Making sense of your weird dreams.
How are your dreams at the moment? (*the ones that come when you sleep)
Voracious and weird? Absent? Almost impossible to remember by the time you are drinking your morning coffee?
After years of my young kids stealing away my night’s dreams with their wakeups, mine have been coming back to me. At first, I was just enjoying them, excited by their return. Then I started to remember snippets, and they were weird, weird, weird.
My wife, Kaitlin, has a psychology degree and has always been a fan of Jungian dream analysis. But while we travel the world this year, Jungian Dream therapists have been hard to pin down, so inspired by my friend Naomi, who had done this before, I built a simple agent in Claude. The prompt was just:
‘Act as a Jungian dream analyst for me. I will enter what I can remember from my dreams. You are welcome to observe trends and patterns, but please rely on Jungian principles, and don’t make things up.’
I’ve done this with a dozen dreams now, all of them feeling fractured and nonsensical as I talked them into Claude. But what my Jungian analyst has found so far has been very interesting, and the trend is clear.
In all of the dreams I’ve started in an environment inspired by a real situation from my life, particularly the Navy and business. But I don’t want to be there. In early dreams, I was frustrated, sad, or scared by these environments, but in later dreams, I’ve found myself taking control, getting myself away from what I don’t want and stepping towards what I do. Last night the dream started with my old business partner (we are still great friends) and I planning a complex, Oceans 11 style heist. We were going to make a fortune and give it all to charity. But I then found myself at an old rickety theme park (a recurring image) with my son, Atlas. Eager to get back to executing the heist, I lost track of Atlas.
The message was clear. ‘You could go back and launch another business, and it would make a difference in the world, but you risk losing your son if you do.’
I’ve been searching for and finding the truest version of myself more and more these last few years. I’ve been living deliberately. Turns out my dreams are telling me to keep going.
What might your dreams be telling you?
(While I may be letting AI analyse my dreams, I am not letting it write for me. All the words are mine here. All mistakes and human fallibilities are therefore also mine.)