Dream

The dream is the via regia to the unconscious — Freud’s phrase, Jung’s inheritance, and the tradition’s central phenomenon. From Homer’s god-sent dreams through the Asclepian incubation cults, the Hebrew prophetic dreams, the medieval somnium, and Jung’s dream-centered analytic practice, the dream is the site at which the autonomous psyche speaks in its own register.

Jung’s reading of the dream is compensatory: the dream presents what consciousness has excluded, in images whose structure can be read through amplification against the parallels of myth, alchemy, and religion. Hillman’s reading is phenomenological: the dream is a visit to the underworld, its images to be met rather than decoded. See dream-as-underworld for the Hillmanian treatment, hall-jungian-dream-interpretation for the practitioner’s handbook, and god-sent-dream for the classical antecedent.

Relationships

• carl-jung
• dream-as-underworld
• hall-jungian-dream-interpretation
• active-imagination