Beginner’s Guide to the Dream’s Dramatic Structure

Author: Christopher Chayban

Disclaimer: These methods are for testing and for educational or informational purposes. Please keep this material for your use only. Thank you.

These are some notes taken from the book, Childrens dreams: Notes from the seminar given in 1936-1940 that I have re-organized as what I think best suits our needs. The notes are stemming from pgs.1-31.

Understanding the Source Causes of the Dream.
1. The unconscious somatic source: bodily perceptions, states of illness, or uncomfortable body postures.

2. The environmental source: sounds, stimuli from light, coldness, or warmth.
3. The Psychical source: Psychical occurrences in the environment are perceived by the unconscious.
4. The Historical source: past events, names of possible significance, etymology.

5.The cryptomnesia source:  A piece of knowledge that the dreamer once had, which then vanishes completely and cannot be reproduced, until it suddenly reemerges in its original form on some particular occasion.

6. The prospective source: Anticipate future psychical aspects of the personality, which are not perceived as such in the present. So these are future events that are not yet recognizable in the present.

Layout the dramatic structure of the dream:

1. Locale:

What is the Environment/Place:?

What is the Time (of Day or period)?:

Who are the Dramatis personae (People/Other beings)?

2. Exposition:

What seems to be the problem in the dream?

3. Peripateia:

What is the turning point/change or reversal in the dream?

What Transforms?

What is the Catostrophe?

4. Lysis:

What compensates the original action (exposition) of the dream?

What meaningful conclusion is made at the end in the dream?

What is the result? Even if that means, you wake up.

Guidelines & Amplification-

1.Dreams are not chronological, they are radial.

What is the center that the dream content radiates from or that the main theme the content circulates around?

2.Note the associations to the content of the dream.

i.e. What do you think of figure X?

What else do you think about figure X?

3.Turn the associations into a sentence.

4 kinds of dreams and questions to ask-

1. What unconscious reaction (complementary or compensatory) is the dream commenting on to the conscious situation of the previous day(s)?
2. What conflict between consciousness and the unconscious is being illustrated?
3. What is the unconscious aiming to change about the conscious attitude?
4. Does the unconscious processes show no relation to the conscious situation? If this is the case, is the dream an overwhelming “Big Dream?” I.e. Mythological and Collective infused with meaning?

Resources:

Jung, C. G., Jung, L., & Meyer-Grass, M. (2010). Childrens dreams: Notes from the seminar given in 1936-1940. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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