Dreamwork: Dreams

DREAMS

Any field of endeavor is known by the tools it uses to reach its goal. The building trades are know for hammers and screwdrivers, the medical profession by stethoscopes and medicines, and landscaping is known for mowers and edge trimmers. The primary tool used by the roughly 2,500 Jungian analysts worldwide is the dream material of the analysand, without which an exploration of his or her unconscious would be nearly impossible. As Jungian analyst Michael Adams says, “The purpose of Jungian analysis is to establish an effective relation between the ego and the unconscious in order ultimately to facilitate a transformation of the psyche. Dream interpretation is vitally important to that process” (Adams, 2006). The concepts about dream work taught by Jung are being taught and developed further by the Jungian community today; within the Unity Movement, relatively few know that dream work was a focus of Fillmore’s work. The following sections will highlight the main theories about dreams taught by Jung and Fillmore with a spotlight on the growth and apparent cessation of dream work taught within Unity.

Jung and Dreams

Speaking on the practical use of dream analysis in 1931, Jung said, “…the avowed aim of dream-analysis is not only to exercise our wits, but to uncover and realize those hitherto unconscious contents which are considered to be of importance in the elucidation or treatment of a neurosis” (CW 16:294). Neuroses are common emotional disorders experienced by most people at various times of their lives. Not nearly as severe as a psychosis, a neurosis indicates an imbalance in the psyche of an individual that may be characterized by anxiety, obsessive thinking about a subject, compulsive behavior, etc. without evidence of a physical ailment. Generally, but not always, individuals experiencing a neurosis – such as an inferiority complex – are still able to function in the world; but what the neurosis does is limit the individual’s ability to experience peace and their own sense of wholeness. In the same lecture given in Dresden, he said, “the dream describes the inner situation of the dreamer, but the conscious mind denies its truth and reality, or admits it only grudgingly.” Additionally he said, “…the dream comes in as the expression of an involuntary, unconscious psychic process beyond the control of the conscious mind. It shows the inner truth and reality of the patient as it really is: not as I conjecture it to be, and not as he would like it to be, but as it is” (CW 16:304). Based on his observance of thousands of patients, Jung was certain that the dream served as a bridge between the unconscious and conscious minds.

This discussion begs the question, “What sort of things are in the unconscious that the dreamer should know?” He said:

Dreams may contain ineluctable truths, philosophical pronouncements, illusions, wild fantasies, memories, plans, anticipations, irrational experiences, even telepathic visions, and heavens knows what besides... one thing we ought never to forget: almost half our life is passed in a more or less unconscious state... the dream is specifically the utterance of the unconscious (CW 16:317).

The healing aspect of dream work comes into play when the patient is able to assimilate into his or her conscious mind the contents of the unconscious. Rather than subjugating the unconscious mind and its contents, Jung’s depth psychology provides the patient with a safe venue for learning what is contained in the unconscious. As noted in the quotation above, much of the information could be extremely helpful for individual to know as he or she goes about daily life as well as engaging in the life work of individuation. The major danger in the process of encountering the unconscious, Jung said, is when it “is excluded from life by being repressed, falsely interpreted, and depreciated” (CW 16:329).

Another, and possibly the most important, function of dreams is that of compensation. Like the physical body, Jung described the psyche as being self-regulating. He said, “When we set out to interpret a dream, it is always helpful to ask: What conscious attitude does it compensate?” (CW 16:330). In dreams, thoughts, beliefs, attitudes, inclinations and tendencies that are too little valued in waking life will be brought to life so that the dreamer may realize alternatives to consciously held attitudes. Jung put it this way:

The unconscious is the unknown at any given moment, so it is not surprising that dreams add to the conscious psychological situation of the moment all those aspects which are essential for a totally different point of view. It is evident that this function of dreams amounts to a psychological adjustment, a compensation absolutely necessary for balanced action. In a conscious process of reflection it is essential that, so far as possible, we should realize all the aspects and consequences of a problem in order to find the right solution. This process is continued automatically in the more or less unconscious state of sleep, where, as experience seems to show, all those aspects occur to the dreamer (at least by way of allusion) that during the day were insufficiently appreciated or even totally ignored – in other words, were comparatively unconscious (CW 16:469).

