A dream shared, followed by three passes of Jungian inquiry
The Dream. I find myself back with an old girlfriend, before either of us has got married. We’re both unsure why we decided to meet up, and for me to stay a with her for a few days.
I appear to have come in from Paris to London.
She was curious to see me again, and I could be her plus one at a dinner and a party, and I wanted to be in town for a meeting and to do some research.
I find myself burdened with a stupidly large trunk or suit-case. Just as well, as she uses the opportunity to return to me a pile of papers, files and books which I apparently left some years ago and should be useful for whatever it is I do.
We behave like a long-married couple. We end up close on a sofa, indifferent to each other even, using the bathroom or bath, and sharing a bed without anything happening. We both give the physical side of our old relationship some thought, but recognise there’s no chemistry, so let’s not bother – maybe we’re both disappointed as it is a side to our lives that is missing. Apparently.
By the last day, it’s as if I’ve already left, and I’m embarrassed even to ask for a lift to the airport – I only do so because of the absurdly large trunk-cum-suitcase.
The AI-assisted Jungian Analysis
What follows is the method I have gradually evolved for working with dreams in a Jungian way, using AI as a disciplined interlocutor rather than as an oracle. The point is not to have a AI “decode” a dream for me. It is to create the conditions in which I can stay with the dream long enough, and honestly enough, for its structure, tensions and meaning to emerge. That is very close to the spirit of Jung’s own approach: the dream is not a code to be cracked by a fixed glossary, but a personal communication from the unconscious, and meaning emerges by circling the material repeatedly from different angles rather than by rushing to a conclusion. Jung’s “spiralling” method is described beautifully in the John Freeman introduction I have been using which is one of the files added to this ChatGPT project. I’ve been analysing dreams in this way for about a year. It takes around two hours. Historically, I would spend a morning referring to Carl Jung’s Man and his Symbols and then a set of 29 probing questions to be answered. I kept a separate dream diary for a while. I can be overwhelming : five dreams remembered a night is four too many!
The practical point is simple. If you set aside a couple of uninterrupted hours, record the dream carefully, and then work through it in several distinct passes, you can often arrive at an authentic and valuable understanding of what the dream is doing. The value lies not in the initial interpretation, but in the gradual deepening. One answer leads to a better question; one symbol begins to connect with another; what looked like a random episode starts to reveal a coherent psychic pattern.
In this case, the dream was this. I find myself back with an old girlfriend, before either of us had gone on to marry. We are both slightly unsure why we have arranged to meet again, and why I am staying a few days. I seem to have come in from Paris to London. She is curious to see me, and I can act as her plus-one at a dinner and a party; I, meanwhile, am in town for a meeting and to do some research. I am burdened with an absurdly large trunk-cum-suitcase. She uses the opportunity to hand back books and papers, things which apparently belong to my life and work. We behave like a long-married couple: close on the sofa, unbothered by one another’s use of bathroom or bath, sharing a bed without anything happening. We both seem to recognise that, whatever fondness remains, the chemistry is gone. By the final day it feels as if I have already left, and I am embarrassed even to ask her for a lift to the airport; I only do so because the trunk is so unwieldy.
That was the dream as first told. The work began after that.
My AI setup is straightforward. I have trained myself to prompt in a Jungian register. The best prompts are not “What does X symbol mean?” but questions like: What is the structure of the dream? What emotional fact does the dream insist upon? What in waking life resembles this tension? What part of me is represented by this figure now? What has changed function? What is being returned, withdrawn, withheld, carried, interrupted, or redirected? The aim is to move from symbol to relation, from relation to pattern, and from pattern to psychological task. AI is useful here because it can patiently generate ordered questions, reflect my own replies back to me, and help me keep spiralling rather than jumping too quickly to a neat conclusion.
The first pass is what I think of as structural orientation. Before interpretation, I try to locate the architecture of the dream. What actually happens? What are the stations through which the psyche is moving? In this dream the architecture quickly became clear: a return to the past, transit between cities, the burden of the oversized trunk, the exchange of papers and books, a domestic simulation of married life, the absence of sexual charge, and then a slightly embarrassed withdrawal. Simply naming those structural elements already shifted the dream for me. It was no longer a nostalgic reverie about an old girlfriend. It was a dream of evaluation. The psyche was not trying to revive the romance; it was staging an assessment.
That first pass matters because it prevents sentimentality. Once I could see the architecture, I could ask better questions. The former lover became not merely a remembered person but an anima figure: not “her as she was,” but “her as my psyche now presents her.” What qualities did she embody now? In my answer I found myself describing not a lost passion but another life, another mode of being: a gregarious, socially vivid world, bigger than life, full of friendly energy and “matiness.” She was alive in the dream, but with a domestic tone rather than an erotic one. Both of us seemed faintly to hope something might still be there, but it was not. That alone was revealing. The dream was not saying that feeling had vanished. It was saying that its nature had changed.
