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Association versus Amplification ‍ ‍Compensation ‍ ‍Dream Amplification ‍

‍A Collection Not a Study‍ ‍Methods‍ ‍Demographics and Platforms‍ ‍Edits and Omissions

‍ ‍ Big Dreams and Collective Dreams‍ ‍How to Consider Collective Dreams as a Community

Shared Dreams

Association versus Amplification

Freud and those whose models branch off of his tree see the function of dreaming as primarily wish fulfillment, and the coded and symbolic language of dreaming exists so that our sleep is not disturbed – as repressed incestuous, sexual and murderous wishes would be too disruptive, and guilt provoking if we were to dream of their fulfillment directly.

Freud’s “association” methods of dream exploration seemingly always led back to this core-content: on early caretakers and repressed aggressive and sexual impulses.

Client: “I dreamed of an enormous tree, it frightened me for no reason”

Therapist: “What do trees make you think of?”

C: “It made me think of fire wood”

T: “And what does fire wood bring to mind?

C: “A memory of chopping firewood with my father when I was little”

T: “Can you tell me more about that memory?”

C: “I was fearful of the axe, of how much bigger and stronger my father was, worried that I would never be as strong as he was when it was my turn and that I would harm myself or harm him somehow.”

In Freudian models, the associative chain of questions leads back to Oedipal castration anxieties and fantasies, a fearful jealous rivalry for parental love and attentions.

Jung diverged from Freud, suggesting that the trail of “associations” to any symbolic image at will likely always lead people to their childhood “complexes” injuries and anxieties around their primal attachments, their bodily integrity, and concerns around shame and sexuality.

Although I am not a Jungian, like anyone who is interested in dreaming, I have read, appreciated and argued mightily with Jungian theory for many decades. I find that his methods of dream exploration are useful for those embedded in cultures that have encouraged people to ignore intutional and imaginal processes rather than value them as a healthy barometer alongside our reasoning and emotional processing.

With associative methods the dream symbol is simply the diving board that one leaps off of into the pool of our own conflicts and complexes. But Jung felt that Freud’s association method was incapable of leading clients to “anything new” or anything else other than a review of their most basic repressions and fixations.

For Jung, Freud’s method misses the richness and the value and healing potentials of symbolic dream content: A symbol is a symbol because it is complex, and cannot be reduced to a singular meaning, or even “boiled down” to categories as broad as either sex or aggression. Symbols, for Jung, always have a multiplicity of meanings.

Jung asserted a different method of exploring and expounding upon dream imagery that he called “amplification.” When working to “amplify” a dream image, the therapist doesn’t create a chain of “associative” questions that lead away from the symbol, but instead, the questions circle around the symbol itself to unpack its many potential meanings:

Client: “I dreamed of an enormous tree, it frightened me for no reason”

Therapist: “Can you tell me more about the tree?”

C: It made me think of firewood.

T: Was that a thought you had in the dream about the tree?

C: Maybe, yes, that it would be cut down at some point. Turned into something else.

T: Anything else about the tree?

C: The tree reminded me of one that I used to climb when I was a child.

T: What was similar about the dream tree?

C: It was an ash I think. Its leaves were just starting to turn yellow and a little red.

T: So it was autumn?

C: The leaves hadn’t started to fall yet; they were just starting to turn. Like summer had just ended.

T: Where were you in the dream? Were you in the tree… looking up at it…?

C: It was almost like I was watching a movie, I wasn’t near the tree, or in it. Its like I was watching a time-elapsed film about the seasons changing and the leaves turning.

T: Like watching the seasons shift from summer to fall in a time-elapsed way? Do you ever feel like that?

C: I get so caught up in the day to day I don’t always notice, I just keep putting one foot in front of the other – but yes, I think that was the upsetting thing – that I’m just letting life pass me by and I may be cut down one day.

