Lesson 1: The Structure of the Subconscious Mind - Overview
Introduction: In order to understand what the dream drama is conveying, it is important to know the parts that make up our unconscious minds, the sectors that will be communicating through our dreams.
What are Dreams?
Do you believe that you can reflect over last night’s dream and gain from it some knowledge of yourself you didn’t previously have? Why or why not? Please consider these questions very carefully before reading further. What is a dream? Where did it come from? Does it carry some sort of meaning? If so, why doesn’t the dream simply come out and say, in common speech, whatever it is that it wants to say?
Historical Background
When Western culture began to move from more religiously or spiritually oriented foundations to those of rationality based on science and reason, the beliefs about the nature of dreams began to change also. Only the outer world and what could be proved using the scientific method was respected and the inner world was diminished in importance except in various underground, esoteric movements.
In 1779, a man was born who would once again begin to postulate a rich and varied inner world. Carl Gustav Carus espoused a doctrine that said that human beings were made up of a conscious self, the self of the mundane world, and an unconscious self that was simultaneously biological and psychological in structure. Later, Dr. Sigmund Freud, in his study of psychopathology built upon the idea of an unconscious layer to human beings and included the study of dreams as a port to understanding the nature of this unconscious self, or the subconscious mind as he called it. A protégé of his, Dr. Carl Gustav Jung, rebelled against many of Freud’s theories of the structure of the unconscious, saying they too rigid and too limited.
Jung believed that we could access the unconscious mind and gain understanding of this other part of ourselves through various methods: Word Association through which the images triggered by various words arose from the unconscious mind and would serve as clues to attitudes and beliefs held there; Active Imagination through which a person began with an image or symbol or scenario and allowed the unconscious to build a story around that source through which it revealed its nature; and Dream Analysis in which his patients’ dreams were explored as dramas rich with symbols and characters that were part of the unconscious side of the dreamers. Later students who followed the theories of Jung provided even greater insight and understanding of dreams as a portal to the unconscious mind. Women like Dr. Marion Woodman and Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes provided insight into the dreams of women that Jung could not have achieved during his time.
