Dreaming of a studio: what can this symbol evoke?

A house with neither cellar nor attic

In 1909, Jung dreamed of a house on several levels: an elegant salon upstairs, medieval rooms on the ground floor, a Roman cellar, and beneath the cellar a cave strewn with bones. He would see in it one of the first images of his conception of the psyche, made of superimposed layers down to a collective and very ancient ground.

In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard in turn describes the dreamed house as a vertical being, stretched between the cellar, place of obscure fears, and the attic, place of clear thoughts. The studio flat abolishes this verticality: everything fits on a single level. There is no nook to go down into, no height to withdraw to.

Dreaming of a studio flat may therefore speak of a life brought back to the surface, chosen or endured: beginnings, student years, a first job, or on the contrary a fresh start after a separation, when only the necessary has been kept.

The studio where you are captured

The other studio — for recording, photography or filming — is a room sealed off from the world, designed so that nothing is lost: a voice, a gesture, a face, fixed to be seen or heard elsewhere. You start again until the right take.

Jung called persona the mask each of us composes to present ourselves to others, both to make an impression and to conceal. The studio is the workshop of that mask. Dreams set there often speak of the gap between what you would like to show and what actually comes out: a voice that breaks, an image that does not resemble you.

One may also think of Jung's early research, in which he timed with a stopwatch his subjects' responses to a list of words. Hesitations betrayed sensitive areas, which he called complexes. Silence at the microphone, in a dream, resembles those hesitations: it may point to the exact place where something resists.

What the studio made you live through

• A tiny studio flat where you bump into the walls — lacking inner space, or longing for a fuller life.
• Returning to the studio of your twenties — nostalgia for a freedom, or taking stock of who you have become since.
• Finding an unknown door in your studio — a depth you believed absent from your life.
• Standing mute at the microphone — the fear that your voice will fall short just when you are finally being heard.
• Seeing yourself on a monitor without recognising yourself — the gap between the image given and the image of self.
• Take after take without ever being satisfied — a demand that prevents anything from being let go.

A psychological reading, not a ready-made box

Dreams of small spaces refer to the limits within which one lives and to how one organises oneself inside them; dreams of recording studios touch on expression and the gaze of others. The Jungian reading sees in them an invitation to distinguish the role from the person. Other, more concrete approaches recall that a dreamed studio is often a place one really lived in, charged with what happened there.