Dream 1: I seek to mate with a huge praying mantis.
Over the course of days, I appear to desire to mate with a human-sized praying mantis. The danger of death is great. I take the plunge, as it were. The mantis wants what I can give, but also wants to end the job by biting my head off. Held firmly, the act is concluded. Later, while still held, tiny praying mantis fry are born and fly off.
Dream 2: I deal with the inconsiderate motorist who cuts everyone off.
Fed up with dodging the rampant bad behaviour and driving of a character, he is hoisted by his own petard when he skids and does doughnuts when meeting other traffic on a slippery road. He seethes with rage, not having got caught up in the fracas this time, I leap in and extract the character. He is like a maggot-being with a human head, a hand for a foot, and no larger than an action figure. Though repulsed, my solution is to bite the hand off the foot end and toss the rest of the body/head to bystanders. He drives off. A person I now recognise, holding a lamp, appears later during a debate on what to do. I don’t want to let on that I know he is the reckless driver.
What I Did With These Dreams
I did not begin by trying to “solve” these dreams as if they were riddles. That is the first important point. A Jungian approach to dream analysis does not treat a dream as a fixed code in which a praying mantis means one thing, a reckless driver means another, and a maggot means something else. The dream is more personal than that. It comes from my unconscious, and so the real question is not “What does this symbol mean in general?” but “Why has my unconscious chosen this image for me, now?”
This is where the spiralling method becomes useful.
Rather than leap to a conclusion, I used AI to generate a sequence of context-specific prompts. These prompts did not impose an interpretation. They invited me to circle the dream several times from different directions: emotional, bodily, symbolic, biographical, moral, creative and practical. Each pass brought something different into focus.
The first pass looked at the surface images. The praying mantis dream seemed to involve danger, desire, sex, death, fertility and something alien or quasi-divine. The reckless driver dream seemed to involve anger, bad behaviour, disgust, recklessness, exposure and shadow. At this stage the dreams looked mythic and grotesque. They were vivid, disturbing, almost cinematic.
The second pass asked what I felt. This was crucial. I realised that the mantis dream was not, for me, simply about sexual violence or horror. It was more transactional, more ritualistic, almost like an encounter in which something had to be extracted or achieved. I described it as more like an IVF clinic or even a dental appointment than a romantic or erotic union. There were erotic tones, but the pleasure lay in the outcome, not the act. Something was being produced.
That changed the dream.
The tiny praying mantis offspring, flying away like dandelion seeds or mayflies, began to look like ideas, stories, creative possibilities: alarming, original, numerous, and hard to control. I began to see that the dream might be about giving my imagination freer rein, allowing stranger material to emerge, and accepting that what is born from the unconscious will not necessarily be tidy, polite or easily managed.
At this point, the dream seemed to be about creativity.
I recognised the danger. If I surrender to the writing, ordinary identity can dissolve. When I am in flow, I am not quite the same reasonable person who sits at the desk with a plan. I can be carried away. I can enter material that is erotic, violent, comic, monstrous, shameful, beautiful or ridiculous. The fear is not intimacy itself. The fear is exposure, ridicule, and the possibility that what comes out of me may shock me or others.
Then the second dream brought the interpretation down to earth.
The reckless driver was not merely a public menace or some external idiot behaving badly. Once pulled from the car, he became pathetic: a small maggot-being with a human head and a hand for a foot. That image revealed something important. The inflated, dangerous, inconsiderate figure was, underneath, diminished and malformed. The dream took the aggressive, entitled, reckless man and exposed him as something almost absurd.
But then came the harder part.
I bit him.
That detail meant I could not remain morally superior. I could not simply say, “This dream is about other people who behave badly.” My own response was primitive, instinctive and disproportionate. I met instinct with instinct. I became part of the dream’s violence.
At first I understood this as shadow material: anger, sexual instinct, risk-taking, rebellion, the part of me that dislikes being powerless and resents those who break rules or endanger others. I recognised the kind of people who trigger me: people who make assumptions, behave carelessly, disregard others, break rules others stick to, and then seem to expect to get away with it.
But the most important turn came later.
