Why are dreams so hard to understand?

Question: If dreams are messages sent to inform our consciousness, why are they so obscure?

That has puzzled me too. I have often asked reproachfully, “Why does this damned unconscious talk such a Chinese difficult language? Why doesn’t it tell us clearly what’s the matter?” Now Jung’s answer was that it obviously can’t. It doesn’t speak the language of the rational mind. Dreams are the voice of our instinctive animal nature or ultimately the voice of cosmic matter in us. This is a very daring hypothesis, but I’ll venture to say that the collective unconscious and organic atomic matter are probably two aspects of the same thing. So the dreams are ultimately the voice of cosmic matter. Therefore, just as we cannot understand the behavior of atoms (look at the Chinese language modern physicists have to use to describe the behavior of an electron), so we have to use the same kind of language to describe the deeper layers of the dream world.

The dream takes us into the mysteries of nature strange to our rational mind. We can compare it to atomic physics, where the most complicated formulas are not sufficient to describe what is happening. I don’t know why nature has constructed our rational mind in a way that prevents us from understanding the whole of nature. We are born with a brain which seeming can understand only certain aspects., Perhaps there will be later mutations on another planet where Nature will invent a brain which can understand these things.

- Marie Louise von Franz (from Fraser Boa’s The Way of the Dream), p. 216