Jung's distinction cuts against the instinct to decode. When a dream hands us an image we quickly recognize — the house, the water, the threatening figure — the first temptation is to collapse it into something we already possess: a theory, a category, a meaning that closes the question. That is treating a symbol as a sign, and the moment it becomes a sign we have stopped in front of it. We have the pointer but lost the direction.

What the symbol promises is not hidden behind it, waiting to be extracted by the right hermeneutic. It reveals in time — meaning the symbol itself changes as the psyche that encounters it changes, and what it opens at forty it could not have opened at twenty. This is not obscurantism; it is a precise claim about where meaning lives. It does not live in the image alone, nor in the interpreter alone, but in the continuing encounter between them.

The practical edge of this is uncomfortable: not-understanding is not a failure state to be corrected, it is the condition under which the symbol continues to work. Tolerating that suspension, staying with the image rather than resolving it into what we already know, is the actual discipline — and the actual difficulty.