Futurum Incognitum

The unknown future. Jung mentions two ways of arriving "at a plausible meaning" for dreams (70). He continues: "One method―which, however, is not scientific―would be to predict future happenings from the dreams...and to very the interpretation by subsequent events, assuming of course that the meaning of dreams lies in their anticipation of the future" (70).

This is never the method that Freud or Jung ever use. Jung mentions the other method of relying on the past (which you know well by now, relying on memories and past events [even recent ones]). Now, at first glance, it's obvious to agree with Jung in that using the future to determine the meaning of dreams is not scientific. Why? Because, the future is scientifically unknown, well in specifics. In addition, telling the future is really more of a magical, mystic subject area. But of course, Jung tosses away the "future" idea.

Why can't using the future be used to determine the meaning and accuracy of a dream interpretation? I mean, other sciences use hypotheses, which are in a sense, future. You guess at a possible outcome, or you look for an outcome after an experiment or situation, and you evaluate your experiment off of that future outcome. Surely, that's scientific. Why can't using the future for dreams be scientific as well? In addition, Jung says that the future method is only there if you assume that dreams can anticipate the future. Well, why not? As Freud had said, dreams work through situations for you, it does mental work. It could guess at how you'll do on that next English test (ace, pass, fail, faint..etc.). In a sense, the subconscious is working through a possibility (though, it may be exaggerated), a future possibility. You can't say that a dream isn't trying to figure out a future thing, it is. It's almost like a hypothesis, "Maybe you'll faint when you find out your grade tomorrow." It's not certain to happen, but it may happen, or at least parts of it may happen (or none). That is the nature of the hypothesis. In addition, Freud also mentioned that the subconscious influences the conscious mind via the subconscious drives (dreams are a manifestation of these drives, hiding themselves). So, if these drives influence our actions, then surely, a dream we have one night, has latent content behind it that will influence our actions during the day. To clarify, latent (hidden) content lies behind dreams. So we dream whatever it is our minds can make from the latent content. That happens one night (or early morning, or afternoon, whenever). You wake up, you quickly remember it and you go on with your living. Latent content influences us. So, that latent content from the dream will influence our future actions, or the actions we'll do while we're awake. In that sense, it is "future". Dreams, in a sense, do anticipate the future, because the things driving them are what drives our future actions. I'm not saying we should rely on future-based interpretation, I'm just saying that it shouldn't be disregarded.