 There is another process that we need to review before we launch into the world of dreams And that is the difference between a symbol and a sign and how to expand or amplify a symbol What exactly is a sign and how does it differ from a symbol? Well a sign is something with a fixed meaning This meaning is culturally or universally understood even though there may be slight variations across cultures An example of a sign is the octagonal red sign we use to indicate a stop in traffic The stop sign has only one meaning That of bring your vehicle to a complete halt just before this red sign It doesn't mean drive through, yield or buy a hamburger or fries In pretty much all cultures the same sign, the stop sign is used to mean the same thing, stop Another sign would be the red exit sign that we see above a door in a movie theater or an office This has only one meaning, that of leave this place by going through the door under the sign It doesn't mean anything else, it is often red in colour so that we can all see it in an emergency And most if not all of us know that in an emergency you need to exit at this place So a sign is some word, a shape or an object that has a single fixed meaning Now here is where we run into some difficulties when we speak of symbols and signs Those of you that have some knowledge of classical Freudian psychoanalysis will know that many of the objects that Freud interpreted in dreams say hills or tunnels or apples or bananas were referred to in a way that made them signs The apple equals the female breast in Freudian dream interpretation or the banana means the male penis One sign has one meaning so it is quite incorrect from a Jungian perspective to interpret dream imagery in fixed ways From this perspective stay away from those dreadful dream dictionaries you find in bookstores that tell you if you dreamt of an apple it means a breast or any other such fixed meaning These books should be called dream sign dictionaries and not dream symbol dictionaries Well then if this is the case for signs having fixed meanings how do they differ from symbols A crucial difference is that a symbol does not have a fixed singular meaning Jung in dealing with the difference between a Freudian sign interpretation and his own symbol interpretation said the following The true symbol differs essentially from this and should be understood as an intuitive idea that cannot yet be formulated in any other or better way And that's from collected works 15 paragraph 105 Better still Jung also said and I quote a symbol always presupposes that the chosen expression is the best possible description or formulation of a relatively unknown fact which is nonetheless known to exist or is postulated as existing end quote that's from collected works 6 paragraph 814 But this leaves us in some difficulty How then do we know what a symbol means? What if I get it wrong and say it means something completely different from someone else Well in this situation you are quite safe because you know what a symbol means to you better than anyone else Because you get a meaning about a symbol from your own unconscious your own feelings and your own experiences Let's take a simple example Say you dreamt of a horse You told your dream to a friend and then began to explain the meaning of the horse In other words you began to enlarge on the meaning of the symbol As a child you may have been thrown from a horse and broken your arm and never ridden one since You may dislike and fear horses as a result and find the appearance of a horse symbol in your dream to be scary and threatening So the meaning of the horse symbol to you is very negative Your friend on the other hand may have been raised on a cattle ranch and spent many hours of his childhood on the back of a horse rounding up cattle He may have had a favorite horse that he trained and rode for the years he spent at home on the ranch To him the horse is a solid powerful dependable creature that helped do his ranch chores Was his good friend and helped him get through some difficult terrain or times The horse symbol for him is one of a positive loyal dependable friend This is quite different to your meaning of the horse So which one is wrong in the meaning of the horse symbol you or your rancher friend The answer is neither You are both absolutely correct as you are developing a sense of the meaning of the horse symbol from your actual lived experience Yours of being bucked off the back of the horse and his from having a horse as a working animal on the ranch So you can see how the meaning of a symbol becomes accurate largely from your own experience Well what do we do with those dream symbol dictionaries then I'm not sure what you have done with yours but mine sit on the bottom of my bookshelf And I turn to them only when I need to find the more universal aspects of a symbol's meaning You are the best symbol dictionary in the world as you rely on your own psyche to provide the meaning But this isn't where it all ends as all we have really done is to develop our personal associations to the symbol From these associations we do need to enlarge our symbol by tapping into the universal nature of the symbol Meaning that as symbols are such powerful images and exist in the collective unconscious We need to see how different cultures attribute meaning to a universal symbol This means that the core meaning of a symbol is the same across cultures But each culture will add something specific to its own cultural meaning of a symbol And it's here that we need to dust off those symbol dictionaries in our bookshelves and do some research So can you see how massively different a symbol and a sign are?