The Economy of Dreaming – Complexes and the Filters of Consciousness
- Brainz Magazine
- 4 days ago
- 9 min read
Dr. Dragana Favre is a psychiatrist, psychotherapist, and a seeker of the human psyche's mysteries. With a medical degree and extensive neuroscience education from prestigious institutions like the Max Planck Institute and Instituto de Neurociencias, she's a seasoned expert.
The experience of dreaming is inseparable from the experience of forgetting. On waking, one may hold a fragmentary image, a fading phrase, or an affect that resists symbolization, while the vast bulk of nocturnal psychic activity has already dissolved. Consciousness, it seems, acts as a filter, allowing only certain dream materials to pass into waking memory. Freud (1900/1953) described this as the “dream censor,” a guardian of the ego who protects it from the eruption of unconscious wishes. Jung (1948/1960) redefined the process less as repression and more as a selective function of consciousness itself, which assimilates only what is compatible with its present orientation. Yet this filtering is not only a matter of what is remembered in the morning; it also operates before sleep. The psyche is always in motion, and in the hypnagogic threshold, the ego performs another act of filtering, letting some residues of the day, some affects and preoccupations, pass down into dream while holding others back. To conceive of dream filtering only retrospectively, what survives awakening, is to miss the preparatory work that takes place in the descent into sleep.
This bidirectional filtering reveals the dream not as a self-contained nocturnal event, but as part of a continuum that stretches across waking and sleeping. Dreaming is simply one form of the psyche’s constant production of images and meanings, of which daydreams, fantasies, reveries, and sudden associations are other manifestations. Neuroscience now supports what Jung intuited: that the dreaming brain is not categorically distinct from the waking brain, but engages overlapping networks, particularly the default mode network implicated in spontaneous thought (Fox et al., 2013). Sleep studies further show that memory consolidation during REM involves many of the same hippocampo-cortical dialogues that underlie imagination in waking life (Nir & Tononi, 2010). We are, in this sense, dreaming all the time, only with different degrees of ego-filtering.
The metaphor of filtering itself requires refinement. It is less like a wall separating conscious and unconscious than like a semi-permeable membrane whose permeability changes with state. In highly vigilant states, during focused work or moments of danger, the membrane thickens, filtering out dream-like associations. In liminal states, creative reverie, falling in love, intoxication, trauma, hypnagogia, the membrane thins, and dream-logic infiltrates waking perception. During sleep it reverses entirely: inner images flood, and the ego is reduced to a faint witness. This imagery of selective permeability resonates with Jung’s (1954/1969) description of consciousness as a kind of spotlight within a wider psychic field, surrounded by the twilight of complexes and archetypal forces. The ego does not command the psyche but regulates its thresholds of access.
If the filtering membrane describes the relation between states, the theory of complexes provides a grammar for the contents that press against it. Jung’s complex theory insists that memory and affect do not merely accumulate in the psyche, but crystallize into dynamic organizations with quasi-autonomy (Jung, 1934/1969). A complex is like a splinter psyche, possessing its own nucleus of meaning, affect, and imagery. Complexes can be understood as having their own “levels of consciousness.” In dormant states, they remain latent, influencing moods in a diffuse way. When triggered by associative stimuli, they surge into greater activation, momentarily hijacking perception, emotion, and behavior, such that the subject becomes identified with the complex.
Contemporary affective neuroscience gives this theory renewed plausibility. Pessoa (2017) has shown that emotional memories are distributed across networks involving the amygdala, hippocampus, and prefrontal regions, and that their reactivation can dominate global brain dynamics. This resembles the way a complex, once activated, assumes command of consciousness. Each complex thus operates like an attractor state within a dynamic neural system, varying in intensity and stability. Its “level of consciousness” is the degree to which it has seized the global workspace of the psyche, determining what is filtered into awareness.
Dreams are a privileged stage for these complexes to manifest their life. A trauma complex may appear as recurring nightmares, forcing the ego to confront the residues of overwhelming experience. The maternal complex may appear as images of nourishment or engulfment, while the anima or animus figures may emerge as seductors, guides, or opponents. These dream manifestations do not depend on recall; even if forgotten on waking, the dream has performed a work of psychic regulation. Walker and van der Helm (2009) demonstrated that emotional memory is processed and attenuated during REM sleep, even in the absence of dream recall. Jung (1948/1960) similarly argued that the dream is a self-portrait of the current psychic situation, regardless of whether the ego remembers it. What consciousness filters into memory is therefore less important than the fact that complexes have staged their nocturnal negotiations.
The filtering function can be imagined as an economy of attention, distributing limited conscious resources among competing complexes. At times of stress, one complex consumes the lion’s share, narrowing perception. In calmer states, multiple complexes hum at lower amplitudes, producing a polyphonic psychic background. The ego’s task is not to suppress these voices, but to regulate their levels, ensuring that none monopolizes the field. This economy parallels what neuroscientists describe as competitive dynamics among large-scale brain networks: the salience network may capture attention with urgent affect, the executive network may reassert control, and the default mode network may drift into associative imagery (Menon, 2011). The psyche thus resembles a parliament of voices, each with its own consciousness level, mediated by fluctuating thresholds of filtering.