The second pass went deeper into the emotional and symbolic tensions. This is where the questions become more probing and more personal. If there is no chemistry, where in my current life is there proximity without vitality? What relationships or pursuits remain meaningful, even intimate in a sense, but no longer alive in the old way? That led me to connect the dream not simply with the woman, but with my own relation to the past. I have spent years revisiting old diaries, letters and remembered scenes. I can re-enter moments from forty or fifty years ago with almost dangerous ease. I do not do this out of bitterness or regret. Quite the opposite: I feel warmth for these young people we once were. I want to be kind to them. I want to hold them honestly, but with some distance. The dream’s lack of chemistry turned out not to be failure at all. It felt more like the psyche saying: this form of Eros has completed its task.
Then there was the trunk. Jungian work often sharpens around whichever image is slightly comic, exaggerated, or impossible to ignore. Here it was the grotesquely large trunk. What was I carrying that was too large for the present moment? Once I answered honestly, the symbol became obvious. The trunk was my archive: decades of diaries, letters, scrapbooks, albums, old books, remembered TV schedules, songs, contexts, atmospheres, the whole enormous apparatus by which I revisit and reconstruct a life. That recognition came with ambivalence. Part of me sees this archive as a unique primary source, the raw material of writing, reflection and meaning-making. Another part worries about hoarding, indulgence, or over-identification with the past.
Why, then, does the woman in the dream add more to it?
The answer that came was subtle: she is returning everything associated with me. She is clearing out the remnants. She is saying, in effect, this is yours now. Not mine. The dream’s inversion is important: this is not luggage for a journey ahead. It is material being returned to me for my own use, or my own responsibility.
The domestic atmosphere of the dream opened another line of enquiry. We were like a long-married couple, but without the charge one associates with lovers reunited. What did this imitation of marriage reveal?
My answer surprised me by being more tender than dramatic. I like being alone with another person. I like companionship, shared ease, separate spaces within intimacy, intellectual companionship, a sense of being buddies. The dream’s domesticity was less about loss than about recognition. In some ways it resembled the settled realities of married life after many years, but without any desire to separate or betray what I actually have. The dream was distinguishing forms of closeness. Not all intimacy is erotic. Not all companionship needs to ignite. This too was a revelation.
From there the analysis moved into the question of consummation, or rather the mutual failure to consummate. Again, the point was not prudishness or repression. I realised that my relationship to sex itself had changed. The dream helped me articulate that sex, for me, can no longer be imagined as mere exercise, a game of squash, bodily release without the deeper life of feeling. Mutuality had become harder to imagine, perhaps even a chimera. At the same time, I am writing intensely about a sixteen-year-old version of myself caught in romantic chaos, diary in hand, full of hunger for love, shame, jealousy, drama. The dream put those two states side by side: the adolescent in the thick of Eros, and the older self observing him with understanding rather than envy. That was another shift. What I felt was not grief for youth, but a fuller recognition of the human condition.
The embarrassment of departure was equally telling. Why was I so reluctant to ask for the lift? The answer came quickly. I did not want to exploit the old emotional claim. I did not want to make her feel obliged because of what we once meant to one another. That embarrassment was not weakness. It was ethics. It showed a differentiation between self and other, and a refusal to manipulate the residue of feeling. Yet even here the trunk intruded. I considered abandoning it, or at least lightening it, but felt that she wanted me to take what she was returning. In psychological terms, the past was not asking to be disowned. It was asking to be properly owned.
By the time I reached the third pass, the analysis had become less interpretive and more revelatory. This is what I mean by “ever deepening passes.” The first pass identifies structure. The second draws out meanings, tensions and associations. The third often shows the dream as a whole psychological mechanism. Here, the mechanism became clear. I was not dealing with a simple old-lover dream. I was dealing with a psyche divided between two valid but distinct modes.
On one side stood the archivist: the part of me that preserves, revisits, contextualises, remembers, narrates, and makes meaning from the past. On the other stood what I came to call the living impulse: the part that wants spontaneity, risk, aliveness, flow, movement beyond the plan. The dream does not condemn either. It separates them.