Just as some dreams are compensatory, offering other points of view that the conscious mind may not have considered, other dreams have what Jung called a “prospective function,” that is, they outline possible future outcomes. Some dreams of this nature are clearly prophetic, offering any number of specific future events (CW 16:493). Other prospective dreams offer the attentive dreamer possible outcomes that play out in the outer world, but maybe not exactly as dreamed. However, Jung did warn against giving prospective dreams too much authority. When an individual’s conscious and unconscious minds are adequately functioning, dreams generally hold to a more compensatory rather than prospective function. (CW 8:494).

In Jungian analysis, the analyst must be apprised of the conscious situation of the dreamer. Just what is happening in his or her waking life? If the dream serves as a bridge between the dreamer’s inner and outer life, then the analyst and analysand must have some understanding of the dreamer’s day to day life, otherwise it will be difficult, if not impossible to link the dream symbols to the conscious life of the analysand. Jung put it this way:

If we want to interpret a dream correctly, we need a thorough knowledge of the conscious situation at that moment, because the dream contains its unconscious complement, that is, the material which the conscious situation has constellated in the in the unconscious. Without this knowledge, it is impossible to interpret a dream correctly, except by a lucky fluke (CW 8:477).

Pivotal to Jungian dream analysis is an understanding of symbols. Since dreams are primarily experienced as pictures, it is vital that these pictures that emerge from the unconscious be given meaning. Jung recognized that although some symbols are universal to mankind, such as the circle, the meaning the patient gave to the symbol was the most important from a therapeutic point of view (CW 16:342). If the therapist were to assume that all symbols had fixed meaning there was a danger of “his falling into mere routine and pernicious dogmatism, and thus failing his patient” (CW 16:342). This is not to say that symbols with relative fixed meanings are useless in dream interpretation, they are useful; however, each individual will have his own “take” on the symbol, with his or her own shade of meaning (CW 16:351). This process of determining the meaning of symbols is often called explication (Adams, 2006).

A process related to explication, is amplification. In the process of amplification, comparisons of dream images or symbols are made to similar images found in literature, religion, mythology, culture, etc. in order to recognize and/or identify archetypical elements of a dream or dream series (Adams, 2006). The appreciation of archetypical energy or imagery in dreams can be both a therapeutic tool towards the healing of a neurosis as well as an important milestone in the path to individuation.

Jung also took into account the dramatic structure of dreams. With this perspective, every part of the dream could be considered a part of the dreamer.

The whole dream-work is essentially subjective, and a dream is a theatre in which dreamer is himself the scene, the players, the prompter, the producer, the author, the public, and the critic. This simple truth forms the basis for a conception of the dream’s meaning which I have called interpretation on the subjective level. Such interpretation, as the term implies, conceives all the figures in the dream as personified features of the dreamer’s own personality (CW 8:509).

Thus the dreamer seeks to discover what is happening in his inner world by asking, “What, in me, does this dream part represent?” In this way he or she could come to greater understanding of him or herself.

Just talking about dreams was not enough for Jung. One had to engage them actively in a process he called active imagination. In a nutshell, the process of active imagination is when form is given to a dream image for the purpose of further analysis. For example, the dreamer may paint or draw a dream image, or with the help of others, act out the scene as if it were a drama. Jung himself painted many of his dream images. There’s no limit to the forms that active imagination can take. The key in this process is for the dreamer not to judge the quality of the creation, but simply to express it (CW 8:168-171). The active imagination process is an example of the transcendent function, the bringing together of conscious and unconscious contents by transcending the apparent gulf between them (CW 8:131).

Fillmore and Dreams

Charles Fillmore wrote numerous articles about dreams, most published in Unity magazine, and one sixty page booklet entitled Inner Vision. From 1917 to 1943 Unity published a short three page tract called “Interpretation of Dreams” that provided only enough text to convey the point that dreams are an avenue by which God instructs people. The text that follows will quote extensively from those articles as his printed output on the subject is much more difficult to find than Jung’s. Additionally, references will be made to Jung as a part of the discussion.

As noted above, by the mid 1890’s Fillmore was writing about psychology, and in the early 1900’s he began writing about dreams in earnest. An early example is this letter from and answer to a reader taken from the July 1909 Unity magazine, p. 30:

I am greatly interested in dreams, but do not know how to interpret mine. How do you know that certain things stand for, or are they symbols of something else? – A.A.E

We know that all external objects represent ideas. For instance, figures represent the principle of numbers. An ox, or a horse, or a body of land or water represent the Principles of Being. We instinctively associate these objects with some idea. The ox stands for strength; the horse for vigor. Land represents the idea of stability and water of flexibility or changeableness.