T: Can you think of any stories or myths about trees that might shed light on the story of the tree in your dream? It reminded me a bit of The World Tree, Yggdrasil, from the Norse myths…

Compensation

The dream is a natural attempt to redress a lack of balance, and it changes the conscious attitude to such an extent that a state of equilibrium is restored. ~ C. G. Jung, Techniques of Attitude Change Conducive to World Peace (Memorandum to UNESCO) , CW, para 1391 loc 251238

The function of dreams in Jung’s view is not merely wish fulfillment - these unconscious productions compensate for our conscious stance – and as such, dreams can help to “round out the picture” and expand the narrow focused lens of day-to-day consciousness, and offer up information from both the personal and the collective unconscious to reveal what we are missing, what we have ignored, what we have erased, what we have denied and repressed.

I have done dream work long enough to never discount the uncanny aspects of our unconscious capacities to predict patterns, anticipate problems, or surface latent content – but nor do I “believe” that dreams are “magic” or that our unconscious is all knowing or even all benevolent. Dreams are full of symbols, which feel numinous and can have different meanings in different contexts; sometime the same dream can offer many different interpretive and meaningful narratives over the course of a lifetime. This is because symbolic content is inherently ambiguous and carries multiple meanings, including all their opposites and the possibility of meaninglessness.

Dreams may potentially offer us content that helps us find the fluid and ever changing thread of meaning over the course of our lives. But dreams are not “magic” and are only very rarely concretely prophetic – even when they may be accurately postulating about an unnoticed underlying pattern or a potential outcome. The messages of dreams are not to be simply “obeyed” as “the real underlying issue” – but we may benefit from contemplating these images and integrating them into our decision-making – or we are in danger of living a life too controlled by consciousness, perceiving only what shores up our preferred narratives and egos while repressing content, sometimes even very essential content, that we find unsettling or disruptive.

We can become too one-sidedly aligned with “ego” and consciousness, or too one-sidedly enthralled with our “unconscious” lives. Either way we are susceptible to developing symptoms.  Dreams should not override the sober determinations of a healthy ego. But the information they offer can give us a fuller picture of ourselves and the environment, our pre-conscious awareness – details and “tells” that we may not have taken conscious note of in the moment, but are nevertheless stored and monitored by our unconscious perceptions.

As an example of what I mean by compensatory functions of a dream: a young adult shared a dream of a “hellish” or “demonic” version of his family with his therapist. Both the client and the therapist were initially baffled by the overtly negative dream, because in conscious life, the client’s attitude about their family was overtly, and “one-sidedly” positive although the young man struggled for independence from his family of origin. Dreams often attempt to round out such “one-sidedness” – and this dream was serving as a reminder that the client’s family had negative aspects, or that the client had some negative feelings about his family that were necessary for him to surface in order to set out on an independent life.

This is what I call the autonomy of the unconscious. The dream not only fails to obey our will but very often stands in flagrant opposition to our conscious intentions. The opposition need not always be so marked; sometimes the dream deviates only a little from the conscious attitude and introduces only slight modification, occasionally it may even coincide with conscious contents and tendencies. ~ C.G. Jung, On the Nature of Dreams, CW paragraph 545, loc 91414

In order to work constructively with dreams, we need some ability to tolerate uncertainty, ambiguity, ambivalence, and paradox, and to not allow archetypal images to “inflate” the dreamer (or the interpreter) into states of hubris and certainty. In 1991 ago Wim Wenders directed a film called Until the End of the World, in which a team of researchers were able to record their dreams at night and watch them the next day on screen. The characters became so enamored of their dream lives, that they did nothing else, but sleep and spend the day lost in the recreation of their forgotten dreams until they were forcibly rescued. Similarly, we can become “too enamored” by our unconscious, too “trusting” too literal in our obedience to its perceived “messages” – it is not omniscient, or even inherently benevolent. It is simply the view of the backside of our psyche that we cannot “see” with consciousness, except in reflections. It is simply the view from the far end of the swinging pendulum. The other side of the coin.

