The Dream: There’s a deep, ancient stone-lined trench that zigzags through or across England. It’s the width of a large room – probably 15ft to 30ft wide, sometimes just 6ft deep, at other times maybe 20ft or more deep – exaggerated with buildings built alongside it over the centuries.
I’m taking a tour of French kids along it. Imagine Hadrian’s Wall, but an ancient trench. Was it a barrier? Was it a conduit? Both probably. This trench goes through towns, drops over cliff edges and zigzags.
I’m leading the tour from a bus that may fly or hover. The high school or undergraduate students are bright, bohemian, and French. I know my stuff, the history of the trench and its architecture. I address them in English, but I can also speak French. How much the kids are interested in the trench more than in each other is another matter.
At some point, we get out of the bus, in a market square above the trench, before entering it again on foot. At some point, I discover I can levitate. I can fly off the ground. At first, leading them, I may find I am hurrying them along out of danger for some reason. And when the trench drops down a step bank, I can grab them one at a time and fly them swiftly to safety.
Jungian Dream Analysis:
What struck me most about this exercise was not that the dream was “decoded,” but that it gradually revealed its own internal logic through sustained questioning. The process did not impose meaning from outside. Instead, meaning emerged through a kind of spiralling dialogue between image, memory, feeling, association and reflection. This is very close to the approach described by and especially Jung’s “spiralling” method of understanding, where a symbol is revisited repeatedly from different angles until a wider pattern slowly becomes visible.
At first, the trench seemed merely an intriguing piece of dream architecture — an impossible stone-lined ravine crossing England like an inverted Hadrian’s Wall. Yet through questioning, it became apparent that I consistently resisted interpreting it as ruin, wound or repression. Instead, I repeatedly described it as inhabited, integrated and adapted over centuries into everyday life. It was not forgotten history, but living continuity.
That distinction mattered.
The trench evolved psychologically during the analysis:
- barrier became conduit,
- conduit became settlement,
- settlement became thoroughfare,
- and finally a symbolic route through which movement, imagination and guidance occurred.
The dream also revealed how strongly I associate meaning with landscape, architecture and historical continuity. The trench belonged emotionally to the North of England — damp stone, lichens, shade, age and border-country atmosphere. Not fantasy detached from reality, but an intensified symbolic version of places and feelings already embedded in me.
Another discovery was the importance of movement. The entire dream moves:
- the bus hovers,
- the students drift,
- the route descends,
- the journey continues,
- and eventually I rediscover levitation.
What emerged was not escapism, but mobility — the ability to traverse psychological and historical terrain. The levitation did not feel like power in the heroic sense. It felt remembered. Familiar. A recovered capacity. In earlier life I often dreamt of flying or levitating by controlling breath. Returning to that sensation in this dream felt joyful and strangely natural.
The role I occupied in the dream also became clearer. I was not merely a historian or lecturer, but something closer to a guide, director or “realisateur” — someone helping younger people move through symbolic terrain. The students themselves mattered because they embodied possibility: emerging adulthood before the fixed structures of career, marriage and obligation fully arrive. Their distractedness was realistic too; youth balancing eros, friendship and curiosity against deeper attention.
Importantly, the dream was not dark. There was no collapse, no despair, no apocalypse. Even the danger came from outside the trench, not from the ancient structure itself. The trench remained stable, navigable and alive.
What this process ultimately achieved was not a final interpretation, but a much richer relationship with the dream itself. The questioning transformed the dream from a sequence of images into a living symbolic system connected to:
- history,
- storytelling,
- imagination,
- youth,
- memory,
- continuity,
- creativity,
- guidance,
- and movement through life.
Rather than reducing the dream, the length process of answering forty or more context specific prompts enlarged it.
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