Republished from Vernacular Nicely Said #54
Hello, dear readers, lovers, and dreamers
My English teacher handed out photocopies of an article titled: Dreams are the dustbin of the mind. Heady stuff for a bunch of stroppy 13-year-olds. I can’t recall the exact nature of the assignment, but the theory presented in the article stuck with me.
The title was a riff on the “garbage disposal theory” of dreaming, proposed by Nobel Prize-winning scientist Francis Crick, who argued that we “dream in order to forget”. His hypothesis flew in the face of the established psychoanalytic view that dreams are more than neurobiological “housecleaning,” offering analysts a profound source of insight.
Carl Jung, the pioneering Swiss psychiatrist, certainly agreed, promoting the idea that dreams were messages from the unconscious, designed to restore psychological balance. The human psyche naturally seeks balance, he argued, and if our conscious mind holds unbalanced views during the day, our dreams will present the exact opposite compensatory perspective.
I thought I’d put Jung’s theory to the test, asking the psychiatrist, via an AI intermediary, to explain the meaning of a recurring early childhood dream that jolted me awake and into a panicked run down the passage to the warm sanctuary of my parent’s bed.
Here goes: I was running down our driveway, past my bedroom, past our sloping front lawn that saw countless escaped footballs bounce gleefully into a valley of dense bush beyond the mown boundary. If you were lucky, runaway balls would get wedged under a camelia tree at the bottom of the lawn – saved, if you like, from being lost in the valley below.
As I ran I felt the burning eyes of some terrible creature beneath that tree hellbent on making a kill. The moment fate seemed inevitable, my running feet left the ground and I was propelled into the night sky, where I looked down on the disappearing drive. Up and up I went, over a patchwork of paddocks and rolling hills. This was no comfort – in fact, losing ground contact was pure terror, as I’d succumbed to forces more dire than whatever was lurking under that tree. From bad to worse, perhaps. That’s when I was jolted awake.
According to Jung (AI Jung, at least), my dream is a textbook example of what he called a “Big Dream” – a profound, symbol-rich nightmare to correct a severe psychological imbalance in my waking life. Sounds heavy.
Jung’s analysis: The front lawn has two halves: a structural, familiar top half (representing my waking, everyday childhood ego) and a deep, disappearing lower half (the bush and valley, symbolising my early memories and emotions that I felt were completely lost or forbidden to explore).
The balls caught under the camelia tree were parts of my true self, vitality, or playfulness that fell out of my conscious awareness. The predatory eyes beneath the tree represented my shadow – the archetypal repository of all my repressed fears, primal instincts, or unexpressed anger.
Because my waking childhood ego likely over-compensated by trying to be exceptionally “good,” controlled, or rational, my unconscious had to manifest an equally powerful, untamed “beast” to balance the scales.
The most critical part of compensation happened when I was propelled into the night sky – a kind of psychological flight or dissociation. The theory goes that as a child, I likely managed fears, conflicts, or vulnerabilities by going up into my head.
The dream’s compensatory mechanism actively punishes this escape route. By making the sky terrifying, my unconscious was trying to force me back down to earth to deal with what was under the tree.
I was jolted awake because the tension between the two extremes – the devouring darkness below and the sky above – was too vast for my young ego to process, and the dream record “skipped” and repeated itself because the psychic conflict remained unresolved.
Wow. Or, as Crick would argue, my dream was simply garbage deserving of the trash pile.
As someone wiser than me once said: life (including dreams) has no meaning – except for the meaning you choose to give it.
Keep reading, magnificent humans.