The Dream: I’m in a workshop or atelier on the second or third floor of a mill-like collection of quasi-industrial workshops. The kind of place for metal and woodworking, with people, mostly middle-aged and older men, building things. I am a team of one working on something when I see a white blob of something at the warehouse window. I go and take a look and grab what is like an octopus. It grows readily, and I sense it is dangerous, grabbing and not something I want, so with difficulty, I get it back to the window, and despite its tentacles, I fling it into the canal, like a pond or moat that runs the length of this side of the building.
Later, to my horror, I find it is back, now a monstrous-sized, pale-coloured, aggressive sea turtle with a chomping beak. I want to get rid of it and run into other workshops to seek advice and tools.
No one is of any use, but I decide to use a blowtorch on the monster. Howling in pain, it opens its beak, which allows me to blowtorch in its mouth and down its throat. It blows up like a puffer fish and dies. I now wonder about finishing the job by hacking its head and limbs.
AI-Assisted Jungian Dream Analysis
The prompt: use a Jungian Dream analysis approach only to help me discover the unique and personal meaning of this Dream through a series of spiralling context-specific questions.
Source: Man and his Symbols, Carl Gustav Jung.
What struck me most during this exercise in Jungian dream analysis was not the apparent violence or absurdity of the dream itself, but how completely my understanding of it changed once I stopped trying to “solve” it and instead allowed the meaning to emerge gradually through what Jung described as a spiralling method of inquiry.
At first glance, the dream appeared straightforward enough: a grotesque threat emerges, transforms, grows dangerous, and is ultimately destroyed. The temptation — especially for anyone familiar with conventional dream dictionaries or simplistic symbolism — is to flatten the imagery immediately into fixed meanings: shadow equals monster, aggression equals repression, turtle equals ancient fear, and so on. But Jung explicitly warns against this kind of reduction. The dream image is not a code to crack but a living communication from the unconscious, highly personal and inseparable from the dreamer’s own associations and emotional life.
So rather than decode the Dream, I used AI to generate prompts and respond to my replies.
That circling proved essential.
The first pass focused largely on the architecture of the dream: workshops, water, craft, old men making things, elevated rooms, archives, industrial canals and restored warehouses. Almost immediately, the dream began attaching itself to my present reality — specifically my clearing out of a tiny study in preparation for six months or more devoted almost entirely to writing. The setting of the dream was not random at all. It reflected the psychological space I already inhabit: one of archives, memory, restoration, craftsmanship, revision and intellectual making.
The second pass moved toward the strange white creature and its transformation. Initially, I interpreted it defensively. Something invasive had appeared at the window. Something shapeless and potentially dangerous. Something that “should not be there.” Yet through questioning, another possibility slowly emerged: what if the danger did not lie in the thing itself, but in how it was handled?
That changed everything.
The dream gradually attached itself not merely to creativity in the abstract, but to very specific material now resurfacing in my waking life: old school letters home, diaries, intimate records, and the preserved emotional archaeology of a formative relationship that lasted from adolescence into adulthood. A relationship deeply tied to memory, sexuality, imagination, mythologising and identity itself.
At that point, the “monster” no longer seemed entirely monstrous.
Instead, it began to resemble emotionally alive material returning from storage.
The third pass was the most revealing because it exposed the real tension beneath the imagery: not fear of the past itself, but fear of what happens when living memory is mishandled. I realised how quickly psychologically rich material can become distorted if treated defensively, over-analysed, aestheticised too harshly, or reduced to mere “content.” The monstrous turtle may not have represented the relationship or memory itself at all. Rather, it represented what emotionally charged material can become once rejected, weaponised, dissected or feared.
The crucial turning point came when I spontaneously reimagined the threatening arrival entirely differently: not as a grasping blob or giant snapping creature, but as Suzi herself passing the warehouse window lightly, tapping on the glass, mouthing a kiss and floating on by.
That single shift revealed more than all the earlier symbolic speculation.
It demonstrated that the psyche was correcting the interpretation from within. Jung repeatedly observed that the unconscious responds dynamically when engaged seriously. The dream was not demanding destruction or confession. It was asking whether emotionally important material could be approached with sufficient tenderness, honesty and symbolic intelligence to avoid becoming monstrous in the first place.
The conclusion I reached surprised me. The analysis was never really about “good” and “evil,” nor simply about repressing or integrating shadow material. It became a meditation on autobiography, creativity and transformation. Specifically: how lived experience can be turned into story without either falsifying it through mythologising or killing it through over-analysis.
The blowtorch in the dream eventually came to symbolise something uncomfortable: my own tendency to approach memory analytically, critically, even destructively. Yet the dream itself refused to end in simple annihilation. Even after the creature’s death, the impulse was toward reinvention — consumption, reuse, transformation into artefact, soup, shell, story.
Which is, of course, precisely what writers do.
In the end, the dream analysis became less about interpreting symbols than about uncovering an attitude. The spiralling method worked because each pass loosened another defensive certainty. The monster dissolved not because it was conquered, but because I finally understood how it had been created psychologically in the first place.
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