The Amplified World of Dreams
by Erel Shalit and Nancy Swift Furlotti
The dream is a little hidden door in the innermost and most secret recesses of the soul, opening into that cosmic night which was psyche long before there was any ego-consciousness, and which will remain psyche no matter how far out egoconsciousness extends. —C. G. Jung
Humans have always expressed themselves in images of their outer and inner worlds—seemingly a characteristic of our genetic structure.
The dream is a communication from the psyche in the form of images arising from the realms of the unconscious, beyond conscious ego control.
The deeper layers within us speak to us nightly through dreams, mostly appearing during the stage of REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, usually
at the end of each of the four to six sleep cycles a night. Whether we remember our dreams or not, they affect us.
Constantly at work, the psyche brings forth that which is positive and creative, as well as all that is negative and destructive in the depth of our soul.
The psyche may guide us or lead us astray; it behooves us to consciously take part in determining which direction we are led.
We participate by attempting to understand the meaning of our dreams and by discerning the inner voices that speak to us, to distinguish between the
inner figures of wisdom and the ghosts behind our complexes.
In this book we focus on the amplification method that Jung developed to uncover the meaning of the dream, a procedure that reflects his approach to the psyche and the understanding of dreams.
In contrast to free association, which reflects a causal view of neurosis, amplification indicates the movement from etiology toward understanding
the meaning and symbolic value of the image.
Rather than reductive causal explanations of the individual’s symptoms, amplification aims at enhancing consciousness by focusing on the image.
As the term implies, we attempt to enlarge the dream image by amplifying it—by relating it to its roots in the objective psyche and its appearance in
culture, history, mythology, and religion.
The psyche speaks in images; thus, in order to gain from its wisdom, we need to understand the language of images, to be aware
of their depth and meaning, and to study them in their personal as well as collective contexts.
Dream and Culture
From the beginning of humanity, a wide tradition of dream work has existed in countless cultures.
In the oldest preserved myth, the four-thousand-year-old Gilgamesh epic,
we are told one of humanity’s oldest reported dreams, dreamed by the king and interpreted by his mother Ninsun, queen of the wild cow, the wise and all-knowing goddess.
She explains to Gilgamesh that the star that in his dream has fallen down to him, which he is unable to remove, is his companion. We might say that the star pertains to that aspect of fate that cannot be evaded.
Jung gave examples of dreams and how they were interpreted in other cultures, as well as in antiquity.
Referring to a series of dreams, Jung, relying on Josephus Flavius,
concluded that Simon the Essene, who was a skillful dream interpreter, understood dreams not only sensibly, but in a way similar to his own.
Analyzing Nebuchadnezzar’s second dream in the Bible, in which he dreams of a tree growing up to heaven that is cut down and the king turned into a beast, Jung followed Daniel’s interpretation of the dream. Jung wrote that it was “easy to see that the great tree is the dreaming king himself.
Daniel interprets the dream in this sense. Its meaning is obviously an attempt to compensate the king’s megalomania, which, according to the story, developed into a real psychosis.”
Jung considered this historical dream, “like all dreams,” to have
a “compensatory function” of counterbalancing the king’s disproportionate sense of power.
For him to achieve a semblance of wholeness, Nebuchadnezzar’s psyche deemed that the tree must be cut down to size. Jung aptly summarized Nebuchadnezzar’s condition as “a complete regressive degeneration of a man who has overreached himself.”
Daniel similarly understood the meaning of the dream as referring to the king’s inflation and warned him “to repent of his avarice and injustice.”10 Since the king did not repent, he was cast out to live as a beast.
In Africa, Jung understood that “magic is the science of the jungle.”
He visited the Elgonyi in East Africa, from whom he learned the distinction between the ordinary and the “big” dreams—dreams that affect the entire group and are dreamed by the medicine man, who would know “where the herds strayed, where the cows took
their calves, and when there was going to be war or a pestilence.”
Now, however, the medicine man wept and told Jung that even he had no dreams anymore, “since the British came into the country.”
Because the colonizers knew “when there shall be war; … when there are diseases,” there was seemingly no need for dreams as “guidance of man in the great darkness.”
Jung traced the tribally significant “big dreams” in different cultures, including “in the Greek and Roman civilizations, where such dreams were
reported to the Areopagus or to the Senate.”
“Big” dreams seem to emerge at important periods in one’s life and may reflect a transition from one stage of development to another, during which the individual is particularly open to collective, archetypal imagery that is believed to be pertinent for the group.
“These dreams in particular make us understand why the ancients attributed a pronounced prognostic meaning to their dreams.
Throughout the whole of antiquity, and to a large extent still in the Middle Ages, it was believed that dreams foretell the future.”
Many ethnic groups developed specific ways of sharing dreams and cultural codes for their interpretation. Jung reported that in some parts of Africa, the indigenous people were shy about sharing their dreams, perhaps out of fear that “harm may come to them from anyone who has knowledge of their dreams.”
