“Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darkness's of other people. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”
— Carl Jung
I Don’t Think Much, and Neither Do You
We consistently, pervasively overestimate our powers of conscious thought. When seen in the full light of day, we make few conscious, consequential decisions. Almost everything we decide that’s of importance we have decided ahead of time. It is unclear whether this is a lack of free will or a great deal of foresight. Most of our real-time decisions we make concern trivial matters.
Bigger decisions, such as whom we’ll speak with and what we’ll say, grow from our emotions. We have feelings about what’s happening or what we would like to have happen. There will be reasons for how we feel, but the reasons justify the feelings, not the other way round. As far as reasons justify things, the ends justify the means.
We seem to have feelings about every situation we encounter. Some feelings are immediate, like a slap in the face, and others grow on us, such as resentment and anger. It’s not like we’ve thought about all of these situations beforehand. So how did we come to such well-formed feelings about so many things?
Clearly, feelings come from past experience, but that’s not enough to explain how well prepared we are to apply them to unexpected situations. Aside from the usual repetitive assaults we suffer from work, family, and community, most of our emotional experiences occur in a new context. We must have considered these triggering things, of which we have some opinion, at some previous point.
Mapping Out the Territory
We need a map of events in the world to tell us how things are related and how we’re going to react to them. It is a fiction to believe we think through each situation that occurs and respond in the moment in ways consistent with our nature. And what is ‘our nature’ anyway, aside from our consistent reactions?
Somewhere, at some time, we have to play through the potential issues in our lives and determine how we feel about them. These are not clear issues, though they might trigger clear associations. These might be issues that relate to our past, future, or various situations we would like to encounter or avoid.
Dreams are exactly the kind of encounters that satisfy this need. They are unfocused, widely associative, free of real-world limitations, deal with confusing material, and are essentially emotional. They usually don’t make sense from a waking point of view. Instead, they stitch together strings of less than fortunate events.
Dreams explore our emotional boundaries. Boundaries that we imagine but are not imaginary. I find the images in our dreams create a more complete picture of our feelings than the uncertain events of our waking lives.
The story lines of our dreams present an exploration of potential confusions and ambiguous encounters that are eerily pertinent to our waking life, but sufficiently outlandish to escape our waking consideration. They are what you might call a “second level” consideration of possibilities that would disturb us. Dream scenarios are not events we expect to occur, and not issues that require our intellect. Dreams express ambiguities that define our emotional framework.
If dreams are so important, you might ask, why don’t we remember them? You don’t remember them because the dream situations are not realistic and are only abstractly connected to your waking life. Your dream events are not going to occur, but the feelings that your dreams have given you will arise when a similar context occurs in waking life.
Dreams do not provide an explanation, as dreams rarely have much logic, they present triggering issues. They leave you with a feeling, and this is the feeling that arises in you when you encounter these associations in waking life. You don’t have to think about how you feel because you’ve already figured it out.
The Train Dream
I have been thinking about some technical problems in physics but I’m not a member of “the physics club,” which is an elite and arrogant group of academic researchers. This means I work alone and the results of my work are not likely to be considered by professionals. I had the following dream:
I’m on the engine of a train that feels like a moving platform. It is open to the air and moving through a rural scene. Some burley guy is controlling the engine and there are few of us hanging on, either on the platform, off the rear, or on the front bumper. I am at most times on the rear, but occasionally on the front hanging onto the front bumper with another person.
The person controlling the engine says I need to get in the back and they need to stop at the garage. I’m told I need to find another mode of transportation because there is no room for me. I’ll have to walk. I’m shown an area where there are a few bicycles of strange configuration. I figure I might keep up on one of the bicycles, but these don’t look normal or comfortable. I pick the best of the few bicycles, one that has an uncomfortable metal seat shaped like a section of a cylinder.
I thought I was going to pedal my bicycle behind the train, but I find myself back on the train with some others on the main platform. Then I feel one of the others feeling my ass and I am repulsed. I feel I’m being appraised for my compliance and acquiescence. Now I’m sitting at the front, on the train’s bumper, by myself and feeling relieved.
This dream, as fantastic and unreal as it appears, is actually a much better description of how I feel about my work and my situation than could be described using a technical description. The dream gives me a degree of relief because it separates my work's emotional and intellectual dimensions.
Drawing on the experience of the dream, I can better endure the stress of my work knowing, or feeling, that the social implication of my work will always be polluted by the selfish attitudes of others who work in the field. This is not a question of truth, though I believe my perspective is accurate, it’s a question of knowing how I feel about things, and how I’ll react to events in the future.
“But I Don’t Dream”
We all dream. We spend a third of our lives in dreams. You don’t remember your dreams either because you are not awoken in the middle of them, or because it serves no purpose. But if you concern yourself with the forging of your emotions, then your dreams will become relevant and you will likely remember them.
A dream-involved attitude is an unusual approach. It means concerning yourself with possible but unlikely events, which may seem confusing or pointless. This is your natural and reasonable attitude. Avoiding confusion is one of the reasons you believe yourself to be in control of your life. But avoiding confusion makes you less in control.
