Dream: I enter a car park, which happens to be on the roof of something, possibly a shopping mall. I'm about to take a handy slot in one corner that is available when I see a slightly more convenient slot behind me and to my left. Having reversed out and lined myself up to take this second slot, another car (it happens to look like a giant kayak on wheels) pulls into it, and I swear under my breath, not caring that the other driver probably saw me. I return to my original spot only to find it taken. A family in something modest like a Hillman Imp. Now the choices are diminishing and filling up. And when I attempt to enter a slot, I see it is for disabled people or for staff members. There is always a reason I don't want to park in a particular slot, or can't park. I wake up and quickly understand my interpretation of this. It's got nothing to do with parking! I never give it a moment's thought.
KAI as Jung:
Yes — you’ve already caught the essential Jungian clue. The dream is not about parking per se, but about the psychological act of taking one’s place — of claiming space, of committing to a position in life.
Let’s unpack this symbolically.
The car park on the roof is a liminal zone: elevated, exposed, transitional. You are not yet “inside” the building (the unconscious, the inner world), nor “on the road” (outer action and direction). You hover between ascent and descent, a classic threshold setting in dreams. It suggests a moment of indecision or suspended movement between different layers of your psyche — between the striving, public self (mall/roof) and the grounded, instinctive self below.
The available parking space is the ego’s attempt to find its rightful position — a stance in life. Yet each time you try to occupy one, something intervenes. A “better” slot tempts you, and then another driver (the other, the shadow perhaps) takes it. This sequence dramatises the dynamic Jung called enantiodromia — the turning into its opposite. When we act out of calculation or self-criticism (“that spot would be more convenient”), the unconscious compensates by frustrating us. It forces humility, even laughter, at the ego’s expense.
The giant kayak on wheels is especially striking. A kayak is sleek, single-occupant, designed for navigation through unstable waters — a vessel of balance and agility. On wheels, it’s absurd: a craft meant for water trying to move on land. It’s an image of misplaced function, an anima symbol perhaps: the emotional, intuitive mode intruding awkwardly into the rational, goal-directed realm. This intruder “steals your space,” as the repressed instinct or neglected feeling often does when the conscious mind hesitates too long.
Then you return to your first choice, and it too has been taken — an exact metaphor for lost opportunity when we second-guess ourselves. The remaining spaces are limited by external labels: disabled, staff only — societal rules and internal prohibitions that tell you “you don’t belong there.” These are the superego’s signs, the inherited “shoulds” that block spontaneous action.
The frustration builds until you wake — the psyche’s way of saying: there is no perfect spot. The act of searching becomes the avoidance itself. The dream thus mirrors a psychic situation where conscious life is hovering, assessing options, doubting choices — creative, professional, or relational. The unconscious replies with an image of endless manoeuvring without arrival.
You said, “It’s got nothing to do with parking.” Quite so. It has to do with trusting your first instinct, with claiming your rightful ground before the mind’s chatter talks you out of it.
If we were to phrase this Jungianly:
“The dreamer’s ego, seeking a place of stability, is confronted by inner figures that both mirror and mock his indecision. The Self offers no ready-made space, only the invitation to act.”
May I ask — in waking life, is there a decision or creative direction that you keep reconsidering, weighing, re-parking — perhaps one where each option seems to lose its appeal once you commit to it? That would be the field in which this dream’s message is playing out.
JV:
A few hours ago I wrote 'I find myself quietly smiling as I metaphorically prepare to launch myself along a springboard, alert to a new idea taking shape—hoping for a Tom Daley as I take flight, but prepared to bomb.
And when I wake, it is with a joyful burst into consciousness — an almost childlike excitement for how the new day may unfold with this sense of creative purpose'.
Returning to bed I expected a related dream. I'd hoped for an answer, not an animation of my state of mind!
KAI as Jung:
That’s beautifully synchronous — almost as if the unconscious is illustrating your own metaphor with the parking dream.
