Whereas Freud saw dreams as serving the strictly biological function of keeping the human organism asleep, Jung saw them as an essential part of human development. For Jung, the unconscious serves a compensatory function, and this gets reflected in dreams.
If I identify as strong then this becomes conscious and my weakness becomes unconscious; my disowned weakness is then likely to manifest in my dreams. In the Jungian sense, dreams bridge the conscious and the unconscious, and offer potential insight into our ongoing development as a human being; what Jung called ‘the individuation process’.
Jung also worked by exploring associations to dream images. Though where Freud used these images as the starting point for free association, Jung kept closer to the dream material. By doing this for as many of the dream images as possible, multiple layers of dream meaning can become apparent.
It was Jung who suggested that dream material can also tap into an archetypal layer of symbolism that represents humanity’s collective experience of itself. In this way, dreams can also be taken as a bridge between the individual and the collective.
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