Dreams: Experience and Perception

Having been studying Carl Jung's psychoanalytical theory, I have just come to an interesting realization of my own dream pattern. If, as Jung hypothesizes, dreams are the event of a powerful force originating from the unconscious explosively entering into the consciousness, and thus they represent important aspects of an individual's unconscious that, for whatever reason, are not being consciously dealt with; then I have an additional statement to add. At least in my case, it is also true that, during the process of the dream, another psychological element occurs, that is the element of the type of reception the consciousness will extend to the dream. This is a startling and highly interesting possibility I have just now come to understand.

Therefore, dreams that my consciousness accepts and embraces, it will consequently experience; dreams that my consciousness rejects and shuns, it will consequently perceive.

I have often told others that I rarely, if ever, dream, and this is true regardless of this new thought. However, before in speaking of my dreams, I have only permitted the inclusion of the former of the afore mentioned cases, i.e. that dream that is experienced. With this new understanding of real dreams which are simply denied and thus perceived only, I might admit double, perhaps even triple the amount of dreams (which would still put me only at about 12 in my life).

Anyway, all this to say I just dreamed tonight. The dream was the latter case, a dream that is rejected by my consciousness.

Click here for a link to another post describing the dream.

It is quite obvious to me why this dream was rejected by my consciousness and thus merely perceived. The reason lies not in the ideology contained therein, but rather in its concrete application to real things. Every person in the dream represented an actual, real person. Every place an actual, real place. While the thoughts may have been a valid statement of my feelings of these people, the reason my consciousness refused to experience this statement was because it was already fully aware of the state of these feelings, and I had already consciously chosen to repress them, in the interest of achieving something better than they could achieve.

Now in comparison, the four dreams I have had that my consciousness experienced always brought to my mind quite an abstract thought, something that I had never before experienced in reality, but something that was, upon the exposure of my consciousness to it, a thing I immediately recognized as holding great importance in my life, yet an importance I had not previously understood.