Hypnagogia illustrates this continuum vividly. As one falls asleep, images arise spontaneously: faces, landscapes, fragments of words. These are complexes loosening from their daytime constraints, testing the membrane. Some pass through into dreams, others vanish. Mavromatis (1987) described hypnagogia as a microcosm of the unconscious, a privileged field where conscious control wanes but is not yet extinguished. Clinically, patients often report that unresolved conflicts or fears surge most vividly in this state, confirming that the pre-sleep filter allows significant psychic material to descend. The opposite threshold, the hypnopompic transition on waking, shows the other side of the filter: the ego reasserts itself, clutching a few images while the rest fade irretrievably.
James Hillman (1979) radicalized this view by insisting that dreams are not messages to be translated but autonomous presences, each image a figure with its own intentionality. To treat dream images as raw material for waking consciousness is already to violate their autonomy. The filter is thus not a neutral mechanism but a colonizer, deciding which images survive in the ego’s daylight. Wolfgang Giegerich (2012), by contrast, argued that psyche itself requires its negation in consciousness; the filtering is the dialectical process by which raw image is transfigured into thought. Both perspectives complicate the notion of recall: what matters is not simply what is remembered, but how the filtering itself participates in the individuation of the psyche.
The continuum model also clarifies pathological states. In psychosis, the membrane becomes too permeable, allowing dream logic to flood waking life. In rigid defenses, it becomes too impermeable, leading to a barren consciousness cut off from imagination. Trauma often destabilizes the filtering function: intrusive images break through unbidden, while other memories remain dissociated. From a therapeutic perspective, analysis aims to help the ego regulate its permeability, neither overwhelmed by complexes nor cut off from them. Clinical work often requires strengthening the morning filter (so that patients are not destabilized by overwhelming dream content), while also softening the pre-sleep filter (so that repressed material can be symbolized in dreams).
Contemporary neuroscience resonates with this therapeutic aim. Studies of sleep and emotional regulation show that REM sleep contributes to affective integration by reprocessing amygdala-dependent memories in a neurochemical context of low noradrenaline, effectively decoupling emotion from trauma (van der Helm et al., 2011). When this process is disrupted, as in PTSD, the filtering function fails: traumatic images recur as nightmares without assimilation. Neuroimaging of lucid dreaming further indicates that prefrontal activation can be partially restored during REM, allowing greater ego participation without suppressing dream imagery (Voss et al., 2009). This parallels the analytic task of cultivating an ego that can remain present to the dream without censoring it.
Seen through this dual lens, individuation appears not as the conquest of the unconscious by consciousness, but as the refinement of filtering. Jung (1959/1968) conceived individuation as a dialogue between ego and Self, mediated by symbols. Filtering is the very process by which symbols emerge: too much permeability and symbols collapse into hallucinations; too much impermeability and symbols wither into abstractions. The symbol lives in the membrane itself, as an image that passes the threshold without being destroyed. Hillman (1979) emphasized that individuation requires us to become porous to images, to let them speak. Giegerich (2012) countered that individuation requires the negation of image into conceptual life. Both agree, however, that the essence of individuation lies in the way the filter is negotiated.
The metaphor of polyphony may capture this best. Each complex is a voice, sometimes faint, sometimes dominant. Consciousness is both a singer and a conductor, modulating the levels. Dreams are nocturnal rehearsals in which complexes present their themes, sometimes clashing, sometimes harmonizing. The filter is not an obstacle but the condition for this music; it ensures that the voices are not heard all at once in overwhelming cacophony, but in shifting sequences that the ego can bear. Individuation does not silence any voice, but refines the ear, cultivating the capacity to listen across the continuum of day and night, waking and dreaming.
In this way, the psyche is never not dreaming. What we call waking is simply dreaming with a tighter filter; what we call dreaming is waking with a looser one. The complexes that compose our psychic life each have their own consciousness levels, rising and falling in amplitude. The ego’s task is neither to deny nor to surrender, but to learn the art of selective permeability. The dream filter is therefore not merely a mechanism of forgetting, but the very medium through which psyche and consciousness coexist. To become more conscious is not to abolish the filter, but to refine it, so that the voices of the unconscious may be heard without overwhelming, and so that the song of individuation may continue.
Dragana Favre, Psychiatrist and Jungian Psychotherapist
Dr. Dragana Favre is a psychiatrist, psychotherapist, and a seeker of the human psyche's mysteries. With a medical degree and extensive neuroscience education from prestigious institutions like the Max Planck Institute and Instituto de Neurociencias, she's a seasoned expert. Her unique approach combines Jungian psychotherapy, EMDR, and dream interpretation, guiding patients towards self-discovery and healing. Beyond her profession, Dr. Favre is passionate about science fiction, nature, and cosmology. Her ex-Yugoslavian roots in the small town of Kikinda offer a rich backdrop to her life's journey. She is dedicated to helping people find their true selves, much like an alchemist turning lead into gold.
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Jung, C. G. (1969). A review of the complex theory. In H. Read, M. Fordham, & G. Adler (Eds.), The collected works of C. G. Jung (Vol. 8, pp. 92–104). Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1934)
Jung, C. G. (1960). General aspects of dream psychology. In H. Read, M. Fordham, & G. Adler (Eds.), The collected works of C. G. Jung (Vol. 8, pp. 237–280). Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1948)
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