What Are Dreams In Carl Jung's The Personal And The Collective Unconscious

Sabrina Ellison

Mrs. Walters

English 1113

15 May 2015

What Are Dreams? In Carl Jung’s The Personal and the Collective Unconscious, Jung poses this question: Are our dreams products of the conscious mind or of the unconscious mind? As a general rule, the product of a dream can be either of the conscious mind or of the unconscious mind. The dreams really depend on the aspect of the person’s daily life, their stress levels, their ability to release their own creativity such as artist and writers, and it also depends on the person mental stability and their own personal background. With all of these factors in mind it is truly hard to determine whether dreams are of the conscious mind or of the unconscious mind but I do believe, with my own

I have discussed this topic with my parents recently to decide if dreams were of the conscious mind or of the unconscious mind, but the choice was not easily made. My father often has dreams regarding his previous actions throughout the day such as filing paper work. His dreams can also be based off of how he felt before he went to sleep, whether angry or happy. He often sleep walks and talks as well, on most occasions he talks about numbers or some sort of gibberish that is a mixture of the events that are occurring that he is very well aware of. My mother on the other hand rarely ever dreams but when she does it not a very pleasant sort of dream. They usually consist of her trying to escape some sort of situation, usually one that has placed a lot of stress on her conscious mind. A close friend of mine has dreams where he often dies in strange and unusual ways that appear to be a common dream among the teens in my class, the dream of falling and the sensation causing you to wake

Most of them consist of color and interaction where I am one of the characters in a play or a book I am currently writing or even eventually gain the inspiration to write about; yet I am not myself. I appear as a different person or creature, possible as a dragon, a princess, or even a knight and I take on many quest that involve magic or some sort of fantasy weapon that only I am able to control. Jung states that “Dreams contain images and thought associations which we do not create with conscious intent” (Jung 933). One dream that I remember vividly was later on an inspiration for a story that I began. I was a woman who had a hidden past and I was riding on horseback with a man who was dressed as a knight. We were running from a group of people that were called “hunters,” later on in the dream the person I was perceived as was forced to be watched by the man that had captured me but unfortunately that is where the dream had ended and I woke up to my alarm clock to get ready for school that day. I feel that my dreams are a result of my conscious creativity to write and read fantasy and fiction stories. Yet they are unconscious due to the fact that I do not purposely think of some sort of storyline before I go to bed. The thoughts come to me in my sleep which then causes me to write them down once I wake up and am aware of every little detail that I can possibly remember from