So one may run through the whole gamut of existence and find the right idea back of every visible object. With this key, we interpret dreams (Fillmore, 1909).

By this point, Fillmore was making the point that dream images represent ideas, a concept that is encountered again in 1911:

All dreams indicate states of mind working in the dreamer, and how they are affecting mentality and the body. All the people, places, and things one sees in the dream state represent ideas, and a true interpretation can be had by resolving them into their primal thoughts. Every person, for example, that you know has some dominant characteristic, and if you should dram about that one, he would represent that characteristic in your own mind.

The thoughts of the day are usually carried into the dream state, and portray their tendency and ultimate effect in the mind before they work out in affairs. Analyze your dominant traits of character and your general trend of thought, and you will find them working out in your conscious and subconscious mind. By meditating in the silence, you can, as a rule, interpret your own dreams. It is difficult for another to do this for you, unless he is familiar with the general trend of your thoughts (Fillmore, 1911, p.58).

Several points should be made in reference to these paragraphs. It is clear from the above quote that Fillmore believed meditation could serve as a transcendent function, although he did not specifically use that term as Jung did. One could ask if the “primal states” and dominant characteristics noted could be equated to the archetypes as described by Jung. Moreover, Fillmore recognized that “thoughts of the day” do manifest in dreams. This is known as day residue, and to Jung day residue provided important clues to the meaning of a dream since it was a link between the dream and the conscious situation of the dreamer.

Meditation in the silence could allow one to interpret one’s own dreams. Fillmore, like Jung as noted above, believed that if one were to work on interpreting his dreams with another person, it was vital that the other person (analyst or friend) be thoroughly familiar with the conscious situation of the dreamer in order to provide a correct interpretation of the dream; however, Fillmore initially taught that the onus of dream interpretation generally rested with the dreamer.

One key disparity between the Fillmore and Jung approach to dream interpretation has to do with amplification. Fillmore did not seem to teach a process of amplification similar to Jung’s that included study of world religions, cultures and literatures. Thus, an individual who sought dream interpretation from Unity may have had difficulty in recognizing the emergence of archetypical energies in his or her life.

Fillmore’s interest in dreams and their interpretation continued to grow and in 1914 was installed as a regular feature in Unity magazine under the heading “Interpretation of Dreams.” This feature continued regularly until 1917 (Teener, 1939). The value of dream interpretation continued to grow in importance in the Unity Movement to the point that on May 15, 1920 Weekly Unity announced that Unity School of Christianity had created a Dream Interpretation Department in order to help readers with understanding their dreams. Part of the notice read:

However, because people have lived so much in the outer, and have not always been in touch with the higher Source of Being, the mind faculties are usually not yet keen enough to catch and read intelligibly the messages given. Therefore, when the mentality is still, as in sleep, the voice of the Master Teacher reaches the consciousness of the soul, and the lesson one is in need of is out pictured on the imaging faculties of the mind. In this way, God’s children are being educated through visions and dreams.

Unity has developed teachers who are able to read and to interpret these messages, hence the installation of this Department…(Fillmore, 1920).

Unity magazine posted a similar announcement in July of that year, with the name of the department noted as the Inner Vision Department. Charles Fillmore, as previously noted, was a keen businessman as a well as a mystic, and this notice made reference to how this department would be funded:

Although the interpretation of every dream and vision submitted to us requires the close study and clear discernment of developed workers, we make no charge for this service, but, like all Unity’s ministry, it shall be on a love offering basis. We shall let the Spirit within each one determine compensation. The Lord provides for us when we do his loving service and make the matter known to his people, hence this explanation (Fillmore, 1920).

Response to the establishment of the Inner Vision Department was overwhelming in more ways than one. Many people had many dreams they wanted interpreted, but the love offerings for this service were not equal to demand put on the teachers who were doing the interpretation. This matter was addressed in January 1921 in an article entitled “About the Flood (Not Noah’s)”:

The Inner Vision Department is flooded with dreams and visions, and we shall hereafter limit our service to one dream interpretation at a time for each person. Some of our correspondents send in as high as six dreams in a single letter. We estimate that it costs us one dollar for every dream we interpret, so you can see what the financial part of the work involves.

