My experience is largely negative with respect to dream dictionary approaches to understanding dreams. Usually most of the particular content of dreams has personal, subjective associations. However, I do see a number of regular motifs that are so common that they can almost always be used to understand a dream and its structure. This structure is commonly seen across dreams and can quickly make understanding dream content (isolated from its meaning to the dreamer) seem familiar.
I have attempted to create my own dream dictionary which focuses on the objective qualities of dreams. I probably need to revisit this effort as my views have changed a little since my initial effort.
But I think I will try to create a brief distillation of the motifs and list them here in a single post:
Energy/light - the amount and kind of energy or light and its contrast between different spaces or times in a dream indicates the relative level of conscious awareness or energy in one's brain/psyche; water, electricity, fire and common forms of energy; the more energy the closer to consciousness the dream becomes
Dream characters - note the relative age and sex of other characters to your own dream "ego" and also the number of people named or un-named in the dream; in what ways do you act independently or cooperatively in the dream?; when does this change?; all dream characters are different voices inside your own psyche even if they are a reflection of people that you know
Polarities - note the tension of opposition; opposition of dream characters, any two objects set side-by-side or following one after another; compare and contrast pairs to note differences
Containers - note how physical spaces or objects are contained one within another
Choice - decisions are often made and may differ between dream characters; make note of the decisions both "on screen" and "off screen" and how different characters choose differently
Direction of motion - look for horizontal or vertical circles; moving upwards or downwards?; full or partial circles?
Self-reference - Often one can find in the oddities of a dream an example of a dream creating an image that makes the same point on multiple levels and references consciousness itself
Two rooms, two successive events - I have long suspected that this motif in dreams reflects two potentially simultaneous dreams taking place in our two separate cerebral hemispheres which our dream recall then stitches together; one room is brighter than the other; one event is more detailed than the other
Many of the above motifs reflect aspects of consciousness and what Carl Jung called the four functions of consciousness: thinking, feeling, sensation and intuition. Although the nature of the functions themselves are always clearly symbolized (although I suspect some such associations may exist), the pattern of one's personality type and the way in which each cognitive function acts like an independent voice in one's psyche is often represented. In short one can line up the four functions in order from strong to weak in one's psyche...the weakest is "contained" by the next strongest and so forth giving rise to the container metaphor pointing toward the relationship between the voices of one's conscious functions. As different voices the four functions tend to take up different motifs (energy/light, polarization, direction of motion contrasts, choice differences, etc.).
The same age, same sex are Jung's shadow figures while opposite sex are men's anima or women's animus figures. The significance of this is that the shadow figures represent the stronger functions but where there is some ambiguity in one's ego's choices the shadow represents the opposite choice that you might have made. Also the anima/animus represent the weaker functions but are seen as either desired and complimentary or as despised and unacceptable. So for a man's psyche there is his stronger conscious functions as ego (hero) and the shadow (sidekick) is a same sex counter figure who chooses a different balance, perhaps, of the stronger functions, the anima (soul mate) which is his weaker functions seen as a needed compliment but other than the ego's capabilities and the "shadow-anima" (outcast) which shows the weaker functions acting against what the ego would choose as a compliment. Some myths show a pairing of the higher (ego-anima) and lower (shadow-shadow anima) couples which I believe reflects the overall balance of the psyche's cognitive functions as voices.
To understand much of the above you have to have some familiarity and comfort with the MBTI or Kersey Temperament sorter and see how your own personality type influences your behavior and how it helps/hinders your ability to interact with others. Seeing this then translates well to dream content. Conflicts in dreams tend to reflect conflicts in cognitive functions as used in your psyche.
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