Up: [[Dreams]] Created: 2025-10-26 After you [[Open Up a Dream by Slowing Down]] and look at your [[Emotion in Dreams]], the next step in Jungian dreamwork is to associate and then amplify, in that order. To do that, you can make a list of all the dream images: - people - animals - setting - objects - emotions ### Associate Beside each image, note any personal associations that come to mind. This could be anything, so don’t censor yourself. If what pops into mind is a song fragment you heard thirty years ago, or a seemingly unrelated memory from when you were six, write it down. The only rule with association in Jungian dreamwork is to stay with direct associations. You can have multiple associations for any image but each one relates back to the original image. If you did this as a mind map, the image would be the centre and each association would be a spoke. This is different from the Freudian approach of free association where each association grows from the previous one. In a mind map, this would be a chain. ### Amplify When you amplify a dream, you are moving from the personal to the collective by looking at what an image has meant in myth, literature, art, poetry, or religion. This obviously requires some research, so it’s not something you do with every image. And many times you won’t need to do it at all. But if there’s an object or animal that feels significant, [[Symbol Dictionaries, Not Dream Dictionaries]] are incredibly helpful. Finding literary connections is much tougher if you don’t have that background. One of the major reasons I want to know more fairy tales and myths is because they will open up a much larger world of amplifications to my dreams. And, I imagine, they might well enrich the dreams themselves. Part of the training program for Jungian analysts involves them writing a “symbol paper” that deep dives into amplifications of a single symbol. A couple of simple things you can do for amplification include looking up the etymology of a word by typing etymology plus the word in your browser.