The Secret Pleasure of Unsealing Your Unconscious

How to understand yourself better

Tribuna of the Uffizi, Johann Zoffany, 1772-1778

Last summer, I started recording my dreams. I’d wake up with eyes still heavy and blurry and jot down whatever fragments I could remember. Capturing this strange world on paper felt surreal. It was like discovering a new continent of thoughts and emotions that had always been there, but had never been explored.

I wanted to do this because my dreams have always been vivid. I’ve often felt shocked by their intensity. In high school, if I had a crazy dream, I’d immediately text it to a group chat we had with fifteen guys. In hindsight, this was a wild move, considering how personal dreams are. Also, I didn’t reflect much on these dreams. The main reason I’d send them was because I thought someone might find it funny. Most of the time, though, people were just annoyed to be getting a massive text at six in the morning.

But that is beside the point. I didn’t appreciate the significance of dreams back then. I now take this process more seriously. Dreams, I’ve learned, often carry important messages from the unconscious mind. They can serve as lessons, reminders, or warnings. They can reveal desires, fears, and ideas you either don’t notice—or perhaps don’t want to acknowledge—during waking life. They can do all sorts of bizarre things, because we humans are bizarre, so it stands to reason that the unconscious is bizarre.¹

During a recent dinner with friends, I shared how it took me a while to grasp the concept of the unconscious. One analogy that stuck with me is how our bodies perform essential functions—like digestion or maintaining a heartbeat—without conscious thought. Similarly, there are countless thoughts and emotions beneath the surface. Over time, this accumulation of impressions, memories, and feelings builds up. If we were conscious of them all at once, it would be overwhelming. So, the mind filters or forgets most of them.

However, in the book Man and His Symbols, an important observation is made on this point: Just because you “forget” something does not mean it is no longer part of your psyche, anymore than someone leaving the company you work at ceases to exist. Just as you may run into your co-worker again, so thoughts that were previously lost to you may arise again. Both are just temporarily out of view.

This is where dream journaling comes in. Because the unconscious manifests its contents so acutely during dreams, if we don’t write down and review them, we miss out on profound insight into our personal psychology. The unconscious remains sealed.

The process of unsealing is challenging but rewarding. It takes honesty—courage even—to write down your dreams exactly as you remember, but the realizations you make through doing it are invaluable. It’s important to do this, because if left unexamined, hidden thoughts and emotions could negatively shape your perceptions and behavior.

By writing down and reflecting on your dreams, you bring so much out of the shadows. Like salt dissolving into water, certain unconscious influences fade and become integrated into your awareness. “Until you make the unconscious conscious,” wrote Carl Jung, “it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”

It is as if the contents of the unconscious are sealed in a treasure chest that opens while you sleep. Writing down your dreams is like reaching into the chest, pulling something out, and examining it. This process is soothing despite often being difficult, like tension releasing from your muscles after stretching.

The more you unseal your unconscious in this way, the more you feel how pleasant it is to actually remember some of your blissful, joyful, and inspiring dreams.

But the paradox is that writing down the weird, confusing, or upsetting ones also becomes a source of pleasure. The deepened self-awareness—and boost of confidence—that comes from doing so is worth every moment of uncomfortable scribbling in the early morning. When you transform the unusual world of visions during sleep into ink on paper, you are like an explorer who wins useful new knowledge, gaining a deeper understanding of yourself, and an odd sense of satisfaction.

1. I can not always understand the meaning of my dreams. I often do, but sometimes they are so bewildering that the meaning remains a riddle, if there even is any. Maybe there is sometimes no meaning behind a dream. Although in my experience dream journaling there often is. Also, the fact there are aspects of dreams which seem to not come from personal memory is a fascinating mystery.