I keep having this dream...not sure what it means.

  — Faith (“This Year's Girl”)

Carl Jung believed that the psyche is a sphere composed of consciousness, the personal unconscious, and the collective unconscious. He argued that the collective unconscious is common to all human beings and is made up of primordial symbols called archetypes. These archetypes are universal symbolic forms that present themselves in the dreams of individuals and myths of societies. Jung studied the psychoanalytic features of the archetype within dreams while drawing attention to archetypal patterns and figures emerging within myth, literature, and daily life.

In the Buffyverse, dreams play a critical role in character development and the progression of the story arcs. Dreams reflect, foreshadow, and predict reality for the characters. Through dreams, characters such as Buffy, Faith, Spike, Willow, Xander, and Giles demonstrate the relationship between the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious. In this paper, written from a literature/psychology perspective, I will examine archetypal dream and nightmare images within the context of Carl Jung’s theory. I will explore how archetypal images of the dream world in the Buffyverse articulate the fears and desires of each character’s personal unconscious. The archetypal images reveal the essence of each character by illustrating the conflict between the character’s conscious awareness and unconscious fears and desires. Furthermore, while articulating the individual characters, the archetypal dream images overlap into a collective unconscious, ultimately helping to create the stories that comprise the Buffyverse. Therefore, the characters become trapped within the dream world of the Buffyverse psyche, because even when they are awake, the archetypes that define their characters still remain hidden in the collective unconscious.