Carl Jung on Why Dreams Matter

Added: 2026-05-16

[00:00:00]What can Swiss psychologist Carl Jung teach us about the importance of dreams?

[00:00:05]For thousands of years humans have been fascinated by dreams, but Carl Jung believed dreams were just more than random images or meaningless noise. He once wrote, "To me, dreams are a part of nature that harbors [snorts] no intention to deceive, but expresses something as best it can." And this is where we see the diversion from Jung and Freud. See, Freud saw dreams as kind of an expression of hidden wishes within us. But Jung thought that dreams were trying to communicate something far more meaningful. For Jung, dreams had a compensatory function. "What does that mean?" I hear you ask. It means that dreams often attempt to balance the attitude of your conscious waking mind.

[00:00:43]For example, if the ego becomes too rational, the dream may become emotional or symbolic. If someone is overly confident, then the dream may reveal vulnerability or fear. If someone is spiritually disconnected, then the dream may produce mythical or numinous imagery. In short, the psyche is always trying to restore some form of inner balance. But here's an additional point to remember that Jung said, "If we want to interpret a dream correctly, we need further knowledge of the conscious situation of that moment, cuz the dream contains its unconscious complement." In other words, as I've said, a dream is deeply connected to your waking life.

[00:01:18]And images and themes in that dream will be context dependent what is happening in your waking life. Hence why just Googling what something in your dream means or just looking at a symbol dictionary is somewhat of a narrow way to go about interpreting that material.

[00:01:31]Jung believed that the dream would produce symbols that could go some way to bridging the connection between your waking life and unconscious material.

[00:01:38]And this connects one of Jung's other ideas I've talked about, the transcendent function. That tension between waking life and unconscious life produces an image in the dream, which becomes a new third thing, a symbol that holds the conflict together and points towards transformation. But it's really hard to interpret dreams, right? You barely remember them often them you wake up. And Jung said it was kind of like listening to a radio. You catch fragments, a sentence, an image, a feeling. Sometimes this can happen over time across multiple dreams. This is why you should not rush to interpret any singular dream. Those fragments that you catch, especially if you can somewhat correlate them over time, can reveal something profoundly true about the state of your psyche. I'm going to do more videos expanding on dreams and how you might do dream work. I'm not an expert in it, so I might get some other people in to help with that. But in the meantime, if you like the video, follow the page, subscribe on YouTube for more videos about Carl Jung and podcasts with amazing guests every two weeks.