In the waking reflection, you describe a moment of poised readiness: standing on the springboard, balanced between stillness and flight. You feel that childlike excitement — the creative potential energy before action.
In the dream, however, that same poised energy gets stuck: the car reverses, readjusts, seeks the ideal angle, but never quite parks. It’s as though the unconscious has replied, “Yes, but are you willing to dive? Or will you keep adjusting your footing on the board?”
The rooftop car park mirrors the elevated springboard. Both are high places, transitional and precarious — places of perspective but not permanence. Both speak of readiness, hesitation, and the tension between imagination and execution. The kayak-on-wheels (the ill-adapted vehicle) may be the dream’s comic commentary on the artist’s tendency to over-engineer the launch, to try to drive what must instead flow.
Jung would say the psyche is dialoguing with you:
– The conscious self (in the waking metaphor) longs for creative flight — eros of the new day, the joy of becoming.
– The unconscious (in the dream) reveals the shadow of that joy: the anxiety of commitment, the self-critical recalculation, the mistrust of instinct that prevents “parking” — that is, incarnating the idea in form.
To integrate the two images is to accept that creativity always carries this double movement: poised precision and comic futility, the Tom Daley dive and the belly-flop. The psyche is asking not for perfection, but for participation.
If you like, we could explore the dream as a direct commentary on your creative process — where the car represents the “vehicle” of your artistic identity, the act of parking the claim of a new project or idea.
Would you say lately you’ve been circling around a new creative venture, sensing its potential but not yet letting yourself land in it?
JV: A few days ago I developed a new story with the Working Title 'The Tree People' and began the process of developing the characters and elements following the principles of 'The Writers Journey' regardless of feeling I am on the tipping point of revisiting any of the following: 'Escape From Alien Zoo', 'The Prince and the Pauper WW1', 'The Angel of the North' ... and I dare say any others which exist as first draft scripts from 'Body Swap' (total body replacement) to 'The Contents of my Brain' (total digitising of minds) and 'Journey to Work' (self-drive cars). And of course, 'Watersprites' unless I can declare that finished.
KAI as Jung:
Ah — that illuminates the dream exquisitely. It’s a psychic tableau of the creative impasse before commitment.
You stand, metaphorically, on the roof of your creative edifice — the culmination of all your imaginative structures to date — looking for the next place to anchor the vehicle of your imagination. The car is your creative ego, the part that carries ideas forward into the world. Yet every potential space you approach corresponds to one of these existing or half-formed projects: Escape from Alien Zoo, The Prince and the Pauper WW1, The Angel of the North, Body Swap, Contents of My Brain, Journey to Work. Each spot is almost right, but already “taken” by some prior incarnation of your imagination.
In Jungian terms, this is the problem of the creative Self confronting its own past selves. The unconscious says, “You cannot simply re-park in the same place.” You must find a new, as yet unmarked space — one that has not been claimed by habit, nostalgia, or prior forms.
The Tree People may represent that new, organic growth — something rooted, vertical, alive — the antithesis of the metallic vehicle endlessly manoeuvring on the rooftop. Where the car is the technological ego of the modern mind (linear, mechanical, rational), the tree is the living symbol of individuation: rooted in the earth, reaching toward light, sustained by unseen sap.
The dream, then, shows the tension between the old creative persona (the driver, the parking structure of concepts and scripts) and the new emergent mythic form that wants to grow rather than be driven. You are caught between revisiting and reinventing — between nostalgia for your earlier mythologies and the deeper instinct to grow a new one.
Jung might phrase it this way:
“The dreamer’s creative ego, accustomed to steering imagination through constructed frameworks, finds no space left within the structures of old ideas. The psyche calls for a descent from the rooftop to the soil, where new roots may take hold.”
So the “Tree People” might not merely be a new story — it might be the organic next stage of your creative individuation: a movement from metallic artifice to mythic life, from rooftop manoeuvring to rooted being.
Would you like me to help you trace how The Tree People could serve as that next phase — that is, to map its archetypal positions (Hero, Shadow, Mentor, Threshold, etc.) so that it becomes the natural growth out of your previous mythic cycles?