We do not make a definite charge for this work but leave the matter of compensation to the divine justice in those who ask for our help in discerning the leading of the Spirit. We find, however, that people do not appreciate the instruction of the Spirit as fully as they do the healing, and their free will love offerings are not quite as generous as they should be.

We want to make this department self-sustaining, and in order to do so, those who ask for interpretations of dreams should be informed of the expense involved, that they may give as they receive (Fillmore, 1921).

By the time the Inner Vision Department was created, Fillmore’s teaching about dreams had reached its apex and apparently had been taught to Silent Unity prayer workers. The February 1914 edition of Unity magazine included with its dream interpretations this line, “Here are some samples of dreams, with interpretations by our Silent Unity correspondents” (Fillmore, 1914). Unfortunately, a review of the Unity Archives has not revealed any notes as to how these Silent Unity workers were trained, but it can be inferred that they were taught about the structure mind and the other points noted above, along with the points noted below.

Fillmore believed that “every form and shape in the dream represents some mental or physical characteristic” in the dreamer’s life (Fillmore, 1914). He based this analysis on a review of the dreams of Bible characters whose dreams revealed a truth or information about questions and concerns that the Bible character was experiencing. Fillmore’s dream teaching drew heavily upon examples and models taken from the Bible, and he would often make reference to the dreams of Solomon, Job, Daniel, Joseph, and others.

That there was a connection between the spirit, mind and body made in dreams was taught by Fillmore. He said in 1914:

There is a need of a fuller understanding of the meaning of dreams and visions, because the Lord is educating his people everywhere by this means. When once a disciple gets the key (that is, that each and everything seen in the dream or vision represents ideas in his mind), his education goes forward from day to day. Many people have come under our observation who have been trained in a few years to interpret their dreams, and now they are guided daily in the renewing of mind and body” (Fillmore, 1914).

Jung made a similar point in 1916 when he said, “Not infrequently the dreams show that there is a remarkable inner symbolical connection between an undoubted physical illness and a definite psychic problem, so that the physical disorder appears as a direct mimetic expression of the psychic situation” (CW 8:502).

Fillmore was clear in his belief that dreams were essentially religious experiences and should be processed as such. The April 21, 1915 edition of Weekly Unity published a lecture he gave entitled “Guiding Visions” in which he elaborated on this idea. He said:

Now, those visions and those things that you have seen are from the Lord, and if you would acknowledge those occult, hidden things as being real, and in the silent recesses of your soul be obedient, you would get something more definite, and this would lead to a farther revelation, and soon you would have the door open between you and your higher self (Fillmore, 1921).

In the same lecture he countered the claims that dreams are often considered meaningless by many religious persons:

The most delicate subject the metaphysician has to deal with is that of visions and dreams. The practical everyday man considers them foolish, childless and valueless. The orthodox religionist, also, who bases his salvation on the Scriptures, puts a like estimate on these seemingly meaningless picture of the mind. And even those who have a certain faith in visions and dreams are in a large degree in darkness as to their real import. The reason of all this is that the realm in which these forces operate is so far removed from material consciousness that it is difficult to get a right interpretation or a right understanding of the symbols (Fillmore, 1921).

He goes on to comment that the Bible is replete with individuals who received divine inspiration through dreams and visions, but questions, “Does anyone know of a theological college where the interpretation of dreams is taught?” (Fillmore, 1921).

A practical matter related to dream interpretation is the question of how does one remember one’s dreams. Jung and Fillmore both addressed this issue. Jung said:

It is probably in consequence of this loose connection with the contents of consciousness that the recollected dream is so extremely unstable. Many dreams baffle all attempts at reproduction, even immediately after waking; others can be remembered only with doubtful accuracy, and comparatively few can be called really distinct and clearly reproducible. This peculiar behaviour may be explained by considering the combination of ideas in dreams is essentially fantastic; they are linked together in a sequence which is as a rule quite foreign to our “reality thinking,” and in striking contrast to the logical sequence of ideas which we consider to be a special characteristic of our conscious mental processes (CW 8:445).

