Archetypal Dream
Category: Dream Interpretation
Big Dreams and Little Dreams
Jung discussed dreams in two groups, big dreams (große Träume) and little dreams (kleine Träume). The little ones are built out of daily residue and personal preoccupations, and they are forgotten fairly quickly. A big dream stays vivid for years and leaves the dreamer moved or awed. Its content carries mythic and religious imagery that the person's ordinary life does not account for. The dividing line is not the length of the dream or the intricacy of its plot; it runs through how many years you remember it and how strongly the feeling comes back when you do.
Memories, Dreams, Reflections, the memoir Aniela Jaffé assembled from conversations with Jung, records dreams of this kind from his own life. The one quoted most often is the dream of a house where each floor down belongs to an older period, until below the cellar he reaches a prehistoric layer. Jung treated the dream as evidence that there are layers his own remembering could not reach. From there comes the way of reading in which personal associations are not enough, and the meaning only appears once the image is set beside mythic patterns found widely across humanity, a procedure called amplification.
What Marks a Dream as Archetypal
There is no official checklist that decides whether a dream is archetypal. Still, several marks have been described. One is the quality of the feeling: awe, or something near the sense of the sacred (the numinous), with an aftertaste that lasts well past waking. Another is where the imagery comes from. Motifs like the flood, the world tree, death and rebirth, or the opposition of light and dark arrive in a form the dreamer's own history struggles to explain.
The shape of the story can also resemble myth or folktale: the journey of the hero, the descent to the underworld, the sacred marriage (hieros gamos). And there is the dreamer's own conviction that this was not merely a dream. That subjective certainty is worth holding loosely, because the mental habit of retroactively promoting a vivid dream takes exactly the same form. Nor is there any need to demote the dreams that show none of these marks. A dream stitched from the fragments of an ordinary day often shows a concrete deadlock in your life more plainly.
Turning Points and Archetypal Dreams
Dreams of this kind have been recounted at adolescence, in midlife, at retirement, after a death, during serious illness: the points where an old stance stops working. No figure for how often they occur can be put forward, and part of what is going on is that people remember dreams intensely at such times and go looking for meaning in them. Jung called the self-regulating work of the unconscious compensation, and held that the further consciousness leans one way, the stronger the counter-image comes back. The unfamiliar picture rises precisely when the existing adaptation has run out of room.
Take midlife as the example. The social role built in the first half of life (the persona) grows tight, and sides that were held down (the shadow, the anima or animus) push toward the surface. Dreams of death and rebirth, of setting out for unknown country, of meeting an old man or a sage are cited as examples from this stretch of life. What is worth avoiding is reading such a dream as an announcement that change is coming. What the dream reports is the discomfort already under way. Treated as an announcement, it leaves you waiting for the next dream instead of moving.
How to Sit With a Big Dream
When a big dream arrives, it is more practical not to settle its meaning in a hurry. Personal associations alone will not do, so amplification is used: the image is set beside material from myth, religion, folktale, and alchemy to see what forms it has taken in different places. Collecting parallels is not the goal, though. Paint your dream over with a story borrowed from another culture and you lose sight of where in your own life the dream is touching.
Putting the image outside yourself, by drawing it, shaping it in clay, or writing it as a poem, keeps it at hand far longer than a verbal summary. You can also continue the dream through active imagination. Assume the meaning will not be fixed in one sitting; a reading that falls into place years later is not unusual. If overwhelming dreams keep coming, though, and you find yourself afraid to sleep or unable to keep the day running, talking to a clinic or a counseling service comes before any deeper interpretation. The size of a dream is no reason to carry it alone.
Was this article helpful?