Feeling one’s way into the dream

The problem of “weight and measure” appears also in psychological work. This motif often alludes to one of the difficult problems in analysis, namely the extent to which a dream motif should be taken concretely and/or the extent to which it should be taken symbolically. There is no rule for that. If, for instance, someone dreams that he is insulted by or insults someone who personifies the shadow, one does not know how far that person represents the inner shadow or to what extent the dreamer – taken concretely – should avoid the real person. This is exactly a problem of weight and measure. Jung says that one must feel one’s way into a dream; it is a question of feeling, which is a weighing and valuing function, a feeling-like distribution of weight and measure. The meaning of the dream is never found by logic alone.

- Marie Louise von Franz, Dreams, p. 90