Dream analysis is one of the few methods that can connect you to your own unconscious, helping you reflect deeply upon your thoughts, feelings, and unlived potential. This inversion process turns you in upon yourself... to your own resource. Thus, dream work is one of the most valuable tools that you can use to become proactive, letting your inner knowledge, your 'inner voice,' guide you to your authentic self.
Recording and analyzing your dreams opens a doorway into your unconscious, where dream material is delivered up to you, in a completely unaltered and unedited manner. That then connects you to your unconscious, whose only mission is to bring you to consciousness. This process creates your model for renewal, allowing a new and stronger personality to emerge, from your deconstructed psyche.
Now, the dis-identified psyche has a chance to reorganize into a new personality - a new, undefended, self-actualized self. By stepping into the wave and letting life do you, you can reach your true vocation and transcend into your natural birthright, your authentic personality.
According to Jung (1), the personality is developed by surrendering to one's 'inner voice.' Jung examined the meaning, development, and causes of personality. He explained that "there is no personality without definiteness, wholeness, and ripeness." Jung defined development of personality "as the optimal development, as the whole individual human being."
By listening and following your inner voice, you are self-directed toward a unique and self-actualized life. This call of the soul separates you from the collective consciousness and, as a result, offers you the greatest opportunity for a whole and complete personal life. Moreover, it is only if and when you can deliberately listen to your inner voice, that you have the potential to become a self-determined person: for to submit to your inner voice is to surrender to a personal law.
Jung said that the inner voice requires a certain fidelity to one's own soul or sense of self. Jung stated his preference for the word "trust" as a definition for "fidelity." So, it is the trust in your own inner-being that is required on your journey to wholeness, as you consciously and deliberately develop your own personality. And, your inner voice lives somewhere deep within your unconscious, as an important psychic entity.
Jung (1) suggested that "the ultimate aim and strangest desire of all mankind is to develop that fullness of life which is called personality." Although there is always the question of whether this inner voice is imagined, the very fact that life takes on meaning when the inner voice is adhered to, assuages such doubt. The loss of libido, which occurs when one ignores the inner voice, is a high price to pay and penalizes you to a life without meaning or vitality.
In Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life, Dr. James Hollis posited "For so many of us, our journey takes place amid the debris of history, the distractions of a noisy culture, and an experience of a loss of meaning." Moreover, he stated that, "When we live without meaning, we suffer the greatest illness of all."
Effectively, everything in life seeks equilibrium and wholeness. Thus, in effect, the one-sidedness of consciousness is compensated for in your dreams. This compensatory function contains a correspondence between mythologemes and dream motifs, which have as their operant aim the integration of the unconscious and consciousness. It is here, in insignificant dreams, that archetypes press you forward: for there is a true personality within you, striving to be born.
By listening and following your inner voice, you are self-directed toward a unique and self-actualized life. This call of the soul separates you from the collective consciousness and, as a result, offers you the greatest opportunity for a whole and complete, personal life. Moreover, it is only if and when you can deliberately listen to your inner voice, that you have the potential to become a self-determined person: for to submit to your inner voice is to surrender to a personal law.
So, it is the trust in your own inner-being that is required on your journey to wholeness, as you consciously and deliberately develop your own personality. And, your inner voice lives somewhere deep within your unconscious.
To hear the inner voice and not obey its command, your own inner law, is to lose conscious access to your identity, the meaning of your life, and therefore your destiny.
Thus, it is important that you work with your dreams, as it is those dreams that will give you access to your own unconscious and hidden material. And it is your dreams that originate in the unconscious and have the capacity to lead you to individuation.
Next week I will teach you how to analyze your own dreams.
Source:
(1) The Archetypes and The Collective Unconscious (Collected Works of Carl Jung), 1981