I'm going to hodge podge some ideas in my head because they suggest a need for birth so that I might more consciously consider them going forward.
Assuming the following:
1. Dreams are produced primarily by the functions of sensation and intuition with intuition having a leading role due to the lack of external sensory stimuli available when the brain is asleep. The rational functions of thinking and feeling come in more in dream interpretation and less so in the dreams themselves although they do certainly appear. This is because there is a tendency for the rational functions to interfere with dream-like, un-self-conscious awareness.
2. Intuition works by re-organizing neural behavior to suit the structure of brain organization and physical design. So the yin-yang symbol becomes an intuition in that it connects all oppositionally paired qualities because the brain functions to recognize/create of the world pairs of opposites and this action is on deeper layers of the physical all one and undifferentiable.
3. Symbols are intuitive constructs that reflect whole psychic organization in terms preferred by the function of intuition.
4. The particular sensory experiences that go to cloth the dreams and symbols of an individual psyche are those that the individual finds in their personal and collective experience.
Given these assumptions, the effect of a well-trained symbolic-archetypal-mythic intuition on a dreamer's own or another's dreams may include the ability to partially direct the content of dreams by providing certain useful metaphoric material to the dreamer's consciousness. The dreamer must invest libido in the pursuit of the amplificatory or associational information and thereby charge that content within their own psyche. This new material may then alter the content of further dreams just as conscious reflection and interpretation of dreams will likely do so.
The only way to derive a sense of purpose or progress from interpreting or otherwise working with dreams is to gain either an appreciation for the process itself as part of one's life experience or to develop a relatively constant measure against which to compare one's movement over time. Given the dynamic nature of dreaming, this is a dubious proposition. I haven't seen a reliable developmental model that one could set one's self against to easily rate the development of an individual's psyche based on a single dream. Each dream affords the dreamer an opportunity for the development of consciousness that could change the dreamer's developmental state in an unpredictable way. Developmental stages are recursively revisited at all stages and the dream doesn't include enough information, independent of the dreamer's conscious response to it, to make any reliable determination. The whole situation is very much analogous to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle where paired qualities are, by measureable definition, mutually exclusive in their accuracy.
The best approach to dream work is to turn the problems and questions and supposed connections that dreams make within their own inner realm upon themselves and have one's conscious ego return to the dream a response of intent, question or purpose based as much upon the dream content as possible, just as we would return to the waking world our waking world responses. Having these two "theatres of development" available affords us a binocular approach to reality that may give us the kind of movement in two systems of knowing needed to overcome the limitations that either way of knowing inherently has.
In that sense, on the whole adaptation to the outer world primarily requires the development of the sensation function while an adaptation to the inner world primarily requires the development of intuition. Feeling and thinking are higher functions of consciousness that should operate in a collective mode and these so called rational and irrational functions could be further coordinated via the process of living through the oscillations between the inner and outer worlds of day and night.
