Make your own associations to each dream image
For every image in the dream, write down the words, memories and feelings it brings up for you, before deciding what anything means.
Why it works
Johnson's first step rests on the view that dream images are personal: a bird, a house or an old teacher carries the meaning your own life has given it, which a symbol dictionary cannot know. Gathering associations image by image slows down the rush to a meaning and collects the raw material the later steps work with. The associations that carry the most feeling tend to be the ones worth following.
How to do it
- As soon as you wake, write the dream down as fully as you can, without tidying or explaining it.
- List every distinct image: people, places, objects, animals, colours, words spoken, the mood of the scene.
- Take one image at a time and write whatever comes: words, memories, feelings, people it reminds you of.
- Read back over the lists and mark the one or two associations that carry the most feeling. Those are where the dream is likely pointing.
Evidence
Making associations is the first of the four steps in Johnson's Inner Work, a book of Jungian practice drawn from his work as an analyst. Hill's therapist-led model also includes associations to each image within its exploration stage. Johnson's steps themselves have not been tested in controlled research. (anecdotal)
The value of this step rests on Johnson's clinical tradition and practitioner experience; the research on Hill's model tests a related, therapist-led procedure, so it supports the step only by analogy.
Sources
- Johnson, R. A. (1986). Inner Work: Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth. Harper & Row.
- Tien, H.-L. S., Chen, S.-C., & Lin, C.-H. (2009). Helpful components involved in the cognitive-experiential model of dream work. Asia Pacific Education Review, 10(4), 547-559.
Common mistake
Jumping to a meaning after the first image, or swapping in what a dream dictionary says. Once you have decided, every later association bends to fit, and the personal meaning gets lost.
Practice this with IX Coach
More practices for Jungian and Research-Tested Dream Work: Hearing the Parts of You That Speak at Night
- Connect each dream image to a part of you
Ask which force, attitude or part inside you each dream figure is acting out.
- Put the pieces together into one interpretation
Combine your associations and the parts you found into a reading of what the whole dream is saying to you now.
- Honour the dream with a small physical act
Do one concrete thing in waking life that affirms what the dream showed you.
- Explore one image at a time: describe, re-experience, associate, find the trigger
Take each image through four questions: what it looks like, how it feels, what it reminds you of, and what in recent waking life set it off.
- Look for insight at more than one level
Ask what the dream says about your waking life, about the parts of you in conflict, and about the larger questions of meaning in your life.
- Change the dream, then carry the change into waking life
Imagine how you would change the dream if you could, then translate that change into one step in your real life.
Related concepts
- Shadow Work
Meeting the parts of yourself you have been ignoring
- Active Imagination: Jung's Waking Dialogue With the Unconscious
Letting an inner figure come up, talking with it in writing, and taking your own stand
- The 3-2-1 Shadow Process: Face It, Talk to It, Be It
Turning the person who gets under your skin from an "it" back into a part of "I", in three shifts of perspective
- Voice Dialogue: Meeting the Selves That Run Your Life
Hearing the pusher, the pleaser and the critic in their own voices, so they stop running you unnoticed
Free to reuse under CC BY 4.0: cite or embed this practice · more practices graded Practitioner experience