Turn Your Dreams into Pictures

Making art from dreams, Jung insisted, breeds creative independence

My daily practice includes turning my dreams into pictures, as early after getting up as possible, often before coffee. I try to play, not work, at this, grabbing mixed media supplies from the art garden of my desk - pencils, markers, water color brushes, oil pastels, inks, neocolors - and sketch and color away. Some of my pictures stay in the sketchbooks. Others surface on social media, because the little boy artist in me wants to shout, “Look at this!” Whatever the merits of my productions, I almost always feel juiced and happy after this creative workout, and the boy artist in me may stay around all day.

Jung was greatly in favor of turning dreams into pictures. Visual art was central to his personal healing and to restoring his balance in the thick of his “confrontation with the unconscious” when his daily practice incuded painting a mandala. He developed the skills to do visual justice to his big dreams. We saw that with the publication of the Red Book. The recent publication of The Art of C.G. Jung shows us even more of his range as artist, sculptor, creator.

In a 1929 lecture "The Aims of Psychotherapy", Jung issued a passionate appeal for art therapy - specifically, for the art of turning dreams into pictures.

First, he noted that it is often a very positive development in a patient's inner life when their dreams featured photos, paintings or films and even more so when the dreamer declared "If only I were a painter I would make a picture of it". When this happened he would encourage his patients to actually draw or paint their dreams and abandon any protestations that they lacked artistic ability. "Many of my more advanced patients, then, began to paint."

He noted that this shifted the dreamer away from a passive attitude to dreams, and to life. "He puts down on paper what he has passively seen, thereby turning it into a deliberate act. He not only talks about it, he is actually doing something about it."

In making a dream picture, the dreamer comes to reflect on a dream in depth and starts to bring vital energy from the dreamworld into embodied life. "The concrete shaping of the image enforces a continuous study of it, in all its parts, so that it can develop its effects to the full. This invests the bare fantasy with an element of reality, which lends it greater weight and greater driving power."

He insists that making art from dreams helps the dreamer to become "creatively independent". The patient no longer depends on the doctor's opinion. "By painting himself he gives shape to himself." He has gone beyond ego to work with his "interior agent" and "the hidden foundation of psychic life".

Then he goes right to the top, or perhaps over the top. “It is impossible for me to describe the extent to which this discovery changes the patient's standpoint and values, and how it shifts the center of gravity to his personality. It is as though the earth had suddenly discovered that the sun was the center of the planetary orbits and of its own earthy orbit as well."

I won’t try to top Jung but I will add this: creating from dreams, wild and free, lets out the inner artist and the magical child. A great way to entertain the kind of spirits we want around.

Quotes from C.G.Jung, "The Aims of Psychotherapy" in Collected Works volume 16 trans R.F.C.Hull (Princeton: Bollingen Series, 1985) pp. 47-49

Illustration: Jung, study for a lost picture of Philemon that once hung in the room of Jung's wife Emma. It is reproduced in The Art of C.G.Jung, published by the Foundation of the Works of C.G.Jung