“AI provides powerful tools for dream exploration by instantly analyzing dream journals, tracking recurring symbols, and offering interpretations across multiple psychological traditions. While AI excels at uncovering thematic patterns, genuine insight ultimately relies on your personal associations and felt sense of meaning.” Thus spake AI.
As my clients know, I often use dreams in our work together. The reason is dreams are, as Freud said, the royal road to a person’s unconscious. While popular books, and it seems, artificial intelligence, suggest common symbolic ideas I think we have to practice a lot more discretion. We do not all share the same cultural background, particularly here in Australia – which is multicultural and the symbols of those with a Germanic background are not going to be the same as those from Iran. This means we can’t really flip open a dream interpretation dictionary, or even get anything particularly useful from AI.
The quote from Google’s AI in response to the words I used in the title of this piece at least recognizes that “genuine insight ultimately relies on your personal associations and felt sense of meaning.” It does. Using AI to interpret your dreams isn’t ultimately useful. I don’t write this because I’m worried my job will disappear. On the contrary I never just interpret dreams anyway. I am always interested in what associations my client has, and also what they suggest the dreams are referring to. The old stereotype of analyst interpreting a person’s dreams is not one I’ve ever followed. Work with my clients is collaborative.
The unconscious is a personal space, not a collective one. This means there are few, if any, common keys. Dreaming of a coil of rope might be a snake, or a coil of rope. Understanding its meaning comes from the conversation we have with the client, not some separate resource.
Naturally, the statement “the unconscious is a personal space” is going to bring to mind Carl Jung’s idea of the collective unconscious. What about that? First of all, the personal unconscious just contains personal memories of experiences, while the collective unconscious refers to the so-called deepest layer of the human psyche, a supposed shared reservoir of universal memories, instincts, and symbolic patterns. There is no doubt that we share biology, but do we actually share psychology? I’m less sure about that, at least in this form. What we do have is a rich cultural human fabric that embraces the world. One that is added to as we travel the globe and expand our immediate association with it at a personal level. In other words, unless we are exposed to the imagery at some personal level, the personal unconscious only then embraces further images. To suggest otherwise, as Jung did, is to venture too far into theory, without evidence.
Doing away with Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious as he described it simultaneously does away with dictionaries of dream interpretation and ultimately using AI to interpret dreams. You really can’t pick out images from your dreamscape and find one on one meanings from external sources.
We should remember that Artificial Intelligence isn’t actually intelligent as we are, it merely gathers together our ideas into mostly intelligible forms. It thus cooks up for our consumption what we have put into it. A tradition of dictionaries of dream interpretation doesn’t automatically make the concept real. In the end, we still have to explore our own inner landscapes for these belong only to ourselves and it there that meaning is made.
Now it may be that an image is so deeply associated for us with a particular meaning that we have taken it on board and it has, indeed, become integrally associated with our psychology that its interpretation actually is what might be written down in some dream interpretation dictionary. If this is the case, then go with it. My point is, however, don’t automatically assume that an external authority actually is in tune with your individual psychology. More often than not, it isn’t.
