting that the snake-biting-the-hero motif is a cross-cultural symbol of initiation (1912).  We’ll return to this idea in the following sections.

In so far as symbols can be defined, Jung had this to say about them:

“So long as a symbol is a living thing, it is the expression for something that cannot be characterized in any other or better way. The symbol is alive only so long as it is pregnant with meaning. But once its meaning has been born out of it... then the symbol is dead.”

This “meaning [being] born out of it” is precisely what a dream dictionary does. It puts it through a kind of cold intellectual process by which vitality is extracted and the transformative power of the dream diminished. It is not unlike how we regard and manage our wild lands.

When we slow down the impulse to define and look at dreams as containing “something that cannot be characterized in any other or better way” it opens the door to a way of interpreting dreams that is far more transformative than diminishing them to unidimensional curiosities.

Three Ways to Interpret Dreams

We have already discussed one way of interpreting dreams through dream dictionaries. These can provide some background on a given symbol and give cultural and mythological context.

My favorite physical dictionary is the Book of Symbols published by the Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism (ARAS).

There are two schools of thought in the world of depth dreamwork. The most dominant is dream analysis, which looks at dreams as manifestations of the inner life: symbolic representations of one’s unresolved emotional conflicts, shadow material, and current stresses in life and relationships.

"If we reduce the multifaceted meaning structure of dream symbols to such simple objects to delight our ego, then we lose sight of what and who is behind them."

From a depth psychological perspective, this is a step up from rote symbol definitions. While the analyst might draw on knowledge of basic principles of a symbol, they help the client to weave their own inner process with them. They do this partially through drawing on their own knowledge of symbols, but also through exploring what each symbol means for the dreamer.

Here the golden rule in analysis is association.

It might be as simple as asking “What’s the first thing that comes to your mind when you think of x?” Or the dreamer might go off on a seemingly unrelated tangent about their personal life. In dream analysis, we are very interested in things that seem irrelevant.

The other school holds interpretations lightly, instead preferring to work with dreams as actual persons or personified energies. This kind of direct relationship with dream symbols and characters is precisely what Jung was trying to initiate in his practice of active imagination.  

How to Work with Dream Symbols

Just as dream analysis is one step up from dream dictionaries, working with dream symbols – or active imagination – is one step up from dream analysis. In working with dreams directly we drop all pretenses at interpretation. This makes our dreams more of a subjective “other” to which to relate, rather than making them objects of our awareness.

Things become far more interesting and effective when we start to pursue this line of thinking, or rather, being.

In active imagination, we consciously reenter our dreams (or fantasies) – not to dictate them, but to discover them, to see what else emerges, to start to consciously relate to those within trying to reach us.

The goal is to speak to the symbols in our dreams like we were having a conversation with someone we deeply cherish, something often referred to as the inner child. This means laughing with them, listening to them, and containing their rage and deep sadness.

Active Imagination Example

Let’s return to the example of the snake bite dream.

Here the most obvious candidate for active imagination is the snake itself. Don’t be afraid, you can speak across the species boundary here! Since this example came from my own unconscious, I’ll show you how I would explore it.

"[Active imagination] makes our dreams more of a subjective “other” to which to relate, rather than making them objects of our awareness."

First, I would settle into a meditative state, breathing deep and rhythmically for 2-5 minutes. I would consciously reenter the dream – feel the atmosphere of the place, search for scents. I wait until I feel I am in the dream. Then I imagine the serpent uncoiling, slithering towards me, crawling up my leg, feeling the sensations as viscerally as I can. Then comes the crucial bite.

Then I would engage the serpent directly.

M: Why did you bite me?

S: It was not I that bit you, but your own unawareness!

M: What am I not aware of?

S: You know damned well!

M: I’m willing to listen. I’m sorry if I have ignored you, put you off in the corner, hoping you would stay dormant, doing my best to sedate you.

S: Yes, you have. I don’t like it. That’s why I bite you. Do you notice that I climbed up your right leg? Do you know where I bit you?

M: Yes, my right hip. It’s been giving me trouble…

At this point I might start to engage with the pain in my right hip in the same way that I have been engaging with the serpent. Relating to these unconscious energies is the whole idea.

Notice that there is no interpretation happening. I am not speaking to the snake as a manifestation of my libido or kundalini, but plainly as he appears to me. When I start to engage him in this way, he opens aspects of my awareness that I am neglecting, the very life force I am looking for I am at the same time sedating and avoiding.

He was able to connect this same personal issue of mine with a current manifestation in my body. Body symptoms are just as much manifestations of the unconscious as symbols in our dreams (Mindell, 1985).

Conclusion

Dream dictionaries can be helpful in clarifying how dreams speak to us, what they are trying to communicate through their images. Be wary with online databases, as they tend towards “X means Y” models and emphasize external rather than internal realities. I highly recommend ARAS’ Book of Symbols.

This should only be the start, however, as we start to look at our dreams as a mirror that reveals much more than our outward experience, but reflects back internal realities that we have not yet come to grips with. When we engage dreams in this way, we enhance their transformative power.