Compensation on the other hand, as the term implies, means balancing and comparing different data of points of view so as to produce an adjustment or a rectification. ~ C.G. Jung, On the Nature of Dreams, CW paragraph 545, loc 91422

There are times when we can “discover” solutions to dilemmas, solve problems and have “eurekas” via our dreams, as when our psyche passes forward some missing piece from the puzzle we have been trying to solve. We may pay attention to our dream lives, when we have reached some impasse in our lives and don’t understand how to proceed. “Incubating” dreams, asking the unconscious, or “the back of the brain” to chime in, deciding to “sleep on it” and see what solution the night may offer up – is often a useful intervention in and of itself.

Dream Amplification

Therapists and others who listen to dreams may offer up some of their associations and amplifications or mirror back some of the themes and images that they hear – but the work of interpreting the dream itself is always the dreamer’s prerogative. I try never to interpret a client’s dream for them, or suggest that my interpretation is anything other than a playful, exploratory exchange of ideas. Of the multitudes of meanings that such symbolic content offers up, only the dreamer can decide which message feels most essential in the present moment.

One simple method to expand our sense of felt meaning in our dreams is to contemplate every symbol, every character, every image in the dream as aspect, or a reflection of some part of the dreamer’s identity. For example: a straight man once told me about a dream where he was “wrestling” and physically fighting with a man he described in the dream as “his enraged boyfriend” in the lobby at his workplace. Upon waking he found the dream mildly unsettling because of the homoerotic implications of the dream but the feelings in the dream itself were focused on the anxious effort of restraining this “enraged boyfriend” from acting out destructively at his workplace.

I offered this question for consideration: “What do you think of the dream, if you consider that your angry boyfriend is actually an aspect of yourself?” – He was quickly able to identify all sorts of split off anger and frustration that he was worried he might destructively act out at work. We then talked about the ways that his angry inner “boy friend” was protective of him, not wanting to see the dreamer kicked around at work by disrespectful co-workers, and we began to explore ways in which the relationship between his conscious identity, and his unconscious self-protective anger could work together more explicitly and cooperatively.

As we become more accepting and aware of our unconscious “shadow selves” and the repressions that lurk and linger in our personal unconscious, our dreams often open up to deeper questions about our relationships and embeddedness within the world around us.

For a bigger more complex dream – a dream that seems very specifically focused on our relationships to family, community, or country – or for a very rich, or persistent dream: it can be helpful to break down the dreams components for amplification as Jung himself did:

Dramatis Personae: Identify and “amplify” the various characters and entities in the dream. In the example we used earlier – the characters were a large tree, and the dreamer.

Locale: Where is the dream set: in a desert? At sea? At work? In a bedroom? In a place from childhood? A crowed bus? – This provides information about the external environment that the dream might be responding to, or about the subjective experience of our inner landscape. The location of the dreamer in our example, was set at a distance from the tree – as if watching the life of a tree unfold on a screen. This speaks to some “overview” or possibly some alienation between the subject and the object of the dream – consciousness and the unconscious are not in the same place or looking at the problem from the same point of view.

Exposition/representation of the problem: A “movie” of a large tree through out the seasons, filmed in compressed time, fills the dreamer with a sense of unease.

Turning Point /the possibility of a catastrophe: The tree may be chopped down at some point. The leaves are starting to “turn” and will soon fall.

Conclusion/compensation or solution: The client watches remotely as the seasons of life unfold.

Mood tone: Anxious. Unsettled.

Dream ego: This is always an important component. Where is the dreamer’s POV? Sometimes in our dreams we are “not ourselves” but our perspective looks out of another character’s eyes: “I wasn’t myself in the dream, I was this dirty little homeless girl.” Where, in whom, is the dream-ego located? Who is the dream’s narrator? Someone caught up in the story seeing only once piece of the action who will be surprised by events? Or does the dream unfold with the dreamer watching from on high, an audience member, or a disembodied watcher? Does the dreamer need to integrate a wider perspective, or is there a specific self-state experience that has been overlooked? Has the dream has placed the dreamer in someone else’s shoes? A dream of standing by and watching two men wrestling in a lobby may offer the dreamer a very different perspective than a dream in which the dream-ego is embroiled directly in the wrestling match fighting for the upper hand.

