The mirror of our dreams

If one takes them seriously as subjective dramas, dreams constantly provide us with new insights about ourselves. Some intuitive arts, such as horoscopy, graphology, chiromancy, phrenology, and the like, can indeed also often provide surprising bits of self-knowledge, but dreams have a great advantage over these techniques in that they give us a dynamic, continuous, self-diagnosis and also clarify smaller fluctuations and momentary erroneous attitudes or specific modes of reaction. For instance, a person can, in principle, be modest, never overvaluing himself, but can become momentarily inflated as the result of some success. A dream will correct this immediately and in doing so will inform the dreamer not only that he or she may, as a general rule, be such-and-such, but that “yesterday in connection with that matter, you were on the wrong track in such-and-such a way.” Through constantly taking dreams into consideration something is produced which resembles a continuous dialogue of the conscious ego with the irrational background of the personality, a dialogue by means of which the ego is constantly revealed from the other side, as if there were a mirror, as it were, in which the dreamer can examine his own nature.

'- Marie Louise von Franz, Dreams, p. 5