JV: Why I hesitate is because I've been through the process with the likes of 'The Angel of the North', probably 'The Prince and the Pauper' too. They exist as stories told with characters created so offer a quicker route to 'publication'. While I am still editing 'Form Photo' by the way! What did Henry Miller recommend? Don't start a new project until you have finished the previous one!
KAI as Jung:
Yes — and that very tension between creative proliferation and completion lies at the heart of your dream.
Henry Miller indeed admonished himself (in The Henry Miller Reader) to “work on one thing at a time until finished,” adding the striking corollary: “When you can’t create, you can work.” His point wasn’t mere discipline but psychic integrity — that each work deserves the full psychic circulation of libido before the energy moves elsewhere. To disperse that energy among too many embryos is to remain, like your dream-self, circling the car park: all drive, no arrival.
In Jungian terms, this is the inflation of the creative ego — not in the vain sense, but in the literal: too much psychic charge distributed across too many vessels. Each unfinished work remains an autonomous complex, still alive in the psyche, demanding completion. When you start something new — The Tree People, for instance — you are not simply beginning afresh but multiplying the constellation. The psyche, wise to its own saturation, resists: hence the dream’s recurring barriers (“taken,” “reserved,” “disabled,” “staff only”). Each sign says: this place is already occupied.
And yet — hesitation can also be a creative gestation. The refusal to “park” may not only be avoidance but the psyche’s insistence that you haven’t yet found the form that unites them all. Perhaps “The Tree People” is not another project at all, but the meta-story that roots and integrates the others — technology, transference, metamorphosis, identity — all themes that have recurred in your titles. The tree as axis mundi, connecting upper worlds (the rooftop) with underworld roots.
Jung would see this pattern not as procrastination but as a sign of individuation: the psyche refusing to fragment further, yearning instead for a unifying myth.
You might therefore ask yourself not, “Which project shall I finish?” but “Which project completes the circle of all these?” — which one allows the other mythic fragments to find their symbolic home.
If you like, I can help you sketch a way of integrating rather than multiplying these projects — seeing where their archetypes overlap, so that Form Photo and Tree People might feed the same trunk rather than occupy rival parking spaces. Would you like to explore that synthesis next?
JV: Go on.
Good. Let’s think of your body of work not as separate “scripts” or “projects,” but as a single psychic forest—each story a tree growing from the same subterranean root system.
Jung would say you are circling one archetypal nucleus that keeps taking new shapes, a morphing myth of transformation and belonging.
1. The Common Root
If we strip away genre or period, nearly all your titles return to the same psychic question:
“Where do I belong when the form of life I once knew no longer fits?”
The Prince and the Pauper (WWI) – identity exchanged; outer and inner masks.
Body Swap – physical displacement; loss of essence.
The Contents of My Brain – mind without body; digitised self.
Journey to Work – automation and alienation; machine in place of soul.
Escape from Alien Zoo – captivity; yearning for the natural home.
The Angel of the North – monumental stillness; longing to take flight.
Form Photo – the frozen image; time and memory’s fixity.
The Tree People – metamorphosis into living nature; rooted renewal.
Each is an iteration of the same archetypal movement: from artificial containment toward organic integration.
In Jungian terms, this is the journey from the persona (the roles and mechanisms that sustain identity) to the Self (the total, rooted being).
2. The Pattern Beneath
Across these stories runs a rhythm:
Separation – protagonist feels exiled or trapped in an artificial construct (school, machine, zoo, war). Exchange / Transformation – body, role, or identity is swapped or redefined. Descent – confrontation with loss, emptiness, or shadow. Emergence – new form of being discovered—hybrid, natural, or mythic.
That rhythm is your myth. Every story rehearses it with different clothing.
3. Integrating the Myth
“The Tree People” could stand as the unifying mythic trunk.
