My actual dreams. Yes, I have aspirations—and I am doing my very best to will those into existence: from thought to actuality. But I also dream, and I remember these dreams that I have at night while I sleep. I don’t always remember them, but I do quite often, especially when sleeping flat on my back, with my spine aligned.

I’ve been keeping a dream journal. I started journaling entries of my dream content sometime before the pandemic—it was around the time that I moved to Los Angeles. I think it has been one of the most profound experiences of my life trying to derive meaning from them.

I started reading a lot of Carl Gustav Jung last year, and with a bit of guidance in terms of his theories on how to interpret my own dreams, it has been incredible what I have found. Profound. It is changing my life as well as my outlook on it. I’d love to share some of these dreams with you at some point, in a one on one conversation. I have always enjoyed personal conversations with people. Perhaps I will have the privilege of getting to know you under those circumstances one of these days. In equal measure though, I am so busy with all my aspirations (ironically), that talking about my dreams one on one with a person is a rare privilege for me (should the individual have interest in such subjects) so forgive me if that never happens.

I have turned some of these dreams into art pieces. They become songs or even short works of writing that I share on my Patreon page and on my website. Here is an example of one.

A Hotel Room Inside My Head

As a beautiful article in Time Magazine pointed out, “Modern psychologists and neurologists, armed with imaging equipment including PET scans and MRIs, have taken things to a deeper and more technical level, speculating that dreaming is the brain’s way of dumping excess data, consolidating important information, keeping us alert to danger and more.”

This may also be true. Stranger yet still: all of these notions could be true.

Regardless of your current outlook on dreams: a vast majority of the population have the exact same type of dreams: flying, teeth falling out, being back in school taking an exam, driving a car, being chased by animals, being naked in a public space in front of people, not wearing pants, and so forth.

I find Jung’s theory for this correlation, to be the most interesting of the lot. He speculates that the portions of the brain responsible for dreaming predate written language and deals and communicates in symbols. A portion of our cerebral cortex, called Wernicke's area and Broca’s area (slightly behind and in front of the ears, approximately), is responsible for language: the use of language and the comprehension of it. The cerebral cortex, from which these two regions are a part of, are the most recent evolutionary addition to our brain structure.

Jung’s theory continues that the older portions of the brain, such as the cerebral cortex, the hippocampus, the limbic system, the amygdala, and so forth, provide us with a symbolic and emotional compensatory monologue—a monologue without words: symbols and metaphors using memories and the rich construct of human experience that we all contain in an area called the collective unconscious. Think of the collective unconscious as something akin to—instinct—yet different and unique. It is a collection, a pool of symbols and meaning and archetypes throughout our continued development as a species.

However, his largest contribution was the idea of compensation—that our dreams are often (but not always) compensatory to our conscious waking life. He illustrates this notion, often, in many of his essays, using experiences with his clients. For the sake of brevity, I will use one such experience that can be found in this article: (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4217604/)

“Jung was seeing a patient, who was a highly intelligent woman. Jung’s analysis with her dream went well at first, but after a while he got stuck with the interpretation and noticed a shallowness in the dialogue with the analysand. Jung decided to communicate this to the patient. He then had a dream the night before he was to meet with her again. The dream is as follows:

I was walking down a highway through a valley in late-afternoon sunlight. To my right was a steep hill. At its top stood a castle, and on the highest tower there was a woman sitting on a kind of balustrade. In order to see her properly, I had to bend my head far back. I awoke with a crick in the back of my neck. Even in the dream I had recognized the woman as my patient.

The interpretation of the dream was immediate and crystal clear to Jung: if in the dream he had to look up at the woman, his analysand, then in waking life Jung had probably been looking down on her both intellectually and morally, as according to Jung, ‘“dreams are, after all, compensations for the conscious attitude”’. Jung shared his dream and interpretation of it with the patient and it produced an immediate positive change in the effect of her treatment thereafter.”

It is a deeply fascinating rabbit hole of curiosities. However, please, “you don’t have to take my word for it,” as Lavar Burton would say.

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