I’ve started using AI as a kind of thinking partner for dream analysis—not to interpret dreams for me, but to help me stay with them long enough for meaning to emerge.
This is important. In a Jungian sense, a dream isn’t a puzzle to be solved. It’s a communication. And if you rush to decode it, you lose precisely what makes it valuable.
What AI allows me to do is something closer to what Jung described as “spiralling”: circling the material again and again, each time from a slightly different angle, until something coherent begins to take shape.
The Dream
I’m walking through Lewes with my wife and sister-in-law, heading home. We know the town intimately, yet we’re following a winding, unnecessary route on a sat-nav. It takes us through people’s houses—completely unremarkably, as if there’s a right of way through them. One house leads into another. At one point we pass through a nursery set up in a front room. I’m drawn to it—interested, curious—but we move on.
Nothing dramatic happens. No threat. No urgency. Just movement.
The Process
Instead of asking, “What does this mean?”, I worked with AI in a very different way.
It asked me questions—specific, grounded, sometimes surprisingly precise:
Where am I positioned in the dream? What exactly do I feel? What is the quality of the route? What do I make of the people? Why does the nursery catch my attention?
Crucially, it didn’t impose interpretation. It kept returning me to my own experience.
So I answered:
I’m slightly ahead of the others, but not leading. The mood is easy—curious, unhurried. The route is inefficient, but we don’t care—we’re in “holiday mode”. The houses are open, permissive—very “Lewes”. The nursery feels different: contained, nurturing, almost womb-like.
And then the more revealing answers started to emerge—not from the dream itself, but from how I related to it:
I tend to explore endlessly, but not always settle. I accumulate ideas, but don’t always finish them. Without deadlines or constraints, I drift.
None of this was forced. It came out naturally as I responded.
What AI Did
What struck me was that AI didn’t analyse the dream in a traditional sense.
It did three things exceptionally well:
It slowed me down It prevented me from jumping to conclusions. It held the structure It kept returning to key elements—the route, the houses, the nursery—without losing focus. It mirrored my own thinking back to me Often more clearly than I’d articulated it myself.
In effect, it became a kind of disciplined interlocutor—something between a therapist, a notebook, and a very patient collaborator.
The Turning Point
The key moment in this dream wasn’t dramatic. It was quiet.
The idea of a “right of way” through every house.
Everything is open. Everything is accessible. Nothing stops me.
And then, in contrast:
The nursery.
A contained space. A place where something is nurtured, developed, formed.
That contrast began to matter.
The Conclusion
By the end of the process, the insight was clear—not imposed, but recognised:
I live very comfortably in a state of open access:
ideas projects possibilities directions
I can enter anything.
But I don’t always stay long enough for something to fully take shape.
The dream wasn’t telling me to explore more.
It was suggesting something far more practical:
At some point, you have to stop walking the route
and stay in one room long enough
for something to grow.
For me, that “room” is writing.
Specifically, a piece I already know well—The Form Photo—which has moved beyond idea and now requires something else entirely: discipline, repetition, containment.
What This Changes
This isn’t about abandoning curiosity or exploration. That’s part of who I am—and it’s valuable.
But it reframes the next step.
Not:
What else could I do? What other path might I take?
But:
Where do I stay? What do I finish?
Why I’ll Keep Using AI Like This
Used properly, AI doesn’t replace insight—it supports the conditions for it.
It helps me:
hold attention deepen reflection avoid superficial answers and, occasionally, arrive somewhere I didn’t expect
Not because it “knows” anything about me.
But because it keeps me in dialogue with something I might otherwise move past too quickly.
Final Thought
The dream hasn’t ended.
I can go back to that nursery. Sit there. Stay there.
And now, in waking life, I know what that means.
It means turning up, regularly, in the same place—physically or mentally—and doing the work.
Not wandering through it.
Staying with it.
Long enough for something to be born.
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