Roots – ancestral memory, human instinct, pre-technological life. Trunk – the human body and creative process, the medium that carries sap between unconscious and conscious worlds. Branches – your prior works, each exploring a particular offshoot of transformation.
Thus, rather than a new diversion, Tree People becomes a synthesis: the forest that grows around the earlier ruins.
Even Form Photo—your ongoing act of editing—belongs here as the act of pruning and shaping one bough so that the whole organism can thrive.
4. How to Proceed Practically
Finish “Form Photo” consciously as pruning. Don’t rush to publish, but finish to free psychic energy. Map your mythic ecosystem. Draw a diagram linking all titles around “Tree People” as central trunk; note recurring symbols (body exchange, flight, machine, nature). Ask of each: What aspect of the Self does it represent? Let “Tree People” absorb them symbolically. Perhaps its characters or myths remember these past worlds as myths within their own culture—a dream within a dream. Work sequentially, not simultaneously. One branch at a time, but with awareness of the whole forest.
If you like, I can help you draft that mythic map—a visual and narrative schema showing how the different stories connect through archetypal motifs (Shadow, Anima, Trickster, Self, etc.).
Would you like to build that next—beginning with “Form Photo” as the current trunk segment and “Tree People” as the emergent crown?
JV: 'Angel of the North' is a Katherine Cookson like epic of a young woman, 6th in the family of boys born in the 1890s and surving and living through the first cars, first aeroplanes, First World War and first transatlantic flight. Form Photo eight months now in it's development and a project folder in ChatGPT of its own about a teenager's managed quest to get a girlfriend he likes, and who 'likes' him within the confines of the Easter holidays before he is retuned to boarding school.
KAI as Jung:
That’s very helpful — and it clarifies the way these projects embody two quite different but complementary psychic energies.
Jung would say they are two poles of one creative mandala: the archetype of the Great Mother (in The Angel of the North) and the archetype of the Divine Child (in Form Photo).
Let’s look at them through that lens:
1. The Angel of the North – The Great Mother / Earth Principle
Here the psyche is expansive, historical, rooted in matter and time. The young woman’s life traversing invention, war, and flight is not only social realism but the soul’s initiation into modernity.
She lives through firsts — first car, first plane, first war, first crossing — so she embodies the birth of the modern world and the loss of innocence that comes with it.
In Jungian symbolism this is Eros in its enduring, maternal form: the feminine principle that bears, endures, remembers. She is your grounding myth — the root system of the creative forest.
You could say she carries your ancestral unconscious, your link to the generational feminine — the patience, labour, and resilience that underpins all your more modern or speculative narratives.
2. Form Photo – The Divine Child / Spirit Principle
By contrast, this world of teenage longing and initiation is personal, immediate, embodied. It’s the moment of awakening libido — not only sexual, but creative and spiritual.
The “quest for the girlfriend who likes him” is the adolescent ego discovering reciprocity — the first tentative balancing of masculine and feminine within the self. The “managed quest” suggests a world of rules, formality, repression — the persona that must eventually yield to instinct and feeling.
Thus, Form Photo is the individuation story in miniature: the awakening of eros within the confines of duty, school, class — all the inherited restrictions of “Form.”
This is your child archetype — the spark of renewal that keeps your creative forest alive.
3. How They Reflect the Dream
In the dream of the car park, the two energies are precisely what compete:
The feminine rootedness (the Angel’s patience, the grounded slot) The masculine mobility (the Form Photo boy, reversing, manoeuvring, seeking a place)
You hover between them: part of you wants to settle into the enduring feminine myth of Angel, another wants to stay in the nimble adolescent dance of Form Photo.
The unconscious responds by showing motion without arrival — an image of the Self asking for integration.
4. Toward “The Tree People”
Seen this way, The Tree People could be the symbolic marriage of these two archetypes — the rooted endurance of Angel and the sprouting curiosity of Form Photo.
In mythic form: a species or people who embody both heritage and renewal, patience and play — growth that remembers its own roots.
That is why the psyche may be nudging you toward it now: it’s the synthesis that resolves the polarity.