ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses a various characteristics of dreams to look at for clues on dream meaning. Dreams are best viewed in the full context of a dreamer's life and her or his surrounding (sub-) culture. The remedy for dogmatic, sloppy, or gratuitous dream interpretation is what Kaufmann calls "absolute faithfulness" to the dream material. By this he elaborates on Jung's advice to "stick to the image" and not stray from it with one's own or even the patient's egoic wanderings. The rationale for this approach is quite simple: it begins with the assumption that the Invisible Storyteller (IS) says exactly what it means, as Jung might put it, and this assumption receives a great deal of support from dream research as reviewed in the chapter. During development, from out of the primordial fertile chaos, the psyche self-organizes the ego, which subsequently brings order from the chaos and exerts a certain amount of top-down control over the psyche.