Dreams about our relationships, dreams about family members and intimate connections and relationships that have penetrated our inner sphere may be simultaneously about our “personal unconscious” as well as a dream with some “collective” function for the family or the friendship or the community that they refer to:

Here is a quick example: I once had a dream, as my husband and I were facing some challenging and high-stakes decisions about our children’s educational environment. We sensed may be failing them, and we hoped to avert a larger problem down the road:

We were in Brooklyn looking out over the East River. I saw a storm approaching in the far distance, behind the Statue of Liberty. I pointed it out to my husband who agreed that it was a bad one, but was more willing to wait and see if it was heading in our direction a little longer before taking action. My instinct was to bolt immediately – grabbing my husband’s hand and pulling him along with me as I raced in the opposite direction from the storm, when suddenly I was yanked to a halt – I looked behind my and my husband had pulled into a giant shell, like a thousand pound tortoise and I could no longer pull him with me to safety.

This dream was hugely useful to me, as it showed me that my own sense of alarm and hyper-vigilance was actually likely to marshal my husbands “defenses” and cause him to “turtle in” – putting us in opposition to each other, even though consciously we were in agreement. I would need to tolerate assessing the situation a little longer than I felt comfortable with, and not “pull” my husband into my reaction. We were able to talk about the dream and negotiate a strategy that respected both of our instincts and work in concert together, with his assessing the “troubles” we were seeing on the horizon, while I did some reconnaissance and research about the school settings we might be able to “flee” to.

We sometimes interpret and dismiss dreams without too much exploration based simply on the emotion in the dream, or the emotion they had upon waking from the dream: But many dreams feel “frightening” upon waking for no obvious reason, except perhaps to call our attention to them and to wake us up sufficiently to remember them. Often when you distinguish between the feeling in the dream itself and the feeling upon waking, the prevalent emotional tone of the dream is very different.

We may dismiss dreams as “just anxiety dreams” or as “random” when we feel a little emotionally flooded by the dream, and it prevents us from hearing the dream’s “narrative.” A client recently shared what they first described as “a typical anxiety dream, nothing interesting” – but when I pressed them to discuss the details – its imagery proved very useful: The dreamer was in a math class, trying to copy and solve problems on the board which were quickly erased, too quickly erased for the dreamer to solve the problem in the way that they knew how. This mirrored a series of emotional decisions the client faced, that they had been unable to make based on lists of cognitively comparing and contrasting the decision’s “plusses and minuses” This was a decision that needed to factor in the client’s “irrational” emotional wishes and desires – maybe even requiring them to shout out their best guesses and hunches – the dilemma was impossible for the dreamer to solve in the “usual” way.

A Collection Not a Study

This is not a formal research study.

There has been no other analysis other than simply counting the number of dreams and sorting them by theme. I have used no research technology other than social media and a calculator.

This is a collection. And I have sorted it as a collector does, somewhat arbitrarily and idiosyncratically: by type, by mood, by theme, by function. All the Aliens together. The Mother’s over here. The Resistors in this pile. The Admirers over there. A stack of Broken Taboos. A heap of Nuclear Holocaust.

Methods

In December 2017 I opened a website titled The 45 Dreams project and opened a Twitter account with the same name and began collecting dreams about Donald Trump to examine how the rise of this authoritarianism compared and contrasted to Charlotte Beradt’s The Third Reich of Dreams which is a exploration of the three hundred dreams she was able to collect

I got client’s permission to for the dreams that I heard over the past year and posted them anonymously at the blog. I began searching Twitter using the terms: “dreamed Trump,” and “had a dream Trump” and retweeting them at the @45dreamsproject twitter feed. People began paying attention and submitting anonymous dreams to the website directly.

