'Who looks outside dreams;
Who looks inside awakes.'
These are the words of one of the most influential psychologists to ever walk the earth - Carl Gustav Jung. Amongst his immense contribution to our understanding of ourselves is a core that is encoded in dreams. You see, Jung believed that reality as we know it is less than what we experience in our dreams. Let me explain. Jung believed that dreams are not mere idle fantasies or random firing of neurons, but profound symbolic narratives that speak directly from our unconscious. He saw the unconscious not as a mere repository of repressed thoughts and desires, but as a rich, living source of creativity and insight. Dreams are therefore vital communications from this deeper realm, offering a more authentic and holistic reality than our conscious mind can perceive within its daily limitations.
Jung saw dreams as ‘a scene from a extraordinarily beautiful opera, woven out of images and metaphors’, whose symbols can ‘penetrate deeply into the unconscious and awaken thoughts and feelings of wide scope and intensity’. Dreams also tapped into archetypes, representing the collective unconscious, so that understanding our dreams’ secret symbols could bring a profound self-awareness, which would in turn catalyse transformative personal growth.
Yet it is here that things get even more interesting. Now, as we explore deep learning and its ability to interpret dreams, we arrive at what might be a new age: one that brings together the symbolic language of dreams that can only be interpreted by humans into one that can be read with the power of complex algorithms. The union of Jung’s world of dreams with the power of AI could unlock unprecedented possibilities for understanding the deepest parts of our psyches.
And through this process, we are approaching an exquisite moment when we might redefine not only how we read dreams – but how we look at the edges of the waking world conjured up by the unconscious. Allow me to be your witness as we read dreams through AI’s eyes, aided by Jung.