I realised there was another, more immediate way to understand both dreams. They were not only about creativity, sex, the anima, the shadow or dangerous instinct in some abstract Jungian sense. They were also about anger management.
That was the real breakthrough.
Recently I have had several incidents where I have felt myself tipping. I can be Mr Nice Guy, Mr Reasonable, the person who wants to explain, repair, apologise, listen and behave well. But I can also feel myself tipping toward something ghastly: verbal lashing out, physical irritation, making something worse than it needs to be, escalating a situation when it would be far better to pause.
That recognition made the dreams suddenly practical.
The reckless driver on the slippery road became an image of emotional loss of traction. Something happens. I feel sidelined, belittled, ignored, out of control or at risk of ridicule. The road becomes slippery. My heart rate rises, sometimes almost towards panic. I can feel the anger building and, disturbingly, part of me wants to let it play out. I want to “lance the wound” by saying the thing I will regret or doing the thing I should not do. The outburst promises release.
That is the dangerous bargain.
The mantis dream now also changed. The threatened loss of the head no longer meant only sexual danger or creative surrender. It also meant losing my head in the ordinary phrase: losing judgment, perspective, proportion and self-command. The fear of decapitation became the fear of being taken over by reaction.
In both dreams, there is a tipping point.
In the mantis dream, the act could end in death, violation or disaster, but it does not. It is negotiated. Something is achieved. There are others in the background helping. The danger is real, but not inevitable.
In the reckless driver dream, the car spins, the driver is exposed, I react violently, and then later there is secrecy, recognition and moral discomfort. I know something. I know who the reckless driver is. I also do not want to expose him. That too became meaningful. Perhaps I do not want only to condemn bad behaviour in others, because I know I have my own version of it. I know I too would like to keep my bad behaviour hidden.
This was uncomfortable, but useful.
The dreams began to show me a recurring sequence:
First, I feel a threat to dignity or control.
Then I feel physiological escalation: heart rate, panic, urgency.
Then I interpret the situation darkly.
Then I feel the temptation to discharge the feeling through words or action.
Then comes damage, regret or the need to apologise.
Then comes reflection and the hope of better behaviour next time.
The most encouraging discovery was that there is a moment before the spin. I am not entirely without agency. I can sometimes still choose to see the good side rather than the bad. I can “dress the situation differently.” I can imagine how a kind, decent, responsible person would interpret it. I can step back, breathe, listen and respond like an adult.
This is not repression. It is reframing.
The Jungian value of the process is that it did not simply tell me to calm down. Nor did it excuse the anger. It gave the anger a form. It showed me the reckless driver, the maggot-being, the mantis, the threatened head, the flying fry. It allowed me to look at the emotional pattern symbolically before I could name it directly.
That is what the spiralling achieved.
The first spiral gave me the archetypal images.
The second spiral connected them to creativity, sexuality, shame, exposure and the fear of producing material that might be shocking.
The third spiral brought the dreams into daily life: anger, escalation, panic, apology and the need to interrupt the pattern earlier.
My takeaways are these.
First, I should not treat violent or grotesque dream imagery as proof that I am monstrous. The dream exaggerates in order to get my attention. It speaks in images because ordinary language has not yet done the work.
Second, the anger is not just anger. It often begins as fear: fear of being belittled, sidelined, ridiculed, ignored or made powerless.
Third, the body knows before the mind admits it. The rising heart rate is the warning light. That is the moment to stop, not the moment to accelerate.
Fourth, my imagination and my anger may be drawing from the same deep energy. If I do not give that energy symbolic form through writing, story, theatre, humour or reflection, it may seek expression through behaviour.
Fifth, apology matters, but apology is not enough. The real work is to catch the emotional skid before the car spins.
Finally, I take from this process a practical image: shout “cut.” If the ghastly part of me appears, I can treat it as a character who has stepped onto the stage too soon and too violently. I do not need to deny him. I do not need to let him drive. I can write him, observe him, cast him, contain him, and then stop the scene.
That, for me, is the value of this kind of Jungian dream work. It does not hand down an interpretation from above. It helps me enter into conversation with the dream, return to it from several angles, answer honestly, and slowly discover what my own unconscious may already be trying to tell me.
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