I collected dreams from December 2017 through May 2018 as the collection reached over 3,000 dreams. There was no reason to stop at this number other than it felt to me to be just about as much as I could bear without becoming completely overwhelmed.

This was a manual process.

A year or so later I opened up a climate dreams website and a climate dreams collection account also at twitter.

The Twitter accounts were deleted when Musk purchased the platform, and were reopened at Bluesky.

Demographics and Platforms

The demographics of these dreams are a sampling of the demographics of these platforms, and people who heard about this project by word of mouth and visited these websites after hearing about them on social media and news media.

I have gathered no personal data about any of these dreamers. I know nothing about their age, race, gender, political affiliations, location or personal histories. On Twitter, people often post publicly with handles that often do not include their names, behind avatars which obscure any identifying details. There is no way for me to say for certain who these dreamers are - and I have done no further investigation – beyond the self-identifications contained in the dreams themselves.

The dreams shared with me in other forms or sent to the blog are credited only as “Anonymous”

There is also no way to verify if these dreams are real or not, or written for effect or for a laugh. There is no way to know how these dreams have been edited or shaped consciously or unconsciously by the dreamer. Whether these are images shaped by the unconscious processes of dreaming or the unconscious aspects of fabrication, daydream, fantasy, storytelling, myth-making, shit-posting or art, I accept them and consider them as consciously edited unconscious productions (our dream recall and reporting is always shaped and edited by conscious choices).

Edits and Omissions

I have removed dreams from the “collection” that used racial epithets, including the “N-word (ending either with “–er”, or “–a”) or that used any extreme derogatory language toward any group of people. For the purposes of this writing, I have edited these dreams lightly – removing out extraneous information such as “Today I had a dream that I hit Trump with a trout [and then I met Amy for Chinese food]” I have removed personal names and twitter handles of others that the dreamer may have referred to or tagged unless they are celebrities or public personas who serve a collective symbolic function in the dream. I have also “unrolled” twitter threads of multiple 280 character tweets into cohesive paragraphs.

A year or two later I opened up a climate dreams website and a climate dreams collection account also at twitter.

All of the publicly shared twitter dreams from the 45 Dreams account have been downloaded sorted, categorized with old twitter handles as attribution, and are available as a pdf. The account at Twitter was deleted. Those who have a legitimate reason to read through the whole thing are welcome to request a copy

Over the past several years I have collected dreams more sporadically as it has not been an easy task to interest others in these surveys and collections - but all three dream collection accounts are currently active at Bluesky and dream submissions are now open here.

The dreams shared at this site are the dreams that were shared and anonymized at the original website, and new submission to this one.

Big Dreams and Collective Dreams 

Jung talks about “big dreams” and “little dreams” – little dreams being those of the moment and of temporal and primarily individual meaning. Like the small, instinctive adjustments in the tiller and the sails that keep our boat on course, many “little” dreams serve their compensatory function so effectively, making micro-adjustments in our personal moods and perspectives while we are sleeping that there is no need to even recall them, sometimes they are forgotten even when we are making a concerted attempt to remember.

Large dramatic changes in the course of life or shifts in our immediate or larger environment require that we consciously prepare and change tack – and mobilize ourselves to make major adjustments. Our dream life often senses the changing winds before consciousness does: Like a boat captain who yells out “Ready about!” to warn the crew to negotiate the dangers of a swinging boom and a snapping sail.

“Big dreams” are dreams that feel important. We may experience them during big changes of life, or big external or “transpersonal” events and crises. They often contain mythic themes and primordial images – which Jung calls “archetypes” common to all of humanity, or to our specific culture or community. Such dreams are often filled with images we recognize from popular culture, from metaphors in common use, or from fairytale or scriptures. Big dreams seem to address our shared problems with themes drawn from our shared stories. Sometimes such big dreams are about our individual relationship to the larger community, or the service that is required of us to fulfill our sensed obligation the “collective” and larger society.

The dream uses collective figures because it has to express an eternal human problem that repeats itself endlessly, not just a disturbance of personal balance.