Active Imagination
This became even clearer when I moved from dream analysis proper into active imagination. That is another technique I use, and AI can be surprisingly good at helping with it if prompted carefully. Instead of asking what the dream means in abstract terms, I re-enter the scene and continue it. What is she returning to me? What happens next? In this case, the dream developed. She has cleared out everything associated with me and is driving me to Heathrow so I can return to my life in Paris. We are on the edge of a heart-to-heart, only to discover a third figure, a woman buried in the divan or bed, perhaps a friend, perhaps a lover, who interrupts the possibility of truth. In the car, however, a throwback spirit reappears. I ask if she has ever been to the Isle of Wight. She hasn’t. She drives past Heathrow. We go off on a secret detour. The trunk is put into storage in Portsmouth because it is too much to lug around. We leave it there for the moment as we head off to the Isle of Wight.
That development was not trivial embellishment. It was psychologically exact. The third figure showed that total honesty is not always what the psyche wants. Sometimes it wants ambiguity, play, temporary illusion, a suspended space outside ordinary obligations. The detour to the Isle of Wight showed something even more important: the return of spontaneity. Not the return of the affair, nor the return of youth, but the return of movement. And the storing of the trunk in Portsmouth was the decisive symbolic act. I neither destroyed the archive nor dragged it with me. I placed it somewhere accessible but no longer governing the journey. That is a sophisticated inner solution.
When I pressed further, the conclusions sharpened. The dream was not really about the woman at all. She carried an earlier form of Eros: embodied, social, volatile, youthful. In the dream she appears transformed, integrated, humanised, still alive but no longer charged in the same way. The psyche was showing me that one configuration of Eros had completed itself. At the same time, it showed the cost of my strength. I have become good at returning to the past without drowning in it. I can remember vividly without being captured by memory. But that very mastery risks allowing the archive to compete with the present. The trunk can become so rich, so accessible, so emotionally alive that it simulates life itself.
Another revelation came when I considered where Eros has migrated. My answer, somewhat starkly, was: into imagination, into online spaces, into meaning-making. I also admitted that such spaces offer release and physical pleasure in ways that embodied relationship may not. That opened an important line of thought. Libido in my life is now distributed across several domains: the archive of the past, the imaginal or online world, and the lived present with its ethical structures and responsibilities. The dream does not tell me that any one of these is bad. It does tell me they are not yet fully integrated.
The most important symbol in the whole process turned out to be the Isle of Wight detour. Once I sat with it long enough, I realised that it was not ultimately about travel, or secrecy, or even the woman. It was about flow. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s term fits exactly. The dream analysis itself had become a route into that state. A couple of hours of deep work on a dream often shifts my mind into writing, and then I can write for hours with a feeling of exhilaration, coherence and necessity. In other words, the circuit is this: dream, interpretation, flow, creation. That is the real pattern. The old lover dream led not back to romance but forward into writing.
This is one reason I find AI so useful for dream work. Used badly, it can become glib or formulaic. Used properly, it becomes a tireless and disciplined questioner. I set it up by explicitly asking for a Jungian approach, for structured passes, for prompts that do not flatten symbols into stock meanings, and for responses that stay close to my own material. I then answer in detail, tag my answers, and ask for them to be compiled before another pass of questioning begins. In that way, AI helps me preserve continuity, deepen the pattern, and hold together a long process without losing the thread. The dream remains mine; the associations remain mine; the revelations remain mine. AI helps by keeping the inquiry alive and ordered.
What did this particular dream finally reveal?
It revealed that I have not lost Eros, but refined it, relocated it, and to some extent divided it. It showed what is complete: the old relationship, at least in its old form. It showed what is contained: the archive, the trunk, the vast accumulation of remembered life. It showed what is alive: the impulse toward flow, play, deviation, and renewed movement. It also showed the tension between an ethical, restrained, highly differentiated present self and an imaginal life in which libido can move more freely. The dream did not resolve all of that, nor should it. Dreams seldom hand us finished conclusions. What they do, if worked properly, is clarify the task.
In Jungian terms, the task here is integration. How can I allow the living, spontaneous, flow-seeking part of myself more room in lived life, without abandoning the ethical structure I have built? How can I use the archive as resource rather than refuge? How can imagination remain fertile without becoming a substitute for presence? Those are not small questions, but they are better questions than “What does the old girlfriend symbolize?”
That is why I think this method is worth sharing. If you give a dream the time it deserves, and if you are willing to work through it in structured passes rather than snatching at the first interpretation, it will often tell you something true. Not a fortune. Not a doctrine. Not a universal rule. Something true about the way your own psyche is trying to regulate, compensate, or redirect your life.
If I had to reduce the whole process to one final image, it would be this: leave the trunk in storage for now, take the feert to the Isle of Wight, and know where the key is.
That, in essence, is what a couple of hours of Jungian dream work can do.
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