Emergence of Meaning in a Dream
The psychological context of dream-contents consists in the web of associations in which the dream is naturally embedded.
Theoretically we can never know anything in advance about this web, but in practice it is sometimes possible, granted long enough experience.
Even so, careful analysis will never rely too much on technical rules; the danger of deception and suggestion is too great. In the analysis of isolated dreams above all, this kind of knowing in advance and making assumptions on the grounds of practical expectation or general probability is positively wrong.
It should therefore be an absolute rule to assume that every dream, and every part of a dream, is unknown at the outset, and to attempt an interpretation only after carefully taking up the context.
We can then apply the meaning we have thus discovered to the text of the dream itself and see whether this yields a fluent reading, or rather whether a satisfying meaning emerges. ~Carl Jung. Psychology and Alchemy (1944). CW 12: pg. 48