~ C. G. Jung, On the Nature of Dreams, CW, para 556

Sometimes the bee is consumed by the risks and challenges of its individualized task. Sometimes the bee is preoccupied by the challenges facing the hive. When the hive is in crisis each bee within it is in crises too. One of the ways we might recognize such big dreams that are from and for “the hive” is that we often feel compelled to share them.

Wherever collective material prevails under normal conditions it produces important dreams… You find the same thing in the Greek and Roman civilizations, where such dreams were reported to the Areopagus or to the Senate ~ C. G. Jung, On the Psychogenesis of Schizophrenia, CW paragraph 525 loc 29793

In Charlotte Beradt’s perspective, such dreams about our collective social and political circumstances are as recognizable as any other image of cartoon or stereotype:

These dreams adopt forms and guises which are no more complicated than the ones used in caricature or political satire and the masks they assume are just as transparent as those worn at carnivals.  ~ C. Beradt, The Third Reich of Dreams, p. 16

How to Consider Collective Dreams as a Community

I would not dare to interpret any of these dreams, even for the dreamers that reached out to me specifically asking for “interpretations.” Just as I try to never tell a client what their dreams mean, but to help them find their own way through the many layers of meaning that their dream provides.

So difficult is it to understand a dream that for a long time I have made it a rule, when someone tell me a dream and asks for my opinion, to say first of all to myself: “I have no idea what this dream means.” After that I can begin to examine the dream. ~ C. G Jung, On the Nature of Dreams, CW loc. 91329

Don’t explore this project looking for concrete interpretations, for directive advice, or for answers. I can say absolutely nothing about the layers of deeply personal idiosyncratic, individual meaning that are embedded in each of these dreams. I know nothing of these dreamer’s personal lives, and the personal truths wound through these dreams are for the dreamer alone to unlock.

No interpretation can be undertaken without the dreamer. The words composing a dream-narrative have not just one meaning, but many meanings. ~ C. G Jung, On the Nature of Dreams, CW  para 538 loc. 91364

But these are not only individual dreams. They are dreams shared with the community, for the community’s sake. I can only hope to open the conversation up with deeper questions, as I do in the therapy office. My intention is to give these dreams space to amplify each other, and to point out archetypal amplifications as I see them.

Dreams do not define us, individually or as a group they merely show us what is hard for us to see about ourselves.

There is nothing definitive here.

Jeremy Taylor developed a boundaried method for considering shared dreams in groups that respected the dreamers ownership of their dream, and allowed others to share their subjective response: “If this were my dream…”

I hope those who read these dreams will use that preamble while exploring and keep a few additional questions in the back of their mind.

• What might dreams like this balance out in our waking political life

• If we are each all the characters in the dream, the heroic ones, the cowardly ones, the villains, what might the dream tell us about our internal and external conflicts as a nation?

• Does this dream anger, amuse, frighten, reassure or disturb? Why?

• What might the environment of the dream indicate about our political environment?

• What effect does it have to see these dreams clustered by theme?

• What are the messages in these dreams that we need to integrate into our collective, conscious life?

• What archetypal amplifications and themes from myth, fairy tale, scripture, turns of phrase, pop-culture narratives, or from your own personal experiences – come to mind?

Shared Dreams

These are in no way “my” dreams – they have all been given over to a public space to be contemplated in community.

Mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot defined fractals as they occur in nature in the following way: “A fractal is a shape made of parts similar to the whole in some way." I encourage the reader to consider these dreams as fractals, mirroring a whole that they are just a small piece of.

These are big dreams. These are our dreams. We are all the heroes and villains of these dreams.

They hold the community’s hopes and fears, and attempts at solutions and possibilities of catastrophe

Just as each of us holds a fiercely glorious individual lens on our lives – we may only see our way through our collective fate when we hold all of our individual pieces up together, to assemble each piece of our partial truth into a larger picture.

What might these dreams tell us about all of us, and each of us?