Understanding Dreams & Psychedelics through Archetypes

I want to begin by sharing a dream that I recently had which impacted my life in a massive way. In this dream I find myself at the front of a classroom full of students. I am trying to write and draw onto the chalkboard a layout with different sections on it, perhaps best analyzed as a framework into which other information could be filled in. I can hear (and become immediately self-conscious of) the students in the class mocking my belabored attempts to create structure onto the board. I argue with the students (who seem in some way familiar to previous unsuccessful employees from previous jobs I’ve managed) trying to get them to see the reason in what I am doing, but each time it seems as if I have convinced one, another one pops up unconvinced. At the same time that I am debating the students, I notice that the janitor is cleaning off the chalkboard, effectively erasing all of my progress. I begin to argue with the janitor, who seems as if he cannot understand me and seems to say “I am just doing my job!” All of the figures in this dream are male. After this I wake up.

For the moment, I'm going to put that dream aside for us to come back to later.

Let's grab a quick definition of what an Archetype actually is before we talk about WHY they are relevant to psychedelics and dreams, and HOW they apply here.

An Archetype, in it's most basic sense, is a representative example of a person or thing. When we break the word into it's component parts, we get Arch, being a fundamental piece of architectural structure, and we get Type, which is self-explanatory. An Archetype is, therefore, a structural high level category of something. The Jungian sense of the word pairs nicely with what we just unpacked. Carl Jung viewed Archetypes as primitive mental images inherited from our earliest human ancestors.