Fillmore’s response to this difficulty was directly addressed in Unity in 1915:

First, learn to still the thoughts when awake by entering into the inner recesses of the being and communing with the Lord, and second, be very quiet after awakening and refuse to allow the conscious mind to take up at once its train of thought. Usually when one awakens, the first thing he does is to begin to make conscious connection between the happenings of the day before and the possible events of the new day, and as the conscious mind usually gets the attention more readily than the inner voice, all the instruction of the night is put aside and silenced by the noisy intellect which clamors for the consideration and the interest of the outer man and his relation to the outer world. Instead of trying to connect immediately with the interests of the previous day, turn the attention within and make a quiet effort to remember your dreams. If even a fragment of a dream is clear, study it carefully, asking the Spirit of Truth to reveal is significance (Fillmore, 1915).

Along with providing a method to help individuals remember their dreams, Fillmore makes it clear that even a dream fragment has value if studied. Moreover, as intimated throughout this essay, Fillmore taught that one could ask God — pray, in other words — for the meaning of a dream to be revealed.

In the July 11, 1925 edition of Weekly Unity was printed an ad for a new Unity publication entitled Inner Vision, a sixty page book which was written “with the firm conviction that it will answer for the seekers of knowledge some of the questions that have puzzled them, and that it will lead to a deeper understanding of the significance of their dreams and visions” (Fillmore, 1925). This is the only book published by Unity about dream work, and for the most part is a compilation of articles, or parts of articles, that had already been printed by Unity or Weekly Unity. Those points have already been addressed in this essay.

Inner Vision was last printed in 1945. According to a typed note made by E. Pharaby Boileau, a reference librarian who began working at Unity School in 1942, “Inner Vision booklet was discontinued from stock because it was generally misunderstood by the public.”

In his 1939 doctoral dissertation about Unity School of Christianity, James Teener makes a remark, “This department [Inner Vision] is no longer carried regularly in Unity, but help is extended to any who ask for it, and Mr. Fillmore frequently refers to the guidance he receives through the method [dreams]” (Teener, 1939).

Apparently in the late 1920’s or 1930’s, the Inner Vision Department was closed. Quite possibly, Unity was not receiving the “dollar a dream” suggested love offering and closed the department owing to its inability to sustain itself. Archival research has failed to produce a date or a reason for the closure of the department; however, by 1925 dream interpretation ceased to be printed in Unity. On August 1, 2006 the author of this essay did ask Rev. Dorothy Pierson, a Unity minister who went to work for Fillmore in the 1930’s about the Inner Vision Department. She did not recall it; however, she did comment that, “Back in those days they were trying everything – starting and stopping projects for any number of reasons.”

Rev. Pierson did recount two stories of dreams of hers that Fillmore interpreted. Her first dream was that another Unity worker was ill. Fillmore asked her what she did about it. “Nothing,” was her reply. He promptly scolded her and said that she should have done something like bless the other worker. He told her she may have been the only one to offer prayer for the individual that day.

Her second dream was that she was flying and what a wonderful experience it was. Fillmore’s response – and she chuckled as she recounted this — was, “Can you pay your rent?” Fillmore’s concern was that her dream represented escapism or inflation of ego, when her first concern should be the meeting of her earthly needs.

Fillmore retired in 1933, and it is quite probable that the teaching of dream work within the Unity Movement ended with him. Every minister, when asked by the author of this essay if they knew that at one time Unity taught dream interpretation, has expressed complete surprise. When asked if they knew about the Inner Vision Department, the response consistently has been “no.” And is should come as no surprise that Unity Institute (the current name of Unity’s seminary located just outside Kansas City at Unity Village, Missouri) does not teach dream interpretation.

Two Other Items

There are two other items mentioned in passing in Inner Vision that warrant a few words in this discussion on account of the synchronistic link they illustrate between Fillmore and Jung: the negative manifestation of the collective unconscious, and the occult.

The Negative Manifestation of the Collective Unconscious

Jung taught that inherent in all persons were universal psychic contents, most notably the archetypes, which constituted a substantial part of the collective unconscious. Jung said that the contents of the collective unconscious “do not belong to one individual alone but to a whole group of individuals, and generally to a whole nation, or even to the whole of mankind” (CW 8:589). Fillmore, though not using that particular term, essentially taught the same thing when discussed the subconscious mind. Jung was greatly disturbed about the potential for the negative side to become constellated in a place or a people, and in his Memories, Dreams, Reflections said:

The Christian World is now truly confronted by the principle of evil, by naked injustice, tyranny, lies, slavery, and coercion of conscience. This manifestation of naked evil has assumed apparently permanent form in the Russian nation; but its first violent eruption came in Germany. That outpouring of evil revealed to what extent Christianity has been undermined in the twentieth century (Jung, 1961, p. 328-9).

