The Symbology of Dreams

Why does the unconscious use symbols to convey messages to the conscious personality? Freud believed the reason for this need of disguising the true message was to prevent the sleeper from waking up. This explanation does not satisfy many psychologists and dream experts, who believe that the reason we dream in symbols is that symbology is the language of the unconscious.

In other words, we think and even feel in symbols. The reason for this phenomenon is that we are constantly bombarded by visual images during our waking periods. Many of these images are registered by our eyes and by our unconscious minds, but not by our conscious awareness.

Again, many of these images, even the ones we consciously acknowledge, are not accompanied by either sounds or explanations for their existence. They are simply recorded and stored in our mental depths and quickly forgotten by our conscious minds. Many of these images resurface during our dreams in connection with any specific problem or thought we had at the same time we saw that particular thing. To our unconscious mind that visual image became a symbol of the problem or thought we were entertaining at the time. It is interesting to note in this context that blind people have dreams that are totally lacking in visual imagery.

From the preceding it is easy to understand why most psychologists have concluded that many of the symbols that appear in dreams are directly related to visual images which have been seen by the dreamer at one time or another, most often during the previous day. This would tend to make the interpretation of dreams rather difficult without a knowledge of the circumstances surrounding each individual dreamer.

However, there is still another set of symbols that reoccur in everyone's dreams, regardless of the images we see during the day. These are the symbols Jung called dream motifs, and which tend to support the theory that there is a fixed meaning to some of the symbology that is part of the deep unconscious.

As we said earlier, some of the most typical dream motifs are dreams of falling of flying, of climbing stairs or mountains and of riding in trains, buses or automobiles. Dreams with death or with the dead, as well as dreams of weddings, of teeth, of ships, or nakedness and swimming or drowning are also common.

We all have dreamt about all or almost all of these motifs, and in practically all cases the meanings seem to be the same. Of course, we must always analyze each dream in the context of each dreamer's private life. But dream motifs as such seem to share the same meaning in all members of civilized societies. This would tend to place these particular symbols within the realm of the collective unconscious, which, as we have seen, is the common working ground for all human minds. Dream motifs are the subject of all dream dictionaries, including the one presented here.