Conversations with our unconscious

using AI to make sense of our dreams

This essay is part of the Human AIgency series where I’m investigating how we become more human in the age of AI.

For years, I’ve been haunted by a recurring dream. Each time it played out, I’d wake up disoriented, grasping for meaning, wondering why this unsettling loop kept presenting itself. At first, I dismissed it as an ungrounded fear, but as the dream persisted, I began to wonder, what if this dream wasn’t random? What if it was somehow a missive of wisdom dispatched from the depths of my unconscious?

For centuries, dreams have been a source of mystery, interpreted as divine omens and psychological clues. Carl Jung, the pioneer of analytical psychology, believed that dreams are expressions of the unconscious — symbols revealing truths that we’re not yet ready to face. These messages arrive in our dreams in the form of archetypal symbols and personal associations. Our dreams, it turns out, are rarely as straightforward as they seem.

Historically, we’ve relied on intuition, myth, and psychology to decipher our dreams, but now, for the first time, technology offers us a new way to decode these messages. Artificial intelligence, with its ability to recognize patterns and draw connections between symbols, invites us into a dialogue with our unconscious selves. With the right approach, AI can serve as an interlocutor, helping us tune in more deeply to the parts of ourselves that linger just beneath the surface of our awareness.

In the dream, I found myself in the driver’s seat of a car, driving to an unknown destination. The landscape varied — sometimes, I drove along the roads of my hometown, routes I’d known for years. Other times, I’d find myself navigating an unfamiliar city. I was often in the car alone and always with an unsettled feeling that something was about to go wrong.

As the scene unfolded, it became increasingly challenging to control the car. Suddenly, right before the dream ended, the car would speed up. I’d lose control of the wheel as I exited a highway or drove toward a ditch on the side of the road that appeared moments before. The dream never played out long enough for me to experience the impact of the crash.

For years, this dream replayed over and over again — each time, I woke up unnerved by the recurring feeling of spinning out of control. Eventually, I chalked it up to a fear of driving, the result of years of city living where I’d stopped driving.

A few years ago, during a coaching session, my somatic coach offhandedly mentioned that she used to have a recurring dream of her mom erratically driving her car while she sat powerless in the passenger seat. Often, her dog would get thrown out of the backseat as her mom tore through the streets.

My jaw dropped as she shared what the dream had represented. Growing up, she often lived in fear of her mom, deferring to her mom for big and small decisions. Metaphorically, her mom sat in the driver seat of her life, calling the shots — and it didn’t make for a smooth ride. Her dog represented her natural instincts which rode backseat. The act of getting thrown from the car symbolized a loss of that protective intuition in moments of chaos.

Her story prompted me to explore the significance of my own recurring car dream. As I unraveled the dream, I learned that, in Jungian dream psychology, cars represent how we move through our (psychological) world. They often represent our ego and the conscious self that navigates daily life.

• Sitting in the driver’s seat meant that I felt in control of my own life

• Being alone in the car represented a feeling of independence or isolation

• A speeding car represented an anxiety of keeping pace or a fear of falling behind

• Losing control of the car right before an accident represented a fear of powerlessness as I watch life spiral out of control

As I recalled the times when this particular dream presented itself, it was often during a season of life when I was overwhelmed and felt things spinning out of control — whether I had a big decision to make or felt under water at work. Incredibly, all of these symbols reflected my state of mind with remarkable accuracy.

This was my first introduction to Jungian dream psychology.

The stories that emerge while we’re asleep often bear the precise wisdom we’re seeking in our waking lives, revealing parts of ourselves we may fear confronting. Rather than taking our dreams at face value, we can delve into their deeper layers to uncover their true significance.

Jung developed theories around archetypes that serve as universal symbols and patterns across cultures and time. Some common symbols that emerge in our dreams are our teeth falling out, encountering a snake, being unprepared for an exam or a meeting, showing up somewhere naked, or being chased.

Source: The Most Common Dream in Every Country

The exploration in interpreting our dreams is becoming increasingly more accessible as new AI models are being released. With the right prompting, we can begin to translate the messages our unconscious minds are delivering us each night.

The process begins with recall — remembering details of our dreams: a skill we can cultivate through practice and attention, training ourselves to hold onto the storylines that emerged overnight before they slip into the abyss.

As we learn to orient ourselves to the inner workings of our dreams, we begin to identify recurring symbols and patterns. While some symbols may carry universal meaning, others hold meaningful personal significance. It’s in the space between universal archetypes and personal associations where meaningful dream interpretation lies — each dream is a conversation with our unconscious selves and an opportunity to transform cryptic messages into pearls of insight.

