Unlocking the Hidden Codes: How Carl Jung Deciphers the Mysterious Architecture of Dreams
Ever wonder if your dreams are secretly channeling the structure of a Hollywood screenplay? Carl Jung, that old sage of the subconscious, thought so—and not just in passing. He broke down dreams into a neat four-act drama: exposition, plot development, a twisty peripeteia, and finally, resolution. It’s like your brain’s producing indie films every night, but without the popcorn. The kicker? This could mean our storytelling instincts aren’t just learned—they might be hardwired into how we dream. So here’s the real head-scratcher: are we crafting stories because we’ve absorbed narrative patterns, or are those patterns ingrained because that’s how our brains naturally dream? If cinema immerses us in passion and peril without the real-life consequences (thanks, Jung!), then maybe tapping into dreams could be the ultimate screenwriting master class. Ready to peek behind the veil of your subconscious screenplay? LEARN MORE.
Subconscious stories revealed in our sleep in four acts.
Carl Jung was a big fan of movies. He said:
“The cinema, like the detective story, makes it possible to experience without danger all the excitement, passion, and desirousness, which must be repressed in the humanitarian working of life.”
Check out his articulation of the structure of dreams from his book “On the Nature of Dreams”:
“The dream begins with a statement of place, next comes a statement about the protagonist. I call this phase of the dream the exposition. It indicates the scene of action, the people involved, and also often the initial situation of the dream way.
The second phase comes the development of the plot.
The third phase brings the culmination of peripeteia, a sudden change of events, a reversal of circumstances, used by Aristotle. Here something decisive happens if something changes completely.
The fourth and last phase is alysis, the solution or result produced by the dream work.
This division into four phases can be applied without much difficulty to a majority of dreams met with in practice, an indication that dreams generally have a dramatic structure.”
For those of you who subscribe to the four-act theory of screenplay structure, you now have more support via C. Jung!
Question: Do we dream with a narrative structure because of our exposure to stories or do we write stories with a narrative structure because of how we dream?
Another thing to consider about the relationship of dreams to story, an excerpt from something I posted in 2009 about noted editor Walter Murch:
In fact, one of the best screenwriting books I’ve read is about editing. It’s called “In the Blink of an Eye”, written by one of the great movie editors and sound men in contemporary filmmaking Walter Murch. While it’s interesting and informative to read about Murch’s experiences editing such movies as Apocalypse Now, The Godfather, Part II, and The Talented Mr. Ripley…
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