Learn the magic of dream amplification Added: 11/29/2006

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Sigmund Freud developed a large psychology base, or which dreams were a part. Carl Jung was both a young colleague and student of Freud's and also developed a complex psychology that included dreams. Yet t heir views and uses of dreams were quite different. Freud identified a level of dreaming where the dream functioned to keep us from being awakened on one hand, and yet cleverly allowed the mind to discharge repressed and disturbing desires by disguising them in other activities and garbage. Jung acknowledged this level of dreaming, but felt that the unconscious was much more vast than Freud had suggested and that dreams were also an attempt on the part of the unconscious to bring about our most wonderful potentials as human beings. Jung felt that dreams were revealing rather than disgusting. What was it revealing? Jung felt that dreams revealed our path to wholeness as unique individuals, what Jung called Individuation.

Because "individuation" means that each individual becomes who they most essentially are, the dream passageway is unique and different for each person. Jung's theory of how to understand dreams follows this rugged individualistic path: "It goes without saying that the dream interpreter/therapist should hold no preconceived opinions based upon a particular theory, but stand ready in every single case to construct a totally new theory of dreams." C.G. Jung in 1933. The full application of Jungian dream therapy involves an understanding of Jungian Depth Psychology. His ideas have been assimilated into Humanistic Psychology and the Human Potential Movement in ways that have led to a proliferation of techniques now commonly used though rarely acknowledged. One of those ideas is dream amplification.

Dream amplification, as the name implies, is an unfolding and bringing out of a small image its full richness and depth, the associations that someone else in the culture might make to the image and the meanings that might apply to those is independent of our particular culture, such as concerns about birth, death, marriage, success and aspiration.

There are four stages of Jungian Dream Amplification. The first level of amplification involves the dreamer's ideas, thoughts, hunches about the overall motive of the dream. This is the outer most surface meaning of the dream. This is called Personal Association.

The second stage of dream amplification is natural amplification. This is a slightly deeper layer of meaning. "Natural" is often at variance with cultural and archetypal meanings. For example, if you dream of a lion, its natural amplification might be a sense of majesty or leadership.

The third stage of dream amplification is cultural amplification. This layer is approximately the same depth as natural, but here it begins to shade into the metaphoric and symbolic meanings of the archetypal. At this layer you find associates to the dream motif that a well-informed person with cultural awareness would know.

The final stage of Jungian's dream amplification is the Archetypal Amplification stage. This is the deepest level of association, in which a particular dream motif or symbol within the dream is located in mythology, folklore, or religious imagery. Those motifs which over an extended period of time have become meaningful to a large number of individuals are the repositories of archetypal content.

It is important to understand that amplification is not free association. Free association may lad to other ideas and feelings not directly connect to the d ream specifics. Amplification honors the precise expression of the dream and attempts to uncover out of what memories, feelings, insight or experience the dreamer has formed or created the dream. Using this dream amplification technique to bring out a creative relationship between the conscious and the unconscious in terms of dreams may be said to be "dreaming the dream onward". But the creativity doesn't stop with understanding. It begins there. Were does it go? While each individual has his or her own path, some generalizations are usually made that we are embodied mortal creatures and our stage is the world itself. Whether our paths of wholeness are leading us to connect with practical or cosmic realities, the dramatizing of Jung's movements are not sure.

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