ChatGPT: pretend you’re a world-class Jungian dream psychologist

I came across Jungian dreamwork in 2023. Around this time, AI models and AI-powered apps were just starting to become widely available to the general public. By the end of the year, I’d logged my first few dreamwork interactions with ChatGPT.

Over the last year, I’ve refined my process, experimenting with different prompts and varying levels of specificity.

Recalling the message

Despite being an avid dreamer, the details of my dreams often disappear the moment I wake up. I’ll have a feeling that I’ve had a meaningful dream, but can’t quite put my finger on what it was. To help jog my memory, I started keeping a notebook by my bed to document the snippets I do remember in as much detail as possible. For example: this morning, I woke up confused about the dream I’d just had except I couldn’t actually remember what had transpired. The only thing I remembered was that there was a scene where I was changing the background on my phone over and over again.

Some questions to contemplate: What was the scene? Who is present? How do you feel? Are there any recurring patterns or symbols? How does the scene interact with what’s happening in your waking life?

Once I’ve noted the details I remember, I’ll engage in low stimulus activities like meditating, doing the dishes, or starting the laundry to create spaciousness for my mind to wander back to the dream on its own time. As soon as I started doing the dishes this morning, my dream from last night resurfaced as if it’d never left my consciousness.

I’ve found that my dreams are more potent the evenings following a bodywork or somatic coaching session — after I’ve consciously grappled with particularly emotionally charged content in my life. It’s my mind’s way of closing the loop on what I’ve drudged up and processing it at the unconscious level.

After reviewing the contents of your dream and reflecting on the emotions that came up, this is where ChatGPT comes in. Of the existing AI models, I’ve found ChatGPT to be the most comprehensive and nuanced in analyzing dreams.

Communicating the message

Curious about AI’s interpretative power, I started feeding my dreams into ChatGPT. At first, my prompts were simple requests to interpret my latest dream:

Over time, I found that the more context I can share on what’s happening in my life, the better the insights. I’ve come to prefer a stream-of-conscious account of the dream. Now, I typically use the voice function to capture the breadth of what unfolded. Voice dictation is particularly helpful when I feel unsettled by a dream or there’s a lot of nuance to capture. I’ve crafted standard ways to frame the ask, often sharing additional context around the circumstances I’m grappling with in my daily life. I remix prompts and will occasionally share snippets of longer journal entries to be analyzed.

Here’s a stream-of-conscious example from this morning:

And boy, did this morning’s analysis deliver.

If you’re relatively new to dreamwork, here are a few prompts to experiment with:

Pretend you’re a world-class Jungian dream psychologist. Please help me analyze and decode the dream I had last night. Provide at least three different interpretations of the dream, focusing on the mythopoetic meanings that aren’t obvious from a cursory read of the dream. Help me break down the different symbols in the dream with an eye toward more symbolic interpretation.

If you need more detail, ask me for more detail and share the reason you want those particular details.

I have a recurring dream where [xyz happens].

I feel [xyz emotion] during the dream, often unsettled by [xyz symbol].

As a Jungian dream analyst, can you help me break down its main symbols and emotions? What might this represent in my unconscious?

I had a dream where I spoke to [xyz person or figure]. As a Jungian dream psychologist, can you guide me through an active imagination exercise to interact with the figure I saw in the dream?

How can I integrate the wisdom of this dream into my relationships and daily life? What might this dream be asking me to do in my waking life?

Looking back at my recent dreams, are there any overarching themes or patterns I ought to focus on?

During the AI for Inner Work salon I recently co-hosted, someone raised a concern that we risk outsourcing our self-awareness when we rely on AI to deliver insights about our inner world rather than coming to those conclusions ourselves. It’s a valid point. But perhaps it’s not always about how we arrive at clarity, but simply that we arrive at it.

Using AI to explore our dreams isn’t about surrendering our intuition, it’s about sharpening it. The real work isn’t in the interpretation, but in discerning what resonates with us then transforming those insights into deeper self-awareness. It’s an act of summoning our agency to explore our unconscious mind.

For years, deciphering my dreams felt like navigating uncharted territory in the dark. AI hasn’t redrawn the map — it’s simply handed me a flashlight, revealing the paths that were always there, waiting to be traversed.

I’d love to hear about the recurring dreams that visit you or ways that you’re using AI for dreamwork analysis. Let me know in the comments or say hi on Twitter :)

If you enjoyed this piece, you may also like:

Human AIgency: on becoming more human in the age of AI

Know Thyself: AI & the quest towards our truth

Dancing with our shadows

Thanks to Ryan for reviewing drafts of this essay.