Inner Vision, though in not such detail, made a similar point:

Man’s body is the sum total of the animal world, because in its evolution it has had experience in nearly every type of elemental form. These memories are part of the soul, and they come to the surface sporadically in the unregenerate. Sometimes whole nations seem to revert from culture to savagery without apparent cause, but there is always a cause. These reversions are the result of some violent wrenching of the soul, or a concentration, to the exclusion of everything else, upon a line of thought out of harmony with divine law (Inner Vision, p. 17).

The text of Inner Vision consistently maintains a positive outlook on the future under the guidance of the Holy Spirit in contradistinction to the Jung’s comment, “How we can live with it [evil] without terrible consequences cannot for the present be conceived” (Jung, 1961, p. 329).

Inner Vision seems to take for granted the existence of supernatural capabilities. The following lines illustrate this point:

Among the disciples, Bartholomew represents imagination. He is called Nathanael in the 1st chapter of John, where it is recorded that Jesus saw him under the fig tree – the inference being that Jesus discerned Nathanael’s presence before the latter came into visibility. This would indicate that images of people and things are projected into the imaging chamber of the mind and that through giving them attention one can understand their relation to outer things. Mind readers, clairvoyants, and dreamers have developed this capacity in varying degrees (Inner Vision, p. 21).

The Occult

In reflecting about his student years, Jung wrote about his introduction to spiritualism and the occult, topics that, along with theology, held lifelong interest for him on account of their relationship to psychology. He said, “The observations of the spiritualists, weird and questionable as they seemed to me, were the first accounts I had seen of objective, psychic phenomena” (Jung, 1961, p. 99). Ellenberger comments:

Remarkable was the tone of Jung’s absolute conviction when speaking of the soul (a term that had disappeared from psychology) and the way he defined it as immaterial, transcendent, outside of time and space – and yet to be approached scientifically. Among the means of obtaining cognizance of the soul were the study of somnambulism, hypnosis, and spritistic manifestations. Thus to Jung spiritism was not a matter of occultism, but of unknown psychic phenomena that needed to be investigated with proper scientific methods (Ellenberger, 1970, p. 689).

The concept of “soul” as used by Fillmore and Jung contained some key similarities that again point to synchronistic patterns in their thinking about the divine, mankind and their relationship. Fillmore claimed that, “the soul is the many accumulated ideas back of his [man’s] present expression. In its original and true sense, the soul of a man is the expressed idea of man in Divine Mind [God]…and includes the conscious and subconscious minds” (Fillmore, 1959, p. 182). Jung said, voicing a similar thought, “however we may picture the relationship between God and soul, one thing is certain: that the soul cannot be ‘nothing but.’ On the contrary it has the dignity endowed with consciousness of a relationship to Deity” (CW 12:10).

This interconnectedness between man and divine on the level of soul had deep implications in the discourse of both men as it related to dreams. Fillmore was quite clear in his acceptance of dreams as communications between God and mankind as the discussion above shows. And on this point Jung was in full agreement. He said, “We are so captivated by and entangled in our subjective consciousness that we have simply forgotten the age-old fact that God speaks chiefly through dreams and visions (CW 18:601). He went on to say:

The Buddhist discards the world of unconscious fantasies as “distractions” and useless illusions; the Christian puts his Church and his Bible between himself and his unconscious; and the rationalist intellectual does not yet know that his consciousness is not his total psyche, in spite of the fact that for more than seventy years the unconscious has been a basic scientific concept that is indispensable to any serious student of psychology (CW 18:601).

It is unfortunate that Jung did not know about the teaching of Charles Fillmore about dreams or else he might not have made the following comment: “I also doubt whether there is a Protestant treatise on dogmatics that would ‘stoop so low’ as to consider the possibility that the vox Dei might be perceived in a dream. But if somebody really believes in God, by what authority does he suggest that God is unable to speak through dreams?” (CW 18:603).