The reasonable attitude, the one that leads us to believe we’re making all our decisions in real time, is an illusion. If you want to be involved in the decisions of your life, then you have to follow your dreams into the uncertain areas. Here are the issues that make you anxious, confused, and uncomfortable. That may sound unattractive, but the benefit is being able to play a larger role in how your feelings develop.
Your most important issues are those that disturb you. Do you really want to be involved in forming your attitudes? How does society deal with chaos and confusion? Society creates rules in order to constrain rule breakers. Similarly, your attitudes will define what actions protect your mental well being. You’ll define them by considering the unwelcome things.
Dream Work
The best way to be present in your night time dreams is to spend time day dreaming. To concern yourself during the day with the kinds of deep and emotional issues of your nighttime dreams. That is, be reflective, project yourself into different futures, and go down the rabbit holes of your disturbing thoughts. The object is not to make things better, it’s to gain clarity and a measure of certitude. Things will not be resolved. Rather, they will be evaluated and deeper connections revealed.
Thinking along these lines, you’ll encounter things that bother you. Once you do, you’ll get a better sense of what benefit this offers. This is a kind of “exposure therapy” to disturbing thoughts. I don’t think this approach suits everyone and probably is not rewarding at all times.
To do this without becoming emotionally upset, you need a strong emotional balance. You need an even keel to navigate tempestuous feelings. There is also the question of what’s useful in the present circumstances. If everything in your life is going well, then why bring your insecurities to consciousness? Let them be taken care of “in the wash,” while you’re asleep.
On the other hand, if you are threatened by something past, present, or future, and you cannot quite figure it out, then perhaps your subconscious offers a more direct understanding. In fact, it certainly does because, as I say, we have little waking understanding of our feelings. In waking life, repression is the norm, not the exception.
Benefits and Expectations
“All disappointments arise from inflated expectations. This is a well-known general rule.” — Vladimir Putin, August 1, 2025 (https://newsukraine.rbc.ua/news/putin-criticizes-trump-for-having-inflated-1754060737.html)
What we imagine guides our perceptions and sets our expectations. Our expectations create limits on what we can accomplish because the resistance we expect becomes the resistance we’ll accept. Once we’ve decided we’ll stop pressing forward when we feel unrewarded, then we will stop pressing forward when these feelings are realized. But feelings are not evidence of what’s real; we create them.
The benefit of exploring what we find uncomfortable is learning to accommodate new ideas. New ideas can provide relief and change our feelings, and from that our expectations and reactions.
Distinguish this from repression which is an evasion, a powerless form of relief that relies on avoiding evidence. It is repression that we see in current politics, and repression usually results in bad things getting worse. The confusing or uncomfortable dream offers us the opportunity to revise our feelings.
People who try to change the world will be less satisfied than people who try to understand the world. I was further convinced of this after my interview with Jillian Reilly (https://mindstrengthbalance.substack.com/p/liberating-ourselves-from-big-men), a social activist living in South Africa. Jillian does not appear to share my interest in understanding why people behave as they do.
We have limited power to change waking reality. We can adapt, compromise, and negotiate but few chances to make any significant, immediate change. Most changes that do happen as a result of our actions are changes in arrangement, not changes in reality.
In contrast, dream reality is entirely flexible. It does not seem that way to us as dreamers because we need to feel invested in the dream’s reality if we’re going to experience all its emotional effects. But at the deeper level of creating the dream, we have complete freedom.
Here is Your Homework
If you remember a dream, then put yourself back into it. And if you don’t remember a dream, then amplify one of your wishful or regretful daydreams, of which you have a constant stream.
Amplify the meaning of your imagination to an absurd degree, so that it becomes unbelievable, unreasonable, unattractive, or intolerable. That point is the limit of your tolerance and engagement, and that’s where you want to stop and look around.
There is an underlying neurological aspect to your tolerance. It is that point of stimulation where you begin to retract and avoid. This limit is a learned behavior that has become a reflex. Learning to go farther is a kind of relaxation therapy to develop tolerance and attention to limiting ideas.
You can appreciate that this exercises your underlying attitudes of perception, expectation, and judgment. Relaxing and enlarging these boundaries has self-fulfilling effects, one of which is to become more creative. Another of which is that you’ll dream more. More relaxed day dreams fosters greater recollection of nighttime dreams.
As you push this boundary it expands, but it still has its limits. There are only so many new ideas you can manage at a time, along with the accompanying feelings that take some time to emerge. You will not dream every day, and your moods will not always be robust and expansive. You’ll need to respect your energy and shepherd your vitality.
Dreaming yourself into being is a real and measured process. It’s easy to burn out and it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. These are different from the feelings of annoyance or panic that come from exploring what you normally repress.
Those feelings arise when you feel threatened from outside. The dreaming process exposes you to what’s inside. You recognize that you’re responsible for your perceptions and reactions, and you will have a more reflective response.
I understand that you will not trust me, as the idea of finding direction in your dreams contradicts the logical approach we have been and continue to be taught. But if you look at events in the world and the actions of people around you, then you’ll agree that what we see is mostly the result of emotions, imagination, and fabrication.
Dreaming yourself into being is an imaginative and creative process. It provides a more objectively real path to understanding the world of people and yourself.
