Dream: I’m with a small group working on installing a technical kit on a high alpine peak late in the skiing season. We might be 3000m or more up. There is snow between the bare rocks. Each of us has a different task. It feels as much like buddies out on a picnic as getting a job done. Over a period of clear-weather days, I’ve set up in a spot sheltered under an outcrop, and now have manhandled a contraption that is like a transformer or heat pump – it’s about 4ft high, 5ft wide and 10ft long. We’re working against the clock as we use the ski lift system to get in and out. It is both late in the day and late in the season. We are running out of time to complete the task.
Back in the valley bottom, over 2000m below, where it already feels like late spring, I see a piece on TV where a builder says he’s impressed that he’s sold his entire stock of stone building slabs. This is far too much for a single House. We are then shown a row of 7 or 8 large detached houses, each different, typical of the 1960s and 70s, all behind metal mess hoarding as if condemned, on a steep hill by a suburban road. The developer/builder, an attractive woman, describes how she and her partner bought the entire Street. We go inside to be told, as if in a regional TV programme, what she has planned.
I started to type this Dream into ChatGPT to analyse it. I go back over the details, intent on remembering them, only to realise I’m still dreaming. So I wake up and type it out for real.
ChatGPT prompt: Use Jungian Dream analysis techniques to offer a series of context-specific prompts to help elicit meaning from the following Dream. Stick to the Jungian approach and aim for succinctness.
Source: Man and his Symbols, Carl Gustav Jung
One of the most interesting things about using AI to explore dreams through a Jungian lens is that the process is not really about “getting the answer.” It is about circling meaning slowly enough for something deeper to emerge.
Carl Jung himself warned against treating dreams like puzzles with fixed symbolic translations. A mountain does not simply “mean ambition,” nor does a woman automatically “mean desire.” Instead, dreams are personal communications from the unconscious to the conscious mind, using symbols selected specifically for the dreamer. As John Freeman explains in his introduction to Jung’s Man and His Symbols, the dream is “an integral, important, and personal expression of the individual unconscious,” and therefore cannot be decoded through a standard glossary of meanings.
That principle became central to this exercise.
Rather than asking AI to interpret the dream outright, I first gave it the dream exactly as remembered — untouched, unedited, and without any attempt to impose conclusions upon it. AI then responded not with definitive answers, but with a structured set of Jungian prompts organised around the symbolic architecture of the dream itself.
The dream naturally divided into sections:
- the high alpine installation,
- the suburban redevelopment in the valley,
- the television documentary framing,
- and finally the strange moment where I began analysing the dream inside the dream before waking properly.
Instead of “solving” these symbols, the AI approached them dialectically, much as Jung often did. The prompts explored oppositions:
- mountain versus valley,
- machinery versus houses,
- masculine technical labour versus feminine redevelopment,
- temporary structures versus permanent dwellings,
- participation versus observation.
Crucially, I then replied personally to each question. These replies became the real material of the analysis.
For example, when asked why the alpine task felt technological rather than spiritual, I connected it directly to my waking attempt to reorganise my study in order finally to write seriously again — and to my uncertainty over whether this preparation represented genuine progress or simply elaborate procrastination.
When asked about the “late skiing season,” I immediately recognised the emotional undertone: publication or screenplay production now feels like an “end-of-life goal.” Yet the dream itself did not feel tragic. There was pressure, but also companionship and purpose.
Other questions revealed recurring patterns I had not consciously connected:
- that nearly all successful creative work in my past involved collaboration,
- that female creative partners often played crucial organisational and motivational roles,
- that my unrealised projects already resemble a coherent “body of work,” even if they remain unfinished,
- and that I naturally experience life both as participant and observer because of decades spent in television, blogging, diarising, and retrospective reflection.
The AI then took these responses and re-integrated them into a second-stage interpretation. This is where the process became recognisably Jungian.
Rather than moving in a straight line toward a conclusion, the discussion spiralled repeatedly around the same symbolic material from slightly different angles. Jung’s editor John Freeman described this beautifully when he wrote that Jung’s method “spiral[s] upward over his subject like a bird circling a tree.” Each pass reveals a little more structure until, gradually, a larger wholeness appears.
That is exactly what occurred here.
At first, the dream appeared to concern mountains, building materials, ski lifts, and suburban houses. But after several passes through questioning and response, a deeper thematic structure emerged:
- creative work as infrastructure rather than inspiration,
- the tension between solitary striving and collaborative completion,
- ageing without surrender,
- and the attempt to organise decades of experience, diaries, fiction, memory, and unrealised projects into one integrated creative landscape.
Perhaps the most revealing moment came at the end of the process.
The dream concluded with a “false awakening” in which I began typing the dream into ChatGPT while still dreaming. The AI focused heavily on this because it represented consciousness observing itself. When finally asked who the “real dreamer” was — the man on the mountain, the viewer in the valley, or the observer typing — I answered simply:
“The writer at a QWERTY keyboard.”
That response clarified something the dream itself already seemed to know.
The unconscious was not presenting me as someone fantasising about becoming a writer someday. Instead, it staged a drama about a writer attempting, late in the season, to construct the psychological and practical infrastructure necessary to complete the work before the lifts stop running and the snow melts away.
What makes AI unexpectedly effective in this process is not that it possesses hidden wisdom. Rather, it can patiently sustain the spiralling method Jung himself valued:
- returning to symbols repeatedly,
- holding tensions without prematurely resolving them,
- asking context-specific questions,
- integrating personal replies,
- and gradually revealing relationships between apparently disconnected images.
The result feels less like “AI interpreting a dream” and more like a structured dialogue between conscious reflection and unconscious imagery — with AI acting as facilitator, organiser, and persistent questioner.
In Jungian terms, that distinction matters enormously.
Leave a Reply