The Somali and Swahilis, on the other hand, says Jung, consulted an Arab dream book and turned to Jung for advice on their dreams.
In Ancient Greece there was a widespread practice of using dreams for healing.
The word incubation comes from the Latin incubare, to sleep in a sacred precinct, which was a practice in ancient Greece of seeking healing dreams in a sacred place.
In her initial dream in analysis, a woman dreams that she walks to a house “further away, a bit on the side; no one has been here for quite some time.
It is like a hide-out, set apart from the rest of the city. I lie down to sleep.”
In the dream, she is guided to the
place of incubation, a condition of openness to dreaming and symbolization, which here takes place in the dream itself.
Around the third century b.c.e. there were more than four hundred sanctuaries creating a network of what we would regard today as general and mental health clinics.
These sanctuaries were termed Asclepieia, after Asclepius, the god of medicine and healing.
Hippocrates, for example, was director of the Asclepeion at the island of Cos.
Henry Miller explained how he had not known the meaning of peace until he visited the principal sanctuary of Asclepius at Epidaurus, where dream incubation began around 600 b.c.e. “There was a stillness so intense that… . I heard the great heart of the world beat,” he writes, and he makes it clear the sanctuary is really an internal space “in the heart.”
In the procedure of dream incubation at the Asclepeion, the person seeking healing first underwent a ritual cleansing bath.
Then, the “patient” visited the temples of Aphrodite (of love and nature) and of Apollo (of understanding and clarity).
Finally, the person would be called into the abaton of the Asclepeion.
The abaton was the innermost sanctuary, the sleeping chamber, where the person slept on a couch, called kline (from which we have the word “clinic”), until a healing dream would appear. (Abaton means “an impassable place,” or metaphorically, “pure or chaste.”)
The person was to await patiently for the arrival of an initial dream in
which Asclepius would appear—that is, until a transference dream occurred in which the image of the healer would evoke and be attached to the internal healing function.
Asclepius could appear, for instance, in the shape of a bearded man or a boy, as god or as dog.
In particularly powerful treatment, Asclepius might appear as a snake:
What can kill and poison can also heal, a reality of which the physicians’ snake-coiled staff, the caduceus, reminds us. In fact, it was with this staff that Hermes, the mediator god, put people to sleep and sent them dreams.
According to Barbara Tedlock,19 cultures frequently have rules concerning the sharing and interpreting of dreams.
For instance, dreams involving the ancestors or the earth deities are shared with the shamans, who are dream interpreters.20 However, there may be forbidden dreams that are not told to anyone.
For the Zuni, telling a good dream would diminish its positive effect on the dreamer; therefore, more bad dreams are shared than good ones.
In the Momostenango culture, all dreams, whether good or bad, even small fragments, are shared. Initially they are told in private but later shared
at length in public groups with initiated “daykeepers,” who are the official dream interpreters.
Chronic bad dreams are thought to cause illness. The Zuni and Quiché believe that all dreams provide information about future events.21
A dream sequence, especially if told to others, moves from its original state of mere sensory imagery in one’s mind to a verbal form.
This form is then filtered through language-centered, secondary-process thinking and shaped into a cohesive narrative
Quite naturally, different languages can impart a completely different meaning to the dream.
Each dream can be interpreted in various ways, depending on the interpreter.
Additionally, the underlying implied purpose of the dream can be different in different cultures.
For example, the word for dream in Zuni is a verb, indicating that the
dreamer acts upon something, whereas in Quiché it refers simply to a state of being.
The English word dream refers to the imaginal sensations that pass through a person’s mind when sleeping.
The Germanic origin of the word refers to deception, illusion,
ghost, apparition, merriment, and noise.
On the other hand, the old English word for
dream referred to joy, mirth, music, and vision.
The Hebrew word for dream, chalom, has the same root as hachlama, meaning recovery.
In Arabic, it means both dream and to mature, as well as seminal fluid. In Hebrew, the word originally meant soft, moist, and viscous.
This is the state of “healthy humors,” when one’s body liquids, or humors, are free and flowing. In this condition imagination can spring forth, and growth can take place.
This life-enhancing moisture can be compared with the nurturing part of the egg, the yolk (in Hebrew, chelmon!), in which the fetus develops.
“Emission of seminal fluid” and “to attain puberty”22 are noted as the key meanings of the root for chalom, dream. Furthermore, a development has been suggested from the Tigre language, wherein the root means “coming of age,” to the Arabic and Hebrew “sexual dreams,” on to the generalized meaning of “dream.”
So what we have is a conglomerate of moisture, sex, and maturity, all combined in the dream, chalom.
Maturity of soul is achieved by raising instinct into imagery—and
what is more powerful than sexual imagery!
In the dream, instinct is expressed by imagery, which then powerfully activates the instinct.
The moisture of imagination may then drive the person to nightly emissions during a sexual dream. ~The Eream And Its Amplification, Erel Shalit and Nancy Swift Furlotti, Page 1-5
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