Analyzing This and That
Using ChatGPT to Look at Dreams
4.17.23
With the conclusion of my 42nd year of life coming to an end next week, I’ve been reflecting on my “Meaning of Life” year — an unveiled reference to Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It’s been a year, for sure. Fitting into that “meaning” making aspect of this past year has been my fascination with studying and reflecting on my dreams. I find dreams of others to be inherently boring and so I will assume you’ll think the same about mine and not share them. But I began Jungian analysis a few months ago with one of the goals being to understand my dreams. It’s been a rewarding process and though analysis isn’t for everyone, I think studying your dreams is. Without getting too Jungian, too in the weeds about why it’s important to study and probe dream meanings, I’m going to recommend a simple way for you to approach your dreams.
Chat GPT is probably something you’ve heard about. If not, go play around with it for a bit. It’s a load of fun — though others have sounded the alarms on the potential for danger. In between sessions, when I have a particularly confusing dream, I write it out as usual and then plug it into Chat GPT. ( It can analyze it as any number of famous psychoanalysts. From Freud to Skinner to Billy Crystal. You can even have it analyze the dream from a Freudian perspective but in the character voice of, say, Richard Splett from VEEP.
Obviously I use a Jungian perspective because I find it more enlarging, less reductive. I don’t always agree with ChatGPT’s analysis but it gets me thinking about what’s going on inside me that I might not be aware of, especially in those dreams that seem silly or short — because those, when unpacked, for me, resonate more deeply than a multi-page dream.
I hope to have more to say about Jung and psychology in this space, as I’m wading through my own experiences and growing in my understanding of these ideas. But for now, plug in that dream and have it be “analyzed” in a famous character’s voice.