Dream Interpretation

 This is a case from an essay by the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung. Jung was a major figure in modern psychology, and he conducted extensive research on dreams and the unconscious. A young man named Henry told Jung about a dream he had. I have shortened it into one paragraph. Let’s read it together.

Henry is traveling alone in South America. Tired of wandering, he decides to return home and heads toward a railway station in a remote mountain town. As he hurries through unfamiliar streets, he notices a dark archway that seems to offer a shortcut. The archway feels uncanny, almost sacred.

In the shadows beside the arch sit four Chinese men, motionless like guardians. Another traveler, equipped like a hunter, walks ahead of him toward the arch. As the two approach, the Chinese figures suddenly rise and block their way. A violent struggle breaks out. The hunter is quickly overpowered. Henry himself is wounded when one of the guardians scratches his left leg with an unnaturally long toenail.

Henry and the hunter are bound and brought before a figure Jung calls the “Messenger of the Spirit.” Although this figure had been hostile during the fight, he now delivers a favorable judgment. Henry is released. The dream ends with the paradox that the same figure who inflicted symbolic harm is also the one who grants liberation.

Upon first impression, we can notice that the dream contains many elements associated with the Gen trigram and the Kan trigram.

The Gen trigram has the image of a mountain, corresponding here to the mountain town. It also has the image of returning, corresponding to the journey home, and the image of a gate, corresponding to the gate of the archway. The railway station corresponds to the stacked Gen-Zhen image: Zhen means vehicles and going outward, while Gen means fire, coming back, and buildings. Gen and Zhen stacked together therefore form the image of a building where trains continually come and go; that is, a railway station.

The Kan trigram has images of loneliness, blackness, darkness, fighting, harm, and foreigners. Henry is travelling alone; the passageway is black; and the Chinese men in the dream are, for Henry, foreigners. All of these corresponds to Kan image, which also carries an image of harm. Henry encounters harm on his way to the railway station. This corresponds to the Meng hexagram: in Meng, the Zhen-side energy formed by lines two, three, and four encounters the harm of the lower Kan trigram and therefore cannot move upward to reach the Gen side above.

But it is not enough simply to know that this dream corresponds to the Meng hexagram. We also need to know how Meng changes here, and which line is the changing line. We should notice that the dream contains a rather chaotic plot, which may correspond to the stacked images of Dui and Xun. For example, the Chinese men and Henry fight back and forth; Henry is harmed and captured. Dui means harm, while Xun means rope, binding and submission, so this also corresponds to the Dui-Xun pattern.

Moreover, Dui means speech, while Xun can mean speech in a reverse way. At first, the Messenger of the Spirit is unfavorable to Henry, but later helps him to be saved; this is also a situation in which the messages are inconsistent. Even more, Henry’s companion is a hunter; a hunter is someone who gains benefit through harm and injury. Gain corresponds to Xun while injury corresponds to Dui. Taken together, we can see that this corresponds to the third line of Meng changing, producing a hexagram image with Dui and Xun.

Dui means speedy and escape, corresponding to the image of the arch. Henry wants to reach the railway station more quickly through the archway. This describes a desire for shortcut: sacrificing long-term benefit in order to obtain short-term benefit. The third line is the line of failed incubation, where short-term benefit is gained at the expense of long-term benefit. This is consistent with Henry’s attempt to take a fast passageway, only to encounter obstruction instead.

Gen also has the image of job and occupation, and the Gen-Kan image suggests that Henry’s career may be unfavorable. The reason for this unfavorable situation is very likely that he is too eager for quick success and too fond of shortcuts. My initial understanding is that this dream is probably trying to tell Henry not to move about recklessly, but to settle down and incubate his own career.

How, then, did Jung react when he heard this dream? Jung suggested Henry to consult the I Ching to interpret the language of his unconscious. Henry then performed a divination by tossing coins to obtain random numbers. The result was the same as what we obtained by reading the images of the dream: he also received the Meng hexagram. And we got the same Hexagram in previous slides by extracting the dream’s core motifs. What a coincidence.

In Jung’s discussion of Henry’s dream, he explains that the patient attempted to relate the dream imagery to his actual life circumstances. The only real-world situation Henry could connect with the dream’s sense of danger, obstruction, and judgment was his recent difficulty in securing employment. While traveling in South America, Henry had hoped to obtain a job in Chile. However, the hiring agency rejected his application because he did not meet their requirement of being married. This unexpected refusal left him feeling trapped, frustrated, and unable to move forward — a psychological predicament that mirrored the dream’s themes of blocked passage, hostile guardians, and symbolic injury. Jung uses this connection to illustrate how the unconscious often dramatizes real-life impasses through vivid symbolic scenes.

This matches quite well with the Gen-Kan image of the Meng hexagram that we discussed just now. Gen symbolizes job and occupation, while Kan symbolizes singleness and harm. The Gen-Kan image shows that his career was harmed because of his unmarried status. When the third line moves, Kan changes into Xun; Xun corresponds to failure, which is the failure of his job application. At the same time, Xun means gain and benefit, while Dui means loss. The Dui-Xun image formed by lines one through four suggests benefit first gained and then lost. Moreover, the transformed hexagram is Gu, which is a hexagram of change in one’s occupation. This shows that the dream was very likely using the language of the unconscious to describe, or even predict, Henry’s failed job application.

In his discussion, Jung regarded the stranger in the dream as Henry’s unintegrated unconscious. I, however, think that the dream here is telling a transformed version of a real-life story, and that this stranger very likely corresponds to Henry’s competitor in the job application. Why? Because the hunter and Henry have the same goal: both are going to the railway station, that is, seeking the position. The two of them fight with the Chinese men at the same time, which very likely means that the recruiting company was interacting with both of them at the same time.

On the surface, Henry is eventually saved and escapes the binding of the Chinese men; in fact, this corresponds to his being eliminated from the application process. The hunter, however, remains behind, which very likely corresponds to the recruiting company keeping the competitor for the same position, the person symbolized by the hunter. Dui means coming out and suffering a loss, corresponding to Henry’s job application failure. While Xun means being captured and gain, corresponding to the competitor’s success.

In addition, Henry dreams that this hunter is covered with hunting tools, which likely indicate that this competitor has more competitive advantages. In other words, the dream uses the language of primordial images, and retells the story of Henry applying for a job, encountering obstruction, and being eliminated.

Here, Henry obtained the hexagram by using the random-number method of tossing coins. But through the analysis just now, we know that the hexagram can also be obtained from the images of the dream itself. Either way, dreams use primordial images as their basic language, coming from the deeper layers of the unconscious, and the I Ching does the same. Dreams and the I Ching operate through the same kind of method and language.

In remote antiquity of China, dreams were regarded as one of the most direct channels through which human beings communicated with Heaven and Earth, so their divinatory status was almost as important as turtle-shell divination and yarrow-stalk divination. Ancient texts such as the Zuo Tradition, as well as oracle-bone inscriptions, contain many records in which a ruler has a dream and then performs divination to ask what it means. The Rites of Zhou also records state officials specifically responsible for dream interpretation. But this method has basically been lost today.

Personally, I first read records of dream divination in ancient texts, and then was inspired by Jung’s writings, which led me to think that dreams and divination could be used to explain each other. So I carried out some experiments myself and found this direction worth exploring. I do plan to make a video on using the I Ching to interpret dreams, and explain several more examples.